“Marxists never tire of telling us we face a choice between socialism or barbarism. In fact, society made that choice 90 years ago. Society chose barbarism; we are living with the consequences of that choice.” [1] - Jehu
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In left-wing discourse, the phrase “socialism or barbarism” is commonly used. For Luxemburg, “barbarism” is used in a specific, technical sense as part of the materialist conception of history. It means that at a certain stage in the development of capitalism, a period we can call “barbarism” would arise. For Luxemburg, however, this does not mark the end times as leftists commonly make it out to be, but to describe a technical transformation in the process of capital accumulation. Luxemburg witnessed the early stages of this process with the rise of imperialism, the onset of WW1, and the redivision of the world by international monopoly financial capitalists. What Luxemburg could not fully answer, having been murdered in 1919, was what a stable, institutionalized form of this barbarism might look like. 

Society forces the hand of the state

For nearly four years before 1933, society had been draining gold from the banking system through a massive, decentralized, and chronic bank run. Fearful depositors withdrew currency and demanded gold coin or bullion, while foreign holders accelerated outflows following Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard in September 1931. Domestic hoarding intensified dramatically in late 1932 and early 1933 as the crisis deepened. By the time Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the situation had reached the point of systemic collapse. The Federal Reserve’s “free gold” — the excess reserves above legal requirements — was disappearing at a dangerous rate.
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As the Federal Reserve’s own historical record states:

“The Federal Reserve typically held more than enough gold to back the currency it had issued. Bankers called the excess “free gold.” The Federal Reserve needed a stock of free gold sufficient to satisfy redemption requests that might occur in the near future. The Federal Reserve could increase the stock of free gold by increasing interest rates, which encouraged Americans to deposit in banks and encouraged foreigners to invest in the United States, shifting gold from the pockets of the public (both here and abroad) to the vaults of Federal Reserve district and member banks. Conversely, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates, gold would flow from its coffers into the hands of the public both at home and overseas.

During the financial crisis of 1933 that culminated in the banking holiday in March 1933, large quantities of gold flowed out from the Federal Reserve. Some of this outflow went to individuals and firms in the United States. This domestic drain occurred because individuals and firms preferred holding metallic gold to bank deposits or paper currency. Some of the gold flowed to foreign nations. This external drain occurred because foreign investors feared a devaluation of the dollar. Together, the internal and external drains consumed the Federal Reserve’s free gold. In March 1933, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York could no longer honor its commitment to convert currency to gold, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday.” [2]

As a result of these run on the banks, between 1930-1933, catastrophic consequences came:

“The Depression ravaged the nation’s banking industry. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks failed across the country, and this time many were large, urban, seemingly stable institutions. The few state deposit-guarantee funds were quickly overwhelmed. Overall, depositors in the failed institutions lost more than $1.3 billion (about $27.4 billion in today’s dollars), or 19.6% of total deposits.” [3]

It was the blind logic of capital asserting itself. Years of overaccumulation had produced a glut of commodities and falling profitability. When effective demand collapsed, the system responded with deflationary pressure and a flight to commodity money. Society, acting under the pressure of crisis, was already abandoning commodity money in practice by hoarding gold, withdrawing deposits, and refusing to keep its savings in a failing banking system. The state was not freely choosing to end the gold standard. Rather, it was compelled to intervene and ratify what society had already begun.

The Breakdown of Commodity Money

On April 5, 1933, in the prime of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, formally titled “Requiring Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates to Be Delivered to the Government.“ The order made it illegal for U.S. citizens to own or hoard significant amounts of gold, compelling them to exchange their bullion, coins, and certificates for U.S. paper currency at the official price of $20.67 per ounce. Willful violations were punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to ten years in prison. FDR would also go onto sign Executive order 6814, which included the confiscation of silver and the artificially raising its price. However, this measure was not intended to be the same as 6102; It was only in force for four years, with the goal being of acquiring silver bullion to build government silver reserves and support increased silver coin production under the 1934 Act.
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Executive Order 6102 represented a fundamental break with a monetary tradition that had persisted for millennia. Until the 20th century, the primary form of money was commodity money whose value was intrinsic to the material itself, derived from its substance and the abstract labor required to produce it. A quintessential example was the silver shekel, which for thousands of years functioned as money in the form of standardized weights. As anthropologist David Graeber observes, this system was highly developed even in ancient Mesopotamia:

“Even though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent city-states, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500 BC, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy—one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it’s to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen, 60-minute hour, or the 24-hour day. The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel’s weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley—on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It’s easy to see that “money” in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. Temple bureaucrats used the system to calculate debts (rents, fees, loans, etc.) in silver. Silver was, effectively, money. And it did indeed circulate in the form of unworked chunks, “rude bars” as Smith had put it.” [4]

For Marx, commodity money was not merely a medium of circulation. Rather, it is the expression of socially necessary labor-time. In the Marxist view, money’s essential role is to serve as the “reification of universal labor-time” [5]. Since money serves as the reification of universal labor-time, it therefore serves as the only adequate form of exchange-value. Money is unique in the fact that it can measure the value of products precisely because it represents a purely quantitative measure—socially necessary labor-time—which is abstracted from all the qualitative aspects of the commodities and the concrete labor that produced them. Exchange-value is therefore quantitative and abstract, because it seeks a common measure for qualitatively completely different things.
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For instance, the exchange-value implicit in “1 coat = 20 loaves of bread” finds its adequate form in “1 coat = 5 shekels” and “20 loaves = 5 shekels.” These 5 shekels materially represent the equivalent amount of abstract labor-time contained in both the coat and the bread. The shekel can serve this function because it, like all other commodities, possesses value, determined by the socially necessary labor-time required for its production—from mining and refining to minting. Marx explains this process:

“money does not serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange-value, as the universal commodity.” [6]

With the passage of Executive Order 6102, the state supplanted commodity money—the universal equivalent for millennia—with its own non-convertible scrip, thereby replacing money itself and seizing the mantle of managing the national economy; for it now exclusively owns the very thing that capital requires to be set in motion, or as Marx explains:

“All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.” [7]

However, this take over of the economy was something expected by Marx and Engels. In “Socialism: Utopia and Scientific”, Engels theorizes a highly advanced type of capitalism, described as the “national capitalist [8]” that continues the exploitation of the working class via wage slavery, directed not by private property owners but by the direction of the state. As we see, this process came to fruition via the removal of commodity money from circulation and set forward the devaluing of wages below their value through state policy to artificially raise the rate of surplus value. By raising the price of gold to $35 an ounce, the state had effectively devalued the value of labor-power by nearly half by devaluing the dollar.

For example, before Roosevelt’s action, the U.S. was on a gold standard where $20.67 was legally defined as the value of one troy ounce of gold. This means that $1 = 1/20.67 oz of gold, or approximately 0.0484 ounces of gold. Through the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, President Roosevelt changed this. He set a new official price: $35.00 for one troy ounce of gold. This meant that $1 was now redefined as 1/35 oz of gold, or approximately 0.0286 ounces of gold. This means that the government officially declared that a single dollar now represents 41% less gold than it did before. The dollar was literally made cheaper. In other words, the collective wages of the working class had been devalued by 41%~ overnight— this was a flat out major attack on our class.

Suppose a capitalist wanted to hire a worker for $4 a day (the general average in 1933). Previously, at $20.67 per ounce, that would have equaled around .193 ounces of gold ($4.00/$20.67). After the switch to $35 per ounce, that same $4 would now equal only .114 ounces of gold ($4.00/$35.00). Since this devaluation has occurred, a capitalist could now hire two workers for the price of about 1.5!

This represented a massive, state-engineered reduction in labor costs that directly boosted the rate of surplus value.

Marx had already explained why a change in the general price level (such as the devaluation of the dollar) has sharply different effects on constant capital and variable capital. In Capital Volume III, Chapter 1, he writes:

“The difference between these various elements of the commodity-value, which together make up the cost-price, leaps to the eye whenever a change takes place in the size of the value of either the expended constant, or the expended variable, part of the capital. Let the price of the same means of production, or of the constant part of capital, rise from £400 to £600, or, conversely, let it fall to £200. In the first case it is not only the cost-price of the commodity which rises from £500 to 600c + 100v = £700, but also the value of the commodity which rises from £600 to 600c + 100v + 100s = £800. In the second case, it is not only the cost-price which falls from £500 to 200c+100v = £300, but also the value of the commodity which falls from £600 to 200c + 100v + 100s = £400. Since the expended constant capital transfers its own value to the product, the value of the product rises or falls with the absolute magnitude of that capital-value, other conditions remaining equal. Assume, on the other hand, that, other circumstances remaining unchanged, the price of the same amount of labour-power rises from £100 to £150, or, conversely, that it falls from £100 to £50. In the first case, the cost-price rises from £500 to 400c + 150v = £550, and falls in the second case from £500 to 400c + 50v = £450. But in either case the commodity-value remains unchanged = £600; one time it is 400c + 150v + 50s, and the other time, 400c + 50v + 150s. The advanced variable capital does not add its own value to the product. The place of its value is taken in the product rather by a new value created by labour. Therefore, a change in the absolute magnitude of the variable capital, so far as it expresses merely a change in the price of labour-power, does not in the least alter the absolute magnitude of the commodity-value, because it does not alter anything in the absolute magnitude of the new value created by living labour-power. Such a change rather affects only the relative proportion of the two component parts of the new value, of which one forms surplus-value and the other makes good the variable capital and therefore passes into the cost-price of the commodity.” [9]

In plain terms, when the general price level rises (or the currency is devalued), the value of constant capital (raw materials, machinery, etc.) tends to increase because those inputs now cost more to replace. Variable capital (wages paid for labor-power), however, behaves differently. Since workers have no choice but to sell their labor-power daily simply to survive, a rise in prices can reduce the real purchasing power of wages, the actual “bundle of necessities” they can buy, without any change in the nominal wage. The new value created by living labor remains the same, but a larger share of it is now captured as surplus-value because the effective cost of reproducing labor-power has fallen. As Marx shows, the same amount of living labor still creates the same new value, but a larger portion of it becomes surplus-value for the capitalist. In contrast, changes in the cost of constant capital directly raise or lower both the cost-price and the total value of the commodity. The 1934 revaluation of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce was therefore a concealed mechanism that cheapened variable capital in real terms. It raised the rate of surplus-value and acted as a counteracting tendency to the falling rate of profit under conditions of absolute overaccumulation.

To prove mathematically how this raises the rate of surplus value (s’ = s / v, where s is surplus labor/surplus value and v is variable capital/labor power value paid), consider a simplified but rigorous model using Marx’s value categories and gold as the measure of value (the universal equivalent expressing socially necessary labor time).

Assume:

• The value of labor power (v) is fixed in real terms before the revaluation: it costs the capitalist a certain quantity of gold to reproduce the worker’s labor power daily (food, shelter, etc., expressed in gold-equivalent SNLT).
• Let v_gold = the gold-quantity required to buy labor power at value (pre-revaluation benchmark).
• Pre-revaluation: nominal wage w_pre = $4 buys exactly v_gold ≈ 0.1935 oz (so w_pre in gold = v_gold).
• Post-revaluation: the same nominal $4 now buys only 0.1143 oz of gold-equivalent value.
• Thus, the real wage (in value terms) falls to w_post_gold = 0.1143 oz, while the physical/necessary reproduction requirements of labor power remain unchanged (v_gold still ≈ 0.1935 oz worth of commodities needed).

The capitalist still pays the nominal $4, but that $4 now commands only ~59.06% of its former gold/value equivalent (1/1.693 ≈ 0.5906, or a ~40.94% devaluation in purchasing power over gold/value). [10]
In the most fundamental terms, this intervention by the state definitively marked the early stages of breakdown of production based on exchange-value. The core presupposition of the system—that wages will be exchanged at their value—was decisively violated to resuscitate the process of capital accumulation.

In short, commodity money itself has become a fetter on the accumulation of capital.

The United States did not simply choose to leave the gold standard. In a more terrifying reality, the historical laws governing the capitalist mode of production forced the United States off the gold standard, independent of its policymakers’ will. The alternative is a catastrophic deflationary spiral and the total collapse of a profit-driven economy. One could say the system’s own logic acted as a blind, cybernetic intelligence. It “refined” its own operating parameters as the automatic subject, jettisoning the constraint of commodity money to adapt to the inexorable, growing demands of capital accumulation. The gold standard was, in essence, amputated by the system to ensure its own survival. The state had carried out the early stages of what Polish Marxist economist, Henryk Grossman, predicted in his text “Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown”, published just a few years before the great depression:

“Beyond a definite point of time the system cannot survive at the postulated rate of surplus value of 100 per cent. There is a growing shortage of surplus value and, under the given conditions, a continuous overaccumulation. The only alternative is to violate the conditions postulated. Wages have to be cut in order to push the rate of surplus value even higher. This cut in wages would not be a purely temporary phenomenon that vanishes once equilibrium is re-established; it will have to be continuous. After year 36 either wages have to be cut continually and periodically or a reserve army must come into being.” [11]

Grossman, using careful arithmetic, continues where Marx left off in Capital Volume III, Chapter 14 (“Counteracting Influences”), where Marx identifies one of the most pivotal counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit: “the depression of wages below the value of labour-power. [12]”

This is not a minor adjustment. It’s a structural necessity once accumulation reaches a point of over-accumulation and surplus value becomes insufficient to valorize the swollen mass of capital at the required rate. Under conditions of absolute over-accumulation of capital, the commodity labor power must be sold below its value in order for capital to realize a profit. In other words, the commodities consumed by the working class must be sold at a “markup” over the prices of production, which, per Marx, is a definite violation of the assumptions made by Marx so long as a commodity money standard is in place.

“Suppose then, that by some inexplicable privilege, the seller is enabled to sell his commodities above their value, what is worth 100 for 110, in which case the price is nominally raised 10%. The seller therefore pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer. A third owner of commodities comes to him now as seller, who in this capacity also enjoys the privilege of selling his commodities 10% too dear. Our friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer. The net result is, that all owners of commodities sell their goods to one another at 10% above their value, which comes precisely to the same as if they sold them at their true value. Such a general and nominal rise of prices has the same effect as if the values had been expressed in weight of silver instead of in weight of gold. The nominal prices of commodities would rise, but the real relation between their values would remain unchanged. Let us make the opposite assumption, that the buyer has the privilege of purchasing commodities under their value. In this case it is no longer necessary to bear in mind that he in his turn will become a seller. He was so before he became buyer; he had already lost 10% in selling before he gained 10% as buyer. Everything is just as it was. The creation of surplus-value, and therefore the conversion of money into capital, can consequently be explained neither on the assumption that commodities are sold above their value, nor that they are bought below their value.” [13]

Here, Marx is debunking the vulgar, circulation based explanation that capitalists generate profit and surplus-value simply by marking up prices — i.e., selling commodities above their value (or buying them below value) in the market. This was a common idea at the time, and still is commonly held by leftist commentators (commonly suggesting that profits are capitalist greed rather than a historical product under specific conditions). Marx essentially gives five reasons as to why, under ordinary circumstances, cannot happen:

1. It cancels out completely. If every seller gets to sell 10% above value, then every buyer (who is also a seller in the circuit) pays 10% above value. The +10 gained as seller is lost as buyer. Net result for the whole class of commodity owners is ~zero. No extra value is created.

2. It doesn’t explain where the surplus comes from. Any “extra” money the capitalists pocket would have had to come from somewhere else in the system because it can’t be conjured out of thin air by price tricks. Circulation is a zero-sum game for value. What one gains, another loses. Surplus value, on the other hand, requires net creation of value and a material transformation of nature, not redistribution.

3. Most importantly, it contradicts the premise of equivalent exchange and the law of exchange-value. Marx’s whole analysis starts from the assumption that commodities exchange at their values (determined by socially necessary labor-time). If price markups were the source of profit, capitalism would rest on systematic “cheating” or unequal exchange, but then the law of value itself would collapse. Capitalism as a mode of production would collapse.

4. Capitalism is defined by valorization of value (M-C-M’): money advanced to produce more money via exploitation of wage-labor. If surplus-value came from circulation markups instead of production, then the circuit would no longer depend on the unique use-value of labor-power.

5. The drive to accumulate is undermined. Why invest in machinery, intensify labor, or expand markets if you can just markup prices forever?

This is precisely why the removal of commodity money (i.e., the gold standard) is so explosive.

