The history of the Olympic Games shows both the struggle by China and the Global South to be accepted by the U.S. and other imperialist nations, as well as alternative models to it. In the early 1990s, barely a decade after rejoining the Olympic movement, Beijing launched a bid to host the 2000 Games. Unfortunately by then, U.S. policy had begun to shift perceptibly from the honeymoon years of rapprochement. Gone was the incentive for even arch-reactionaries like U.S. Presidents Nixon and Reagan to embrace the People’s Republic of China (PRC) effusively in the name of hard-nosed anti-Soviet realpolitik. With the end of the first Cold War, anticommunism also receded as a guiding framework for U.S. imperial rhetoric, in favor of a universalized (if richly hypocritical) weaponization of neoliberal “human rights.” This was a discursive terrain tilted heavily toward bourgeois democracies in the imperial core, on which China was hardly more equipped to compete than it had been in the Mao era. Sure enough, the U.S. mainstream press united in opposition to Beijing’s bid, with the New York Times anticipating the facile and now-omnipresent analogies with Nazi Germany, as University of Hong Kong historian Xu Guoqi quotes in his 2008 book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008: “The city in question is Beijing in the year 2000, but the answer is Berlin 1936.” Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress vehemently urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reject the bid on human rights grounds. In the event, Beijing led in every round of voting until the last, when it narrowly lost to Sydney 45-43. It later emerged that the Sydney organizing committee had not only secured the two-vote margin via outright bribery (par for the course for the IOC), but had secretly commissioned an anti-China smear campaign laundered through a London-based human rights group. The bonds between white Anglo settler colonies prevailed, and the Sydney Olympics became the stage for a truly noxious whitewashing of Australia’s genocide against Aboriginal peoples. Still smarting from its defeat and the naked hypocrisy of Western powers around the “politicization” of the Games, Beijing nonetheless forged ahead with a bid for the 2008 Olympics. This time it won with ease, aided by widespread sympathy for the circumstances of the 2000 loss, as well as a slick PR campaign designed to neutralize the attack lines that had sunk its previous attempt. Bid committee official Wang Wei assured the IOC that “with the Games coming to China, not only are they going to promote the economy, but also enhance all the social sectors, including education, medical care and human rights.” Despite strenuous efforts to weaponize large-scale unrest in Tibet in the months leading up to the Games, even limited boycott appeals from Western campaign groups went nowhere. The 2008 Beijing Olympics went down in history as China’s “coming-out party” and a seminal moment in its growing self-confidence as a rising world power. It is telling that Jules Boykoff, the outspoken critic of the Olympics whose book Power Games I have relied on heavily in my research for this and other articles on this topic, makes no mention at all of this widespread popular perception of the 2008 Games or their significance in the broader arc of Chinese history. Instead he treats them as an exclusively elite project and focuses entirely on critical narratives, a tendency he has doubled down on in his most recent commentary on the 2022 Beijing Games. Possibly the most revealing line is his response to Beijing’s assurances from the 2008 bid: “This human-rights dreamscape never arrived. It’s telling that today, neither China nor the IOC are vowing that the Olympics will spur democracy.” It does not seem to occur to Boykoff to see this as a positive development: that China’s growing confidence in its own model frees it from the need to address Western imperialists in their favored (and deeply hypocritical) discursive terms. As the New York Times put it succinctly, “Where the government once sought to mollify its critics to make the Games a success, today it defies them… China then sought to meet the world’s terms. Now the world must accept China’s.” This reflects a broader analytical lacuna in campaigns that take the Olympics themselves as an undifferentiated political target: they fail to account for the positions of different host countries vis-à-vis the imperialist world system. To flatten “the Olympics” or “human rights” as universal categories is effectively to privilege normative Western understandings of both. In practice this leads to the grossly uneven and asymmetrical treatment of Olympics hosted by self-styled democracies in the imperial core—historically the overwhelming majority—versus the few that are not. To be sure, local anti-Olympics campaign groups are undoubtedly justified in fighting the social dislocations they bring to host cities everywhere. (Full disclosure: I have previously worked with one such group, NOlympics LA, which does valuable work connecting the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics to gentrification and racialized policing.) But where was the outrage over the illegal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, when Salt Lake City hosted in 2002? Over Britain’s war crimes there and in Iraq, when London hosted in 2012? Over Japan’s continued refusal to acknowledge its colonial crimes against humanity, when Tokyo hosted in 2021? The indictment of entire host countries as “human-rights nightmares” (Boykoff’s crude label for China and Kazakhstan, when Beijing and Almaty wound up as the only finalists for 2022) seems to be reserved for nations outside the imperial core. The nascent transnational anti-Olympics movement needs to overcome these ideological blinders if it is ever to match the coherence of the great anti-racist mobilizations that shook the IOC in the 1960s and ’70s. Presently there seems little cause for hope, with leading figures like Boykoff and his fellow “left” sportswriter Dave Zirin uncritically propagating U.S. State Department lines on both Xinjiang and Peng Shuai in their coverage leading up to the 2022 Games. New Emerging Forces What, you might ask, was the People’s Republic of China up to in the world of international sport during its more than two decades in the Olympic