A poll by mainstream firm Gallup found that Nicaragua is the No. 1 country in the world where citizens feel at peace. Nine of the top 14 countries are in Latin America. But the US constantly attacks the Sandinista government and imposes sanctions on it.

A poll found that Nicaragua is the top country in the world where citizens feel at peace.

The United States and Western media outlets have long demonized Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and its President Daniel Ortega, sponsoring violent coup attempts against him and imposing illegal unilateral sanctions aimed at hurting the Central American nation’s economy.

But studies show that the Sandinista Front is very popular among the Nicaraguan people, who enjoy a high quality of life compared to their neighbors.
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CNBC reported this January that Nicaragua is the “No. 1 country where people say they are ‘always’ at peace“.

This is based on a survey conducted by the mainstream firm Gallup.

Gallup interviewed adults in 122 countries across the planet. They found that 34% of people on Earth “always” feel at peace, while 39% “often” do, 17% “rarely” do, and 5% “never” do.

Nicaragua came in first place, with 73% of its population reporting it “always” feels at peace.

Gallup noted that “Latin American countries dominate the ‘always at peace’ list worldwide”.

There are 14 countries in the world where the majority of the population “always” feels at peace. A staggering nine of these 14 are in Latin America.

Nicaragua is No. 1, followed by El Salvador at No. 3, Panama at No. 4, Honduras at No. 5, Paraguay at No. 6, Dominican Republic at No. 7, Uruguay at No. 8, Colombia at No. 12, and Mexico at No. 14.

Gallup wrote:

Nicaragua is also the No. 7 in the world in terms of gender equality. It has the highest level of women’s representation in all of the Americas.

While Nicaraguans are nearly three times as likely to feel at peace than North Americans, the US government has frequently attacked the nation’s Sandinista government, claiming democratically elected President Daniel Ortega is “authoritarian”.

This is despite the fact that 77.4% of Nicaraguans support Ortega, according to a late 2022 study conducted by one of the leading polling firms in Central America, M&R Consultores. (US President Joe Biden had just a 37% approval rating in the same period.)
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Ortega is consistently one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.

In 2018, the United States supported a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua. In this rare moment of instability in an otherwise very safe country, right-wing extremists backed by Washington used bloody tactics to try to overthrow President Ortega.

When the coup failed, the US and European Union imposed several rounds of devastating unilateral sanctions on Nicaragua, which are illegal under international law.

Despite the fact that numerous polls like these show that Nicaraguans feel very safe, the US State Department has since 2018 issued an annual travel advisory, discouraging tourists to visit the country.
Washington claims the Central American nation is dangerous, suffers from supposed “arbitrary enforcement of laws”, and has “limited healthcare ability”.
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Nicaragua’s Sandinista government created a system of free universal healthcare for everyone. The United States, on the other hand, has one of the most expensive and inefficient healthcare systems on Earth, and medical expenses are the cause of two-thirds of US household bankruptcies.

This article was republished from Geopolitical Economy. 

Hundreds of radical Bolsonaristas have been camped in front of the Army Headquarters, in Brasília, since the day after the elections of last October 30, in which Lula defeated Bolsonaro.

Supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro took this Sunday by force the National Congress, breaking the blockade carried out by the Military Police and the National Security Force at the Esplanade of the Ministries in Brasilia.

Brazil's Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, affirmed this Sunday that "the will of the radical Bolsonaristas who have invaded the National Congress "will not prevail".

Bolsonarista demonstrators do not accept the electoral result and invaded an area of the Congress and when they were heading towards the Government Palace they were dispersed with tear gas bombs by the police in Brasília.

Minister Dino authorized the use of the National Force in the security of the capital in the face of the threat of violent actions.

The extremists, mostly wearing yellow and green T-shirts and Brazilian flags, also attacked some vehicles of the Legislative Police, which provides security to the Congress.
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They also destroyed protection barriers and armed with sticks confronted the agents who tried to contain, without success, the entrance of the demonstrators.

Hundreds of radical Bolsonaristas have been camped in front of the Army Headquarters, in Brasília, since the day after the elections of last October 30, in which Lula defeated Bolsonaro.

The camps of radical Bolsonaristas, which have multiplied in cities across the country, began to be dismantled on Friday in Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, where some disturbances occurred.
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On Saturday, the Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, authorized the deployment of the National Security Force, an elite group of police forces from all over the country, which is mobilized for special missions.

Bolsonaro protesters who do not accept the electoral result invaded an area of Congress and when they were heading towards the government palace, they were dispersed with tear gas canisters by the police in Brasília.

Since Lula's victory in the October 30 runoff election with 50.9% of the valid votes against Bolsonaro's 49.1%, Bolsonaro's supporters have gathered outside the Army barracks.

Before the invasion of Congress, Dino made a statement on social networks and said that opponents will have to wait until 2026, when the next presidential elections will be held, just as the current government waited between 2018 and 2022.
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In a statement, Dino said that the Ministry of Justice convened an emergency meeting with security agencies to deal with the demonstrations.

This article was republished from teleSur.

The general strike against Peru’s coup regime has entered its third consecutive day. The strike is growing and social movements are now demanding the resignation of the unelected president, Dina Boluarte. Other demands include; the release of former President Pedro Castillo, the closure of Congress, early general elections, and a constituent assembly.

According to the government, as of today, protesters have blocked off highways at 46 points across the country. This is up from 37 yesterday, and 25 the day before. 

Mobilizations are stronger in the southern part of the country. Protests have taken place in the departments of Apurimac, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Puno, Cuzco, and Tacna, also in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa. The Panamerican highway is blocked off in Abancay, Andahuaylas, and Apurimac.
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In Puno, an Aymara region on the Bolivian border, a mass meeting decided to march on Lima to demand the resignation of the coup regime. The community resolved to send 30,000 people to the capital on Saturday. The strength of the mobilizations in Puno has caused the closure of the land border between Peru and Bolivia.

I arrived in Shanghai, 36 hours after leaving São Paulo, a near deportation in South Africa, and a canceled connecting flight. It was March 21, 2020. In the following days, China implemented its mandatory centralized quarantine for all international travelers. Exactly a week later, on March 28, China started its travel ban1 to prevent the spread of a still little-known virus called Covid-19, which was making its way to all corners of the earth.

Nearly three years later, on the coming January 8, 20232, China will officially open its borders, remove the mandatory quarantine and nucleic acid tests for people entering the country, and downgrade the management of Covid-19 from Class A to Class B3. It is not an end of an era; rather, it is a continuation of a rigorous process of confronting a historic and global pandemic, while putting science and the people at its center. It has been an incredible experience to see how the Chinese government and people have taken on this pandemic, while the world has suffered4 6.68 million recorded deaths, with over 650 million people infected. The impact of this virus is one for the history books, the lasting effects to be studied for years to come, and the fight has not yet ended.

The Western mainstream media, however, has been quick to criticize China every step of the way, from the “draconian5” Zero-Covid strategy to the “dystopian6” measures to ensure a safe Winter Olympics games in Beijing, and now to the “nightmare7” of relaxing the country’s Covid-19 requirements. Rhetoric aside, what has the fight against the virus been like in China—characterized by the Zero-Covid strategy—and why are the relaxation measures happening now? It is important to look back at the last three years to understand how we arrived at this point today. Having lived in China throughout the ebbs and flows of the Covid-19 virus, I would categorize the country’s dynamic strategy into four key phases.

Two-and-a-half weeks after I arrived in China, on April 8, the country celebrated the end to the 76-day historic lockdown in Wuhan, where the pandemic first broke out and claimed the lives of 4,512 Chinese people8. It was an emotional and bittersweet victory for the entire country, which had mobilized its people and resources to fight a very deadly and never-before-seen virus.

On December 26, 2019, Dr. Zhang Jixian9, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of Hubei Province hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, saw an elderly couple that had a high fever and a cough—symptoms that characterize the flu. But further examination ruled out influenza A and B, mycoplasma, chlamydia, adenovirus, and SARS. She and her team then quickly determined there was a new virus at play. Three days later, the provincial authorities were alerted, then the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) and by December 31 the WHO was informed10. On New Year’s Day, the CDC officials called11 Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, while he was on vacation, to inform him of the severity of their findings.

On January 3, the virus was identified with its genetic sequence which was then shared12 with the world a week later. At this point, there were many unknowns—what the virus was, how it was transmitted, and how it could be stopped. There were no vaccines, while the country—and the world—was unprepared. A strict lockdown of the city of 11 million people began on January 23, and 41,000 medical workers13 were dispatched from across the country to Wuhan. Saving lives and studying this new virus were the main priorities in this phase.

After Covid-19 had been successfully contained in Wuhan, and throughout the rest of 2020 and 2021, China implemented a Zero-Covid strategy, characterized by extensive measures to track, test, isolate, and treat infected people. The Chinese mainland recorded extremely few deaths14 in this period since the Wuhan outbreak, while successfully containing 11 outbreaks15 of the Delta variant, which is more transmissible and the cause of more serious infections. Meanwhile, the global reported death toll had climbed to over 5.4 million people16 by the end of 2021 with countless millions more infected.

Far from “failing17” as the Western media is claiming now, Zero-Covid worked extremely effectively. Since the pandemic broke, the average life expectancy of Chinese people actually increased from 77.318 to 78.219 years (2019-2021), surpassing the United States for the first time in history (Chart 1). In the U.S., however, the average life span dropped from 78.820 to 76.421 years during that same period, owing in large part to the high number of Covid-related deaths. This is particularly striking when you consider that China was the eleventh22 poorest country in the world in 1949 (measured by per capita PPP GDP) with a life expectancy of only 3623 versus 6824 for the U.S. This means that an average Chinese person’s lifespan more than doubled, whereas in the U.S., the average lifespan only grew by eight years in nearly eight decades.

Life expectancy in China increased beyond that of the U.S. during the pandemic.

The U.S. has recorded 1.1 million deaths due to Covid-19. The cumulative U.S. death rate per one million people is currently 83425 times that of China (3,339 versus 4). In the case of the U.S. and China, the use of “excess-death” numbers—the difference between observed and expected mortality rates—is of little value for analysis purposes as both countries had relatively low numbers of these deaths in the last three years. If China had followed the reckless U.S. path, these figures indicate China would have suffered 4.8 million dead. Even a quick calculation reveals that China’s strategy indeed saved millions of lives.
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While it was containing the virus, China was also intensely studying the virus and developing responses, inaugurating26 its first vaccine, Sinopharm, in December 2020, which was subsequently approved27 by the WHO for emergency use on May 7, 2021. By October of that year, according to a Nature study28, Chinese vaccines accounted for nearly half of the 7.3 billion doses delivered globally. Since then, China has approved29 eight vaccines, with 35 others undergoing clinical trials, donated30 328 million doses, pledged31 over US$100 million to the Covax global vaccine distribution program for Global South countries, and proposed32 that vaccines become a global public good.

In August 2021, in response to the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, China adopted33 a new strategy called “Dynamic Zero-Covid.” It was designed to balance health, economic, and social needs and to minimize the impact of the epidemic on the economy, society, production, and the people’s everyday life.
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There is no one-size-fits-all measure for a country of 1.4 billion people. During this third phase, guided by science, the country experimented with its prevention and implementation practices. Mass testing was developed to high levels of efficiency, in which Guangzhou34’s 18 million inhabitants could be tested a mere three days, while the cost of pooling PCR tests (ten samples per test tube and taking advantage of low infection rates) were reduced to merely 3.5 yuan35 (US$0.50) per person. The country developed a nation-wide digital travel code and city-level “green code” cellphone applications36 to track Covid cases and those who have visited high-risk areas. All the while, the government moved towards more targeted measures to limit the use of large-scale lockdowns. During the Shanghai outbreak, for example, residential communities were classified37 into “lockdown,” “controlled,” or “precautionary” zones based on their risk level to try to minimize the interruption of daily and economic life.

Between January 2020 and mid-April 2022, China had spent38 an estimated US$45.1 billion to provide 11.5 billion free PCR testing for its residents. The costs of this mass testing strategy, however, were also mounting, with estimates reaching 1.8 percent39 of the country’s GDP and putting pressure especially on local government budgets. Despite the economic pressures, rather than “crippling40” China’s economy, the country’s GDP grew nearly four times faster than the U.S. and five times compared to the EU, from the start of the pandemic to Q3 of 2022.41

Despite being the second largest economy, China is still a developing country. The pandemic strained the country’s medical system, which was lacking in several key areas. Accordingly, China used the last three years to begin to fill in those gaps, primarily through increasing its intensive care unit (ICU) capacity. In 2019, China had only 3.6 ICU per 100,000 residents42, which was nine times less than the U.S. with 34.7 units. Since 2019, China increased43 its supply of ICU beds 2.4-fold (57,160 in December 2019 to 138,800 in December 2022). In the same period, ICU doctors and nurses44 increased by one-third and doubled, respectively.

On January 15, 2022, China had its first case of locally transmitted Omicron infection. On April 18, 2022, Shanghai announced45 its first three Covid-related deaths, all unvaccinated elderly people aged over 89 years. At the time of the Shanghai outbreak, while 87 percent46 of the country were already fully vaccinated, that number dropped to only 62 percent47 for the city’s 3.6 million elderly aged over 60, with 38 percent having received booster shots. The country knew that this vulnerable sector of the population had to be protected.
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Significant efforts have since been made to increase vaccination of the elderly. The official National Health Commission reported48 that on November 30, 2022, the breakdown of vaccination rates for people aged over 80 years are as follows: 76.6 percent at least one shot, 65.8 percent two shots or more, and 40 percent three or more doses. Despite the lower mortality rates of the Omicron variant, its highly contagious nature posed serious challenges to the country’s existing prevention and control measures, while putting great strains on the economy. Even two doses49 of so-called advanced Western mRNA vaccines like Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine or Moderna’s similar mRNA vaccine provide only about 30 percent protection against symptomatic infection from Omicron for about four months.