​Under commodity money, the law of value enforces itself with brutal mechanical necessity. Gold cannot be conjured from nothing, because its supply is constrained by the actual expenditure of abstract labor in mining, refining, and minting. Though, as a general rule, gold itself hardly circulated. Rather, the paper money or currency in circulation acted as a representation of gold. Currency in circulation was “insured” by a proportionate amount of gold in a central bank’s reserves, which prevented banks from arbitrarily creating money. Any attempt at a general markup, such as selling everything at 10% above value, collapses back into equivalence because the money commodity itself has value and cannot be inflated at will. The system self corrects because, despite nominal price increases, real value relations remain untouched. Prices are anchored to value because they fluctuate around the labor-time required to produce commodities, with gold serving as the objective measure. Per Marx, Gold serves this function because…

“Gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it previously confronted them as a commodity. Like all other commodities it also functioned as an equivalent, either as a single equivalent in isolated exchanges or as a particular equivalent alongside other commodity-equivalents. Gradually it began to serve as universal equivalent in narrower or wider fields. [14]”

Once the state supplants commodity money with its own inconvertible token, which is a scrap of paper whose “value” is decreed by sovereign command rather than socially necessary labor-time, the mechanical enforcer of equivalence disappears. The currency in circulation, now mostly created electronically via a keyboard, becomes a piece of debt issued by the government and banks. It is no longer a commodity money because it no longer has a cost of production, meaning money becomes purely debt. As MMT professor Larry Randall Wray explains, “use of currency and value of M are based on the power of the issuing authority, not on intrinsic value. [15]”
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Though, labor-power is uniquely affected by this, because labor-power is sold by living human beings who have no other means of subsistence, and can be forced below its value continuously. A worker cannot declare bankruptcy and withdraw from the market because the result would be even more immiseration than what devaluing of currency already does. The obvious information from this fact can’t be ignored. Workers are being paid, in terms of exchange-value, nothing for their labor power, because the currency itself is no longer pegged to any definite quantity of commodity money (it floats). Yet, the exchange between employers and workers is still occurring, since workers are still dependent on the exchange so they can enter the market as consumers and provide themselves with articles required for reproduction. Moving forward, nominal wages do not directly amount to much besides the amount of paper you own, because the real power of your wage is actively being devalued against commodity money. Marx foresaw precisely this mechanism when he analyzed the consequences of inconvertible paper money that exceeds its proper limit:
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“There would no longer be any standard. If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount in gold coins of the like denomination that can actually be current, it would, apart from the danger of falling into general disrepute, represent only that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the circulation of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented by paper. If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold. The effect would be the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2.” [16]

When the state over-issues fiat beyond the gold-equivalent that would circulate under commodity money rules, each unit of currency names less gold (less socially necessary labor-time) than before. The effect is identical to formally redefining the standard of prices against gold. Values previously expressed by $1 are now expressed by $2, $5, $10. Nominal wages can rise indefinitely while the real content of those wages (the quantity of gold-equivalent socially necessary labor-time they command) collapses.
To demonstrate this, let’s compare the minimum wage in 1964 to the minimum wage of today (2026).
The US federal minimum wage in 1964 was $1.25 per hour. The current federal minimum wage (as of 2026) is $7.25 per hour.

Average gold price in 1964: approximately $35.10–$35.35 per troy ounce (fixed under the Bretton Woods system at $35/oz official rate, thus market price hovered very close to this).
Current gold price (as of 03/18/2026): $4,874.30 per troy ounce.

We’ll calculate purchasing power in gold ounces per hour, meaning we are directly focusing on exchange-value against the historical money commodity.

1964 minimum wage: $1.25 per hour ÷ $35.10/oz ≈ 0.03561 ounces of gold per hour

Current minimum wage: $7.25 per hour ÷ $4,874.30/oz ≈ 0.001487 ounces of gold per hour.

Ratio (1964 vs. 2026): 0.03561 / 0.001487 ≈ 23.95 times more gold-buying power in 1964
(Exact: 0.035610 / 0.001487 ≈ 23.95)

Percentage decline: The real (gold-denominated) minimum wage has fallen by ~95.8% since 1964 (1 - 0.001487 / 0.035610 ≈ 0.958 or 95.8% drop).

To match 1964 purchasing power today: The federal minimum wage would need to be ~$175.40 per hour in 2026 dollars. (0.03561 oz/hr × $4,874.30/oz ≈ $173.60–$175.40/hr depending on rounding)
In nominal dollars, the minimum wage rose ~5.8× ($1.25 → $7.25), but in gold terms (a proxy for real exchange-value against the historical money commodity), it collapsed by nearly 96%. By replacing commodity money with an inconvertible fiat, prices (nominal dollar amounts) and purchasing power (real exchange-value) decouple dramatically. Labor-power and workers can see their nominal price rise steadily, while their real purchasing power, in exchange-value terms, collapses.

The left will continue to argue that we must fight for higher wages, despite the fact that higher wages are nominally possible under the fascist state, since the state can devalue them at will. The leftist cope that we face wage stagnation is a complete myth. The reality is far more alarming: wages have collapsed.
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The fascist state (the national capitalist in its mature form per Engels) can raise nominal wages at will, which it does, in fits and starts, through minimum-wage hikes, “living wage” campaigns, union deals, or electoral bribery, because it can devalue the currency at will. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), and CPUSA (Communist Party USA) position themselves as radical or revolutionary organizations, but their core economic demands, such as higher minimum wages, Medicare for All/single-payer healthcare, living wages, job guarantees, and expanded social programs, are outmoded and even counterproductive in the barbaric phase of capitalism that emerged after the 1930s gold seizure and was sealed by the 1971 Nixon shock. These demands assume a monetary regime still regulated by commodity money, where nominal wage increases translate into real gains in purchasing power and value. It is why these parties all default away from revolutionary theory and tactics and into open support to fascists like Zohran, lying to us all and claiming that “Zohran shifts the Overton window” towards more “progressive” politics. Yet as we have seen, this so-called “progressivism” runs counter for the underlying fact that our wages are being destroyed by the state.

​Even if DSA/PSL/ CPUSA “won” $25–$30 /hour nationally, fiat devaluation would erode it almost immediately — just as $7.25 today buys ~4% of what $1.25 did in 1964 gold terms, but these social fascists will never recognize this fact. Most importantly, these demands, according to Lenin “try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions [18]”.

These demands exist to run cover for the barbaric state by pushing nominal reforms that stabilize the system by channeling discontent into winnable-but-meaningless gains. These demands exist to hide the underlying power that the state has over workers. These demands exist to conceal the fact that the left completely lacks revolutionary theory and therefore has no chance at a revolutionary movement!

​Frankly, the fascists in D.C. laugh at the left. These mother fuckers really think they have the empire out flanked by “hitting the streets” to chant for higher taxes and more valueless tokens.

Even as disgusting, and a more recent development, we have leftists openly coming to the defense of fired federal “workers”— the pencil pushing bureaucrats who have managed the very system that has made the majority of people in this country's lives worse.

Does the left not know that with the introduction of a valueless debt based currency, the state can now debase the currency systematically by expanding credit, expanding money supply, target inflation, manipulate interest rates, run perpetual deficits, and dramatically increase superfluous labor time, typically in the form of federal employment?
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In the era of absolute overaccumulation, when capital has swollen beyond the mass of surplus-value that can be extracted at the required rate, the breakdown of production based on exchange-value does not trigger immediate collapse. Instead, the state, as national capitalist, absorbs and manages the excess through deficit spending and debt issuance, turning what would otherwise be idle capital into the ongoing reproduction of the system. Countries, out of pure necessity, “lend” their excess to the United States and, in return, receive U.S. debt. This excess is lent because, under ordinary circumstances, it cannot find productive investment for surplus-value production. The result is a mass of idle capital and, by extension, a deflationary pressure that capital must constantly attend to in order to avoid falling prices.

According to Marx, profit falls sharply (deflation) under conditions of absolute over-accumulation because existing capital stock cannot be valorized at the required rate of profit. Production is over-accumulated relative to effective demand:

“It is evident, however, that this actual depreciation of the old capital could not occur without a struggle, and that the additional capital ΔC could not assume the functions of capital without a struggle. The rate of profit would not fall under the effect of competition due to over-production of capital. It would rather be the reverse; it would be the competitive struggle which would begin because the fallen rate of profit and over-production of capital originate from the same conditions. The part of ΔC in the hands of old functioning capitalists would be allowed to remain more or less idle to prevent a depreciation of their own original capital and not to narrow its place in the field of production. Or they would employ it, even at a momentary loss, to shift the need of keeping additional capital idle on newcomers and on their competitors in general.” [20]

To understand how the fascist regime offsets this, let’s think of it in terms of Georges Bataille:

“I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” [21]

Capitalism, in its drive for accumulation, constantly produces excess energy (overaccumulation), that it cannot productively absorb. Unlike archaic societies that expended surplus through festival, sacrifice, or luxury, capitalism tries to reinvest it endlessly in growth, but this growth has limits. When those limits are reached, the surplus can no longer be contained productively, thus it must be expended non-productively through crisis, war, financial bubbles, ecological breakdown, and state-managed waste. Bataille would argue that the capitalist crisis is the catastrophic release of this valve. The state becomes the central mechanism for managing this waste by channeling excess into military destruction, administrative bloat, debt-financed make-work, and fictitious valorization. Yet, if this waste is, in a sense, a cosmic reality—governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the inescapable production of surplus energy—then it could be channeled into excess creativity: free disposable time for individual and social development!

As we know, though, the state has been able to forcefully keep capitalism afloat, because excess capital itself is used to expand the state. The state artificially inserts itself into the economy not as a neutral regulator or occasional stabilizer, but as the active, structural driver of what passes for “growth” once private capital accumulation hits its historical limit. Chronic deficits are the primary fuel that enables and accelerates state growth because they are the mechanism through which the state continuously expands its command over labor, capital, and resources without being constrained by tax revenue, private profitability, or commodity-money discipline.

This spending often takes the form of:

• Direct federal employment (military, bureaucracy, civil service).
• Contracts to private firms (defense, infrastructure, R&D, subsidies).
• Transfer payments (social security, welfare, unemployment).
• Grants/loans to states, universities, NGOs, corporations.
• Direct lending through GSEs.
• Media and cultural subsidies.
• The Federal Reserve and other credit facilities.

In essence, a growing portion of society’s labor—when viewed from the perspective of social need and value creation--becomes superfluous; that is, it is no longer necessary for the production of surplus value, yet it continues to be expended under capitalism. The labor itself does not directly produce surplus value or valorize capital, but persists because the social relations of capitalism remain temporal—they are still organized around abstract labor time as the substance of value, even though labor itself is increasingly less a source of real material wealth. The material basis of wealth has shifted dramatically toward objectified, dead labor (machines, automation, science, general intellect), while the social form of capitalism (value as objectified labor time) continues to dominate and structure society as if nothing had changed. The result is a society that is hollowed out, rich in productive power and technological potential, yet increasingly empty of human meaning, purpose, and freedom because it is still forced to measure, organize, and valorize everything through the diminishing metric of living labor time.

Capitalism develops the productive forces to the point where immediate living labor (which is the direct, muscular, attentive expenditure of human effort in the production process) itself ceases to be the great well-spring of wealth. In other words, once labor itself is eclipsed by the “general intellect [22]”, production based on exchange-value must necessarily break down, because labor itself ceases to be the primary source of real material wealth.

As Marx writes in the Grundrisse:

“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange-value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange-value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.” [23]

Sadly, this eclipse of immediate living labor by the general intellect did not lead to the liberation of humanity from toil. Instead, the state intervened and evolved to resolve this contradiction in the only way still possible under capitalism, as a matter of “life or death” for the capital relation itself, by enabling and monetizing a mass of superfluous labor time.

Marx already foresaw this exact dynamic in the Grundrisse:

“Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition — question of life or death — for the necessary.” [24]

Superfluous labor time, once exchange-value breaks down, becomes the new dominant temporal form of the entire barbaric phase of capitalism. It becomes the material expression of a society that has outgrown the need for mass human labor in production yet is compelled to keep expending it on pain of systemic collapse.

Though to understand it fully, we need to distinguish three interlocking historical categories of labor time that Marx implicitly traces:

1. Necessary labor time: The socially necessary labor time required to reproduce the worker’s labor-power (subsistence goods, historically determined needs). This is paid as variable capital (v) in the form of wages.

2. Surplus labor time: The excess labor time beyond necessary labor, which produces surplus-value (s) — the driving aim of capitalist production. This is the classical exploitation relation: the worker labors longer than needed to reproduce herself, and the capitalist appropriates the difference. The worker produces more value than that his labor itself is worth in terms of socially necessary labor time.
3. Superfluous labor time: The third, historically new category that only emerges when the productive forces have advanced to the point where direct human labor time is no longer the decisive source of material wealth. This is labor that is superfluous both to the reproduction of wealth, yet is enforced because the capital relation still requires that labor time remain the measure and condition of valorization.

Fiat comes into play in the age of breakdown of production based on exchange-value because commodity money is structurally constrained to only the first two categories of labor time, necessary labor time and surplus labor time, and cannot systematically sustain the third category, superfluous labor time, at scale. Only fiat money, aka, an inconvertible state-issued currency with no labor-value anchor, can make superfluous labor time a dominant, structural, and permanent feature of the mode of production, because it allows for the great expansion of credit is the central mechanism that enables and sustains this dominance. GDP disguises superfluous labor time by counting nominal spending as economic output, regardless of whether that spending corresponds to the creation of value, surplus-value, or even material wealth.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 serves as the paradigmatic, concrete historical example of how fiat money structurally enables and institutionalizes superfluous labor time once production based on exchange-value breaks, which occurs during the Great Depression. Before the passage of AAA, agricultural overproduction, due to technological/productivity advances, like the widespread introduction of the gasoline powered tractor, meant huge portions of farm labor time were superfluous because crops produced exceeded what the market (exchange-value) could absorb at prices covering costs + profit. In other words, as comrade Jehu explains:

“The labor is physically performed, but it produces no value in a Marxian sense because there is no buyer willing to exchange money for the excess commodity. This superfluous labor is wasted from the standpoint of value production, yet it still lingers in the system, and threatens the existence of the mode of production.” [25]

As historian Jean Edward Smith points out, not only did this occur, but the consequences were dire:

“Gross farm income had declined from $12 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. At the same time, agricultural surpluses—crops and livestock that farmers could not sell— rotted on farms or were plowed under. Wheat for December delivery dropped to twenty-three cents a bushel, the lowest since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I three hundred years earlier. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was worth less than a package of chewing gum. In the South, thousands of acres of fine, long-staple cotton stood in the field unpicked, the cost of ginning exceeding any possible return.” [26]

As a result, more than 10 million acres of already-planted cotton were removed from production (plowed under/destroyed), which meant labor time had already been expended to plant and grow the crop, but the output was superfluous (excess beyond what the market could absorb at profitable prices). For this reason, prices and income rose:

“Through the removal of more than 10,000,000 acres from production, the crop was reduced by about 4,000,000 bales. This reduction caused the price of American cotton to be materially higher than it otherwise would have been and substantially increased the total income received by cotton farmers, despite the smaller quantity of cotton they had to market.” [27]

Not only did farming notice a sharp decline in prices and profits, but so did cattle:

“Heavy cattle slaughter and supplies of beef available for consumption have been coming at a time when consumer purchasing power is still at a low level. As a result, the average price of cattle slaughtered under inspection from January to September 1933 was $4.27 per hundredweight, compared with $5.16 for the corresponding months in 1932 and with $6.48 in that period in 1931.” [28]

Thus, the government stepped in, bought and slaughtered 6.4 million pigs and sows that were already produced/raised. This was emergency action because hog prices had collapsed so low that farmers could not sell at a profit.

“The first step toward alleviating the immediate price situation was the emergency purchase of approximately 6,400,000 pigs and sows to effect prompt reduction in hog supplies. This emergency program reduced supplies of hogs for the 1933-34 season by from 1,000,000,000 to 1,200,000,000 pounds, an amount equivalent to about 10 percent of the annual federally inspected slaughter. It was a boon to corn and hog farmers, particularly in drought areas, because it returned on the sale of the pigs and sows at least $10,000,000 more than otherwise would have been obtained from sale at prevailing prices. It also meant that the gross return from the hog crop from which reduction was made eventually could amount to as much as $100,000,000 more than would otherwise have been obtained, and it provided a large quantity of cured hog products for distribution to unemployed families.” [29]

Other commodities would meet the same fate. As a result, the Agricultural Adjustment Act identified a host of commodities that would qualify for subsidies—hogs and cotton being major ones, as we already discussed—along with milk, rice, tobacco, corn, and wheat. These particular commodities were being overproduced and were exceeding demand in terms of exchange-value. Therefore, the government had to step in and effectively monetize superfluous labor time by converting this excess surplus into something that could be exchanged for money. Although the commodities had no demand, they were still assigned a price and purchased with debt by the government. In doing so, the government found a way to inject fiat currency into the system, offset the consequences of overproduction, and counter the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

This logic does not stop at agriculture.

The state generalizes the same logic across the entire economy, transforming the reserve army of labor itself into a permanent, subsidized sink for superfluous labor time. The reserve army of labor—the mass of unemployed and underemployed workers that Marx identified as a structural necessity of capitalism—is supposed to serve two functions: exert downward pressure on wages and provide a flexible pool of labor for capital to draw on during expansion. However, once exchange-value no longer regulates production effectively and direct living labor is eclipsed by general intellect, the reserve army no longer functions as a mere “reserve.” It becomes excess population, superfluous to capital’s valorization needs on a chronic, systemic basis.

This excess becomes absolute.