As Omicron began to spread, comparisons50 showed that the risk of death when infected with Omicron BA.2 was less than half that of Delta. One Chinese scientific study51 on mice showed that the new Covid-19 strains had 100 times lower virus load than the original, but was highly transmissible. China knew it needed to adjust its policies with the shifting nature of the virus, but with some important considerations.

On November 11, the central government released its “20 measures”52 to begin to relax its Zero-Covid policies. This included reducing mandatory quarantine time for inbound flights, decreasing isolation times, promoting vaccination of elderly, and eliminating the use of mass testing. For a country of its size, any central government policy takes time and huge organizational capacity to be implemented at the local scale.

The easing created initial confusion, and some people were upset with local community officials for not upholding the central government’s easing measures, frequently aired on Chinese social media platforms. Though there was frustration and exhaustion, it would be a mistake to believe that the downgrading phase was a response to the series of small, coordinated “white paper protests” that occurred after an Urumqi apartment fire that claimed the ten lives on November 24. Not only did the protests occur two weeks after the government began relaxing its Covid measures, but they were also not representative of the Chinese public opinion at large. The government easing also sparked another concern, with many people worried about getting infected. Several Weibo social media users53 expressed anger and criticism of the protesters, seeing them as irresponsible, middle-class youth who wanted their personal liberties at a collective expense. Unlike the blanketing Western media portrayals, Chinese people do not have a singular voice.

On Monday December 26, China announced54 it will downgrade the management of Covid-19 from Class A to Class B of infectious diseases on January 8, 2023. The three main reasons for this change include the fact that Omicron is not as virulent as Delta, a large percentage of the population had been vaccinated, and the country’s health system was better prepared. China uses a three-level system for the classification of infectious diseases, each delimiting specific response measures. Class A, the most dangerous, includes only cholera and the plague. Class B includes SARS, AIDS, and tuberculosis. Class C includes the flu and the mumps. Corresponding to this change, Covid-19 measures will be further relaxed.

Twelve55 main countermeasures were identified for the new Covid-19 policy corresponding to Class B control: 1) Increase vaccination rates; 2) prepare drugs and testing reagents for patients;  3) increase investment in construction of medical resources including ICU beds; 4) shift from mass PCR testing; 5) treat patients according to severity; 6) improve health survey and data, including vaccination status of those aged over 65 years; 7) control vulnerable population institutions, including elder care, hospitals, and schools; 8) strengthen prevention and control for rural areas and for high-risk patients; 9) increase epidemic monitoring, response, and control; 10) promote personal protection and the principle of everyone’s responsibility for their own health; 11) enable information access and education; and 12) optimize international personnel exchanges.

In a press conference56 of the State Council Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism, Dr. Yin Wenwu, Chief Physician of CDC’s Division of Infection Prevention, addressed the consequence of classifying Covid-19 as a Class B, which would reduce the frequency of the publication of data. The new data, which will be released monthly, will include the number of existing hospitalized cases and serious illnesses, including critical illnesses, and the cumulative number of deaths.

As expected, downgrading the severity of the virus’s management would also mean increasing the number of infections and related deaths. However, no single prediction model can be easily applied to China. Existing models for Covid-19 infection and mortality predictions have a wide range of outcomes. Forecast accuracy tends to decrease as prediction times increase, with models showing up to fivefold increase57 in error comparing one-week to 20-week horizons. Even the same Omicron variant has resulted in varied mortality rates in different countries. As of December 21, the U.S. seven-day rolling death rate58 was as high as 437 people, or a rate of 1.29 per million. Meanwhile, Japan had a comparable rate of 2.0 per million and New Zealand 0.85 per million.

Although China has now surpassed the life expectancy of the U.S., it has relatively fewer people 75 years and older than the U.S. (46 percent59 fewer as a percentage of the total population for each country). Omicron has had the impact that a massive 69 percent60 of all Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. in September 2022 were from this age group. The demographic difference in this age group, taken as a stand-alone factor, would imply an over 30 percent reduction in likely death rates for China.

Western media have been quick to use selective stories and photographs to create a broader image of the “chaotic61” situation in China, including alleging very high death rates. China, with a population of over 1.4 billion people, had over 27,00062 deaths per day prior to the pandemic. Using existing Omicron death rates from other countries would infer a possible 6 percent increase in death rates. These would be significant deaths, into the many tens of thousands, but there is no evidence yet provided that supports the millions that the West is speculating.
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This downgrading phase is indeed complex and challenging, as doctors are working overtime with increase in cases, some hospitals are in full capacity, fever medicines have faced shortages, and winter-related ailments are adding complications. However, relaxing measures now means that China has used the last three years to try to prepare itself the best that it can by vaccinating the people, studying the virus, building medical infrastructure, training workers, and waiting until a much less deadly strain had emerged. It has also gained hard-earned experience that is essential to managing any future pandemic.

Not for lack of vaccines, there are several reasons for the relatively slow vaccination rates for China’s elders. Many of them63 had preconceived notions about vaccines or were worried about complications related to underlying health conditions, while the successful control of the virus disincentivized elders to get vaccinated. Comparatively, in the United States, only 36 percent of people 65 and older have received the updated shot, known as the bivalent booster64, according to data65 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. China, on the other hand, has consistently made efforts to convince, and not coerce, this vulnerable group to get vaccinated.

On November 29, the State Council’s Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism, adjusted the booster vaccination protocol, and required localities66 to extensively survey senior populations and ramp up services and awareness campaigns. Between December 1 and 13, 823,00067 of those over 80 years old received a third vaccine. China has created the world’s first commercially released inhaled vaccine68 for Covid-19: CanSino Biologics’ Convidecia Air, a non-replicated viral vector vaccine. This booster is already gaining popularity69 with the elderly.

Regarding the supply of medicines, some cities had shortages of fever medicines in the first weeks of December as cases increased. Hoarding, price-gouging, and the spike in demand were among the factors that contributed the supply shortage. In response, local governments started to distribute70 Ibuprofen for free, and Beijing residents, for example, can now get Ibuprofen and Paracetamol within an hour. China also passed a regulation71 on online pharmaceutical suppliers, that included penalties up to five million RMB (US$720,000) for pharmacies that increase prices according to speculative behavior. China has72 also made Pfizer’s Paxlovid oral antiviral treatment available.

Due to mass testing during phase three of the anti-pandemic fight, the government was able to obtain accurate data about the virus to inform its responses. As mass testing has been phased out in this current phase, some data precision will inevitably be foregone. However, China’s resilience is demonstrated in its ability to respond to new situations, applying technologies and science to evolve its public health system. For example, in the past two weeks, over ten provincial CDC’s, including in Sichuan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, have launched surveys73 with hundreds of thousands of participating citizens. This survey data, though limited by sampling methodology, provides an important reference for local and central authorities to monitor the path of the disease, and collect information including on important hospitals, availability of fever drugs, and response capacity of local governments.
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On December 31, Hainan released74 the results of their second online survey (conducted December 19-25) filled in by about 3.4 percent of the province’s population. Below is one of the charts released (Chart 2).

China’s CDC continues to actively conduct real-time dynamic monitoring on Covid-19. From December 1 to 29, it had completed the whole genetic sequencing of 1,14275 cases through sampling survey. There are seven Omicron subvariants circulating, two of which, BA.5.2 and BF.7, account for more than 80 percent of all cases. BF.7 has greater immune escape ability, a shorter incubation period, and faster transmission. Guangzhou reported76 that 96 percent of people infected and tested had the BA5.2 variant, the symptoms of which are generally considered milder. There has been no reemergence of the Delta variant or other previous strains. However, the U.S. has conveniently used this moment to target visitors from China, requiring them to show negative Covid-19 tests to enter the country. Ironically, it was the U.S. that failed77 to prioritize Covid-19 variant surveillance in 2020.

Several prediction models have been published in the last week, including one by former CDC chief scientist of epidemiology Zeng Guang,78 states that the infection rate in Beijing may have exceeded 80 percent. These models also predict that the second wave is likely to be much milder and point to three factors behind the higher hospitalizations in the city: Beijing’s winter exacerbates respiratory symptoms among the elderly, Beijing is now listed as a moderately aging society (with 20 percent79 of the residents are above 60 years old, and the dominant80 BF.7 subvariant appears more virulent.

The government is paying close attention81 to the availability of medical resources, especially in the rural areas, in anticipation of the week-long spring festival starting January 21. China has increased daily production82 of antigen tests to 110 million units, along with 250,000 oximeters per day, and is prioritizing supply to rural areas. Rapid antigen tests cost as low as US$0.51 each on the e-commerce platform, Pinduoduo. In the rural areas where the medical infrastructure is less developed, the severity of the virus is not as bad as originally feared, according to online accounts83. Barefoot doctors84, a legacy of the Mao-era and sometimes pilloried by those seeking to privatize rural health, have been essential in providing care in rural eras despite having less resources than major city hospitals.

A look back at the last three years shows how difficult the pandemic has been for China and the world, testing the Chinese government’s capacity to confront such an unforeseen public health crisis as well as the people’s patience. In Beijing where I live, however, people are back and bundled in the streets, at work, and on the subways, with traffic and travel recovering. People are anxiously awaiting the spring festival, the most important holiday of the year. As we enter into a new year and a new era of fighting Covid-19—while anticipating the new viruses that will inevitably emerge—the hope is that the world can learn from these hard-earned lessons, act and cooperate using science, not rumors, and embody a spirit of international solidarity, not stigma.85

​Notes

1. ↩ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC, MFA News
2. ↩ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC, MFA News
3. ↩ Global Times, China to downgrade management of COVID-19 from Class A to Class B from January 8
4. ↩ World Health Organization, WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard
5. ↩ Bloomberg, China Hits Zero Covid Cases With a Month of Draconian Curbs
6. ↩ Daily Mail and Reuters, Winter Olympics Dystopian Scenes Inside Beijing’s Closed-Loop Covid Quarantine
7. ↩ The Washington Post, China’s new covid nightmare could become a global catastrophe
8. ↩ CGTN, COVID-19 testing to be increased in China’s Wuhan after new case confirmed
9. ↩ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, China and CoronaShock
10. ↩ World Health Organization, Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT-1 JANUARY 21 2020
11. ↩ The New York Times, The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19
12. ↩ World Health Organization, Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT-1 JANUARY 21 2020
13. ↩ China Daily, Entire nation mobilizes to help Wuhan
14. ↩ Worldometer, COVID-19 Data in China
15. ↩ China CDC Weekly, Eleven COVID-19 Outbreaks with Local Transmissions Caused by the Imported SARS-CoV-2 Delta VOC—China
16. ↩ Worldometer, Coronavirus Death Toll
17. ↩ Consumer News and Business Channel, Here’s what lies ahead for China after zero-Covid failed
18. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Statistical Bulletin of China’s Health Development in 2019
19. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Statistical Bulletin of China’s Health Development in 2021
20. ↩ National Center for Health Statistics of CDC, U.S. Life Expectancy Increased in 2019, Prior to the Pandemic
21. ↩ National Center for Health Statistics of CDC, Mortality in the United States, 2021
22. ↩ Asia Times, A history of China’s fight against poverty
23. ↩ National Library of Medicine, Nutrition and health in China, 1949 to 1989
24. ↩ National Center for Health Statistics of CDC, Mortality Trends in the United States, 1900–2018
25. ↩ Worldometer, Reported Cases and Deaths by Country or Territory
26. ↩ Contagion Live, China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 Vaccine Approved by WHO
27. ↩ World Health Organization, WHO lists additional COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use and issues interim policy recommendations
28. ↩ Nature, China’s COVID vaccines have been crucial—now immunity is waning
29. ↩ COVID19 Vaccine Tracker, 8 Vaccines Approved for Use in China
30. ↩ Bridge of Global Health Strategy, China COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker
31. ↩ South China Morning Post, Xi Jinping says China promises 2 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to other countries in 2021
32. ↩ China Daily, China’s vaccines are global public good
33. ↩ China CDC Weekly, Perspectives: The Dynamic COVID-Zero Strategy in China
34. ↩ South China Morning Post, Coronavirus: 18 million tests in three days as Guangzhou tries to stem spread in latest outbreak
35. ↩ Caixin Global, China Further Slashes Price of a Covid-19 Test to $2.40
36. ↩ The Paper, When will the health codes be interconnected?
37. ↩ Global Times, Shanghai reports three COVID-19 related deaths due to underlying diseases for the first time amid the latest flare-up
38. ↩ Caixin Global, In Depth: As Mass Covid Testing Becomes China’s New Normal, Debate Grows Over Who Pays
39. ↩ Caixin Global, Will Regular Covid Testing Help or Hurt China’s Economy?
40. ↩ Financial Times, How China’s lockdown policies are crippling the country’s economy
41. ↩ This data was provided by British economist John Ross and is included in his upcoming article on Covid-19 and the Chinese economy.
42. ↩ Global Times, China further focuses on severe COVID cases treatment with tiered medical services plan
43. ↩ Yujian Finance and Economics, ICU beds increased 2.4 times in three years: our critical care supporting facilities have been racing against time
44. ↩ Yujian Finance and Economics, ICU beds increased 2.4 times in three years: our critical care supporting facilities have been racing against time
45. ↩ Global Times, Shanghai reports three COVID-19 related deaths due to underlying diseases for the first time amid the latest flare-up
46. ↩ YCharts, China Coronavirus Full Vaccination Rate
47. ↩ Global Times, Shanghai reports three deaths, all elderly, unvaccinated
48. ↩ Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Work Plan for Strengthening COVID-19 Vaccination for the Elderly
49. ↩ The Scientist,  Omicron Appears to Evade Vaccines Better Than Other Variants
50. ↩ JAMA Network, Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.2 Subvariant Severity in New England
51. ↩ Global Times, Exclusive: Chinese scientists prove Omicron’s pathogenicity has geometrically decreased compared with previous strains
52. ↩ Global Times, China optimizes anti-epidemic measures, shortens quarantine period for intl arrivals
53. ↩ The Wall Street Journal, China’s Censors End Crackdown on Covid-Policy Criticism—of a Certain Kind
54. ↩ China Daily, China to manage COVID-19 with measures against Class B infectious diseases
55. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Explanation on Overall Plan for Implementing Class B Infectious Disease Management for COVID-19 Infections
56. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Transcript of the Press Conference of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism on December 27, 2022
57. ↩ PNAS, Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States
58. ↩ Our World in Data, Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths
59. ↩ Statistics Times, United States vs China by population
60. ↩ Kaiser Family Foundation, Deaths Among Older Adults Due to COVID-19 Jumped During the Summer of 2022 Before Falling Somewhat in September
61. ↩ The Economist, Ending China’s zero-covid policy could unleash chaos
62. ↩ National Bureau of Statistics, PRC, Statistical Bulletin of China’s National Economic and Social Development in 2019
63. ↩ Caixin Global, Weekend Long Read: Why China’s Seniors Hesitate to Get Vaccinated
64. ↩ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, COVID-19 Bivalent Vaccine Boosters
65. ↩ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States
66. ↩ China Daily, Vaccination action plan to target elderly
67. ↩ Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Work Plan for Strengthening COVID-19 Vaccination for the Elderly
68. ↩ Business Wire, World-First Inhaled COVID-19 Vaccine, Developed in Partnership Between Aerogen® and CanSinoBIO, First Public Booster Immunization in China.
69. ↩ CGTN, Inhalable COVID-19 vaccines gain popularity among seniors in China
70. ↩ Communist Youth League Central Committee, Free medicines deliver in many places! Mobile diagnosis and treatment vehicles drive to the door and the PCR test booths turn into a diagnosis and treatment station.
71. ↩ South China Morning Post, China targets online pharmacies for price gouging on Covid-19 medication
72. ↩ Global Times, Beijing to distribute COVID-19 drug Paxlovid to community health centers to help key population amid approaching peak caseload
73. ↩ The Paper, Why did Sichuan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other provinces launch the COVID-19 infection survey?
74. ↩ Sanya Released, Online survey of COVID-19 infection in hainan province
75. ↩ Global Times, Virologists and CDC departments deny reemergence of COVID-19 original strain and Delta variant in China
76. ↩ Guangming, What strains are dominant in Guangzhou now?
77. ↩ JAMA Network, How the U.S. Failed to Prioritize SARS-CoV-2 Variant Surveillance
78. ↩ IFeng, Zeng Guang:Beijing covid infection rate may exceed 80%. The first storm is relatively large, then the second wave is very low.
79. ↩ Global Times, Beijing now a moderately aging society, to become severely aging by 2035
80. ↩ Guangming, Beijing’s main strain is BF.7, the most contagious one so far.
81. ↩ Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Notice of the current work program for the prevention and control of covid infection in rural areas
82. ↩ Guancha, All-out efforts to ensure the supply of medical supplies and drugs
83. ↩ Yuyan Guancha, My hometown has survived the “pandemic”.
84. ↩ Gongdushijian, The barefoot doctors won a headwind game, while the online experts were confused
85. ↩ World Health Organization, WHO Director-General’s remarks at the media briefing on COVID-2019 outbreak on 14 February 2020

On February 23, 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Defense asked visiting American Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll to warn off Miami Brothers to the Rescue planes that planned to again fly over Havana. Carroll immediately informed the State Department. Instead of ending the provocations, the US let the planes fly, and two “Brothers to the Rescue” planes were shot down over Cuba the next day. The US used this to sabotage the growing campaign to moderate the US blockade on the island. The US official who arranged Admiral Carroll’s meeting was Ana Belén. Her explanation that the date was chosen only because it was a free date on the Admiral’s schedule was accepted.

Nevertheless, a DIA colleague reported to a security official that he felt Montes might be cooperating with Cuban intelligence. He interviewed her, but she admitted nothing. She was given, and passed a polygraph test.

She had access to practically everything the intelligence community collected on Cuba, and helped write final reports. Due to her rank, she was a member of the super-secret “inter-agency working group on Cuba”, which brings together the main analysts of federal agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House itself. The Washington Post reported, “She was now briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and even the president of Nicaragua about Cuban military capabilities. She helped draft a controversial[!] Pentagon report stating that Cuba had a “limited capacity” to harm the United States and could pose a danger to U.S. citizens only “under some circumstances.”

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a US agent in Cuba’s Ministry of Interior that Cuba had uncovered and imprisoned, was released and traded for three of the Cuban 5 in 2014. He had “provided critical information that led to the arrests of those known as the “Cuban Five;” of former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers; and of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, Ana Belén Montes.”

In 1999 the National Security Agency intercepted a Cuban communication. It revealed a spy high in the hierarchy, who was associated with the DIA’s SAFE computer system. It meant the person was likely on staff of the DIA. The suspect had also traveled to Guantánamo Bay in July 1996. Coincidentally, Montes had traveled to the Bay on DIA business. The NSA knew the person was using a Toshiba laptop, and it was discovered she had one. The FBI decided to break into her apartment and copy the hard drive.

Since the case being put together indicated she was providing information to Cuba, she was arrested by FBI agents on September 21, 2001 while in her DIA office. She was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for Cuba. “She told investigators after her arrest that a week earlier she had learned that she was under surveillance. She could have decided then to flee to Cuba, and probably would have made it there safely.” But her political commitment made her feel “she couldn’t give up on the people (she) was helping.”

Owei Lakemfa presented ten reasons he thought Ana Belén Montes avoided detection during her 16 years in the DIA. She was extremely discreet and kept to herself. She lived alone in a simple apartment north of the US capital, and memorized documents, never taking any home. She never received unexplainable funds.

Ironically, her brother was an FBI special agent, and her sister an FBI analyst who “played an important role in exposing the so-called Wasp Network of Cuban agents [the Cuban 5 and 7 others] operating in Florida.” 
​
Ana Belén avoided the death penalty for high treason, highly likely in the post September 11 atmosphere, by pleading guilty before the US federal court handling her case. Since she acknowledged her conduct, and told the court how she worked, she was sentenced to “only” twenty-five years. However, she was imprisoned in conditions designed to destroy her, as the case with Julian Assange today. She was sent to special unit of a federal prison for violent offenders with psychiatric problems. ​

​In her October 16, 2002 trial statement, she declared that she obeyed her conscience:

“There is an Italian proverb that is perhaps the one that best describes what I believe: The whole world is one country. In that ‘world country’, the principle of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, is an essential guide for harmonious relations between all our ‘nation-neighborhoods’.

This principle implies tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It mandates that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated – with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, unfortunately, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.

Your Honor, I got involved in the activity that has brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. Our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, deeply unfriendly; I feel morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values ​​and our political system on it.

We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders cannot be, and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for more than two centuries?

My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba’s right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice. 

My greatest wish would be to see a friendly relationship emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope that my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility toward Cuba and work together with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect and understanding.

Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred – by individuals or governments – only spreads pain and suffering. I hope that the United States develops a policy with Cuba based on love of neighbor, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any other nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt.
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Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one ‘world-country,’ in our only world-homeland.”

Dear friends,
​
New Year greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In May 2021, the executive director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and the UN high representative for disarmament affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, wrote an article urging governments to cut excessive military spending in favour of increasing spending on social and economic development. Their wise words were not heard at all. To cut money for war and to increase money for social development, they wrote, is ‘not a utopian ideal, but an achievable necessity’. That phrase – not a utopian ideal, but an achievable necessity  – is essential. It describes the project of socialism almost perfectly.

Our institute has been at work for over five years, driven precisely by this idea that it is possible to transform the world to meet the needs of humanity while living within nature’s limits. We have accompanied social and political movements, listened to their theories, observed their work, and built our own understanding of the world based on these attempts to change it. This process has been illuminating. It has taught us that it is not enough to try and build a theory from older theories, but that it is necessary to engage with the world, to acknowledge that those who are trying to change the world are able to develop the shards of an assessment of the world, and that our task – as researchers of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research – is to build those shards into a worldview. The worldview that we are developing does not merely understand the world as it is; it also takes hold of the dynamic that seeks to produce the world as it should be.

Our institute is committed to tracing the dynamics of social transcendence, and how we can get out of a world system that is driving us to annihilation and extinction. There are sufficient answers that exist in the world now, already present with us even when social transformation seems impossible. The total social wealth on the planet is extraordinary, although – due to the long history of colonialism and violence – this wealth is simply not used to generate solutions for common problems, but to aggrandise the fortunes of the few. There is enough food to feed every person on the planet, for instance, and yet billions of people remain hungry. There is no need to be naïve about this reality, nor is there a need to feel futile.

In one of our earliest newsletters, which brought our first year of work (2018) to a close, we wrote that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than to imagine the end of capitalism, to imagine the polar ice cap flooding us into extinction than to imagine a world where our productive capacity enriches all of us’. This remains true. And yet, despite this, there is ‘a possible future that is built to meet people’s aspirations. … It is cruel to think of these hopes as naïve’.
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The problems we face are not for lack of resources or lack of technological and scientific knowhow. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we believe that it is because of the social system of capitalism that we are unable to transcend our common problems. This system constrains the forward movement that requires the democratisation of nations and the democratisation of social wealth. There are hundreds of millions of people organised into political and social formations that are pushing against the gated communities in our world, fighting to break down the barriers and build the utopias that we require to survive. But, rather than recognise that these formations seek to realise genuine democracy, they are criminalised, their leaders arrested and assassinated, and their own precious social confidence vanquished. Much the same repressive behaviour is meted out to national projects that are rooted in such political and social movements, projects that are committed to using social wealth for the greatest good. Coups, assassinations, and sanctions regimes are routine, their frequency illustrated by an unending sequence of events, from the coup in Peru in December 2022 to the ongoing blockade of Cuba, and by the denial that such violence is used to block social progress.

In his introduction to philosophy in 1997, the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, ‘I am. But I don’t have myself. And only therefore we become’. This is an interesting statement. Bloch is reformulating René Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’, an idealist proposition. Bloch affirms existence (‘I am’), but then suggests that human existence does not flourish due to forms of alienation and loneliness (‘But I don’t have myself’). The ‘I’ – the atomised, fragmented, and lonely individual – does not have the capacity to change the world alone. To build a process towards social transcendence requires the creation of a collective ‘we’. This collective is the subjective force that must strengthen itself to overpower the contradictions that stand in the way of human progress. ‘To be Human means in reality to have Utopia’, Bloch wrote. This phrase resonates deeply with me, and I hope that it touches you, too.

In the new year, we at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will reflect at length on the pathways to socialism and the barricades that seek to prevent the world’s billions from going beyond a system that extracts their social labour and promises greatness while delivering the barest minimum of life’s possibilities. We walk into this new year with a renewed commitment to the simple postulate, socialism is an achievable necessity.

As we begin the new year, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who works at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a team that is spread across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Shanghai, from Trivandrum to Rabat. If you would like to assist our work, please remember that we welcome donations.

We urge you to share our materials as widely as possible, to study them in your movements, and to invite members of our team to speak about our work.

Warmly,
​
Vijay

The longest held political prisoner in the US has been punished for decades for his participation in a modern day slave rebellion

​The story of Ruchell Magee, like the story of so many Black prisoners, is a story of the legacy of slavery in the United States. Ruchell was born in 1939 in Louisiana, in a time when the Southern region of the United States was mired in “Jim Crow” laws and racist terrorism, in which both the state and white vigilantes enforced strict racial segregation. 

At age 16, Ruchell was sentenced to prison for 8 years for “aggravated attempted rape” for his relationship with a 23-year-old, married white woman. False charges of rape by Black men against white women were not uncommon in the Jim Crow era, often with devastating consequences. In 1955, the same year Ruchell was accused of rape, Emmett Till was brutally lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. As discovered by journalist Ida B. Wells many years prior to Ruchell’s birth, rape was the most common accusation against lynching victims. Lynching was an infamous terror tactic used by white vigilantes against Black people in the Jim Crow South, many times upheld and sanctioned by the courts. And in the context of US prisons, many prison activists refer to unfair trials of Black people as “legal lynchings”. 

Ruchell spent eight years in the Angola prison in Louisiana as a result of this accusation. Angola itself was a former plantation, named after the part of Africa where its slaves originated. 
​
As Hurt described, Angola “is called a former plantation but we know that with the way that the mass incarceration system is set up, it doesn’t have to change a lot to go from a plantation to a prison.” Currently, the 75% Black prisoners in Angola are forced to pick cotton in the same fields that slaves used to work on, paid only a few cents per hour. And especially at the time Ruchell was incarcerated, Angola had a fearsome reputation for brutality and squalid conditions. Only three years before Ruchell was accused, 31 prisoners cut their Achilles tendons in protest of prison conditions. 