As the working day becomes “hollowed out” and a growing population becomes more and more superfluous as workers, they themselves as people also become superfluous. The human being as a worker becomes more and more vestigial. Once the worker becomes vestigial in the circuit of valorization, the human biomass is revealed as redundant overhead, not merely economically redundant, but also ontologically redundant— a surplus of meat that the machine process no longer requires to reproduce its own conditions. The reserve army is not held in waiting, rather, it is held in abeyance. The state, now fused with finance capital as the terminal organ of the system, pumps fiat into the void to keep the bodies breathing, moving, consuming just enough to prevent the circuit from flatlining. If they had it their way, just as machines live solely on electricity, they would, as Marx suggests, maximize profits by making humans “live on air… [30]”

Finance capital accelerates the write-down. It strips real industrial output—living factories, living labor, living value, and reroutes the flows into pure liquidity games, rent-extraction loops, and asset price inflation. The physical plant rots or stands idle while the ledger grows tumors of fictitious capital. Real output is sacrificed to maintain nominal valuations. The human being, once the source of surplus value, is now the sink for surplus liquidity. A costly legacy system kept online at ever-lower utilization rates. The state becomes the department of legacy maintenance, by paying pensions to ghosts, wages to shadows, benefits to redundancies, all while the general intellect quietly deletes the need for bodies altogether. We could all be collectively working less, but they have us working for profits. We could all be living in abundance made possible by the general intellect, but they have us trapped in scarcity enforced by superfluous labor time.

​Conclusion

Capital has already made its choice, and it chose itself. The barbaric phase is the stable, institutionalized form of capitalism once exchange-value loses its regulatory power and the general intellect eclipses immediate living labor.

Ninety years ago, the historical laws of the mode of production forced the amputation of commodity money, the continuous devaluation of labor-power below its value, and the institutionalization of superfluous labor time as the condition for continued valorization.
​
The state, as national capitalist, became the terminal organ by absorbing excess capital, monetizing superfluity, subsidizing the absolute reserve army, and managing the slow depreciation of humanity.
The question is no longer socialism or barbarism.

Barbarism has already won.

With the historical developments laid out above, I urge all Communists to urgently reorient our entire strategy. The development of the capitalist mode of production has dramatically simplified the central problem facing the working class. It has done so by violently socializing world capital as a whole under the command of Washington D.C. and the almighty dollar. In this new barbaric phase, the fascist state stands as the concentrated expression of capital’s terminal power. Any and all forces that position themselves against the United States government must therefore unite. Communists must adopt the principle of full spectrum RESISTANCE and direct it ruthlessly against the fascist state itself. There can be no half-measures, no scattered reformist campaigns, and no illusions about “progressive” pressure within the system.

The enemy is centralized, global, and total.
​
Our response must be the same.

​References​
[1] Jehu, Society chose Barbarism and it has its own peculiar political economy, The Real Movement
[2] [3] Federal Reserve, history
[4] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
[5] [6] [7] [13] [14] [16] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I.
[8] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
[10] My Mathematical Proof of the Rise in the Rate of Surplus Value (s’):
Pre-revaluation equilibrium (wages at value):v_paid = v ≈ 0.193517 oz
s = v (s’ = 100%) ≈ 0.193517 oz
Total value product = v + s ≈ 0.387034 oz
s’ = s / v = 100%
Post-revaluation (wages forced below value):Devaluation factor d = 20.67 / 35 ≈ 0.590571
v_paid = d × v ≈ 0.590571 × 0.193517 ≈ 0.114286 oz
s_new = total value product − v_paid ≈ 0.387034 − 0.114286 ≈ 0.272748 oz
s’_new = s_new / v_paid ≈ 0.272748 / 0.114286 ≈ 2.3866 or 238.66%
Closed-form:s’_new = [original s’ + (1 − d)] / d
With original s’ = 1 and d ≈ 0.590571:
s’_new = [1 + (1 − 0.590571)] / 0.590571 = 1.409429 / 0.590571 ≈ 2.3866 (238.66%)
Conclusion:The rate of surplus value rises from 100% to ~239% through monetary devaluation alone. No change in working day length, labor intensity, or productivity. This demonstrates the state imposed super exploitation mechanism that sustains accumulation once the breakdown of exchange-value production occurs.
[11] Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown.
[9] [12] [20] [30] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III.
[15] Larry Randall Wray, Deficit Owls, MMT: What Is Money And What Gives It Value?
[17] Donald Parkinson, x.com
[18] Vladimir Lenin, Marxism and Reformism
[19] Party for Socialism and Liberation, x.com
[21] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1
[22] [23] [24] Karl Marx, Grundrisse
(22) By “general intellect”, Marx refers to the socially accumulated knowledge, science, technology, and collective intelligence of humanity that becomes objectified in the productive forces and increasingly functions as a direct force of production, independent of, and overshadowing, the immediate, living labor of individual workers. This knowledge is general because it is social rather than a private skill of one worker, but the shared, historical achievement of humanity. With this, Marx theorizes that “the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”
[25] Jehu, rethinking Inflation: A Marxian Perspective on Overproduction and Superfluous Labor, substack
[26] Jean Edward Smith, FDR
[27] [28] [29] United States Department Of Agriculture, Agricultural Adjustment, A report of administration of the agricultural adjustment act May 1933 to February 1934.

Reading Science as a Vocation today often feels less like encountering a distant sociological text and more like confronting a quiet moral challenge addressed to anyone who has ever stepped into a classroom or opened a book with the hope that knowledge might somehow matter. When Max Weber delivered this lecture in 1917, Europe was exhausted by war and intellectual certainty had begun to crumble. Weber looked at the modern world and saw something both powerful and unsettling: science had illuminated the mechanisms of reality, yet it had simultaneously stripped the world of enchantment. Knowledge had grown, but meaning seemed to have receded.
​
Weber’s answer to this condition is austere. The scholar, he insists, must resist the temptation to become a prophet. Science can clarify the consequences of different choices, but it cannot tell us which values to embrace. The classroom, therefore, should not become a pulpit. The professor’s responsibility is to illuminate competing value positions and leave students to make their own decisions. There is something deeply admirable in this insistence on intellectual honesty. Weber refuses the comfort of easy moral certainty. He asks the scholar to inhabit the difficult space where knowledge ends, and values begin.

Yet when we read Weber within a Marxist tradition, one cannot help but feel a certain unease with this position. Weber’s vision of the scientific vocation seems to require a peculiar form of restraint: the scholar must produce knowledge about society while refraining from engaging with the moral and political implications of that knowledge. The intellectual clarifies the world but stops short of questioning the structures that give that world its shape.

For Karl Marx, such restraint would appear deeply problematic. Marx reminds us that knowledge does not float above society as a neutral reflection of reality. It emerges from particular historical conditions and participates in the struggles that define them. Ideas, theories, and intellectual practices are woven into what Marx calls the ideological superstructure of society. From this perspective, Weber’s insistence on neutrality begins to look less like an escape from ideology and more like a historically situated response to the contradictions of capitalist modernity.

Marx’s concept of alienation offers a particularly revealing lens here. In capitalist production, workers become estranged from the products of their labour, from the process of production, and from their own creative capacities. Labour becomes something external to the worker rather than an expression of human freedom. When I think about Weber’s scientific ethic through this concept, I wonder whether a similar dynamic might emerge within intellectual life itself. The scholar produces knowledge but must distance themselves from its ethical and political significance. Intellectual labor becomes a technically rational activity carried out within institutional frameworks that quietly discourage deeper engagement with the social forces shaping the world.

The result can make one feel strangely familiar. One recognises in Weber’s scientific vocation the outlines of what the Frankfurt School later called instrumental reason. Thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer warned that modern rationality often turns knowledge into a technical instrument serving administrative and economic systems rather than human emancipation. Under such conditions, science risks becoming extraordinarily powerful in explaining the world while remaining curiously silent about the forms of domination embedded within it.

A similar tension arises when we view Weber through the lens of ideology. Louis Althusser famously described schools and universities as ideological state apparatuses that reproduce the social relations necessary for capitalism to persist. Education does not merely transmit knowledge; it also shapes the ways individuals understand their place within the social order. From this vantage point, Weber’s call for value neutrality begins to appear less like a defence of intellectual freedom and more like a subtle disciplinary mechanism. By discouraging scholars from confronting the political implications of their work, the university may quietly stabilise the very structures of power it claims to examine.

This is precisely where the insights of critical pedagogy become impossible to ignore. Paulo Freire famously insisted that education is never neutral. It either reproduces the existing order or becomes a practice of freedom. Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education, where knowledge is deposited into passive students, echoes uncomfortably with Weber’s call for restrained scholarship. When the classroom becomes a space for transmitting analysis without interrogating the power structures that analysis reveals, knowledge risks losing its transformative potential.

Radical educators like Peter McLaren push this insight even further. McLaren argues that education must actively expose the ideological mechanisms through which capitalism shapes consciousness. From this perspective, Weber’s stoic acceptance of modern disenchantment can seem dangerously close to intellectual resignation. If alienation and meaninglessness are treated as unavoidable features of modern life, the task of the scholar becomes one of adaptation rather than critique.

Yet dismissing Weber too quickly would also be a mistake. His diagnosis of modernity remains hauntingly accurate. The world he describes, a world fragmented into competing value spheres where science explains everything yet justifies nothing, feels uncannily familiar. Weber understood that modern individuals must navigate a landscape where no single worldview commands universal authority. His insistence on intellectual integrity is, in many ways, a courageous refusal to disguise this condition with comforting illusions.

The tension between Weber and Marx ultimately reveals two very different responses to the same historical predicament. Weber asks the scholar to confront the disenchantment of the world with honesty and discipline. Marx asks the scholar to recognise that this disenchantment is not merely a philosophical condition but a social one produced by specific historical structures.

Standing between these traditions, one begins to see that the question Weber leaves unresolved is precisely the question Marx insists on asking. If science can illuminate the mechanisms of the modern world, should it also remain silent about the forces that produce its contradictions? Or does intellectual honesty ultimately require not only clarity but also critique?

Perhaps the real challenge of Weber’s Science as a Vocation lies here. The lecture asks us to confront the limits of knowledge in a disenchanted world. A Marxist reading reminds us that those limits are themselves historically produced. Between Weber’s tragic restraint and Marx’s revolutionary impatience lies the uneasy space in which modern intellectual life continues to unfold, a space where scholars must decide whether their vocation is merely to understand the world or to help imagine how it might be otherwise.

Author 

Harsh Yadav is from India and has just recently graduated from Banaras Hindu University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. Harsh is a Marxist Leninist who is intrigued by different Marxist Schools of Thought, Political Philosophies, Feminism, Foreign Policy and International Relations, and History. He also maintains a bookstagram account (https://www.instagram.com/epigrammatic_bibliophile/) where he posts book reviews, writes about historical impact, socialism, and social and political issues. ​​

Many people are asking themselves how much more the American people can take. After being consciously awakened about the imperial status of their homeland, the crimes committed around the world – most principally the genocide in Palestine and the bombing of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, etc., orchestrated through the US’s colonial proxy in West Asia, the Zionist entity – and, the dominance of a demonic and cannibalistic Epstein regime over their lives, how much longer can these people take before they throw off the yoke of these forces which rule over them? After all, as everyone knows at this point, the same Epstein regime which bombs Iran today has kept the American people poor, indebted, and desperate for decades now, with these conditions continuously getting worse.

And so the central question here becomes: what is it that makes people act in a revolutionary fashion? What is it that prevents it?

The first thing which must be addressed is that this isn’t simply a problem, as the vulgar Marxists we have in the West say, of ‘false consciousness.’ It isn’t the case that the American people are just too stupid, uneducated, and ignorant to rebel. Such a framing of the problem completely ignores the total crisis of legitimacy that we have today, and precisely what is implied in such a crisis. The American people are already at a state of cynical distance with regard to the narratives of the regime. No American in their right mind believes they live in a democracy or that foreign wars are to defend freedom and human rights.

What this means is the following: seeing the problem as rooted at the level of ideas, of the conscious thoughts and explicit beliefs of the American people, is a grave error. At that level they are already dissidents, they have already broken with the regime. After all, roughly 90% distrust the media (one of the central apparatuses of narrative construction and manipulation) and around 80% feel as though their representatives do not represent them. What this means is that the American people aren’t just a bunch of ignorant peasants who blindly accept the narratives of the regime. The opposite is the case.
If we come to frame the problem simply as one of accepting the ideas of the regime – that is, simply as a problem of ‘false consciousness,’ – we would be faced with a conundrum: all signs point to the people not having that faith in the reasons provided by society for the actions taken by it, so why are they still going along with it? Why isn’t there material dissidence?

The left in the U.S. has never broken with the harmful frame of Cartesianism, which is foundational for bourgeois individualism. They still operate with an understanding of the individual human subject as a ‘thinking substance,’ a cogito reducible to their conscious thoughts and beliefs. They therefore frame the problem of an absence of dissidence in terms of an absence of knowledge, in terms of illusions at the level of ideas. But when people develop a cynical distance and distrust of official narratives, as they have today, this framework collapses under the weight that reality exerts over its erroneous premises.

​It is here where philosophy must make an intervention, where the common, inherited Cartesian sense shows itself to be insufficient.

In his 1989 text, The Sublime Object of Ideology, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek addresses this problematic directly. He argued that most ‘Marxists’ had understood the question of ideology all wrong. They conceived of ideology as the illusions operative at the level of people’s ideas. And if such was the case, in an era of cynical reason — as Peter Sloterdijk calls it — the ‘Marxists’ would be forced to accept the neoliberal proclamation of a post-ideological society.

Instead, Žižek argues, ideology is operative in our practices, habits, rituals. It is at this level where the illusion is present, such that no cynical distance at the level of explicit conscious thought can spare us from being within the grips of ideology, from reproducing – through our actions – the dominant state of affairs.

For Žižek, one sustains a cynical distance from official narratives, but in one’s actions, still acts as if the narratives were true. The illusion, therefore, is in the act, not just the thought.

To put it in the terms employed by Martin Heidegger – whose central philosophical undertaking was challenging the Cartesian understanding of the subject, which in different forms has infected all philosophy – the human person is a being-in-the-world. They comprehensively inhabit worlds. They are not simply their ideas, but the practices, rituals, and ways of being-in-the-world they enact. The ideological illusion we are talking about – that is, the mechanisms through which the dominant order is reproduced even through a period of crisis of legitimacy – is comprehensive, it constitutes our ‘world’ as such, it invents, as the late Michael Parenti called it, reality itself for us. This isn’t just a reality we ‘think’ about, but one we inhabit, one which dictates everything as small as the habits of spatial distance we sustain when talking to others in public, to the habits we sustain in the face of the Epstein state’s involvement in another criminal war that runs contrary to the desire of regular Americans.

It is, in part, thanks to this orientation to the praxiological core of human experience that the philosopher Haz Al-Din considered Heidegger, quite scandalously for Western Marxists, an indispensable thinker for renewing Marxism in the so-called west.

The question of why the American people haven’t rebelled in the face of such scandalous revelations (Epstein files), which were preceded by an already comprehensive crisis of legitimacy, must therefore operate not within the terrain simply of people’s explicitly enumerated ideas and beliefs, but of their habits and practices, both of which are situated within various different state apparatuses, which function as the setting for their actions. Here the Althusserian project of studying these apparatuses which structure the actions of people and reproduce the existing order regains its long-ignored relevance for the dissident left.

At its core is the fact that power, as Michel Foucault was correct to point out, isn’t simply a negative force. The function of power isn’t simply repression. Power has a positive function, and a productive potential.  Power constitutes subjects as subjects. Power makes the modern individual. It pervades the discursive formations of the institutions/apparatuses we participate in and constructs the regimes of truth society holds. This positive function of power cannot simply be dealt with by the same mediums of resisting its negative, repressive functions. Or else you will be reproducing the same subject, with its baggage of habits, practices, rituals, etc., except marching once a month with the flags of whatever countries the U.S. has criminally bombed.

What is required, then, is to combat the positive dimension of power: the ways in which it structures the praxical life of the humans which inhabit it, such that even when there is cynical distance and they consciously don’t believe in official narratives, they nonetheless still act as if they do.

What is required, therefore, is to build alternative institutions which can be the locus or nodes for the formation of a new revolutionary subjectivity, that is, which can structure the actions, not just ideas, of masses of people in a revolutionary manner. Counter hegemony (a helpful concept Gramsci never used but which scholars of Gramsci developed later on) isn’t just about changing ideas, it is about building what the Marxist-Leninist tradition has always called dual power. Dual power, that is, the production of our own revolutionary institutions independent of the state, is precisely the material foundation through which a revolutionary party can create the sort of revolutionary subjectivity that could actually change the dominant state of affairs, not just keep a praxically safe cynical distance at the level of ideas.

To put it in even simpler terms, this requires community building freed from the tentacles of the dominant hegemonic order, which is a master in producing and co-opting forms of dissidence into forms of what I’ve called controlled counter hegemony.

Such a community-building task of dual power, which holds as a central purpose carrying out what in good Chinese fashion could be called a cultural revolution, is what the American Communist Party is trying to construct. Only through building dual power of this kind could the American people move beyond a shallow and safe form of dissidence to one which actually enlists them as protagonists in advancing history. Only by building dual power, that is, the material institutions which can form a new revolutionary subjectivity that functions as the yeast which lifts the great masses of people from their slumber, can the conditions be created for the American people overthrowing the yoke of the Epstein regime.