Participating in such a historic rebellion led Ruchell to identify deeply with Joseph Cinqué, who led a slave revolt on the ship La Amistad, and who successfully defended himself in the US Supreme Court on the grounds that he was being enslaved through the then illegal African slave trade. Ruchell takes on the name “Cinqué” as his own. As Hurt wrote for Liberation News, “Magee has continuously drawn parallels between Cinqué’s just struggle against slave traders in 1839 and his attempt to break his unjust, racist confinement as a prison slave in 1970.”

As Hurt described to Peoples Dispatch, “Ruchell is the only survivor out of those who participated in the act of liberation. Therefore, he’s seen as the person who needs to be made into an example.” Magee was indicted for the rebellion, but from the beginning he applied the same principles of fighting for the freedom of prisoners, who he viewed as enslaved, which brought him to Judge Haley’s courtroom in the first place. Ruchell did not leave his defense to educated, upper-class lawyers, as was and still is the norm. Ruchell largely served as his own defense, setting out not only to exonerate himself from murder but also to prove the corruption of the entire California court system. 

“I am going to show you and prove to you that the entire state of California judicial system…don’t care nothing about the little man’s rights,” Magee spoke up in court. “It’s not just Magee but any black man that they feel they can get away with, sneak and hide and convict him through fraud and thereafter place fraud records upon him. Then, when he attempts to overcome this, he is overpowered with all types of racist restraints, falsely accused…you will find you have hundreds of thousands of people illegally held in slavery…”
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The California courts were so threatened by Ruchell’s language that they chained him, gagged him, and even had his own attorney threaten him with the gas chamber if he didn’t incriminate his co-defendant, Angela Davis. And to this very day, Ruchell languishes in prison as the longest serving political prisoner in the United States. ​

As Ruchell himself said, “My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery. This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.” What Ruchell symbolizes, to those incarcerated outside and inside, is a person willing to rebel against a system perhaps even more powerful than slavery in its sheer size and influence: the US prison system. As Hurt described, Ruchell’s crime is heresy in his unmasking of the system. 
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Hurt and the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee demand California Governor Gavin Newsom to immediately commute Ruchell’s sentence so that he can be released. He is now 83 years old, and although he is due for parole in 2024, any year can be his last.
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“Not all political prisoners are arrested because of their political activity, but some are politicized while in prison,” Hurt said. “And then when they come out, they’re able to spread what they have learned, how they’ve grown with the world. And we believe Ruchell has a lot to teach the community and talk to people about. So we hope that we’ll have a day where Ruchell is able to talk to young prisoners or young people who are at risk in the community, to help share insights and build a new world.”

One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]

Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.

The thinker in question is also a self-declared Eurocentric who intimates that Europe is politically, morally, and intellectually superior to all other regions of planet Earth.[8] When the European refugee crisis was intensified due to brutal Western military interventions around the wider Mediterranean region, he parroted Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ credo by declaring that “it is a simple fact that most of the refugees come from a culture that is incompatible with Western European notions of human rights.”[9] This top-tier pundit also endorsed Donald Trump for president in the 2016 election.[10] More recently, he explicitly positioned himself to the right of the notorious warmonger Henry Kissinger by accusing the latter of “pacifism” and expressing his “full support” for the U.S. proxy war in the Ukraine, claiming that “we need a stronger NATO” to defend “European unity.”[11]

Being fêted by the preeminent journal co-founded by the arch-conservative national security state operative Huntington is only the tip of the iceberg for this global superstar, who has achieved a level of international fame rarely accorded to professional intellectuals.[12] In addition to being an academic celebrity with prestigious appointments at leading institutions in the capitalist world and innumerable international junkets, he has consolidated an enormous media platform. This includes publishing books and articles at a dizzying speed for some of the most prominent outlets, serving as the subject of multiple films, and regularly appearing on television and in major media spectacles.

Given the nature of these political positions and their amplification by the bourgeois cultural apparatus, one might assume that the thinker in question is a rightwing ideologue promoted by imperialist think tanks and the U.S. national security state. On the contrary, however, this is a commentator that anyone perusing online for radical theory or even Marxism is likely to encounter almost immediately, because he is one of the most visible intellectuals taken to represent the Left: Slavoj Žižek.
​
Donald Trump expressed his belief in the power of the U.S. propaganda machine by infamously claiming that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing a single voter.[13] In our perverse and decadent society of the spectacle within the imperialist core, much the same applies to the poster child for the global theory industry. Žižek could take the most reactionary political positions imaginable, have them broadcast around the world by the capitalist cultural apparatus, and still be presented as a towering intellectual of the Left. As a matter of fact, he has done precisely that.

As a young philosophy student in the United States in the early 1990s, I must admit that I was hoodwinked by this huckster and the system that promoted him. He burst onto the scene like the Evel Knievel of the theory industry when I was an undergraduate. Rather than endless disquisitions on a European philosophic history I knew nothing about, here was someone who could talk about it all to a poorly educated 19-year-old-wannabe intellectual: Hollywood movies, science fiction stories, consumer society, online culture, cool theories from Europe, pornography, sex, and, well, more sex. He was intoxicating to read, particularly for someone miseducated by the capitalist ideological apparatus and hungry for something—marketed as—different.

I devoured each book when it came out in the 1990s and early 21st century. I also followed on his heels by pursuing a Ph.D. under the direction of his intellectual father figure in Paris: Alain Badiou. However, as I continued to educate myself, I began to tire of his repetitions, theoretical superficiality, and rote rhetorical moves. I increasingly saw his provocative antics as a poor ersatz for historical and materialist analysis. This came to a head in 2001 when he endeavored to explain the events of September 11th through a cheeky Lacanian interpretation of The Matrix. His hot takes, while they sold like hot cakes, paled in comparison to rigorous materialist analyses of the history of U.S. imperialism and the machinations of its national security state, if it be in the work of Noam Chomsky, or much better, that of Michael Parenti.[14]

I then had a unique opportunity to see how Žižek’s discursive sausage is made when I translated a book by Jacques Rancière as a graduate student. Since Rancière was largely unknown in the Anglophone world at the time, every single publisher turned down the project. When I was finally able to talk one of them into considering it, after a hasty initial rejection, the acquisitions editor for the publishing house—which is now defunct—imposed one condition: to guarantee lucrative sales, I needed to secure a preface by a major marketing force in radical theory like Žižek. The latter agreed and later sent me a jumbled text that bore more than a striking resemblance to the section on Rancière in his book The Ticklish Subject.[15] He had added to this some free-associative ruminations and prefatory comments for one of Rancière’s books on cinema, which demonstrated little to no knowledge of the latter’s work on aesthetics or the book in question (I had translated Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique). Disgusted by this shameless disregard for scholarly rigor, yet devoid of any institutional power or a deeper political analysis at the time, I felt that my hands were tied because I needed to accept the theory industry’s use of this charlatan to promote its commodities if I wanted my translation to see the light of day. I sought to bury the preface by turning it into a postface and surrounding it with scholarly elucidations of Rancière’s work. In retrospect, however, I should have simply halted the project.

In looking back on my experiences with the so-called Elvis of cultural theory, I now see that, as part of the ascendent and miseducated professional managerial class stratum in the imperialist core, I was the target audience for his antics. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and Žižek’s first major book came out in English with Verso: The Sublime Object of Ideology. With a preface by the post-Marxist—viz. chichi anti-Marxist—radical democrat Ernesto Laclau, it was presented as a flagship publication in his new series with Chantal Mouffe. The series sought to draw on “anti-essentialist” theoretical trends, like those in France inspired by Martin Heidegger, in order to provide “a new vision for the Left conceived in terms of a radical and plural democracy” rather than support for socialism.[16] These two radical democrats—whose political orientation resonated with the anti-communist movements that were presented as ‘pro-democracy’ and used to dismantle socialist countries—played a central role in promoting Žižek. They invited him to present his work in the Anglophone world and opened up prestigious publication platforms to him. He reciprocated by explicitly using their post-Marxist pronunciamento, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), to frame his first book, based on their shared opposition to “the global solution-revolution” of “traditional Marxism.”[17] In 1991, the USSR was dismantled, and the aspiring post-Marxist theorist catering to the West published two more books: another in Laclau and Mouffe’s series, and one as an October book.[18] He thus definitively caught the rising theoretical wave of radical democracy just as dissident ‘pro-democracy’ movements backed by imperialist states and their intelligence services were aggressively rolling back the gains of the working class in order to redistribute wealth upwards.
​
As Soviet-style socialism was being dismantled, this Eastern European native informant increasingly presented his post-Marxism as nothing short of the most radical form of Marxism. Not unlike Elvis, who notoriously rose to fame in the music industry by appropriating, domesticating, and mainstreaming music from Black communities that was often rooted in very real struggles, Žižek became a front man in the global theory industry by borrowing his most important insights from the Marxist tradition but subjecting them to a playful postmodern cultural mash-up to crush their substance, thereby commodifying them for mass consumption in the neoliberal era of anti-communist revanchism. It is essential to note in this regard that, while the capitalist establishment celebrated the supposed end of history in the 1990s, it also promoted, for the rather niche social stratum of the radlib intelligentsia, the symbol of Marxism, purportedly set free from its substance, like a red balloon floating whichever way the—capitalist-driven—wind would blow. This was Žižek: he was to become the most well-known ‘Marxist’ in the neoliberal age of accelerated anti-communism. The mystery man from the East—a literal caricature of the ‘crazy Marxist,’ best captured by the sobriquet ‘the Borat of philosophy’—rose like a perverted phoenix publicly masturbating over the flames that had destroyed Soviet-style socialism.

Like many of his fellow self-styled radical thinkers, whose snake oil sells so well because it is ever so slippery, Žižek prides himself on his elusive prose and erratic behavior. In reading him, one comes to anticipate, at the turn of each page, yet another ‘gotcha’ moment when we learn that it’s actually the opposite (of whatever he had led us to believe on the previous page)! Like a child who never tires of playing hide-and-seek, in spite of their inability to actually hide, the Slovenian wunderkind constantly shirks and spirals out of discursive control to say everything and its opposite in the hopes that he can cover his tracks and remain ever elusive. He appears to be ignorant of the fact that there is an obvious and consistent ideology operative in the chameleonic character of intellectuals of his ilk. It is called opportunism.

When Žižek was interviewed for the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, his interviewer said she’d share the text with him in advance of publication. He retorted: “Oh that’s not necessary. Whatever I say, you can make me say the opposite!”[19] Saying something is just as good as saying its opposite for an opportunist whose main objective is to have his name in lights. In fact, if you say both over time—while disingenuously attributing this tiresome rhetorical move to ‘dialectics’ in order to provide pseudo-intellectual cover for nothing more than crass self-promotional chicanery—you occupy more space and take up even more time, squeezing out any of those who might actually have something to say. The fact that the bourgeois cultural apparatus gives him such an enormous platform reveals its proclivity to promote such tomfoolery over and against truly radical forms of analysis. It is worth recalling, in this regard, that his dada dialectics knows very precise limits. We have never heard him say, as far as I know, something like: ‘the dominant ideology constantly says that actually existing socialism was utterly horrific… but it’s precisely the opposite!’
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We might wonder why a self-stylized Marxist uncritically embraces the crassest elements of the culture industry that promotes him, willingly whoring himself out to a mega-corporate clothing line that was placed on the “Sweatshop Hall of Shame” by the International Labor Rights Forum in 2010. This is, however, just one example among many others of the intimate relationship between the global theory industry and the general industry of consumer capitalism. Žižek doesn’t only sell books; he also peddles movies, art, literature, magazines, newspapers, public spectacles, and, well, American-style clothes for “cool, good-looking people,” in the choice words of A&F’s CEO.[20]

 Since this grifter says and re-says just about everything and its opposite, it is helpful to focus on what he has actually done and the nature of his theoretical practice. To fully understand the latter, it is necessary to situate him and his specific skullduggery within the social relations of intellectual production. In other words, by theoretical practice, I not only mean his subjective activities as an intellectual but also the objective social totality within which he operates, and which has promoted him as an international superstar. Part of my argument is that Žižek needs to be understood as a cultural product of the global theory industry rather than fetishized as a sui generis subject.