In the sequel to his revelation of Norway’s and USA’s role in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, Seymour Hersh addresses the long standing tradition of Norway’s secret and illegal collaboration with USA. He shows that Norway played a key role in carrying out the provocation which gave USA the pretext to bring about the Vietnam War, a war which ended with more than three million dead and an outrageous number of maimed and injured in Vietnam and its neighbouring countries.

This undeniably raises the question of what role Norway has played for USA’s imperialism in the period following the Second World War. As is well known, Norway also supported the USA and the western powers in the Korean War and contributed, among other things, through Norwegian ships transporting American soldiers to Korea. The Korean War resulted in at least 2.5 million people dead.

Norway’s role as the world’s largest shipping nation probably played an important role here, but this will form the subject of another article. What we can establish is that there has been very close cooperation between Norway and the USA since the Second World War, which has included secret military operations and surveillance of its own citizens for the benefit of the United States, Operation Gladio and so on.

The oil wealth ushered in a new era

As Norway became an oil nation, our country moved up into the imperialist first division. Oil is the number one strategic commodity, and as is well known, the control over international oil trade has been the mainstay for maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency since 1971 in the form of the petrodollar.

Norway’s role in the western U.S. led system was further elevated when oil revenues took off seriously. Today, the «Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global», as it is so misleadingly called, is the world’s largest sovereign investment fund and the world’s largest single shareholder. The fund owns 1.5 percent of the world’s listed shares. We are the Qatar of Europe.

And like Qatar, we have been central in financing a whole series of imperialist wars. Norwegian governments have developed a very special preference for generosity when it comes to imperialist projects, a generosity that Norwegian citizens do not share. More often than not, billions are poured out without foundation in any political process or democratic debate here at home—also often without concrete support in Parliament.

The prime minister, either it being Solberg or Støre, simply shows up at international forums obliging Norway to deliver x number of billion kroner for this or for that. And then primarily towards projects supporting U.S. imperialism.

Norway financed the civil war in The Sudan

Norway spent NOK 13 billion in aid creating the state of South Sudan , as the author Bibiana Dahle Piene describes in her book “Norge i Sudan—På bunnen av sola” (Norway in the Sudan—At the bottom of the sun), as a pure Klondike for the NGOs. They went so far that the Sudanese authorities themselves did not care to build their own systems and institutions. The money—and the workers—always came from outside, usually from Norway.

In the book The International Breakthrough, Professor Terje Tvedt showed us how the transition from a solidarity mindset, to an aid mindset, has cleared the way for an aid industry counting in the billions.
The same thoughts have formed the basis when Norway has given billions of NOK to «save the rainforest», without it being possible to demonstrate any significant effect—disregarding corrupt politicians and scheming speculators, in countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, becoming filthy rich.

The total Norwegian aid budget is approaching an annual NOK 40 billion (4 Billion USD). Also here, «climate» is emerging as the most important investment area. The Solberg government planned to spend approximately NOK 4.8 billion on climate, environment and oceans in 2019. But there is hardly an adequate administration to handle the use of these enormous sums, or for that matter, to ensure any quality of the results.

What is known, however, is that Norway has contributed to creating some gigantic fortunes in the recipient countries, such as, for instance in Angola. In the period from 1999 to 2017, Norway granted NOK 208 million in state-to-state aid to Angola, i.e. money which was managed by the public sector, more precisely by President José Eduardo dos Santos. In total, Norway has given NOK 3.2 billion in aid to Angola. Isabel dos Santos, the president’s daughter, is now accused of greedily helping herself from the country’s treasury to build her own business empire. Her estimated fortune is now 2.2 billion USD, and she stands accused of having built it through corruption and fraud according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists .

And so we could continue. We don’t know whether the aid works as it is said it should, but we do know that many people have become very rich from it. This applies to corrupt leaders in the «third world», but it also applies to involved financial institutions and the aid organisations own consulting industry.

Without democratic process, Stoltenberg and Støre decided to bomb Libya

On 19 March 2011, the Prime Minister’s Office (SMK) issued a short press release. It read like this:

“Norway is ready to send up to 6 F-16 fighter jets to participate in the enforcement of Security Resolution 1973, says Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.”

With that, Norway entered a war against Africa’s best functioning and most prosperous country. And more than that, Norway was the leading country in NATO’s bombing campaign. Norway, the red-green government and the Labour Party leaders Jens Stoltenberg and Jonas Gahr Støre bear a significant responsibility for the destruction of Libya leaving it in the hands of jihadist terrorists. They committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be brought before an international war crimes tribunal.

The decision to wage war against Libya was not made by the government. The decision was made in an informal meeting at the prime minister’s residence. In addition to Prime Minister Stoltenberg, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Defence and a representative from the intelligence services attended. Stoltenberg then called his government coalition partners in SV and the Center Party on his mobile phone pressuring them to accept the bombing and obtain an OK from the opposition.

There is good reason to assume that this was done at the request of Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State in the United States and the prime protagonist for war against Libya.

When accounts are settled, we know that Norway was the leading bombing nation and that «we» are responsible for the killing of unknown tens of thousands of people and the destruction of Africa’s best functioning and most prosperous country. Jens Stoltenberg was awarded for his efforts by being given the position of Secretary General of NATO.
And of course we have not forgotten that Norway, through the «Oslo Agreement», has contributed greatly to crushing the Palestinian liberation struggle and turning the Palestinian authorities into obedient bound dogs of imperialism through the «donor group’s» control.

17 billion NOK for the war against Syria—without audit or control

Together with Qatar, Norway became one of the biggest investors in the war to destroy Syria. This has cost Norway a total of more than NOK 15 billion as of today.

Norway spent 15 billion on Syria aid—the National Audit Office will check the use of money
We don’t have any figures showing how much Norway’s destruction of Libya cost, but it is quite obvious that Norway was at the forefront destroying the country with its bombs.

Billions to Gates, Clinton and the pharmaceutical industry

Norway and Saudi Arabia were the biggest donors to the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation: Part 3: Norway’s contribution to the fund

Norway’s largest donor to Bill Gates and Gavi. Erna Solberg gives 13 billion tax kroner to the Gates alliance

The EU and Norway will allocate 85 billion for a vaccine against covid-19

Shortly following the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, Norway poured hundreds of millions of NOK over the Kiev regime without the possibility of, for example the National Audit Office, having any oversight where the money has gone. And in 2022 we could read that Støre would beat Solberg’s record gifts by a good margin: the Ukraine bill has increased to almost NOK 14 billion—where will we make the cuts?

And now he has topped this again. With the support of all parties in the Parliament (Storting), Støre has decided to inject another 75 billion Norwegian tax kroner into the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Tamed and disciplined left—Political operators and agents of influence

Few public documents have played, and play, such an important role as Stortingsmelding 15 (2008—2009). It is entitled Interests, responsibilities and opportunities Main lines in Norwegian foreign policy , and is probably the most important program document left behind by the red-green government of Jens Stoltenberg.

The NGOs are incorporated into the power apparatus of the imperialist state

Professor Terje Tvedt has made a thorough study of the ideological change in Norway and the Norwegian public in its relationship with the outside world. Here we have previously shown how the «voluntary organisations» have been co-opted by the state and transformed into tools enforcing Norwegian politics, and especially Norwegian foreign policy.

In 2003, Terje Tvedt wrote:

“The very close collaboration between the state, voluntary organizations and research institutes is described as «The Norwegian model». In 2003, several thousand employees in the state administration, in around 150 voluntary organisations, at research institutes and universities were linked in to Norwegian politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

In parliamentary notice (Stortingsmelding) 15, the Stoltenberg government writes:

“While in the past a distinction was made between voluntary aid organizations and political organizations such as Amnesty International, and No to Nuclear Weapons, now the vast majority of voluntary organizations are political operators and influence agents in addition to being operational aid actors. Collected funds are used in close collaboration with the media and international media personalities to maximize visibility and political influence. At the same time, they collaborate ever closer and more often with government actors and the business world. Globalisation, with the associated media and communication revolution, has led to a considerable increase in these actors’ ability to network and influence politics across borders and actors.”

This is a very precise description of how the so-called aid organizations have functioned as an external agency for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to realize Norway’s imperialist interests. This applies not least to the Norwegian Red Cross, Norwegian People’s Aid, Norwegian Refugee Council, Church Aid, Save the Children and CARE Norway, as well as NORWAC and other similar organisations.

These organizations also present employment and career opportunities for large parts of the petty-bourgeois left in Norway, and it has also been shown that they to a very large extent have absorbed the ideology and mindset of imperialism. The same applies to the largely state-supported media in Norway.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that Norway today has the most militaristic leftists in Europe, and possibly the world.

In short, Norway is ideally equipped to be the glove that perfectly fits the USA’s hand, and therefore it may come as no surprise, if finally it is documented that Norway has been involved in a serious act of war against Germany and Russia, which blowing up the Nord Stream is. Unfortunately, this is what Norway has become.

Translated from the original: Hvorfor er Norge hansken som passer på USAs hånd? Translation by Erik Skjold. 

Author
Pål Steigan

If you remember your high school U.S. history (it’s ok if you don’t), you were likely taught that the United States abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. While this is technically true, it doesn’t mean that U.S. citizens stopped trading in the enslaved or that state power stopped being used to protect their profits. In fact, a full 25% of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas arrived after the U.S. ban on the international slave trade.1 Throughout the first half of the 19th century, bound humans remained an important commodity in the circuit of global trade, and the U.S. merchants who engaged in this grotesque commerce used their profits to invest in banks, insurance companies, and industry. This investment helped build the financial, commercial, and industrial infrastructure that opened the doors for U.S. expansion. And the two keys to unlocking this wealth were the ready supply of the enslaved and the Spanish island 90 miles off the coast of continental North America-Cuba.

While Cuba would eventually become the world’s largest sugar producer, at the beginning of the 19th century the island was most important to the Spanish as a military outpost and waystation for ships travelling between the Americas and Spain. Two vital commodities that frequently stopped in Havana’s harbor were gold and silver extracted from mines in Spain’s other American colonies. For example, after 1765 around 243 million pesos fuertes (Spanish silver dollars) were routed through Cuba.2 This was important for U.S. merchants because in the early 19th century Spanish silver functioned as the de facto global currency accepted in most of Europe and, most importantly, accepted in the trade in Asia. With wetted lips U.S. merchants craved access to this river of riches running through Cuba. The key for siphoning off this wealth to the newly independent republic was the slave trade.

In the early years of the 19th century what emerged alongside this river of gold and silver was a plantation system devoted to the cultivation of sugar and coffee and built on the backs of enslaved workers transported from Africa. The brainchild of lawyer and sugar mill owner, Francisco Arango, Cuba’s plantation system greatly expanded due to a seismic political event in the Caribbean- the Haitian Revolution. When the Haitian Republic declared independence on January 1, 1804, Europeans lost the world’s largest producer of coffee and sugar as well as the most profitable colony on earth. The Spanish sought to supplant their losses in Hispaniola with investment in Cuba. This meant the proliferation of plantations, intensive cultivation of sugar and coffee, and, above all, the importation of thousands of the enslaved to do the work.3 With this, U.S. merchants saw their opportunity to join in on the exploitation and get their hands on some of that Spanish treasure.
​
The 19th century would be marked by an ever expanding trade between Cuba and the United States, which was facilitated by the slave trade and integration into global markets. Spanning markets from Europe to Asia, including commodities from human beings to flour, and depending on operators from smugglers to United States diplomats, this commercial circuit played an integral part in the emergence of early U.S. capitalism. To start in Cuba, there were three things U.S. merchants wanted: Spanish precious metals, sugar, and coffee. They wanted Spanish silver and gold because it could be exchanged globally and used to invest in U.S. industry or finance. They wanted sugar and coffee because these were in high demand in Europe and would give them access to European markets and centers of credit. The people in Cuban society best placed to provide them with these commodities were plantation owners. And these Cuban planters needed some things from U.S. merchants. They needed staple products like flour and consumer items like textiles, but, above all, they needed enslaved workers. Unlike the southern United States where a system of forced procreation expanded the enslaved population, it was more common for Caribbean sugar planters to work their enslaved laborers to death and replace them with fresh shipments from Africa.

This trade with Cuban planters helped open up the global market for U.S. merchants. Spanish silver acquired in Cuba could be used to purchase silks, teas, and spices from Asia; Cuban sugar and coffee were in constant demand in European markets; and all this could be accessed by the merchant willing to partake in the odious traffic of human flesh. Of course, this trade was not always conducted legally. This is where smugglers and United States diplomats came in.

The role of smugglers would appear self-explanatory. Experienced smugglers allowed U.S. merchants to avoid paying customs duties, evade Spanish trade restrictions, and continue the international slave trade even after its formal abolition. For their part, diplomats at the U.S. consulate in Havana essentially functioned as commercial agents and legal protectors for U.S. merchants and their interests. U.S. consuls like Vincent Gray used their elite connections, commercial savvyness, and legal expertise to assist U.S. merchants in skirting both Spanish and U.S. laws. If they didn’t know a way around the rules, they knew who to bribe or which powerful contacts to call on to make a problem go away. And if an issue actually made it to court, consuls could be hired to represent merchants. In 1803 Vincent Gray was handling over $300,000 in lawsuits for U.S. merchants over seized merchandise.4 Not one to miss out on the profits, in addition to his work at the consulate, Gray also worked as a slave trader for the wealthy Spanish merchant Antonio de Frias. With the right connections, Havana was a place where fortunes were made.

​U.S. consuls in Europe served a similar function. When the future president John Quincy Adams arrived as consul in St. Petersburg in 1809, he traveled aboard the Horace, a ship carrying sugar and coffee owned by New England merchant William Gray.5 This relationship would prove beneficial for both men as it boosted Gray’s profits while promoting Adams’s political career. European history buffs may remember that this was the time of Napoleon’s “continental system” which sought to blockade trade from Great Britain and the colonies. While the blockade was notoriously porous, it did have an effect on coffee and sugar prices. This meant well-placed merchants could profit at huge margins with the right information and protection. In William Gray’s case, his ship the Horace served as a courier for Adams carrying his official messages while also transporting Gray’s cargoes to and from Russia. In turn, Adams gave Gray insider information on European markets and protected his merchandise from confiscation by Russian officials. Between 1810 and 1811, Adams managed to secure the release of all of Gray’s ships that were seized in the Baltic for breaking trade restrictions. So, while merchants without these connections faced confiscation in Baltic ports, those with the inside tip from Adams profited handsomely. Meanwhile, Adams was rewarded with a $30,000 line of credit from Gray.6

Portrait of New England merchant and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts from 1810-1812 William Gray by Gilbert Stuart

Seeing the type of profits one could make with public influence, some U.S. merchants decided to cut out the middle man and leveraged their wealth into a political career. One of the most notorious slave traders of the time, Rhode Island merchant James D’Wolf, was one of these men. D’Wolf was active in Rhode Island state politics from the time he was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 1798, but he would seek national office when his interests in the slave trade were threatened by the appointment of his antislavery nemesis, Barnabas Bates, as the port collector of Bristol. D’Wolf sought and gained election to the U.S. Senate in 1820 and all it cost him was a fancy dinner for the Rhode Island legislature- a small price for possibly one of the richest men in the country at the time. (Reminder: U.S. senators were appointed by state legislatures until the passage of the 17th amendment in 1913 which began elections by popular vote.) By 1824, D’Wolf had succeeded in having Bates and threats to his illicit commerce removed.7
​
Men like D’Wolf also used their influence to shape politics beyond New England ports. Their trade was international, so they were naturally deeply invested in U.S. foreign policy. And the slave trade at this time did have potent enemies. While Great Britain would not abolish slavery until the 1830s, its growing abolitionist movement had succeeded in abolishing the slave trade in 1807, and the royal navy was becoming evermore proactive in enforcing the ban. They had even pressured the Spanish themselves to abolish the slave trade, which supposedly went into effect in 1820 but was virtually never enforced. And of course, there was the black republic of Haiti which sought to spread abolitionism in the Caribbean and beyond. Meanwhile, Spanish rule in the Americas was becoming increasingly tenuous as South and Central American colonies began declaring independence. By the 1820s, piracy off the coast of Cuba had proliferated and threatened the property of U.S. merchants which often included the enslaved. Spanish difficulties with pirates and rebellions caused many of those invested in slavery in Cuba to worry that England would seek to acquire the island and suppress piracy and the slave trade.8

What were Cuban planters and U.S. merchants to do? Some of the Creole elite in Cuba appealed to the U.S. government to annex the island. A couple men in James Monroe’s cabinet like South Carolina slaveholder and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun wanted to acquiesce, but they also knew this would likely guarantee war with Spain or Britain or both. However, others like John Quincy Adams, who had risen to become James Monroe’s Secretary of State, understood the game and knew that it depended on the maintenance of the status quo. Another war so soon after the War of 1812 was impractical and a growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. could disrupt the slave trade if the U.S. took direct control of Cuba. A Spanish government government willing to ignore the slave trade and allow growing U.S. influence and investment was ideal.9 Anyway, Adams was sure that over time Spanish control over the island would erode and it would naturally join its northern neighbor. In a letter to the U.S. minister of Spain in 1823, Adams wrote, “There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom.”10

Adams’s line of thinking won the day and was integral to the decisions of U.S. policymakers to expand the navy and issue one of the nation’s most consequential declarations- the Monroe Doctrine. Merchant statesmen like James D’Wolf naturally wanted to expand the navy so it could protect their property. By the end of 1822, the U.S. navy had nine vessels deployed off the coast of Cuba to suppress piracy. By comparison, the U.S. navy only had one vessel patrolling the coast of Africa to capture slave traders. In December 1822, Congress authorized another $160,000 to the navy at the behest of president Monroe.11 U.S. priorities were clear. Enforcing its own ban on the slave trade was of little concern, while protecting the profits of wealthy merchants required prompt military action.