The author of In Defense of Lost Causes was born in 1949, and he grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). He would later assert, with no evidence beyond anecdotes to support his claim, that “life in a Communist state was mostly worse than life in many capitalist states.”[21] However, his home country provided a quality of life for the masses that is worth briefly recalling:

Between 1960 and 1980 it [Yugoslavia] had one of the most vigorous growth rates, along with free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to an income, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 per cent, and a life expectancy of seventy-two years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, in a mostly publicly owned, market-socialist economy.[22]

According to his biographer Tony Myers, Žižek disliked the communist culture of his homeland. Surely clued into potential opportunities for personal socio-economic advancement in the larger capitalist world, this venal young intellectual devoted himself to imbibing Western pop culture. “As a student,” Myers writes, “he developed an interest in, and wrote about, French philosophy rather than the official communist paradigms of thought.”[23] His Master’s thesis on French theory “was deemed to be politically suspicious” because, in the words of his fellow Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar, “the authorities were concerned that the charismatic teaching of Žižek might improperly influence students with his dissident thinking.”[24]

He did end up writing his first book on the unrepentant Nazi Martin Heidegger, the principal reference for the Slovenian anti-communist opposition according to Žižek himself. He also published the first Slovene translation of the French philosopher who made an enormous contribution to rehabilitating Heidegger’s reputation after WWII: Jacques Derrida.[25] The French magus of deconstruction was himself directly involved in dissident anti-communist political activism against the government in Czechoslovakia.[26] He co-founded the French chapter of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which has been funded by an impressive array of corporate and Western governmental sources with a record of supporting anti-communist subversion, including the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the Open Society Fund (Soros), the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is a CIA cutout.[27]

After a sojourn in Paris to complete a second Ph.D., Žižek returned to the SFRY in 1985 and first came to public attention as an anti-communist dissident who was part of the French-theory inflected, Western-oriented ‘opposition.’[28] “In [the] late 1980s,” he explained, “I myself was personally engaged in undermining the Yugoslav Socialist order.”[29] He was “the main political columnist” for Mladina, a prominent weekly publication that was part of the dissident movement against the communist government.[30] The magazine, for which he wrote a weekly column, was accused of being backed by the CIA in a long and detailed report by the Yugoslav Communist Party, which also highlighted the proliferation of counter-revolutionaries who were threatening the very survival of the SFRY.[31] Žižek later claimed, on numerous occasions, that this was precisely his orientation as a dissident who contributed to the fall of communism.[32] He was involved, amongst other things, in the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights of the Four Accused in 1988 that demanded, in his own words, “the abolishment of the existing socialist system” and “the global overthrow of the socialist regime.”[33] This was in perfect line with President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive 133 (NSDD), which advocated in 1984 for “expanded efforts to promote a ‘quiet revolution’ to overthrow Communist governments and parties” in Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries.[34]

Žižek cofounded the Liberal Democratic Party (LDS), and he served as one of its leading public spokespeople.[35] The LDS was rooted in the liberal tradition of promoting ‘pluralism’ and would dominate Slovenia during the first decade after the end of socialism.[36] Žižek was the party’s candidate for the four-person presidency of the earliest break-away republic, which served as a wedge for dismantling the SFRY. He made the following campaign promise in a 1990 televised debate: “I can, as a member of the Presidency, substantially assist in the decomposition of ideologic Real-socialist apparatus of the state.”[37] He expressed his willingness to implement policies of liberal economic restructuring, which had already had catastrophic consequences for workers, asserting that he’s a “pragmatist” in this area: “if it works, why not try a dose of it?”[38] Indeed, he openly advocated for “planned privatizations” and flatly asserted, like a good capitalist ideologue: “more capitalism in our case would mean more social security.”[39] This was, once again, in perfect line with Reagan’s NSDD 133, which explicitly called for “Yugoslavia’s long-term internal liberalization” and the promotion of a “market-oriented Yugoslav economic structure.”[40]

The Eastern liberal also affirmed his support, at least in the short term of socialist demolition, for what the anti-communist philosopher Karl Popper called the ‘open society.’ He claimed that George Soros, the anti-communist founder of the Open Society Fund (and Popper’s former student), was “doing good work in the field of education, refugees and keeping the theoretical and social sciences spirit alive.”[41] Popper supported NATO’s intervention in the SFRY, and his work had been promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the infamous CIA front organization. Soros has been deeply invested in anti-socialist regime change operations in Eastern Europe. In Yugoslavia, “his Open Society Institute channeled more than $100m to the coffers of the anti-Milosevic opposition, funding political parties, publishing houses and ‘independent’ media.”[42] Moreover, Soros openly admitted that he was—through his foundation’s lavish funding of anti-communist organizations and activities—“profoundly implicated in the disintegration of the Soviet system.”[43]

Although Žižek was narrowly defeated in his presidential run, he served as the Ambassador for Science in the emerging post-socialist republic and apparently continues to provide informal advice to the government.[44] Indeed, he expressed his “open support for the Slovenian state after the restoration of capitalism in the 1990s,” and he remained faithful to his anti-communist liberalism: “I did something for which I lost almost all my friends, what no good leftist ever does: I fully supported the ruling party in Slovenia.”[45] The LDS, as a party of capital, pursued denationalization and privatization. This was in a context in which the IMF and World Bank were pushing through brutal economic counter-reforms that had been destroying the industrial sector, dismantling the welfare state, fostering the collapse of real wages, and laying off workers at a terrifying pace (614,000 out of a total industrial workforce of some 2.7 million had been laid off in 1989-90).[46] The pro-privatization party that Žižek openly supported, during a time of “massive declines of living standards for large sections of the world population,” was also keen on becoming a junior partner in the imperialist camp. It was “the leading proponent of accession to the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).”[47] This process began in the 1990s, and Slovenia officially joined the EU in 2003 and NATO the following year.[48]

It must not be lost on us, then, that this entrepreneurial intellectual had been for pro-Western civil society and against the state when the latter was socialist, whereas he was proudly against civil society and for the state when the latter turned capitalist (and sought membership in capitalist and imperialist transnational organizations).[49] As a matter of fact, in his presidential campaign, he advocated for an anti-socialist purge of the state apparatus, adding that he would be very strict and “start from scratch” regarding “the Administration of internal affairs, political police and so on.”[50] He explicitly advocated for developing an intelligence service that would be completely liquidated of all socialist elements, announcing what could only be interpreted as the CIA’s wet dream in the first break-away republic (which raises serious questions about his precise relationship to the agency that has played such a central role in overthrowing socialist governments around the world, often by working hand-in-glove with local anti-socialist political parties, intelligence agencies, publication outlets, and intellectuals): “There [regarding the Administration of internal affairs and the political police] I would make a cut. Now I will say something sinful. I think that in these turbulent times Slovenia will need an intelligence service because during this battle for sovereignty there will be actions to destabilize it. But for this service it is particularly important that it does not share any continuity with the current Administration of internal affairs [i.e. the socialist one]. Here I advocate a cut.”[51] The communists, according to this toady of the West, hate him. They undoubtedly recognize that he is an opportunist playing a very dangerous game to advance his career—as well as brutal privatization schemes and imperialist expansion—at the expense of the masses of workers. “I am rather perceived as some dark, ominous, plotting, political manipulator,” writes the Lacanian joker about how he’s seen in Slovenia, “a role I enjoy immensely and like very much.”[52]

Although he provided mild pushback against the Western propaganda narrative that ethnic hatred was the principal cause of the dissolution of the SFRY, his rationale for this stance perfectly aligns—like so many of his other political positions—with the propaganda promoted by pro-capitalist public relations firms like Ruder & Finn and CIA media assets. In a text entitled “NATO, the Left Hand of God,” he flatly asserted: “it was Serbian aggression alone, and not ethnic conflict, that set off the war.”[53] The Serbs, it is worth recalling, had “a proportionately higher percentage of Communist party membership than other nationalities.”[54]Žižek was thus parroting the position put forth by Ruder & Finn’s Director James Harff, who bragged that his spin doctors had been able to construct for the SFRY a “simple story of good guys and bad guys.”[55] The Eastern liberal even attempted to blame the communists, who had overseen a functioning multi-ethnic state for decades, for producing nationalism and “the compulsive attachment to the national Cause.”[56] He also embraced the Western demonization of the socialist President Slobodan Milošević by indulging in liberal horseshoe theory, claiming that “he managed to synthesize some unthinkable combination of fascism and Stalinism.”[57] However, whatever mistakes or misdeeds were committed by the socialists, the fact of the matter is that, as Michael Parenti has explained in a fact-driven book on the topic: “there was no civil war, no widespread killings, and no ethnic cleansing until the Western powers began to inject themselves into Yugoslavia’s internal affairs, financing the secessionist organizations and creating the politico-economic crisis that ignited the political strife.”[58]

Where did the pro-capitalist stand on NATO’s self-proclaimed humanitarian bombings of defenseless civilian populations and socialist infrastructure, whose real goal was the ‘Third Worldization’ and effective colonization of the only nation in the region that had refused to shed what remained of its socialism? He cheekily asserted, with his signature gusto for puerile provocation: “So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma ‘Bomb or not?’ is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE.”[59] Since he made this ringing endorsement for intensifying the illegal mass murder of civilians in a draft that circulated online, and this particular statement dropped out of the text when it was published, we should note that he is crystal clear in other interviews, like when he flatly asserts: “I have always been in favor of military intervention from the West.”[60]

In his subsequent career as one of the world’s most visible public intellectuals, he has repeatedly taken strong positions against actually existing socialism. Cuba, for him, is nothing but “a nostalgic inert remainder of the past” that provides no hope for the future and is undeserving of even circumspect support.[61] In perfect line with capitalist propaganda, he casts China as an existential threat, and he unflinchingly describes Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping as an authoritarian capitalist who runs in the same corrupt gang as Trump, Putin, Modi, and Erdoğan.[62] It is quite obvious in reading him, in spite of his radical mummery, that he abides by Margret Thatcher’s infamous neoliberal mantra: TINA--There Is No Alternative. In fact, he regularly says as much himself: “I’m not aware of any convincing radical left alternatives” and “I don’t have any fundamental hopes in a socialist revolution or whatever.”[63] In the 1990 presidential debate mentioned above, he expressly embraced the views of Winston Churchill—whose dogged advocacy for colonial butchery positioned him “at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum”—by claiming that capitalism “is the worst of all systems” but “we don’t have another one that would be better.”[64]
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At the same time, he has regularly intervened in public debates to express his support for the European Union (a longstanding capitalist project promoted by the U.S. national security state as a bulwark against communism) and select acts of Western imperialism, including some of NATO’s brutal military interventions, particularly those in or near Europe.[65] His grand idea for the future of humanity is not to be found in the socialist states in the Global South that have waged successful anticolonial struggles against imperialism. It is instead located in the historic epicenter of colonialism and imperialism. “In today’s global capitalist world,” he writes, “it [the idea of Europe] offers the only model of a transnational organization having the authority to limit national sovereignty and the task of guaranteeing a minimum of norms for ecological and social well-being. Something subsists in this idea that directly descends from the best traditions of the European enlightenment.”[66] As a matter of fact, according to his Euro-diffusionist historical narrative, Third World anti-colonial struggles are themselves dependent upon concepts purportedly imported from the West, including what Žižek describes as the latter’s “self-critical examination” of its own “violence and exploitation” in the Third World.[67] As a social chauvinist who deeply believes that Europe is the natural leader of world development, he even concurs with Bruno Latour’s reactionary assertion that “only Europe can save us.”[68]

In spite of Žižek’s clear political orientation in practice as a pro-Western anti-communist, who aggressively supported the overthrow of socialism in favor of capitalism, this self-styled eccentric never tires of claiming that he’s a communist. He even attempts to dress the part, so to speak, presenting himself as the ‘dirty communist’ from the East. In addition to the obligatory beard and the disheveled appearance, he belligerently talks over his interlocutors, spewing out endless dirtbag left provocation like pseudo-intellectual logorrhea was going out of style. A true performance to épater les bourgeois.

Žižek is neoliberal capitalism’s court jester. Aping the figure of the Marxist-qua-antisocial-fanatic, he encourages disdain for the real-world project of socialism, while hawking the wares of Western consumer society through his pop cultural mash-up. The histrionic show put on by this contumacious enfant terrible is—we must never forget—on the capitalist stage. The trickster is just a hireling, and a telling symptom of neoliberalism’s cultural apparatus. It is the capitalist court that has made the joker into a superstar, precisely because he has played his part so well. Like all good jesters, he pushes the limits of courtly decorum and says the most outrageous things in a hysterical spectacle of critique, while ultimately toeing the most important line by demonstrating his fealty to the puppet master (king capital).

To convincingly play his provocative part, this clown not only says he’s a Marxist, but he insists on being nothing short of a Leninist. Let’s listen in to one of his ridiculous rants, which, of course, is part of his routine and is therefore repeated in numerous texts: “I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. […] When you get power, if you can, grab it. Do whatever is possible.”[69] This commie cosplay depiction amounts to saying that Leninism is all about playing dirty and ruthlessly pursuing power. Such a disingenuous representation of Lenin, and Marxism-Leninism more generally, is perfectly in line with a long ideological history. Benedetto Croce, the Italian liberal and fascist sympathizer, said the exact same thing about Marx: he was the Machiavelli of the proletariat because he put force first and sought to ruthlessly seize power.[70] Steve Bannon, relying on a similar conflation of Leninism with brute power politics, is also a self-declared “Leninist” à la Žižek.[71] This is likely one of the many reasons why the neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer declared: “Slavoj Žižek is my favorite leftist. He has more to teach the alt Right than a million American conservative douches.”[72]

Since the jester always has more to say on every topic, let’s hear him out on what it means to be a Leninist in 2009, when he made the claim cited above: “I am a Leninist. […] This is why I supported Obama.”[73]This is one of his best jokes of all time. The deadpan delivery is killer because he actually means it. He literally equates Leninism with supporting the neoliberal Deporter-in-Chief whose diversity cred provided thin cover for revving the engine of the U.S. imperial machine around the world, leading to Obama’s infamous statement about his assassination program, namely that he was “really good at killing people.”[74] Žižek, though, homes in on the former President’s purportedly revolutionary approach to healthcare, meaning an imposed mandate for private insurance modeled on Republican Mitt Romney’s plan: “I think the battle he is fighting now over healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology.”[75] Obama, we might remember, rejected any discussion whatsoever of single-payer healthcare, a system of universal coverage with socialist roots.
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When you’re an idealist wag like Žižek, Leninism is just a word, a floating signifier, that you can play around with, using it as just one more prop or gimmick. This is painfully obvious in his comic book Repeating Lenin. In spite of what the straightforward title might suggest to the naïve and uninitiated, he proclaims: “I am careful to speak about not repeating Lenin. I am not an idiot. It wouldn’t mean anything to return to the Leninist working class party today.”[76] What he likes about Lenin “is precisely what scares people about him—the ruthless will to discard all prejudices. Why not violence? Horrible as it may sound, I think it’s a useful antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating, politically correct pacifism.”[77] It’s that unbridled death drive that the Slovenian Lacanian feels compelled to repeat. “To REPEAT Lenin,” he writes with clownish typography,“does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin – to repeat Lenin is to accept that ‘Lenin is dead,’ that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. […] To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities.”[78] As the most visible ‘Leninist’ never tires of repeating, communism was and is a cataclysmic failure. His compulsion to repeat it is thus best understood in terms of the line in Beckett that he regularly quotes in contexts such as these: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” What the future has in store, according to this rebel with a lost cause, is thus nothing more than enhanced failure: “we have to accept the fact that it is impossible for Communism to win […] , i.e., that, in this sense, Communism is a lost cause.”[79]
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The final payoff for the jester’s commie cosplay is that the super-rich chortle in their martinis and invite him to write copy for their advertisements. Meanwhile, some students and members of the professional managerial class stratum buy up his pop philosophy thinking perhaps they’ll learn something about Marxism. Instead, they are taken on a theoretical magic carpet ride that demonstrates how ridiculous Marxism is while advertising Hollywood’s blockbuster films, TV shows, science fiction novels, and assorted consumer products of the global theory industry.

Žižek, like Badiou, is not a historical materialist.[80] Neither of these philosophers engage in rigorous analysis of the concrete, material history of capitalism and the world socialist movement, and they eschew serious political economy in favor of discussing superstructural elements and products of the bourgeois cultural apparatus. Both of them openly indulge in an idealist philosophical approach that privileges ideas and discourses, and they are metaphysicians who defend an anti-scientific belief in superstition.

If we bracket their idiosyncratic vocabularies and examine their theoretical practices outside of the ideological confines of cultural commodity fetishism, their specific version of idealism could best be described as transcendental idealism. They present their brand-managed conceptual framework (largely based on personal interpretations of non-Marxist discourses like those of Jacques Lacan and G.W.F. Hegel) as the transcendental structure of reality. They then choose specific empirical elements—a current event, a text, a Hollywood movie, a candy wrapper, the back of a cereal box, a Starbucks’ cup, a porn site, or literally anything else, particularly in the case of Žižek—that they contend confirms this pre-established theoretical model, thereby producing the illusion that it has been proven true. Such a claim, however, can never be collectively tested in any rigorous manner, because it is up to the whims of each speculative prestidigitator to decide what empirical data corroborates their theoretical assumptions (and thus what information can be ignored).

This can be clearly seen in their approach to communism. Unlike Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who maintained that “communism is the real movement which abolishes [aufhebt] the present state of things,” they assert that communism is an “Idea” and a “desire.”[81] At the same time, they regularly toe the capitalist propaganda line by condemning the real movement of communism for purportedly indulging in bloodthirsty terrorism, violent dictatorship, and genocide (blithely ignoring the need to provide documentation for such claims, or simply invoking as ‘proof’ the work of reactionary anti-communists or sources funded by the U.S. State Department and the Open Society Fund).[82] The possible exceptions they sometimes point to would often better be described as anarchist, at least as they interpret them, because they tend to celebrate moments of anti-state and anti-party insurgency, including against socialist states (as in Badiou’s interpretation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution).[83] Meanwhile, those who support actually existing socialism are presented as ideological dupes or remnants of a bygone era, trapped in an imaginary world not unlike those ensnared in capitalist ideology. “The left which aligned itself with ‘actually existing socialism’ has disappeared or turned into a historical curiosity” is what we are told in the introduction to their widely acclaimed volume The Idea of Communism.[84]

When this book was published by Verso in 2010, the Chinese Communist Party boasted some 80 million members, which surpassed the entire combined population of both France and Slovenia by about 16 million people. Where, then, we might wonder, are these social chauvinists getting their information about the current state of the world? The answer is embarrassingly simple for these idealist philosophers: Jacques Lacan and the Lacanian elements in Louis Althusser’s work. The latter drew on Lacan’s mirror stage and conceptualization of the imaginary to create a misleading portrayal of ideology in his famous interpellation scene.[85] As Althusser asserted in a passage that contradicts his earlier analysis, an individual becomes an ideological subject when it recognizes itself as the one being hailed (interpellé) by a police officer in the street, meaning that the individual identifies with the image put forth by the other, assuming one’s place in the extant symbolic order.

There is another possibility, however, which Lacan referred to in his seventh seminar as following the imperative to not compromise one’s desire (ne pas céder sur son désir), which Žižek has theorized in terms of the ‘ethical act.’ Rather than remaining an ideological subject trapped in an imagined relationship to the social relations of production within the symbolic order, one can become a Subject à la Badiou by fearlessly pursuing the Real, which is that je ne sais quoi that resists the symbolic order (while at the same time being “contained in the very symbolic form” insofar as the Real is “the absent Cause of the Symbolic”).[86] The object-cause of desire, what Lacan called the objet petit a, is in Žižek’s words “the void [of the Real] filled out by creative symbolic fiction.”[87] It drives our jouissance in the sense that we crave it precisely because of its impossibility: the Real can never be seamlessly integrated into the symbolic order or simply translated into what Lacan calls ‘reality.’[88]

Since Badiou is more systematic and rigorous than the scattershot Žižek, and the latter borrows profusely from the idealist whom he refers to as a living Plato, it is worth recalling the basic Lacanian structure of Badiou’s “Idea of communism”:  “the communist Idea is the imaginary operation by which an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political real into the symbolic narration of a History.”[89] In slightly more straightforward language, this means that the Idea of communism is an operation by which an individual ideologically (the imaginary) commits themselves to an unexplainable political event (the Real)—like May ‘68 for Badiou—whose consequences they attempt to trace out within a given historical situation (the symbolic). This cannot actually (réellement) be done, according to the French metaphysician, because the Event qua Real is recalcitrant to the symbolic realm of ‘History’ and the ‘State’; it can only be done imaginarily (imaginairement) by the individual Subject.[90] This is one of the reasons why Badiou peremptorily proclaims that “communist” cannot be used as an adjective to describe an actual party or state.[91] A century of collective aspirations and horrors has apparently demonstrated that “the Party-form, like that of the socialist-State, are henceforth inadequate for assuring the real support of the Idea.”[92] As a matter of fact, the communist Idea can only sustain politics that “it would be definitively absurd to say that they are communist.”[93] Anarchist would be the common term, and more specifically insurgent anarchism, merged with an unhealthy dose of metaphysics and utopian socialism. After all, this is a politics in which an individual becomes a Subject by being faithful to an inexplicable Event that interrupts history, acting on its consequences like the followers of Christ.

“Real communism” is thus a metaphysical communism of the Lacanian Real. Accordingly, we are told, the collective project of materially transforming the world is in fact destined to fail if it takes the form of parties or states since these would give concrete form or ‘symbolization’ to the otherworldly Real. Communism is thereby displaced from the realm of collective action aimed at socialist state-building projects—as a first but necessary step to break the chains of imperialism—to that of individual consciousness and the subjective experience of the privileged few that Nietzsche referred to as ‘free spirits.’ In counter-distinction to this small group of great thinkers and artists of the world, Žižek explains with his signature disdain for the working class, 99% of “concrete people” are “boring idiots.”[94] These hapless proles and peasants did not study in Paris with the petty-bourgeois luminaries of the global theory industry, so they have not understood what is most essential: communism is a subjective process of resisting the symbolic order of extant societies and desiring the impossible, even individually ‘acting on’ this desire.[95]

One of the reasons idealists love to heap scorn on materialists as somehow being crass reductionists and ‘unphilosophical,’ is precisely because the latter are capable of revealing the material structures that undergird and determine the conceptual games they play. If we subject the idealist communism of the Real to a class analysis, it becomes readily apparent that it rejects, under the heading of ‘actually existing socialism,’ the project of the masses, of the global Untermenschen (subhumans) who have imagined that they could make the Real of their desire into a historical reality. It is here that the Nietzschean orientation of these radical aristocrats comes clearly into view because they deride the purported ignorance of the hoi polloi. Over and against their crass materialism, the Real communists aspire to much more than the lowly pursuit of collective access to potable water, food, shelter, healthcare, and so on via concrete anti-imperialist state-building projects (all of these are in the realm of what Lacan called ‘need’ as opposed to ‘desire’). Real communists, in the Lacanian sense, have the supreme subjective dignity of individually demanding the impossible—not something that could materially help improve the lives of the global masses in the here-and-now.[96]

Such a posture literally means that these self-stylized radical thinkers demand something that cannot be done, which is the epitome of petty-bourgeois radicalism. What they truly desire, if we translate their pseudo-intellectual narcissistic self-indulgence into materialist terms, is the appearance of making the most radical demands imaginable while, at the same time, avoiding any threat to the material system of social hierarchies that has elevated them as leading intellectuals in the imperialist core. They desire the impossible, and even ‘act on’ this desire, precisely because they do not want anything to substantially change. That, then, is their big Idea of communism, namely that it is impossible.[97]

“The work of the Marxists,” wrote V.I. Lenin in a passage that anticipated the liberal leanings of the Lacanian-Althusserians, “is always ‘difficult’ but the thing that makes them different from the liberals is that they do not declare what is difficult to be impossible. The liberal calls difficult work impossible so as to conceal his renunciation of it.”[98] Marx also presciently described these capitalist accommodationists avant la lettrewhen he diagnosed the essence of petty-bourgeois sophistry in his critique of anarchism, which merges with liberal ideology on essential points. He traced its material roots back to opportunist careerism within the capitalist core. What he says here about Proudhon describes the idealist casuistry of Badiou and the ostentatious contradictions of Žižek with remarkable precision:
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Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But as he never grasped really scientific dialectics he never got further than sophistry. This is in fact connected with his petty-bourgeois point of view. Like the historian Raumer, the petty bourgeois is made up of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. This is so in his economic interests and therefore in his politics, religious, scientific and artistic views. And likewise in his morals, IN EVERYTHING. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is in addition an ingenious man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and develop them according to circumstances into striking, ostentatious, now scandalous now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in science and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view. There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the éclat of the day. Thus the simple moral sense, which always kept a Rousseau, for instance, from even the semblance of compromise with the powers that be, is bound to disappear.[99]

The collapsing biosphere, the rise of fascism, and the threat of the ‘new’ Cold War turning into WWIII all mean that the stakes of contemporary class struggle could not be higher. Capitalism’s court jester, like other intellectuals of his ilk, is applauded by the ruling class’s elite managers and promoted internationally for encouraging us to ride fearlessly into the apocalypse of ‘the Real’ while lapping up his provocative hot takes and binge-watching the blockbuster films and TV shows he promotes.
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This neoliberal prankster is thus the epitome of a radical recuperator. He cultivates and markets the appearance of radicality in order to recuperate potentially radical elements in society, particularly young people and students, within the pro-imperialist anti-communist fold. This is precisely why he is the most famous ‘Marxist’ in the capitalist world, festooned by the likes of a journal linked to the engine of U.S. imperialism. His mantra is nothing but an opportunistic perversion of the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto: “Cultural consumers of the pro-Western world unite—and buy my next book, or movie, or crossover product, or whatever, and so on, and so on!”

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Notes.