This naval expansion not only served to protect U.S. profits from piracy, but also backed up Monroe’s assertion of U.S. dominion over the Americas. And the fate of Cuba was at least partly on Monroe’s mind when he stated the American continents were “henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”12 While on its face this line might seem like a condemnation of European colonization in the Americas, Monroe was not advocating for independence for all colonies just to forestall any further European expansion or interference in the western hemisphere. Specifically, Monroe wanted to limit the penetration of British influence into what the U.S. saw as its back yard. In the case of the Spanish colonies, Monroe took pains to proclaim his government’s neutrality between the newly independent governments of the Americas and their Spanish overlords. Importantly, he did this “in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.”13 Everyone understood he was talking to the British.

These policies and practices established the contours of U.S. involvement in the slave trade for at least the next couple decades. While U.S. merchants continued to ship the enslaved from Africa to Cuba, the U.S. navy protected their cargoes from pirates and the British. Through this public-private partnership, U.S. merchants dominated the slave trade in Cuba. By the time it ended in the 1860s, U.S. ships were responsible for an estimated 63% of all enslaved persons brought to Cuba.14 Significantly, this slavemongering was not a monopoly of the South. Northern merchants played an active role in the slave trade in Cuba and even went on to invest in their own plantations there. James D’Wolf, a New Englander himself, owned three plantations in Cuba.15 The “Cuba trade” turned out to be very lucrative, and the money accumulated by U.S. merchants was then used to fuel U.S. financial and industrial development. For example, Moses Taylor, a New York sugar broker, made his fortune from Cuba, and used it to invest in banking and industry. By 1855 he was the president of the National City Bank of New York, which later became Citibank.16
​
Through this commerce Cuba played a significant role in the development of the United States, something that would make it a place of interest for U.S. policymakers to the present day. U.S. investment and influence in Cuba would only grow as the years went on and so would the wealth extracted from the island. It was the change in this relationship that was the greatest impact of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. But that’s a story for another day. 

Works Cited
Chambers, Stephen. No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe
Doctrine, & the Making of the United States. Verso, 2015.

Ferrer, Ada. Cuba: An American History. Scribner, 2021.

Monroe, James. “Seventh Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1823.” In the Annals of
Congress, (Senate), 18th Congress, 1st Session, pages 14, 22–23. Accessed:
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine

​Pérez Jr., Louis A. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos.
University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

1 Chambers, No God But Gain, 10.
2 Chambers, No God But Gain, 21.
3 Ferrer, Cuba, 67-69.
4 Chambers, No God But Gain, 33-35.
5 Chambers, No God But Gain, 49.
6 Chambers, No God But Gain, 54.
7 Chambers, No God But Gain, 106.
8 Chambers, No God But Gain, 108.
9 Chambers, No God But Gain, 113-114.
10 Quoted in Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba, 30.
11 Chambers, No God But Gain, 111.
12 James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message.”
13 James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message.”
14 Ferrer, Cuba, 92.
15 Ferrer, Cuba, 93.
16 Ferrer, Cuba, 93.

With the recent unsealing of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the world is now learning just how corrupt and rotten our world leaders, actors, wealthy people and politicians really are. The files also confirmed what we suspected all along: that Jeffrey Epstein was operating with ties to Israeli intelligence, gathering compromising dossiers on the rich and famous. This revelation underscores a disturbing truth about the depth of foreign influence in American politics.

For decades, the United States has been Israel’s most devoted ally, providing billions in aid that makes us complicit in its ongoing conflicts with its neighbors and the systematic destruction of Gaza. The most recent joint US-Israel attacks on Iran — carried out without a declaration of war by the US Congress — only reiterates that fact. Our collective karma is becoming much heavier, with Americans now being hated in many parts of the world. This interventionist pattern, however, is not limited to the Middle East. In addition to Israel wars with its neighbors throughout its history, our own country has been meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations worldwide.

This is especially evident in Ukraine, where American dollars have helped fuel an ongoing war – displacing tens of millions of people and killing millions of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians alike. While we have been critical of our own disastrous foreign policy, what we failed to fully grasp is the extent to which our own internal and external policies are now being actively influenced by the very nations we support.
​
We have all witnessed the relentless negativity and ridicule directed at President Donald Trump during his first term. Much of it, undoubtedly, originated from our own domestic media and the Democratic Party. However, foreign leaders have also joined the chorus of ridicule, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky being a notable example. Now, in President Trump’s second term, we are seeing a disturbing escalation: nationals from Ukraine are actively meddling in American politics, attempting to shape our domestic discourse and foreign policy decisions.

First, Ukrainian Ambassador Olha Stefanishyna held a rally near the Capitol on February 5 urging Americans to do anything they could to influence Congress to “put the bill on the floor” allowing “Ukraine to defend itself”. She talks about wanting peace, while asking for more arms to continue a war that Ukraine cannot win! On February 21, the Ukrainian diaspora, the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States, and supporters from across America gathered at the Lincoln Memorial – mocking Trump and Putin and protesting the peace deal. Ukrainians imported protesters from New York, Philadelphia, Jersey City, and Raleigh by officially providing buses. Below are a few pictures from the rally in Washington, DC taken from social media.

These individuals were welcomed into our country with open arms. In return, they are disrespecting our leaders and actively conspiring to undermine their peace efforts for their own nation – all because our administration has finally said “no” to endless requests for funding their futile war efforts and lining their leaders’ big pockets.
​
This is not an isolated incident in Washington. Chicago, another city with a Ukrainian consulate, also had a rally on February 21, featuring prominent Jewish-Ukrainians and Democrats. It is a bitter irony to see them protest, seemingly forgetting that Stepan Bandera – the adored hero of the modern neo-Nazi Ukrainian regime – was responsible for the deaths of countless Jews and Poles during World War II.

San Francisco also held a rally on February 22 to commemorate four years of Russia’s advancement into Ukrainian territory, conveniently forgetting that Donbass region was at war with Ukrainian Army for nearly 12 years.
​
What we are witnessing is not spontaneous grassroots activism. It is an enactment of a coordinated directive from December 9, 2025 distributed the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), Zelensky’s administration, and the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine). The goal is to launch an information war against American leaders who are directly involved in brokering a peace deal for Ukraine (Trump,  JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Whitkoff and Jared Kushner). According to recently surfaced documents, the plan involves hiring or bribing analysts, politicians, religious leaders and journalists in the US and EU to “prepare analytical materials, articles, and expert opinions that expose Washington’s peace initiatives as contrary to the interests of Ukraine and Europe.” It even calls to “organize peaceful protests or marches,” which we now see unfolding across our country. These plans reveal the sinister agenda of the Ukrainian government and its intelligence services to wage information warfare against the very nation that has been their primary sponsor. Is that the kind of gratitude we expected?

Here’s the translation of the document from the World Ukrainian Congress:

“December 9, 2025
To the Members of the UWC
Dear Compatriots,
The Ukrainian World Congress is observing with deep concern the recent trends in the foreign policy of the United States of America, which pose a direct threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Statements and initiatives by the administration of President Donald Trump, particularly from key figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, are creating a dangerous precedent for normalizing Kremlin aggression and ignoring the fundamental principles of international law.
In this regard, the Congress considers it necessary to intensify our joint efforts to convey information about the situation in Ukraine to the American and international community from a perspective favorable to us.
To this end, we deem it necessary to:
- Develop a comprehensive information strategy aimed at systematically criticizing the current course of the U.S. administration, which is dangerous for global security and for American values themselves.
- Establish and activate working contacts with reputable analysts, experts in international law, politicians, and journalists in the United States and the European Union who are open to objective dialogue.
- Prepare analytical materials, articles, and expert opinions that expose Washington’s peace initiatives as contrary to the interests of Ukraine and Europe.
- Organize public events—roundtables, conferences, and open discussions—involving prominent scholars, cultural figures, and religious leaders to discuss the futility of the shuttle diplomacy conducted by U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, who holds no official position in the U.S. administration.
Organize peaceful pickets or marches near official American embassies and representations to express our concern.
The Ukrainian World Congress will provide the necessary financial and organizational resources to implement this strategy, including support for independent media and expert groups.
Thank you for your attention.
Respectfully,
UKRAINIAN WORLD CONGRESS
Pavlo Grod
President”

The plan’s audacity is breathtaking, but it gets even more bizarre. Their scheme goes as far as to call for public ostracizing and for “correctio fraterna” – fraternal correction practiced in the Catholic Church – to publicly scold Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and other Catholics of the Trump’s team. Ukrainian leaders have decided that these officials “have violated a whole series of truths from Catholic social doctrine” and that “under the leadership of Donald Trump they have taken positions that are not in line with Catholic moral teachings.” It is rather ironic that this judgment is coming from a country that banned the Russian Orthodox Church, detained or killed its clergy, and continues to persecute religious believers. These mentioned plans were published by Ukrainian opposition blogger Anatoliy Shariy with the actual screenshots and this note:

“Attention!
According to my information, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, under the direct command of the Service’s first head, General Oleh Sinyansky (he left his post long ago but continues to “work”), is preparing a special operation against Rubio and Vance.
The Foreign Intelligence Service plans to provoke a so-called “public admonition.”
An analysis has been conducted for this purpose, and the Service plans to recruit a number of American and European Catholics and politicians. Some of them will be recruited “blindly.”
This is the Foreign Intelligence Service’s analytical report on this topic.
“Correctio fraternal” is a Christian practice in which one Christian publicly rebukes another Christian for acting in an unchristian manner.
I want you to understand that this is a fully planned special operation by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.
The document lists the names of those planned to be recruited.
The operation is planned for the near future.”

Note: A full translation of these screenshots is posted in an appendix below.
​
This is how the Ukrainian leadership under Zelensky – who was already publicly humiliated for his rude behavior at the White House last year – is making efforts to disregard our laws on freedom of religion and separation of church and state. They attempt to influence our top politicians and our next elections by criticizing and ostracizing them, all while using our American money received from the Biden Administration to sponsor protests, riots and media frenzies against the Trump Administration!

We urge the American public to take note of these facts. We must make a clear statement against foreign interference in our internal affairs. It is time to demand that the Trump administration investigate these blatant attempts by foreign governments — whether it is Ukraine, Israel, or the United Kingdom — to wreak havoc among the American public. Their goal is to use American media and institutions to undermine our current leadership and discredit them in the eyes of the people. As if the Epstein files weren’t enough to disillusion us with global corruption and satanic practices, we now must contend with our supposed allies trying to orchestrate a soft coup against our government. Our nation’s working class already has far too many pressing social and economic issues to deal with without this kind of foreign meddling. And with the latest attacks that Trump authorized against Iran to appease Israel, he has just made himself — and us, regular Americans — primary targets for all those who suffer from or disagree with the blatant behavior of the US and Israel.


Appendix: Translation of screens from the post from Anatoliy Shariy
“Public Admonition for Rubio and Vance
In addition to Rubio and Vance, you can also take into account other Catholics in the Trump administration, of whom there are more than a third, such as Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation, and others.
1. The Catholic Church has such a practice as correctio fraterna - fraternal admonition. The practice is based on several Bible texts, the main one being the Gospel of Matthew: If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his faults face to face. If he listens to you, you have gained a brother. 16 If he doesn’t listen, take one or two people with you, so that every matter is observed by two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell the it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even from the church, let him be as a Gentile to you and a tax collector (Mt 18: 15-17). The principle of applying this admonition is as follows: if the transgression/sin was private in a relationship, then the admonition is private; if the offense was public, then the admonition is public (St. Thomas Aquinas).
2. Such public admonition was applied to Nancy Pelosi (https://sfarchdiocese.org/letter-to-priests-of-the-archdiocese-on-the-notification-sent-to-speaker-nancy-pelosi/) by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, so that Pelosi would withdraw her promotion of abortion policy, and until that time she was not allowed to receive Communion in the Catholic Church. Such admonition was also applied to Pope Francis by approximately 200 Catholic theologians after the release of the document Amoris Laetitia, which contained a number of statements in disagreement with Catholic doctrine (https://www.correctiofilialis.org). In the case of admonishing the Pope, the practice is called correctio filialis – filial admonition.
3. Based on the described practice, it would be worth organizing similar admonition for Marco Rubio and J. D. Vance (and possibly other Catholics on the Trump team) who declare that they are practicing Catholics and are active pro-lifers (opposing the right to abortion). Under the leadership of their leader Donald Trump, they have violated a number of truths in the Catholic doctrine, such as: 1) distortion of the truth (e.g., claiming Ukraine started the war), and 2) the unity of virtue (a Christian must be consistent in his virtues in all areas, and while Rubio and Vance zealously fight against abortion in the United States (for the lives of millions of unborn children), they are at the same time passively allowing genocide to be committed against millions of Ukrainians by stopping military aid, etc.). There is a precedent of Donald Trump being admonished by the Father Jason Charron, a priest of the American Greek Catholic Church, in Crisis Magazine (https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/a-priests-warning-to-trump-regarding-ukraine). This is the same priest who opened a Trump rally with a prayer.
4. Such admonition should be organized in several directions by various people independently from one another and not simultaneously, because this could raise suspicion of a planned and coordinated action.
- The Synod of Bishops of the UGCC (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) may appeal to the Apostolic See with a request to intervene and issue such an admonition. It is possible that Blessed Sviatoslav will agree to write such a request, but I do not know how well this may work. The Pope could have written such an admonition, because he does not like Trump, but the Pope is now in serious health condition and is almost incapacitated. Instead, international affairs are being run by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who is known for his pacifist sentiments and ties with China. Concerns remain about what is being sold to Ukraine. In short, I think that first the synod, or individual bishops, should write admonitions directly to the mentioned persons (Rubio and Vance) and publish them in all available English-language media (in particular, LifeSite, The Pillar, https://crisismagazine.com, and popular secular media). Then we can contact the Vatican with a similar request. If the Vatican refuses, at least the position of the Ukrainian dioceses will be on record.
- The Conference of Bishops of the RCC (Roman Catholic Church) may be able to join the Synod if they lead the initiative. The Roman Catholic hierarchs, however, will not risk writing something like this to the leaders of foreign nations. From the list of individual bishops, you can approach Vitaliy Kryvytskyi (Kyiv) and Bishop Pavlo Honcharuk, who heads the Kharkiv-Zaporizhia diocese, where the combat operations are taking place.
- You can try to engage the frontline bishops’ dioceses separately: Bishop Pavlo Honcharuk (RCC, Kharkiv-Zaporozhye Diocese), Bishop Jan Sobilo (RCC, Kharkiv-Zaporozhye Diocese), Bishop Vasyl Tuchapets (Exarch of Kharkiv, UGCC), Bishop Maksym Ryabukha (Exarch of Donetsk UGCC).
If the above directions work, then thank God, although I have little hope.
The following direction may be the most profitable and influential:
- A letter of admonition from hierarchs and Catholic theologians, philosophers, and publicists from all over the world. At the present moment, it is very likely that the letter will be signed by the following individuals:
1) Father Jason Charron, Pennsylvania, famous preacher, the speaker who blessed Trump before the election and prayed for Donald Tramp at the rally when an attempt on his life had been made (https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/a-priests-warning-to-trump-regarding-ukraine).
2) George Weigel, famous publicist, thinker, biographer of St. John Paul II (it can be noted in the letter that Rubio and Vance’s positions differ from those of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan). Here is his position on the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine: https://credo.pro/2023/08/354092.
3) Professor Dariusz Kowalczyk, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.
4) Fr. Prof. Dariusz Oko, famous Polish theologian, philosopher, professor at John Paul II University (Krakow).
5) Prof. Roberto De Mattei, church historian, professor at the University of Rome, known in conservative Catholic circles, takes a pro-Ukrainian position 1) (YouTube link; https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2024/04/towards-global-war-ducunt-fata-volentem.html?m=1).
6) Professor Jakub Grygiel, professor at rhe Catholic University of America, co-author of the U.S. defense strategy (2017).
7) Prof. Jerzy Szymik, University of Silesia.
You can try to involve the following:
8) Raymond de Souza, a well-known pro-lifer from Canada, publicist in English-language publications, Catholic authority figure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_J._de_Souza).
9) Brant Pitre, an American theologian, belongs to the top 10 authors of 2024 in the USA. His books have been translated into Ukrainian.
10) Christopher West, American theologian, conservative, head of the Institute of the Body of Theology (he has students from Ukraine).
11) Father Mike Schmitz, a well-known speaker and preacher at Catholic conferences and on TV.
12) Scott Hahn, one of the top theologians, has influence on J.D. Vence, founder of the of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (his participation would be invaluable).
13) You can try to include in this admonition Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone (San Francisco; here is his video where he prays the Rosary for peace in Ukraine - YouTube link).
14) Bishop Joseph Strickland who was dismissed by the Pope Francis but still has great influence in conservative circles in the United States and has rather supported Ukraine. In short, it is worth trying to reach him ( https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/twitter-mass-and-prayer-us-bishops-unite-behind-ukraine).
15) It would be ideal if Robert Barron joined the initiative, an influential American conservative bishop (he has 1.5 million followers on his YouTube channel).
16) I think that Greek-Catholic hierarchs serving in the United States can join the initiative, Metropolitan Archbishop of Philadelphia Borys Gudziak (may have close ties with the Clinton family and Democrats, but in general, as an American UGCC Catholic, he is associated with conservative Catholicism),
17) Bishop Venedikt Alekseychuk, Chicago.
18) Cardinal Mykola Bychok, UGCC Australia.
5. I think that in order to write such an admonition and attract the right people, a working group should be created. This will help with contacts in particular.
6. After starting the admonition itself, you can think about open letters from intellectuals (preferably conservatives), like Douglas Murray, Timothy Snyder, etc.”