[1] I would like to express my gratitude to Jennifer Ponce de León, Eduardo Rodríguez and Marcela Romero Rivera for encouraging me to write this article and providing feedback on it, along with Helmut-Harry Loewen and Julian Sempill. I accept full responsibility, however, for any errors or infelicities.
[2] See Foreign Policy (December 2012): <https://web.archive.org/web/20121201034713/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,55#thinker92> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[3] See his interview on the British BBC show “HARDtalk” on November 4, 2009: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThTJBKYPiNo&t=153s> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[4] Ibid. Also see Slavoj Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 127-129.
[5] Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 151 (Žižek’s emphasis).
[6] Ibid. 169.
[7] See Domenico Losurdo’s insightful critique of Žižek in Western Marxism. Trans. Steven Colatrella (New York: 1804 Books, forthcoming).
[8] See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek. “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry 24:4 (Summer 1998): 998-1009; Slavoj Žižek. “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!” Le Figaro (October 31, 2022); and his oral comments on the future of Europe available here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pA35HuhEYY> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[9] Quoted in Thomas Moller-Nielsen. “What Is Žižek For?” Current Affairs (Sept/Oct 2019): <https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/what-is-zizek-for> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[10] See, for instance, his statements during a 2016 Channel 4 interview archived here: <https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154211377601939> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[11] See Slavoj Žižek. “Pacifism Is the Wrong Response to the War in Ukraine.” The Guardian (June 21, 2022): <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/21/pacificsm-is-the-wrong-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[12] Huntington served as White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He also worked as an adviser to P.W. Botha’s Security Services in Apartheid South Africa (Botha was an outspoken opponent of Black political power and international communism, as well as an unrepentant defender of Apartheid).
[13] Reena Flores. “Donald Trump: I could ‘shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’” CBS News (January 23, 2016): <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-i-could-shoot-somebody-and-i-wouldnt-lose-any-voters/> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[14] See, for instance, Noam Chomsky. 9/11: Was There an Alternative? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001) and Michael Parenti. The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002).
[15] Issues of plagiarism and self-plagiarism have arisen so often regarding Žižek’s work that there is even a section of his Wikipedia page with links to multiple articles on the topic. See, in particular, Jay Pinho. “A Year of Writing Dangerously: Žižek’s Serial Self-Plagiarism.” The First Casualty (September 22, 2012): <http://archives.jaypinho.com/2012/09/22/the-year-of-writing-dangerously-slavoj-zizeks-serial-self-plagiarism/> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[16] See their description of the book series “Phronesis” in Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). For an insightful critique of radical democracy, see Larry Alan Busk. Democracy in Spite of the Demos: From Arendt to the Frankfurt School (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020).
[17] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 6 (on Žižek’s embrace of their theoretical matrix, see his acknowledgements on page xvi). I also refer the reader to the book Žižek and Laclau wrote with fellow ‘anti-totalitarian’ radical democrat Judith Butler for the “Phronesis” series. In their co-authored introduction, they present the book as being founded on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy insofar as it “represented a turn to poststructuralist theory within Marxism, one that took the problem of language to be essential to the formulation of an anti-totalitarian, radical democratic project” (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000, 1, my emphasis).
[18] Žižek described his second book for the series “Phronesis” as being based on a series of lectures in Slovenia “aimed at the ‘benevolently neutral’ public of intellectuals who were the moving force of the drive for democracy” (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991, 3). In addition to Laclau and Mouffe, the Lacanian Joan Copjec helped facilitate the rise of Žižek in the Anglophone world through her promotion of his work in the circles of the French-theory driven New York City arts journal October. As he points out in the acknowledgments to his 1991 book Looking Awry, published as an October book with MIT Press, Copjec “was present from the very conception” of the project, encouraged him to write it, and spent time helping him with the manuscript (Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991, xi).
[19] Jodi Dean. Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), xi.
[20] Benoit Denezit-Lewis. “The Man Behind Abercrombie and Fitch.” Salon (January 24, 2006): <https://www.salon.com/2006/01/24/jeffries/> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[21] Slavoj Žižek. “The Communist Desire.” Los Angeles Review of Books. “The Philosophical Salon” (July 25, 2022): <https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-communist-desire/#_ednref1> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[22] Michael Parenti. To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2000), 17. Drawing on World Bank data, which could not be suspected of pro-socialist sympathies, Michel Chossudovsky provides a similar portrait of pre-1980 Yugoslavia in The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Pincourt, Canada: Global Research, 2003), 259.
[23] Tony Myers. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10.
[24] Ibid. 7.
[25] On the Heideggerian ‘opposition’ and Žižek’s first book, see Christopher Hanlon and Slavoj Žižek. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” New Literary History 32:1 (Winter, 2001): 1-21.
[26] See, for instance, Barbara Day. The Velvet Philosophers (London: The Claridge Press, 1999).
[27] On the NED, see William Blum. Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (London: Zed Books, 2014), 238-243. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing the NED, openly acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (ibid. 239).
[28] See, for instance, Ian Parker. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004). On the CIA’s support of French theory and intellectual anti-communism more generally, see Gabriel Rockhill. “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left.” Los Angeles Review of Books. “The Philosophical Salon” (February 28, 2017): <https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[29] Thomas Moller Nielsen. “Unrepentant Charlatanism (with a Response by Slavoj Žižek).” Los Angeles Review of Books. “The Philosophical Salon” (November 25, 2019): <https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/unrepentant-charlatanism-with-a-response-by-slavoj-zizek/> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[30] Ernesto Laclau. “Preface.” Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, xi.
[31] See the BBC documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3VyGPu6PKc> (accessed on November 22, 2022). On Žižek’s weekly column, see the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on him: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Slavoj-Zizek> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[32] Amongst other sources, see his interview on the British BBC show “HARDtalk” on November 4, 2009: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThTJBKYPiNo&t=153s> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[33] Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 990.
[34] Cited in F. William Engdahl. Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance (Wiesbaden: mine.Books, 2018), 101.
[35] Matthew Sharpe claims that Žižek was the cofounder of the LDS in his article on the Slovenian philosopher in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: <https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/> (accessed on November 22, 2022). Although I have not found this information confirmed by other sources, it is very clear that Žižek was, at a minimum, a major public spokesperson for the LDS.
[36] See, for instance, “Lacan in Slovenia: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl.” Radical Philosophy 58 (Summer 1991). It would be interesting to explore the history of this party’s financing, following the lead of the great Michael Parenti’s analysis of the dismantling of Yugoslavia: “US leaders—using the National Endowment for Democracy, various CIA fronts, and other agencies—funneled campaign money and advice to conservative separatist political groups, described in the US media as ‘pro-West’ and the ‘democratic opposition’” (To Kill a Nation, 26).
[37] See the televised 1990 election debate archived here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942h8enHCZs> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[38] “Lacan in Slovenia,” 30.
[39] See another segment of the same televised 1990 election debate, archived here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfNeIRQ350> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[40] See the digital archive of NSDD-133 available here: <https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-133.htm> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[41] Geert Lovink. “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek.” Ctheory (February 21, 1996): <https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14649/5529> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[42] Neil Clark. “NS Profile—George Soros.” New Statesman (June 2, 2003): <http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ns062203.htm> (accessed on November 22, 2022). “From 1979,” Clark specifies in this article, “he [Soros] distributed $3m a year to dissidents including Poland’s Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media. Ostensibly aimed at building up a ‘civil society,’ these initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the way for eastern Europe’s eventual colonization by global capital.”
[43] Cited in Néstor Kohan. Hegemonía y cultura en tiempos de contrainsurgencia “soft” (Ocean Sur, 2021), 63.
[44] See Myers, Slavoj Žižek, 9.
[45] Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[46] See, for instance, Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, 267: “Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia had agreed to loan packages to pay off their shares of the Yugoslav debt […]. The all too familiar pattern of plant closings, induced bank failures, and impoverishment has continued unabated since 1996 [i.e. in the wake of the November 1995 Dayton Accords]. And who was to carry out IMF diktats? The leaders of the newly sovereign states have fully collaborated with the creditors.”
[47] “The fall of the Berlin Wall,” writes Minqi Li, “was followed by massive declines of living standards for large sections of the world population. The disintegration of the socialist economies contributed to the weakening of the global working classes. National income has been redistributed from labor to capital in nearly every part of the world” (“The 21st Century: Is There an Alternative (to Socialism)?” Science & Society 77:1 (January 2013): 11). Also see Božo Repe. “Slovenia” in Günther Heydemann and Karel Vodicka. From Eastern Bloc to European Union: Comparative Processes of Transformation since 1990 (New York: Berhahn Books, 2017) and Leopoldina Plut-Pregelj and Carole Rogel. The A to Z of Slovenia (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2010), 241. On the imperialist dismantling of Yugoslavia, whose horrific consequences for the majority of the local population were in inverse proportion to the increased profits for the capitalist ruling class, also see Boris Malagurski’s documentary film The Weight of Chains (2010) and Michael Parenti’s 1999 lecture “The U.S. War on Yugoslavia”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEYQ46gH08> and <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEzOgpMWnVs> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[48] See Matjaž Klemenčič and Mitja Žagar. The Former Yugoslavia’s Diverse Peoples (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004), 300-301.
[49] See, for instance, Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[50] See the second segment of the 1990 presidential debate mentioned above: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfNeIRQ350> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[51] Ibid.
[52] Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[53] Slavoj Žižek. “NATO, the Left Hand of God.” Nettime (June 29, 1999): <https://www.lacan.com/zizek-nato.htm> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[54] Parenti, To Kill a Nation, 81.
[55] Quoted in ibid. 92.
[56] Slavoj Žižek. “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead.” New Left Review I/183 (Sept/Oct 1990): 58.
[57] Žižek, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 29. Milošević reportedly launched his campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Kosovo in a speech he gave in 1989. As reported by Michael Parenti, who provides essential contextualization that contradicts, on numerous points, Žižek’s hot takes, here is part of what Milošević said: “Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully. Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be divided in the national and religious respect” (To Kill a Nation, 188).
[58] Žižek, “NATO, the Left Hand of God.”
[59] Cited in Parker, Slavoj Žižek, 35.
[60] Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[61] “Slavoj Žižek on Cuba and Yugoslavia” (December 1, 2016): <https://zizek.uk/slavoj-zizek-on-cuba-and-yugoslavia/> (accessed on November 22, 2022). Also see Žižek, “The Communist Desire.”
[62] Žižek, “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!”
[63] See his interview on the British BBC show “HARDtalk,” cited above, and Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[64] This segment of the televised debate was archived here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfNeIRQ350> (accessed on November 22, 2022). For a brief summary of some of Churchill’s contributions to imperial atrocities, including the 1943 Bengal famine that claimed the lives of three million people, see Johann Hari. “Not His Finest Hour: The Dark Side of Winston Churchill.” Independent (October 28, 2010).
[65] On Europe, see, for instance, Steve Weissman, Phil Kelly and Mark Hosenball. “The CIA Backs the Common Market.” Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Eds. Philip Agee and Louis Wolf (New York: Dorset Press, 1978). It is also important to note that the European Union has been an important anti-communist force. In 2019, the European Parliament passed a resolution that largely equated communism with fascism and condemned “all manifestations and propagation of totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism or communism” <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0021_EN.html> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[66] Žižek, “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!”
[67] Slavoj Žižek. First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 115.
[68] Žižek, “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!”
[69] Slavoj Žižek. “New Statesman Interview, with Jonathan Derbyshire.” New Statesman (October 29, 2009): <https://zizek.uk/new-statesman-interview-with-jonathan-derbyshire/> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[70] See, for instance, Domenico Losurdo’s insightful critiques of Croce in Antonio Gramsci: Del liberalismo al comunismo crítico(Madrid: disenso, 1997).
[71] Ronald Radosh. “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, told Me He Was ‘a Leninist.’” Daily Beast (April 13, 2017): <https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-trumps-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[72] Spencer’s tweet was archived here: <https://archive.ph/qT5Xu> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[73] Slavoj Žižek. “New Statesman Interview.”
[74] Michael B Kelley. “Last Year President Obama Reportedly Told His Aides that He’s ‘Really Good at Killing People.’” Business Insider (November 2, 2013): <https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-at-killing-people-2013-11?op=1> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[75] Žižek, “New Statesman Interview.”
[76] “Doug Henwood Interviews Slavoj Žižek.” No Subject – Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (February 27, 2002): <https://nosubject.com/I_am_a_fighting_atheist> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[77] Ibid.
[78] Slavoj Žižek. Repeating Lenin (Zagreb: bastard books, 2001), 137.
[79] Žižek, “The Communist Desire.”
[80] To take but one example among many others, Žižek has the audacity to claim that class struggle is not part of “objective social reality” but is instead the Real “in the strict Lacanian sense,” meaning that class struggle “is none other than the name for the unfathomable limit that cannot be objectivized, located within the social totality” (Slavoj Žižek, Ed. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 2000, 25, 22).
[81] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 49.
[82] Badiou draws attention in particular to the books by the rightwing dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was welcomed with open arms by Hienrich Böll and the CIA networks he was involved with in Germany (see Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s 2006 documentary for ARTE, Quand la CIA infiltrait la culture: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58QTcf_mFag>, accessed on November 22, 2022). The metaphysician also refers to the “outstanding, incontrovertible work” on the Stalinist Terror and positions “in the first rank” the “great book” by J. Arch Getty, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932-1939 (Slavoj Žižek, Ed. The Idea of Communism. Vol. 2. London: Verso, 2013, 6). Badiou declines to mention that this work was funded by the U.S. Department of State, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Open Society Fund. He also omits the fact that the book was published in a series whose advisory board includes powerful members of the U.S. imperial elite, including U.S. State Department operative Strobe Talbott and the anti-communist National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The latter was involved, amongst other things, in covert CIA operations in Afghanistan that funded and supported the Mujahideen—including Osama bin Laden—to fight the Soviet Union (see Chomsky, 9/11, 82).
[83] For an excellent critique of Badiou along these lines, see Losurdo, Western Marxism.
[84] Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, Eds. The Idea of Communism (London: Verso Books, 2010), viii.
[85] See Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León. “Toward a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics and Social Imaginaries.” Philosophy Today 64:1 (winter 2020).
[86] Žižek, Looking Awry, 39; Slavoj Žižek. Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 30. “The Real,” Žižek writes, “is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 30).
[87] Ibid. 76.
[88] Žižek, Looking Awry, 12. I am under no illusion regarding the stability of Žižek’s political positions or, for that matter, his interpretation of Lacan or other issues. As an opportunist, he has, of course, taken numerous different positions, some of which show clear signs of self-contradiction. What I am pointing out here, then, is simply one of the more coherent through-lines in his work, namely the theme of the ethical act, as it segues with Badiou’s theory of the subject.
[89] Alain Badiou. L’hypothèse communiste (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009), 189. On numerous occasions, Žižek explicitly embraces Badiou’s Idea of communism, which overlaps with the former’s extensive writings on the ethical act. Here is one example: “The communist Idea thus persists: it survives the failures of its realization as a specter which returns again and again, in an endless persistence best recapitulated by Beckett’s already-quoted words: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Douzinas and Žižek, Eds., The Idea of Communism, 217).
[90] Badiou, L’hypothèse communiste, 188.
[91] Ibid. 189.
[92] Ibid. 202. Never to be outdone in the realm of hyperbole, Žižek doubles down on Badiou’s position and takes it even further: “If it is to survive, the radical left should thus rethink the basic premises of its activity. We should dismiss not only the two main forms of twentieth century state socialism (the social-democratic welfare state and the Stalinist party dictatorship) but also the very standard by means of which the radical left usually measures the failure of the first two: the libertarian vision of communism as association, multitude, councils, anti-representationist direct democracy based on citizens’ permanent engagement” (Taek-Gwang Lee and Slavoj Žižek. The Idea of Communism. Vol 3. The Seoul Conference. London: Verso, 2016).
[93] Badiou, L’hypothèse communiste, 190. Badiou tellingly references the following examples: “the
Solidarność movement in Poland in the years 1980-81, the first sequence of the Iranian Revolution, the Political Organization in France [Badiou’s political group], the Zapatista movement in Mexico, the Maoists in Nepal” (ibid. 203). In the third volume of The Idea of Communism, which was based on a conference in South Korea—a capitalist state and de facto U.S. colony occupied by the military—Badiou insists in his opening comments that the participants in the conference “have nothing to do with the nationalist and military state of North Korea,” adding for good measure: “We have, more generally, nothing to do with the communist parties that here and there continue the old fashion of the last century [i.e. actually existing socialism].”
[94] “Slavoj Žižek: ‘Humanity Is OK, but 99% of People Are Boring Idiots.” The Guardian (June 10, 2012): <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring> (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[95] Žižek has written extensively on Antigone as someone who performed just such an act by rebelling against the state and rejecting the reign of the ‘reality principle’ in favor of an uncompromising dedication to her desire (to bury her brother and thus honor the higher law of the gods). “An act is not only a gesture that ‘does the impossible,’” he contends in his glorification of individual desire à la Antigone, “but an intervention in social reality which changes the very coordinates of what is perceived as ‘possible’” (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 167).
[96] Badiou and Žižek have occasionally taken political positions in support of the working class, and this is not the object of my critique. It is instead their stalwart opposition—with only very minor and explainable exceptions—to the international socialist movement from 1917 to the present, which has taken the form of anti-imperialist state building projects from the USSR to Vietnam, China, Cuba and beyond.
[97] See Radhika Desai. “The New Communists of the Commons: Twenty-First-Century Proudhonists.” International Critical Thought1:2 (August 1, 2011): 204-223.
[98] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works. Vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 396.
[99] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 33.