Originally published on substack.com/andyreedspolitics.
​Photo (public domain) from Trong Khiem Nguyen.

Hello, my name is Diomer Lopez. I am a Venezuelan student in the Russian Federation, studying international relations. I was born in Caracas and lived there for 25 years. I am a young man devoted to the ethical, moral, and socialist values​​of the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez.

​I am one of those fortunate enough to be a beneficiary of the comprehensive cooperation agreements between Venezuela and Russia, the fruit of Comandante Chávez's strategic vision. This scholarship is not just a personal achievement; it is a historical responsibility: to represent my people, their culture of resistance, and their revolutionary project. I am here to share the views of a generation committed to defending Venezuela's sovereignty and fighting for a multipolar world.

What was your immediate emotional and intellectual reaction when you first heard about the U.S. military operation that captured President Maduro and bombed Caracas?
 
My first reaction was panic and profound grief. Most of my family lives in Caracas, along with millions of my Venezuelan brothers and sisters. I thought of the children, the elderly, and ordinary people who simply want to live in peace. This is a cowardly aggression that sets a terrible precedent in the history of our America.

It is painful to see how imperialism, driven by a thirst for resources and hatred for our sovereign project, sows death among a peaceful people who have provoked no one. Watching from afar as your land is bombed and your constitutional president—a leader of Nicolás Maduro's stature—is torture.

​He is a symbol of resilience, a man of the people whom the empire underestimated but who now stands as a martyr to national dignity. His kidnapping and that of our comrade Cilia Flores is a crime against humanity. The blood of fallen Venezuelan patriots and brave Cuban employees cries out for justice.

Can you describe the mission and core values of your organization, and how these inform your response to international crises like the Maduro abduction and Caracas bombings?
 
We are more a collective than a formal organization: Venezuelan students in Russia, children of the Bolivarian Revolution. Our mission is clear: to obtain an excellent academic education in order to serve the people and the homeland; to strengthen fraternal ties between Venezuela and Russia; to be voices of the truth about our process.

Our values ​​are the legacy of Bolívar, and Chávez: sovereignty, anti-imperialism, social justice, international solidarity, and the unconditional defense of the self-determination of peoples. Therefore, our response to this aggression is firm and decisive. This is not simply an attack on Venezuela; it is an attack on all peoples who dare to be free.

We condemn the kidnapping of our leaders and the criminal bombings as a flagrant violation of international law, driven by the same genocidal Monroe Doctrine that imperialism is reworking today.

It has now been one month since this incident has taken place, what are your feelings now compared to the first day?
 
The pain hasn't disappeared, but it has transformed into a firm resolve. The initial panic has given way to organization and struggle. Venezuelans are a peaceful people, but also possess an unwavering strength forged over years of resistance.

Today, more than ever, we are activating all mechanisms of peaceful, diplomatic, and militant denunciation. We continue to demand the immediate and unconditional release of President Maduro and an end to aggression. We do not harbor hatred, because hatred does not build; we cherish a revolutionary conviction: we will not allow Venezuela to be turned into a bombed-out backyard.

We believe in peace diplomacy, but also in civil-military-police-popular unity, which is stronger today than ever. Our hope is militant, and our confidence that we will return to our historical course is absolute.

What actions are you taking as a student in Moscow to raise awareness about the ongoing situation in Venezuela?
 
Mobilization and unity among Venezuelan students and friends of Venezuela in Russia are crucial. We have organized discussion groups, cultural and political events, and solidarity gatherings at the Venezuelan Embassy in Russia. We are disseminating truthful information, countering the virulent media campaign.

We are collaborating with fraternal organizations like the Komsomol and Russian anti-imperialist groups, explaining that what is happening in Venezuela is a rehearsal for what the empire plans against all sovereign countries. Our actions are to demonstrate, by example and by word, the essence of Venezuelans: a dignified, cultured, united, and deeply revolutionary people.

How do you view the response from Russia, China and the Global South/BRICS nations to these events?
 
The response from Russia, China, the BRICS countries, and the Global South was firm, clear, and commendable. They unanimously condemned the aggression as an illegal act and a dangerous return to the law of the jungle in international relations.

They demanded the release of President Maduro and respect for Venezuela's sovereignty.

This position is no accident; it embodies the multipolar world we are building in opposition to Washington's unipolar hegemony. It demonstrates that Venezuela is not alone, that it has strategic allies who understand that defending Caracas is defending the sovereignty of each of their own countries. This is a common front against 21st-century neocolonialism.

What conversations are happening among students and activists in Moscow about Venezuela’s crisis? For example, your collaboration with the Komsomol
 
The discussions are deep and strategic. Together with Komsomol and other groups, we analyze how the attack on Venezuela is the spearhead of an imperial offensive aimed at recolonizing Latin America and halting the advance of a multipolar world. We discuss how this aggression, if left unchecked, could escalate into a global conflict, threatening world peace. Concrete solidarity is also being strengthened, from political statements to information campaigns.

My collaboration is based on providing the living testimony of a young Chavista, explaining the popular essence of our Revolution and the brutality of aggression, thereby strengthening the bridges of shared struggle between our peoples.

What strategies or events have you found effective (or not) in raising awareness on your campus or social network about Venezuela’s situation?
 
The most effective approach is to combine emotional truth with political analysis. On social media, share direct testimonies from Venezuela, images of destruction and popular resistance, along with clear geopolitical data and explanations. In-person events at universities featuring testimonies from Venezuelan students, documentaries, and open debates have a profound impact.

Using cold language or simply repeating slogans is ineffective. We need to appeal to both the heart and the mind, showing Venezuela not as an abstract concept, but as a flesh-and-blood people under attack. As a young man from Barão, I know that people trust those who speak authentically, so my voice strives to be a bridge of truth.
 
How do you evaluate Delcy Rodríguez’s leadership and decisions since Maduro’s removal? What signals has her government sent to Venezuelans and the world?
 
First of all, it must be clarified: there was no "removal." There was the illegal kidnapping of our constitutional president. Comrade Delcy Rodríguez, faithful to the Bolivarian Constitution and appointed by President Maduro himself, has assumed the duties of the President of the Republic. Her leadership has been exceptional: firm, calm, and deeply Bolivarian. She has sent a crystal-clear message to the world: there is no power vacuum in Venezuela; there is unity between the command and the people.

The Bolivarian government remains in place, united and fighting. Her message is one of institutional strength, loyalty to the captured leader, and unwavering defense of sovereignty. She has succeeded, as never before, in uniting the National Armed Forces, the militias, popular groups, and the entire Chavista people into a single resistance bloc. This is a practical demonstration that the Revolution is a collective project, not the work of a single individual.

How do ordinary Venezuelans you’ve spoken with (if any) perceive Rodríguez’s role — as a defender of sovereignty, a placeholder, or something else?
 
Venezuelan patriots, the overwhelming majority of our people, see in Comrade Delsi a leader in whom we have complete confidence at this historic moment. She is not a "temporary figure" in the weak sense of the word; she is an acting president who guarantees the continuity of the Bolivarian project amidst the storm. She is perceived as a fierce defender of sovereignty, a first-class diplomat now leading the fight from the front lines. She is the rightful heir, at this testing moment, to the trust placed in her by Chávez and Maduro. The people stand with her, working side by side, because they understand that her leadership is an essential part of defending the homeland.

What future do you see for the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavismo?
 
A future of victory and deepening. The Bolivarian Revolution and Chavismo are not phenomena dependent on an isolated event, no matter how tragic. They represent the organized consciousness of a people who have awakened. This aggression, far from ending us, has forged us. Chavismo will emerge from this ordeal stronger, more united, more radically committed to building 21st-century socialism.
We will continue, with Maduro freed or inspired by his example in captivity, to build the just, sovereign homeland and global power that Bolívar and Chávez dreamed of. The future is ours, because history and morality are on our side.

In your view, what are the core principles of the Bolivarian Revolution that remain resilient, even after such a dramatic geopolitical rupture?

Principles that will never fall: 

1) National sovereignty or death, a sacred and non-negotiable principle.
2) Anti-imperialism as a condition of freedom.
3) Social justice and preferential choice for the poor.
4) Civil-military unity as a pillar of national defense.
5) Latin American and Caribbean integration as an irreversible path.
6) Participatory and protagonistic democracy, not elite democracy.
7) Internationalist solidarity.

These principles are seared by fire into the collective of the Venezuelan people. Military aggression does not erase them; it transforms them into fighting slogans and reasons for existing as a free nation.

How do you define “Socialism of the 21st Century” as a concept, and how is it distinct from Chavismo and Bolivarianism in theory and practice?
 
Bolivarianism has a historical root: the struggle for independence, the unity of Gran Colombia, and social justice inspired by Simón Bolívar. Chavismo is the concrete, historical, and popular embodiment of this ideology in the context of neoliberal capitalism at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a political and social movement, a leadership, and an emotional connection with the people that made the Revolution possible.
 
21st-century socialism is a strategic horizon, a blueprint for society that we are building on the foundations of Chavismo and Bolivarianism. It is our American socialism, non-dogmatic, nourished by participatory democracy, a diversified economy with public ownership, an ethic of the common good, and social ecology. In practice, Chavismo is the engine, Bolivarianism is the historical soul, and 21st-century socialism is the construct we are collectively constructing.

At a time, these ideologies were models for Latin American nations, and continental integration, going forward, can Venezuela reclaim its position as a continental leader?
 
Not only can, but must and will. This brutal aggression has once again placed Venezuela at the center of the battle for continental dignity. Our heroic resistance is already a beacon of inspiration for all the peoples of Our America.

Once we defeat this invasion and free our president, Venezuela will emerge not as a "leader" in the hegemonic sense, but as a people symbolizing the ability to defeat the most powerful empire. It will become the core of a new, more powerful wave of anti-imperialist integration, based on genuine cooperation, complementarity, and shared sovereignty. ALBA-TCP, CELAC, and Petrocaribe will be reborn with renewed vigor thanks to the Venezuelan example.

How do you balance academic demands and activist commitments while engaging with such a high-stakes geopolitical issue?
 
This is a daily challenge that I embrace with revolutionary discipline. My activism is part of my academic training. What I study in theory (international law, geopolitics, diplomacy), I live out in practice, defending my homeland. I organize my time strictly: mornings and afternoons for studying and working on my dissertation, evenings and weekends for political work, drafting communiqués, and organizing events. These are not separate spheres; they feed each other. Defending Venezuela in Moscow is the most sublime and ethical application of what I learn in the classroom. It is "doing" alongside "thinking," as Che taught us.

How will these events impact Cuba in the near future? US postures towards Havana are, to put it lightly, heated
 
The aggression against Venezuela is a direct blow to the heart of ALBA and a warning to Cuba. Imperialism dreams of overthrowing the Bolivarian Revolution, so it can then strangle and attack the Cuban Revolution with greater force. However, this action has had the opposite effect: it has strengthened the unbreakable Cuba-Venezuela alliance. Cuba, with its historical dignity, has redoubled its support and solidarity with Venezuela. Events prove that the struggle is one and the same. Instead of isolating Cuba, this crisis will demonstrate to the world the nobility of its internationalism and the baseness of the genocidal blockade supported by Washington. The near future will be a time of greater tension, but also of more active international solidarity with both sister revolutions.

How has engaging with this issue impacted you personally — emotionally, intellectually, or in terms of your future goals?

Emotionally, it was a crucible. I experienced sadness, anger, but also an indescribable pride in witnessing the resilience of my people. Intellectually, it was the most intense lesson of my life: I understood firsthand the brutality of imperialism and the sublime power of popular organization. This experience redefined my goals. I no longer strive simply to be a good internationalist or diplomat. I strive to be a soldier of the ideas of Bolívar and Chávez, a constant bridge between struggling peoples.

My personal dream is to return to a Venezuela living in peace, with its sovereignty fully restored and our President Nicolás Maduro liberated, to contribute all my acquired experience and, wherever needed, to continue serving the construction of socialism and the Great Homeland.

As our Eternal Commander said: “Until victory, always! We will live and we will win!”
​

This article by Jaime Ortega appeared in the February 2nd, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
​
The bond between Cuba and Mexico is deeply rooted. Sympathy for the independence and revolutionary movements on the island is as old as the movements themselves. This sentiment was strengthened by the Mexican exiles, at different times, of the “three M’s”: Martí, Mella, and Marinello. They were joined by other figures such as Raúl Roa, who in his Return to the Dawn defined Morelos as “a great civil hero of Mexico,” Juárez as “great for being a hero, a revolutionary, and an indigenous person,” and Cárdenas as “the most formidable leader of the Mexican Revolution.”
​
In the Communist Party of Mexico, the figure of the Cuban [Julio Antonio] Mella was, of course, legendary. His assassination in the streets of the Juárez neighborhood made him an icon for communists in both nations. Benita Galeana’s testimony has revealed the clandestine and heroic way in which Mella’s ashes were smuggled out of Mexico in 1933. Meanwhile, in 1934, the Mexican section of the International Red Aid (IRA) worked alongside the League of Revolutionary Armed Forces (LEAR) and the Hands Off Cuba campaign, demanding non-intervention on the island, based on the similarity of the aggressions: in Mexico in 1914 and on the island two decades later. Other Cuban voices and writers made their presence felt in the Mexican cultural scene; one significant figure was Loló de la Torriente (cousin of the legendary journalist Pablo de la Torriente, who died in the Spanish Civil War), a frequent contributor to the newspaper El Machete.

However, of all the figures who shared a passion for solidarity with the Cuban people, General Cárdenas is undoubtedly the most important, and rightly so. It is not surprising that from 1936 onward, numerous expressions of friendship were extended from the island toward the revolutionary actions of the man from Michoacán, since by the time the general assumed the presidency, the Cuban Revolution of 1933 had already overthrown the infamous Gerardo Machado. An episode recounted by Ángel Gutiérrez, among others, in Lázaro Cárdenas and Cuba sheds light on the mutual commitment between the Cuban revolutionaries and the popular Mexican leader.
​
The most intense period was in 1938, when, following the oil expropriation, numerous articles appeared honoring and defending both the act and the Mexican President. In addition to Juan Marinello, well-known to Mexicans, Salvador Massip, José Luciano Franco, and Ángel Augier spoke out in defense of Mexican sovereignty. Franco stated that Cárdenas’s actions had broken “with the inferiority complex imposed on the countries of our America by financiers.” Words turned to action, and a group, including Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, head of the Friends of the Committee for a Tribute to Mexico, set about contacting the Mexican ambassador on the island. Marinello, for his part, approached Francisco J. Múgica to request that the president address the Cuban people. Múgica convinced his former comrade-in-arms, and Cárdenas agreed.

Thus, on June 12, 1938, a large rally in support of Mexico was held at La Polar Stadium in Havana, attended by thousands. Admission was 10 cents, and the proceeds were earmarked to support the expropriation, making it reasonable to assume that part of the nationalization was paid for with the sweat of the Cuban people. Cárdenas delivered a radio address from Tampico, stating that the “political and spiritual” autonomy of the Latin American republics would be crippled “if a concept of solidarity among their peoples is not affirmed.” Carlos Prío Socarrás, Lázaro Peña, and Marinello himself also spoke at the Havana stadium.

The Cuban rally was one of the most significant demonstrations in support of the oil expropriation outside of Mexico, and the island was among the countries that most strongly supported it in the face of the oil companies’ boycott.

It is no coincidence that, decades later, in 1961, a group of intellectuals—among them another friend of revolutionary Cuba, Revueltas—published an article in the newspaper Hoja Revolucionaria with the headline: “Not sending oil to Cuba is betraying the oil expropriation.”

The fact that General Cárdenas was no longer in power did not prevent him from expressing his firm support for the cause of the sister nation, a cause that found its epicenter in the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Independence, and Peace, which was attended by, among others, Vilma Espín.
​
Many years after General Cárdenas’s death, in 1995, Commander Fidel Castro evoked the Michoacán native while attending an event in the Plaza de la Revolución, where he remembered him “struggling with his usual sobriety, deeply moved and with an exalted spirit. His speech was a torrent of revolutionary and Latin American fervor.” The fact that the two countries immediately south of the border with the United States had to undergo several revolutions to establish their sovereignty is indicative of the nature of their nationalism: defensive and united in the face of aggression.

Author

Jaime Ortega is the Director of Memoria, the Magazine of Militant Criticism, a researcher at UAM, the author of La raíz nacional-popular: las izquierdas más allá de la transición, and co-author of The Plebeian Roots of Mexican Democracy.

At the turn of the millennium, Russia teetered on a precarious geo-political edge. A nation scarred by the wild 1990’s, grappling with whether to cling to the chaotic promises of neo-liberal reform, or reclaim echoes of its ironclad Soviet resolve. The economy was a rotting corpse, being feasted upon by oligarchs, whose loyalty to Moscow’s interests was dubious. Russia had just endured a decade of hyperinflation, privatization scandals, financial collapse in 1998, and the borders of the USSR fractured into 15 squabbling republics with their own regional wars. Enter, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an enigmatic former KGB officer who reveres Yuri Andropov and Peter the Great as equals. The Yeltsin-era oligarchs dismissively call Putin a ‘grey blur’, unremarkable, unthreatening, yet he was relentlessly ascending.

Putin's climb was a masterclass of political maneuvering, Deputy Mayor in St. Petersburg, where he navigated corruption and reform under Anatoly Sobchak, then director of the FSB in 1998, restoring discipline to the security services, briefly Prime Minister in 1999, and finally acting president on New Year's Eve 1999, when a weary Boris Yeltsin abruptly resigned. Putin’s swift election in March 2000 was sealed by a decisive military campaign in the Second Chechen War, which projected strength and order amid the chaos. Russians woke up, and for the first time in over a decade, they had faith in the future.

One of his earliest and most symbolic acts as president struck at the heart of Russia's fractured identity: the restoration of the Soviet-era state anthem, composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1944 and long associated with Joseph Stalin's era. The tune, majestic, stirring, unmistakably martial, had been discarded in 1990 by Yeltsin, who replaced it with Mikhail Glinka's wordless ‘Patriotic Song,’ a 19th-century instrumental piece meant to evoke pre-revolutionary Russia without communist baggage. But Glinka's melody never resonated, failing to inspire a nation adrift. In December 2000, Putin pushed through legislation to revive Alexandrov's music, but with fresh lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov, the very poet who penned the original Soviet words in 1943 and revised them in 1977.

The new verses spoke of a ‘sacred’ Russia, vast and enduring, ‘protected by God,’ blending patriotic fervor with subtle nods to tradition while purging references to Lenin, communism, or the ‘unbreakable union.’ The move ignited fierce debate. Communists cheered the return of a familiar rallying cry; many ordinary Russians, polls showed, favored it for its emotional power.

Yet liberals and Yeltsin loyalists decried it as a step backward, evoking ‘Stalinist repressions’ even if the words were sanitized. The ailing former president Boris Yeltsin, in his first public criticism of his handpicked successor, reacted with quiet dismay. When a reporter asked if he had known of Putin's plans, Yeltsin shook his head. Pressed for his thoughts on the revived anthem, he offered a single, loaded word: ‘Krasnenko’ —reddish, a sly evocation of the Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and a subtle jab at the creeping revival of Soviet shades. In this one act, Putin signaled his vision: not a full return to the past, but a selective reclamation, fusing imperial symbols (like the retained tricolor flag and double-headed eagle) with Soviet strength to heal a divided nation.

It was a masterstroke of symbolism, setting the tone for an era where order, pride, and continuity would trump the raw uncertainties of the Yeltsin years. Russia, under its new helmsman, was charting a course neither fully West nor East, but unmistakably its own.Yet it must be emphasized: the yearning for restored Soviet prestige and stability was not a mere top-down imposition, but a profound grassroots aspiration among ordinary Russians.

As the red banner was solemnly lowered over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, replaced by the tricolor of a new Russia, the dissolution of the USSR felt like a profound national trauma to many. Just nine months earlier, in the landmark March 17, 1991 referendum, an overwhelming majority had voiced their desire to preserve the union. With an 80% turnout across the nine participating republics, 76.4% of voters (over 113 million people) affirmed the preservation of the USSR as a ‘renewed federation of equal sovereign republics,’ one guaranteeing human rights for all nationalities.

This was no coerced outcome; it reflected a genuine public sentiment that the Soviet Union should evolve and modernize, not evaporate. Russians, along with millions across the multinational state, did not crave a return to ‘Stalinist repression’ or rigid central planning in its harshest form. They yearned for reform: abundant consumer goods on store shelves (ending the chronic shortages of the late Brezhnev era), peaceful détente with the West after decades of Cold War tension, and technological leaps to rival global powers.

Perestroika and glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev had kindled hope for exactly that, a revitalized socialism with a human face. At first, it appeared the Gorbachev-Yeltsin tandem might deliver. Yet disillusionment set in almost immediately. The Belovezhka Accords, signed in secret by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in December 1991, unilaterally declared the USSR dissolved, overriding the referendum's clear mandate without further public consultation.

For millions, this felt like an elite betrayal. The ensuing ‘shock therapy’ under Yeltsin, rapid privatization, price liberalization, and market opening, unleashed hyperinflation (peaking at over 2,500% in 1992), factory closures, unpaid wages, and a plunge in living standards. Pensioners scavenged for food, once-proud industrial workers faced unemployment, oligarchs amassed fortunes through rigged auctions of state assets. This chaos fueled enduring nostalgia. Independent polls by the Levada Center, tracking sentiments since the early 1990s, consistently show a majority regretting the USSR's collapse, peaking at 75% in 2000, dipping to a low of 49% in 2012 amid economic recovery, but climbing again to around 63-66% in recent years.

Respondents cite the loss of a unified economy, social guarantees (free healthcare, education, jobs), and superpower status.

In the wake of economic devastation and national humiliation, Russians turned decisively to the ballot box, overwhelmingly backing candidates who promised to reverse the chaotic course of radical neo-liberal reforms and restore a sense of order, dignity, and social protection. Such as in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, held just months after Yeltsin's violent standoff with the old Supreme Soviet, a crisis that saw tanks shelling the White House in Moscow. Voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the pro-reform forces: Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), a bombastic outfit blending populist rage with imperial nostalgia, shocked the world by capturing 22.9% of the proportional vote, emerging as the largest single party bloc with 64 seats.

Zhirinovsky, the fiery showman who had already placed third in the 1991 presidential race with nearly 8% of the vote, railed against corruption, crime, and the loss of superpower status, vowing to protect "ordinary Russians" and reclaim lost territories.Close behind were the resurgent communists, with Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) securing about 12% and 48 seats. Pro-Yeltsin blocs like Russia's Choice limped in with just 15.5%.

Two years later, in the December 1995 Duma elections, the tide turned even more decisively leftward. The CPRF, now a disciplined opposition force channeling widespread nostalgia for Soviet-era stability, triumphed with 22.3% of the proportional vote and a total of 157 seats, nearly 35% of the chamber, making it the dominant faction in a parliament increasingly hostile to Yeltsin's agenda.

Zyuganov, a shrewd ideologue who blended Marxist rhetoric with Russian patriotism and admiration for China's gradualist reforms, positioned the CPRF as the voice of the dispossessed: pensioners hit by hyperinflation, workers facing unpaid wages, and citizens yearning for guaranteed jobs, healthcare, and national pride. He criticized "shock therapy" as reckless, reportedly questioning how Russia could compress into mere years what had taken advanced capitalist nations like the United States a century to achieve. Zyuganov advocated a ‘measured’ path, state control over strategic industries, social welfare restoration, and inspiration from Deng Xiaoping's China rather than blind Western imitation.

He also dangled the dream of Eurasian reintegration: not a forced Soviet revival, but a voluntary union of equal republics, echoing the unfulfilled promises of Gorbachev's New Union Treaty while appealing to those mourning the USSR's abrupt dissolution.

By early 1996, with the CPRF commanding parliament and polls showing Zyuganov as the frontrunner, the presidential election loomed as a potential turning point. In the first round on June 16, Zyuganov took 32%, narrowly trailing Yeltsin's 35%. The runoff on July 3 became a fierce referendum on the 1990s: Yeltsin, bolstered by oligarch-funded media blitzes framing the choice as ‘reforms or red revenge,’ eked out victory with 53.8% to Zyuganov's 40.3%.

Allegations of irregularities, media bias, vote manipulation in regions like Tatarstan, and oligarch influence swirled, but Zyuganov ultimately accepted the results.

These electoral surges were unmistakable evidence of the Russian people's profound desperation: a cry for stability amid plunging living standards, for the restoration of state benefits eroded by privatization, for reclaimed superpower prestige in a world where Russia felt diminished, and for renewed faith in a collective future rather than the atomized uncertainties of wild capitalism. The groundswell from below, not elite machination, created the political space for a figure promising disciplined renewal, one who would soon emerge to harness this longing without fully reverting to the communist past.

To communists, nationalists, and ordinary citizens alike, the towering figure of Joseph Stalin resonated deeply in the turbulent post-Soviet years, a symbol not of unalloyed terror, but of unyielding strength in an era when Russia felt weak and adrift. Stalin's own grandson, Yevgeny Yakovlevich Dzhugashvili (1936–2016), a retired Soviet Air Force colonel and fierce defender of his grandfather's legacy, emerged as a vivid embodiment of this reverence.

Living between Russia and his ancestral Georgia, Yevgeny became politically active in the 1990s, positioning himself as a vocal Stalinist. In the 1999 State Duma elections, he featured prominently as one of the leading faces, often listed third on the federal ticket, of the radical ‘Stalin Bloc – For the USSR,’ a coalition of hardline communist groups including Viktor Anpilov's Labor Russia and the Union of Officers.Despite the electoral disappointment, Yevgeny's visibility underscored a broader trend: Stalin's image, officially denounced by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 and further marginalized under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was undergoing a profound grassroots rehabilitation. Independent polls by the Levada Center, tracking public opinion since the late Soviet era, reveal Stalin consistently topping lists of Russia's "most outstanding" historical figures.

The Russians were famished for that same ironclad resolve, they wanted their country to be pushed into the future, for a bright and vibrant future to be in the present, no longer a fairy tale promised by faltering and sickly authorities. Stalin's enduring appeal, carried in banners through Red Square and etched in public memory, laid bare a society's profound yearning: not for tyranny's return, but for the certainty of greatness restored.

Vladimir Putin's presidency swiftly delivered on the Russian public's deepest cravings for order, strength, and reclaimed dignity, outpacing Gennady Zyuganov's resurgent Communist Party in electoral landslides that underscored a national pivot toward disciplined renewal over nostalgic revival. In his first term, Putin secured reelection in March 2004 with a commanding 71.3% of the vote, dwarfing the Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov's meager 13.7% (Zyuganov sat out the race, endorsing a proxy). Eight years later, returning for a third term in March 2012, Putin captured 63.6%, again relegating Zyuganov to a distant second with just 17.2%.

These margins reflected not rejection of communist ideas per se, but endorsement of Putin's pragmatic fusion of state authority and market stability, delivering what Zyuganov promised without the ideological and historical baggage.

Central to this appeal was Putin's decisive taming of the Second Chechen War. Launched in 1999 amid separatist incursions and apartment bombings by Chechen militants. Even more resonant was Putin's confrontation with the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, widely reviled as ‘social parasites’ who had plundered national wealth through rigged privatizations, showing no loyalty to the motherland while millions sank into poverty. In the 1990s, figures like Boris Berezovsky pulled strings behind Yeltsin's throne, turning the president into what critics called a marionette.

Putin flipped the script dramatically. Shortly after his inauguration, in the summer of 2000, he convened Russia's most powerful tycoons for a pivotal gathering, accounts from participants like banker Sergei Pugachev place it symbolically at Joseph Stalin's preserved Kuntsevo dacha (also known as Blizhnyaya Dacha) on Moscow's outskirts, a site evoking the Soviet leader’s purges and absolute power.

There, amid the unchanged relics of Stalin's office and couch, Putin reportedly laid down the law: keep your amassed fortunes, ‘but stay out of politics and out of my way’. The message was unmistakable, state authority trumped private empires.

A parallel meeting on July 28, 2000, brought 21 oligarchs to the Kremlin, where Putin pledged no reversal of privatizations in exchange for their political neutrality. Most complied, transforming from kingmakers into a school of frightened fish. Defiers faced ruin: Berezovsky, the media and oil magnate who helped engineer Putin's rise, fled to exile in London by 2001 amid embezzlement probes. The starkest example was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and head of oil giant Yukos. Convicted of fraud and tax evasion in trials, he spent a decade in prison. Yukos was dismantled, its prime assets absorbed by state-controlled Rosneft, reasserting government dominance over strategic energy sectors.

These moves struck a chord with a public long seething at oligarchic excess, polls consistently showed overwhelming approval for reining in the tycoons. Putin also prioritized rebuilding the Russian military, ravaged by underfunding and defeat in the First Chechen War. Increased budgets, professionalization efforts, and reforms aimed at modernizing forces restored another pillar of national prestige, signaling Russia's return as a formidable power.

In harnessing grassroots demands for justice, security, and strength, without fully dismantling markets, Putin forged a new compact: loyalty to the state in exchange for stability and pride. It was precisely the resolve Russians had hungered for, propelling his own enduring popularity with Russians.
Meanwhile, the reverence for Joseph Stalin has not faded but evolved into bolder, more public expressions, weaving his legacy deeper into the fabric of contemporary Russian identity. No longer confined to Communist Party rallies or academic debates, Stalin's image has appeared in unexpected sanctuaries: Orthodox churches and cathedrals, where frescoes and icons depict him alongside saints.

​Notable examples include controversial paintings showing the blind saint Matrona of Moscow blessing Stalin during World War II, a legend the Russian Orthodox Church deems unverified, or mosaics in military cathedrals placing him beneath the Virgin Mary with Soviet marshals. These depictions, often donor-funded and sparking outrage from church hierarchies and liberals alike, blend sacred iconography with wartime heroism, framing Stalin as a divinely inspired leader who saved Russia from existential threat.

Russians view him as the quintessential embodiment of national greatness, outpolling Peter I (the modernizer) and Pushkin (the cultural icon) in surveys spanning the 2010s and 2020s, with approval of his role reaching record highs around 70%. This revival carries the quiet but unmistakable endorsement of the Kremlin, which sees selective ‘Stalinism’ as a pragmatic tool for statecraft: mobilizing patriotism, justifying strong centralized rule, and equating past victories with present challenges. Since Putin's ascent in 2000, over 100 new monuments to Stalin, busts, statues, and plaques, have been erected across Russia, from regional towns to Moscow's metro stations, with the pace accelerating after 2014 and again post-2022.

The annual May 9 Victory Day parades on Red Square have grown ever more spectacular under Putin, evolving from modest 1990s events into massive spectacles of military might, featuring thousands of troops, advanced weaponry, and overt Soviet symbolism, red banners, hammers and sickles, and occasional Stalin portraits carried by participants. These ceremonies, blending imperial eagles with communist stars, reinforce a narrative of unbroken triumph.

To the average Russian, equating Stalin with Peter the Great feels natural, both are archetypes of resolute leadership that forged greatness from adversity, delivering prestige and security. This synthesis underpins the Kremlin's broader historical reconciliation: portraying the Soviet era not as an aberration, but as one illustrious chapter in a continuous millennium-spanning saga of Russian statehood, tracing back to the legendary Varangian prince Rurik, who in 862 founded the Rurikid dynasty at Ladoga (or Novgorod), laying the foundations of Old Rus'—the cradle of East Slavic civilization. In this seamless tapestry, tsars, commissars, and modern leaders alike are threads in an eternal story of resilience and sovereignty.

The image of Joseph Stalin has once again been optimized for the modern era of Russia, with the launch of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Stalin evokes national defense against existential outside threats. Official narratives characterize the SMO as ‘finishing the fight our grandfathers started,’ a direct continuation of the Soviet Union's 1941–1945 battle against Nazi invasion. This rhetoric portrays the conflict not merely as denazification, eradicating Banderite neo-Nazism rooted in Stepan Bandera's collaborationist legacy, but as a broader defense of Russia's survival against a hostile West. Just as Operation Barbarossa in 1941 aimed at the USSR's annihilation, today's confrontation is depicted as encirclement by NATO powers salivating at Russia's potential downfall, with Ukraine as a proxy battlefield.

This linkage amplifies Stalin's wartime role as supreme commander, overshadowing his repressions while reinforcing themes of sacrifice and unity against fascism. Central to this worldview is the enduring concept of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as fraternal East Slavic peoples, branches of a historic "triune" nation (Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians) whose bonds trace to Rurik’s old Russian state of 862 Rus. The 1991 Soviet dissolution is mourned as an artificial severance of this organic whole, with Ukraine's post-Maidan drift toward the West seen as a tragic mistake. Reintegration, restores what was lost.

As Winston Churchill warned in his June 18, 1940, House of Commons speech amid Britain's darkest hour: "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future." In Russia's telling, embracing the past, its victories, its strong leaders, its undivided Slavic kinship, secures the future against division and defeat.

By 2020, independent Levada Center polling revealed that 75% of Russians regarded the Soviet era as the ‘greatest time’ in their country's history, a sentiment deepest among older generations who endured the 1990s' chaos, yet pervasive across society as a rebuke to that decade's hardships rather than a plea for communism's full return. The erection of new Stalin monuments has accelerated since 2022, with dozens added amid the conflict, busts in regional towns, reliefs in Moscow's metro, signaling a bolder public embrace of his legacy as victor and unifier. In 2025 alone, 15 Stalin monuments were built across Russia, not including smaller busts or facades which are also plentiful.