​Without any doubt, the WWII Holocaust and the 1915 Armenian genocide consist the two largest mass slaughters of the 20th century. They are crimes which must never be erased from the collective memory of the peoples, no matter how many decades will pass. 

However, there are also less known sides of History, the “forgotten” holocausts to which the bourgeois historiography has given little importance, either by downgrading them as insignificant details of world history or by distorting their true dimensions. 

A major example of such a “forgotten” holocaust is the mass slaughter of the communists in Indonesia by Suharto's dictatorship during the 1965-66.
The criminal called General Suharto was the man who, with the tolerance and silence of the U.S. and British governments, was responsible for one of the most barbaric bloodshed of the previous century: the mass slaughter of more than 1,000,000 people, mostly communists, members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia [1].

If we want to have a comprehensive image of the social and political conditions that led to the 1965-66 massacre, we must refer to the historical background of developments in Indonesia after the end of Second World War. These developments are related to the role of the British and Dutch imperialists, the conditions under which the independence of the Republic of Indonesia took place, the formation of the class struggle in the country and, of course, the position of Indonesia in the post-WWII imperialist plans which led to the active involvement of the US in the domestic political processes.

In the mid of 1960s, the sharpening of the intra-bourgeois contradictions (with the steady interference of US-British governments) led to a series of military coups and counter-coups that ultimately resulted to the overthrow of the elected president Sukarno. In the morning of October 2, 1965, numerous military vehicles were patrolling at the streets of Jakarta in order to capture the insurgents and lead them to prison. A day earlier, a failed coup attempt had been organised by the commander of the presidential guard Colonel Untung. From his side, in a message transmitted via radio, the Colonel had justified the coup attempt by arguing that its role was to prevent a conspiracy planned by the CIA and army officials to overthrow President Sukarno.

The army crushed the failed coup's insurgents, with a General called Suharto playing a decisive role. This man would subsequently override Sukarno's leadership thus becoming the new powerful leader of the country. Suharto and his imperialist allies point the Communist Party of Indonesia as the source of the failed coup – after all, the well-organised and popular Communist Party had played a leading role in the anticolonial struggle and had significant influence in Sukarno's policies.

The massacre of the communists in Indonesia by the authoritarian Suharto regime, with the support and tolerance of the US-British imperialists, consists one of the darkest pages of the 20th century. It consists a deliberately “forgotten” holocaust that the bourgeois propaganda tries to downgrade as a “collateral damage” of the Cold War. They try to downgrade the historical significance of the 1965-66 massacre of Indonesia's communists because it is one more example that exposes imperialist brutality.

Imperialism tries to erase its bloody past in order to safeguard its future. For that reason, the imperialists distort History in every possible way. Because they know the actual power that the working class, the proletariat in every country, has. That is why the working people, the people, must know their history and fight against distortion and oblivion, in order to have a powerful weapon in the struggle against the big enemy of humanity which is the rotten exploitative system that generates barbarity, poverty and wars. ​

Timor-Leste was proclaimed by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) as a sovereign state on November 28, 1975. Tragically, on December 7, Indonesia launched a large-scale military invasion backed and supplied by U.S.-led Western diplomatic, economic, and arms support. For twenty-four years, Indonesia committed one of the “greatest genocides” in the twentieth century history. During the first three years, East Timorese under the FRETILIN leadership responded with a war of resistance and popular revolution, a “most tenacious difficulty yet seen in the colonial revolution,” per Dennis Freney.

Under the leadership of Xanana Gusmão, compromise policies emerged within the national liberation front from the early 1980s until the late ’90s. In an August 1999 referendum, the Timorese people voted overwhelmingly for independence, ending twenty-four years of Indonesian neocolonial occupation. Timorese entered into a two-year transition period under UN Transitional Administration on East Timor (UNTAET) governance, which some have referred to as the “UN’s Kingdom,” pointing to recolonization by the imperialist power under the flag of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank. This recolonization aimed to establish what George Aditjondro described as a “global capitalist outpost” in Southeast Asia, as a top-down “neoliberal macroeconomic testing ground.”

The implementation of neoliberal in Timor-Leste is not new, but it has been radically ramped up since 2000 as a savage policy of the ruling class against the poor, not only by the IMF, World Bank, and Western imperialist states, but also with the help of local politicians.

In 1999, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested that the IMF collaborate with UNTAET leadership in the reconstruction of Timor-Leste. During the two-year transitional period (2000—­02), the IMF acted as an advisor on budgetary and technical issues. Due to its own regulations, however, the IMF was not allowed to provide funds to nonmember countries such as Timor-Leste. The IMF mediated between the East Timor Transitional Administration, UNTAET, aid agencies, and donor countries. Instead of offering unconditional grants, the IMF sought to make Timor-Leste take out titanic loans, aimed at creating long-term debt.

Still, the IMF mission has indelibly shaped the state economic infrastructure, in terms of budget authority, revenue, taxes, and payment regulations. The Central Fiscal Authority, which is responsible for the fiscal strategy of the East Timor Transitional Administration, was created by IMF efforts and guidance. The IMF was responsible for securing the adoption of the U.S. dollar as Timorese currency, further expanding U.S. global neoliberal hegemony based on the dollar. The IMF was crucial in the Western imperialist foreign policy of subjugating East Timorese into the imperialist world system, centered in Washington.

The IMF has advocated for Timor-Leste to have more power to administer funding from donors, which remain supervised by the United Nations in Washington. But this is not because the IMF was really preoccupied with the wants and needs of the Timorese people, but because Timor-Leste as administrator opened up possibilities for the IMF to further influence and direct funds according to its own agenda and interests.

What the IMF has done is a form of aggressive imperialism, forcing Timor-Leste to work and serve the West by hindering its own independence in foreign relations. As the IMF managing director Horst Koehler has stated, the economic difficulties of Timor-Leste, created by colonialism and imperialism, forced the country to work with the IMF as the only path forward. Ironically, Timor-Leste joined the IMF and World Bank as its 184th member and the Asian Development Bank as its 61st member two months after its restoration of independence in May 2002. Later that year, Timor-Leste became the 191st member of the United Nations.

The IMF and World Bank had already occupied a penetrative role in promoting neoliberal austerity reform and measures in Timor-Leste before the official restoration of its independence in May 2002. Even without any strong sources of revenue, oil production did not really start until 2004, but the IMF had already advocated “fiscal responsibility” during the transitional period. It advised the FRETILIN government to maintain wages at similar levels as during the Indonesian occupation, even proposing to cut salaries and wages of civil servants, as well as state expenditure on services and goods. Since 2000, the IMF has worked to ensure Timor-Leste as a new vibrant target for foreign capital to exploit cheap labor and access to a market and raw materials, encouraging policies preventing the increase of the minimum wage, subsidies, and price control.

In a similar move, after regained independence, FRETILIN governed the country from 2002 until 2007. In early 2006, the country faced a political crisis. FRETILIN secretary general and center-left politician known for his opposition to the IMF, World Bank, and Western imperialist debt policies, Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri was ousted by mass protests organized by right-wing sectors and liberal democrats backed by imperialist powers such as the United States and Australia. At the time, he had had a dispute with president Xanana Gusmão and the destabilization of his government was also rooted in his opposition to Australia and Western oil corporations in the maritime delimitation and oil-gas dispute. In the end, he was temporarily replaced by the neoliberal technocrat Estanislau da Silva until Jose Ramos-Horta, a pro-Western politician, was appointed as the new prime minister.

Amid the political crisis of 2006—08, the new cabinet favored the agenda of IMF-sponsored reform. In 2006, Horta called for the reduction of taxes and promoted national and international investor-friendly fiscal policies. In the meantime, a joint comparative study by the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and global consultants laid the groundwork for new policy recommendations that would set up a new reform and fiscal strategy of the Timorese state.

In 2008, the new coalitional government headed by Gusmão comprised of four right-wing and pro-Western political parties: The National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT, founded by Gusmão), Democratic Party, Social-Democratic Party, and Timorese Social Democratic Association. They formed a coalitional government and adopted the name Aliança de Maioria Parlamentar (Alliance of Parliamentary Majority), typical of right-wing coalitional governments in Latin America backed by U.S. imperialism.

Gusmão and his new government enjoyed the revenue gained from the oil boom, which created a new upper class tied to a patron-client relationship. From 2008, the government promoted a “Referendum Packet” as a national strategy for rural revitalization and the promotion of “autonomous” development of local/national capital through seven hundred infrastructure projects, precisely designed to offer government contracts to Gusmão-CNRT clients and loyal veterans. There were two ultimate results of this. First, sectors of veterans became part of the local and national bourgeoisie; second, the veterans were incorporated into the national ruling historical bloc as the social forces promoting reactionary ideology. Indeed, the project aimed to create a new comprador class with a counterrevolutionary culture. The effect was that the right-wing neoliberal turn of public economic policies widened social inequality, and increased authoritarianism and clientelism in Timor-Leste.

Despite the global capitalist crisis of 2008, Timor-Leste enjoyed considerable growth and stability, and was generally safe from economic contractions. The CNRT government sought to use much of the money made from petroleum funds for broad national investment. The IMF, however, insisted that it would jeopardize the national economy and cause rising inflation. The IMF contended that the government had chronic expenditures problems, and that its inability to spend the money was due to “inadequate budget planning and poor implementation capacity” rather than the structural barriers imposed by the IMF.

From 2000, any big budgetary proposal from the Timorese authority was described by the IMF as ambitious and as exceeding its administrative capacity. This has been a constant IMF policy since the beginning, promoting fiscal austerity to discourage any big public investment while encouraging small fiscal responsibility. At the same time, the IMF sponsored monetary austerity centered on dollar revaluation while reducing money supply, in favor of few national capital and foreign investors—policies that were responsible for constantly chipping away at the bargaining power of Timorese workers to resist and struggle against capital.

Since the assault against the social reform government of the FRETILIN in 2006, there has been a steep rise in new legislation favoring international capital, the free-market economy, and neoliberal austerity reform such as labor market deregulation. IMF-sponsored policy reforms have been well received by all major parties and political figures without strong resistance from popular or left-wing political parties or civil society since 2008. It is the price the traditional political left such as FRETILIN had to suffer for ignoring the revolutionary mass struggle and project.

2022 marked two decades of neoliberal offensive in Timor-Leste, assaults that aimed to deepen the neoliberalization of the bourgeoisie national state of Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste represents a new case in the dawn of the twenty-first century on how the IMF imposed a top-down neoliberal macroeconomic infrastructure and reform project from scratch. Neoliberal-oriented fiscal and monetary austerity has been implemented and designed to keep Timor-Leste from having no economic and political sovereignty.

To end, the capitalist-imperialist’s monstrous strategy of neoliberal austerity has haunted the Timorese people for over two decades. IMF-sponsored policy reforms have shaped national development and economic policies and strategy centered on austerity that favored global capital and imperialism since the beginning—economic policies responsible for maldevelopment, poverty, unemployment, and deep inequality, but also the impasse of left-wing and working-class movements in Timor-Leste.
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Our proper task is to create a new anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist front fighting for popular democratic sovereignty and the construction of a new socialist economy.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
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Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
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To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
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[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
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[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.