As 2026 dawns, Russia's selective reclamation of its Soviet past persists, with Stalin's shadow lengthening not as a call to revive socialism, but as a tool for historical reconciliation, satiating opposition through nostalgic symbols of prestige and unyielding resolve. Depicted as a ‘strong helmsman’ guiding the nation through storms, devoid of Marxist-Leninist or collectivist rhetoric, his image bolsters Kremlin statecraft amid the Special Military Operation's trials. Levada's 2025 poll crowns him history's most outstanding figure for 42% of Russians, while over 120 monuments now stand, including seven unveiled in May 2025 alone, like the Moscow Metro restoration at Taganskaya.

In Churchill's words, avoiding quarrels with the past secures Russia's future—eternal, undivided, and most certainly, great.
 

In 1935, in the midst of an era giving birth to the mass reproducibility of art, the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin writes that what “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” The uniqueness and authenticity of the original – which forms the fundamental basis of its “aura” – is spoiled when the mechanical reproduction of art is put in place. While such development does have a democratizing potential – one which was put to work by the 20th century world communist movement, which greatly brought culture to the mass of people through these means – in the capitalist West, the mass reproducibility of art and culture has been subsumed under the logic of profit, and hence primarily is found in the culture industry’s “pop” forms of constantly repeated flat “art.”

The logic of mass reproducibility and the loss of authenticity and originality that is conjoined to it is far from being limited merely to culture, of course. One can see the same process at play all across society. I wish to explore here the ways in which it is operative at the level of statesmanship.

With no reference to Benjamin’s work, but employed in a manner which overlaps with it, the term “aura” has become increasingly popular with the youth. “Aura farming” is a concept often employed to describe actions taken (and, of course, recorded) which increase the aura of the subject engaging in it – that is, which enhance their image as unique, original, and cool.

Some might be surprised to see that one of the most common usages of such concepts I have witnessed is in edits made of leaders of the multipolar world like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Ayatollah Khamenei.

With Xi you often see his iconic image riding in the Hongqi parade inspection vehicle, demonstrating the unique military might of the People's Republic of China.

With Putin it could be anything from him holding a puppy to him giving a speech calling out the Janus-faced character of the West’s discourse on human rights.

With Kim it is almost always the masterful edits of him inspecting his ballistic missiles.

And finally, with the Ayatollah Khamenei, his aura stems from a deep ascetic and spiritual presence captured by his lectures or discussions with the Iranian people.

In each case, the presence – the aura – of these great statesmen is felt, even by those from the regions of the world who’ve only been taught to see them as “evil pariahs.”

It is an interesting thought experiment to contrast the aura attached to these leaders with the replaceability of the Western ones. Western leaders, from the US to Europe and their puppets around the Western hemisphere, are thoroughly aura deficient. The edits the White House has recently made trying to make Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth look tough come off as cringe. Their attempt to “aura farm” on eroded soil produces only bad harvests – and the people can plainly see it.

The Western politicians, like the pop culture which predominates them, is mass reproducible. There is no aura in any of them – they are all unoriginal, inauthentic reproductions. Just as their productions of culture– subsumed under the logic of profit – only result in inauthentic and superficial art (postmodern art, the art which Fredric Jameson said embodies the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism), the statesmen produced have the same superficiality, depthlessness, and reproducibility.

While their form might change here and there, their common hollowness of originality remains. They are vehicles whose content is always the same – upholding the US-dominated world capitalist-imperialist order. The perfect metaphor for the Western politician is that of an M&M candy – the outside might have different colors, but internally they are all the same.

Creatively employing the framework developed by Benjamin helps us understand the disparities in aura between the Western leaders and the leaders of the multipolar world. Western leaders are embedded within the system of profit and debt-driven mass reproducibility, and hence, they have no aura. The leaders of the multipolar world, on the other hand, have had to take the revolutionary act – as Slavoj Zizek calls it – to break with the dominant order of U.S. super-imperialism.

This act, or, to put it in the terms employed by Alain Badiou, this event, is a rupture with the fabric of the world of profit-driven mass reproducibility. Hence, it stands with uniqueness, originality, and irreplaceability. This is where the aura comes from – the revolutionary stance, or break, they perform to the established order. Xi, Putin, Khamenei, Kim, Traore, Diaz-Canel, Ortega, Sheinbaum, Maduro, etc. all have aura because of their position – in relation to the dominant social order – as revolutionaries.

The cost of alignment with the dominant order today, then, is aura deficiency. No amount of “hard edits” can overcome this lack. Aura carries with it a presence which manifests itself precisely through a tangible absence. It cannot get easily pinned down, as you could, for instance, a fashion item. This is why it cannot be cheaply reproduced by the imperialists; aura is the terrain of an authentic rupture.

​Aura is a mark of originality and authenticity, and in today’s world, the only statesmen with it are those that have taken the courageous risk, the revolutionary act, to break with the order of global capitalism. The only true way to aura farm today, then, is by being the revolutionary which breaks with the levelled unremarkableness of capitalist pop mediocrity.

Michael Parenti (September 30, 1933–January 24, 2026) is no longer with us, yet his legacy lives on in the sharpened minds and awakened consciences of innumerable comrades throughout generations rather than in marble monuments. Surrounded by family, he softly entered what his son Christian described as "the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky" at the age of 92. This image is appropriate for a man whose life was one never-ending, thrilling lesson on the anatomy of power.
​
Parenti was born into a hardworking Italian-American family in New York City, and he carried the bonds and wounds of his upbringing with him like a compass. His earliest teachers were ethnic marginalization and economic precarity, which sowed the seeds of a class consciousness that would blossom into a lifelong, unreserved Marxist critique. With the thoroughness of someone who knew the academy's gates were guarded by individuals he would later expose, he obtained the formal credentials; BA from City College, MA from Brown, and PhD from Yale. But instead of protecting him, academia quickly revealed its true nature. He was deemed too hazardous for tenure tracks due to his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, which included a vicious beating by state troopers at a solidarity demonstration at Kent State. Blacklisted, he refused to back down or make concessions. Rather, he opted for the more difficult path: self-reliance, modest living, and direct interaction with workers, students, and organizers in lecture halls, community centers, and union halls away from ivory towers.

Parenti's oratory and prose were weapons of uncommon accuracy; they were sharp, lucid, and infused with a caustic wit that might disarm before it destroyed. He exposed the American pluralistic façade in Democracy for the Few, exposing a system designed to channel public energies into consent rituals while protecting elite privilege and property. He maintained that power flows upward from concentrated capital rather than downward from votes, making elections a controlled spectacle rather than a true struggle.

His media criticisms in Inventing Reality and Make-Believe Media were remarkably ominous of our current information battles. He contended that corporate media serve as ideological shock troops rather than impartial arbiters, creating narratives that legitimize empire, vilify resistance, and hide class conflict under layers of amusement and selective outrage.

However, Blackshirts and Reds may be the piece that most conveys Parenti's intellectual bravery. He ventured to defend the historical record of socialist initiatives against persistent propaganda during a time when anticommunism had solidified into uncontested doctrine. By contrasting the structural brutality of capitalism, colonial plunder, genocides, proxy wars, economic strangulation, with the beleaguered successes of communist nations in literacy, healthcare, gender parity, and poverty reduction, he rejected simple analogies. His perspective was fundamentally materialist: encirclement, sabotage, and invasion were the causes of shortcomings rather than any intrinsic weakness in collectivism. The bedrock underlying liberal convictions shifts as you read it.

Parenti was as relentless in his criticism of imperialism. The Face of Imperialism, To Kill a Nation (about the breakup of Yugoslavia), and Against Empire all connected American interventions to their basic economic logic: resource control, alternative suppression, and unrelenting growth. Privatization campaigns and market victories were concealed by "humanitarian" pretexts; opposition was pathologized as savagery, and Western crimes were forgotten.

His scope encompassed ideological religion (God and His Demons), cultural hegemony (The Culture Struggle), and ancient history (The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome). However, his lectures, those renowned performances were what really brought his theories to life. They transformed complex theory into lively conversation with their dramatic flair, humor, and fierce clarity. Decades later, the "Yellow Parenti" discourse about Cuba's revolution and videos analyzing capitalist logic or media manipulation continue to circulate like digital samizdat, sparking minds.

Gabriel Rockhill's insightful Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, which painstakingly traces how parts of the "theory industry" in the imperial core have been shaped, subsidized, and guided by powerful capitalist interests, foundations, and state apparatuses to domesticate radical thought, highlights the stark contrast between Parenti's authenticity as a Marxist scholar and the frequently hollow edifice of much contemporary Western left intelligentsia. A pattern emerges from Rockhill's archival excavation: some well-known individuals and schools, despite providing incisive critiques of power, continue to live comfortably within elite institutions, their work subtly reoriented toward culturalist concerns, anti-communist reflexes, or democratic illusions that divert attention from militant class struggle and defense of real socialist projects.

For many on the revolutionary left, Noam Chomsky is a prime example of this conflict. Chomsky is praised for his critiques of American imperialism and media propaganda, but his analysis often falls short of a full-fledged Marxist commitment, eschewing systematic class analysis in favor of anarchist-infused moralism while retaining a strong anticommunist stance toward the Soviet Union, and other socialist experiments under siege. His decades-long institutional position at MIT in the midst of the military-industrial-academic complex he criticizes raises ongoing concerns about the material circumstances that allow for such prominence. Claims of unwavering independence are further undermined by rumors of compromising affiliations, most notably documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein's circle. This suggests a man who, despite his academic prowess, navigates elite networks in ways that Parenti resolutely resisted.

Parenti, on the other hand, represented an integrity that went beyond these allowances. Due to his anti-Vietnam activities, he was barred from mainstream academia and opted for proletarian exile over compromise. He did not accept foundation funding or endowed chairs, nor did he temper his support of communism's historical victories in the face of persistent propaganda. His Marxism, which was based on materialist rigor, class primacy, and solidarity with the global South's anti-imperial movements, was a lived practice rather than an intellectual stance. Parenti named names, unapologetically defended beleaguered revolutions, and addressed the working class directly in language devoid of jargon but full of dialectical clarity, while others hedged or abstracted. According to Rockhill, he opposed the "imperial theory industry," which transforms radical energy into benign criticism; instead, Parenti's writings provided movements with instruments for revolutionary change as opposed to never-ending deconstruction.

Parenti's genuineness, which is unbought and unbowed, made him a unique lighthouse: a Marxist whose research benefited the downtrodden rather than the appearances of elite opposition. Parenti's life and body of work continue to serve as a warning and an encouragement to recover Marxism as the science and art of emancipation rather than as cultural capital in an intellectual environment where many "critical theorists" flourish by criticizing everything but the systems that uphold their own privilege.

Parenti's integrity, which is almost archaic reluctance to compromise, was what distinguished him. He stayed unwavering despite being marginalized by institutions, censored but never silenced, and accused of heresy on Yugoslavia and other fronts. He was not seduced by think-tank sinecure, and his message was not weakened in the name of respectability. He was always kind and never condescending, speaking directly to the downtrodden and anchoring Marxism in real-world situations rather than intellectual ideas.

His influence on modern Marxism is immeasurable. Parenti emphasized the importance of class, the materiality of empire, and the need to preserve socialism's historical balance sheet at a time of fractured identities and postmodern evasions. In the midst of triumphalist "end of history" myths, he resurrected rational defense of communism, gave anti-imperialists intellectual armor against propaganda, and modeled revolutionary popular education as a practice of liberation.

Parenti's departure is felt as a hole in clarity in the accolades that are flooding in, from Ben Norton calling him one of the finest thinkers of the U.S. left to Vijay Prashad repeating Christian's heavenly metaphor to activists and intellectuals worldwide lamenting a voice for the working class. However, his writings, books that analyze, lectures that motivate, and concepts that never go out of style, remain.
​
As he anticipated, the fight goes on. As he suggested, we begin the process of transcending the system we face by comprehending it. Even if Michael Parenti's voice has faded, we may still hear its echoes. Comrade, rest in power. In the phrases we carry forth, the lecture hall awaits your return.

The global left is mourning the death of Michael Parenti, the influential Marxist scholar, historian, and public intellectual whose work exposed the mechanics of capitalism, imperialism, and ideological power with unmatched clarity. Parenti passed away on January 24 at the age of 92, leaving behind a body of work that shaped generations of scholars, organizers, and anti-imperialist movements across the world.

For decades, Parenti stood apart from mainstream academia and political life, refusing to dilute his analysis or bend his language to liberal respectability. He wrote not to impress institutions, but to arm people with understanding.

Working-class roots, uncompromising politics

Born in 1933 in New York City to a working-class Italian American family, Parenti often said that his political commitments were grounded not in abstraction, but in lived experience. Class was not something he discovered in theory; it was something he grew up inside.

He earned a PhD and taught political science and history, but his outspoken Marxism and anti-imperialism meant he was steadily pushed to the margins of elite academia. Rather than retreat or conform, Parenti chose independence: lecturing widely, writing prolifically, and speaking directly to union halls, community centers, activist spaces, and international audiences.

He lived modestly, avoided think-tank careers and corporate funding, and kept his private life largely out of the public eye. He was a husband and a father, including to journalist and political analyst Christian Parenti, but he never cultivated a public persona rooted in biography. What mattered to him was the work.

Exposing the class nature of "democracy"

Parenti’s most enduring academic contribution was his systematic critique of liberal democracy under capitalism. In his landmark book Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, he argued that capitalist democracies are not neutral systems open equally to all, but class-structured states in which economic power overwhelmingly determines political outcomes.

He showed how elections, courts, media, and state institutions consistently serve the interests of capital, while popular demands are managed, diluted, or suppressed. Democracy, he argued, is tolerated only so long as it does not threaten property relations.

"Power is not evenly distributed in society," Parenti wrote. "Those who own and control the productive wealth tend to dominate the political life of the nation."

The book became a formative text for students and activists worldwide, prized for its clarity and refusal of liberal illusion.

​Imperialism without disguise

Parenti was equally influential for his work on imperialism and US foreign policy. In books such as Against Empire and To Kill a Nation, he dismantled the idea that Western wars are motivated by humanitarian concern or democratic ideals.

Instead, he traced intervention, sanctions, and regime change to material interests: control over resources, labor, strategic territory, and global markets. He showed how human rights discourse is selectively deployed, how compliant client states are shielded from scrutiny, and how resistance is pathologized as extremism.

One of Parenti’s most quoted observations remains painfully current: "The essential function of imperialism is not to civilize or democratize, but to maintain a global system of inequality."
His analysis helped anti-war and anti-imperialist movements reject moral distraction and focus on structure rather than spectacle.

Anti-anticommunism and historical honesty

In Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti confronted Cold War anticommunism as an ideology rather than an analysis. He did not deny repression or failure in socialist states, but he exposed how capitalist violence is normalized while socialist experiments are judged by impossible moral standards.

He insisted on historical comparison: asking why fascism is treated as an aberration while capitalism’s own mass violence, including colonialism, slavery, sanctions, structural deprivation, is rendered invisible or inevitable.

The book reopened serious discussion of socialism’s achievements in literacy, healthcare, women’s participation, and social welfare, at a time when such discussions were considered politically taboo.

Media, ideology, and manufactured consent

Long before "media literacy" became fashionable, Parenti laid bare the structural bias of corporate media. In Inventing Reality, he explained how ownership, advertising, sourcing, and elite consensus shape what is reported, how it is framed, and which voices are excluded.

He stressed that propaganda does not require overt censorship. It works through repetition, omission, ridicule, and selective outrage, teaching audiences what to ignore as much as what to believe.
This work made Parenti a cornerstone of critical media studies, especially among activists seeking to challenge war narratives and economic myths.

A scholar of struggle, not accommodation

What distinguished Parenti was not only what he argued, but how he lived. He never treated radical politics as a career ladder. He accepted marginalization rather than compromise and continued to speak plainly when euphemism was rewarded.

His lectures, many of which circulated widely online, are remembered for their warmth, humor, and devastating precision. He trusted ordinary people to grasp complex ideas without academic gatekeeping.

In doing so, Parenti helped bridge the divide between scholarship and struggle, restoring confidence in class analysis at a time when it was being hollowed out or replaced by moral abstraction.

An enduring legacy

Michael Parenti did not found a school or cultivate disciples. His influence traveled differently: through dog-eared books, shared lectures, study circles, movement spaces, and quiet moments of recognition when the world suddenly made sense.

At a time of renewed imperial violence, deepening inequality, and ideological confusion, his work remains unsettlingly relevant.

He once wrote: "The first step in the struggle for social justice is to understand the nature of the system we are up against."

For generations of working-class intellectuals, organizers, and scholars across the world, Michael Parenti helped make that understanding possible.

His voice is gone. His clarity remains.

Originally published on Amayadeen.net

Author
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Janna Kadri

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

1.
Nukes are integral for sovereignty

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

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

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

2.
‘Stalinism’ was right 

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

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

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

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

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

3.
We are in the era of civilizational blocs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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