wilderness (from 1952 to 1980)? The story of “ping-pong diplomacy” with the United States and other Western powers is already well-documented, reflecting an obvious Northern historiographical bias. But in an age of growing calls for “decoupling” between China and the West, and for South-South cooperation via the Belt and Road Initiative among other projects, the buried history worth uncovering is that of the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO). GANEFO emerged from a bold act of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist solidarity by the Indonesian government of Sukarno, the visionary anticolonial leader and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1962, Indonesia as host pointedly refused to invite Israel and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) regime to the fourth Asian Games and was summarily suspended from the IOC. In response, Sukarno proclaimed that: “The International Olympic Games have proved to be openly an imperialistic tool… Now let’s frankly say, sports have something to do with politics. Indonesia proposes now to mix sports with politics, and let us now establish the Games of the New Emerging Forces, the GANEFO… against the Old Established Order.” His bracing rhetoric is reminiscent of the Chinese IOC delegate Dong Shouyi’s 1958 broadside against then IOC President Avery Brundage, but shorn of any residual attachment to a mystical “Olympic spirit.” China enthusiastically jumped in to help organize and promote GANEFO in 1963, covering travel costs to Jakarta for 2,200 athletes from 48 countries, overwhelmingly based in the Global South. It left with a bumper crop of athletic victories—topping the overall medal table, followed by the Soviet second-string squad and the Indonesian hosts—and effusive goodwill from athletes across the emerging Third World. There would never be another GANEFO, owing to the horrific U.S.-backed coup that ousted Sukarno and installed Suharto’s military dictatorship in 1965. But this piece of history remains more vital than ever to recover. Because the lesson of Beijing 2022 and the moves toward a diplomatic boycott, however farcical, is that the United States and its allies in the Global North will never fully accept China as a legitimate member of their elite club. In their current position as hosts, PRC officials may feel understandably constrained in denouncing the “politicization” of the Games. But it would be wise for them, for the Chinese people, and for the rest of the world to keep in mind the fact that politicizing the Olympics is a long, hallowed tradition for the workers and oppressed nations of the world. The People’s Republic of China has a storied place in that tradition, of which it can be justly proud. AuthorCharles Xu is a member of the Qiao Collective and of the No Cold War collective. This article was first published on Qiao Collective and was adapted in partnership with Globetrotter. Archives February 2022
0 Comments
2/8/2022 On Semiotic Capitalism: Rejecting Idealism and Embracing a Materialist Revolutionary Line. By: Will WhiteRead NowWith the everyday rise in media consumption and “sick” new NFTs dropping every day, it is easy to wonder how capitalism operates in an increasingly digitized age. A handful of “Marxists” investigate how capitalism influences our consumption of information and signs. Such thinkers forward an understanding of capital as something semiotic or symbolic in nature. These theories of capital can be categorized as a part of revisionist idealism. I aim to briefly introduce the discussion around semiotics, capitalism, and a conclusion that favors a stance rooted in materialism. Semiotics refers to the study of signs and their interpretation. This is distinct from epistemology, the study of knowledge, in that epistemic inquiry investigates how we learn about an object. Semiotics delve into questions on how we understand what symbol someone refers to when someone refers to that object. By extension, semiotic capitalism calls attention to the idea that capitalism has coded all semiotics and bodies to their relationship to capital. Franco Bifo Berardi, in his article “Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance During the Twentieth Century,” writes that capitalism is no longer a physical economy but rather a precarious one based on knowledge and signs-commodities; in other words, capital is no longer a material phenomenon.[1] Therefore, the messages that we communicate are viewed as a unit measured by use and exchange value instead of what is capital T truth. Semiotic capitalism could have damning implications on revolutionary engagement. For instance, something like the image of Che Guevara is used as a symbol to accumulate capital instead of propaganda to galvanize revolutionaries. Scholars attribute two leading causes for this image’s viral impact during the 1960s. First, his involvement in a successful revolution made him an intriguing symbol for folks worldwide.[2] Second, some scholars argued that his handsome physique makes his portrait desirable.[3] This made Guevara a marketable image to sell products that now have the idea of a revolution attached to them while at the same time reinforcing capitalist economies under the guise of “relatability”. Capitalist sign exchange also establishes a dominant form of semiotic systems. Those who do not fit the mode of existence that produces symbolic capital are viewed as unproductive and thus deviant. For instance, if the symbol of the cis-heterosexual white man is ideal for accumulating capital, then those who do not fit that are to assimilate or violently be erased. Bifo’s prescription to semiotic capitalism is to isolate an act of language to escape the technical automation of capitalism and produce a new form of life.[4] He suggests that poetry exceeds the established meaning of words in communicative spaces and thus expand the imaginary beyond the captures of semiotic capitalism.[5] However, this prescription saps revolutionary potential in resisting capitalism. There is a significant issue with the way Bifo perceives semiotic capitalism and its remedy. Bifo’s conception of capital negates the fundamental premise of dialectical materialism. Forwarding the theory that capital has transcended from the material to semiotics indicates that capital functions outside the superstructure of capitalist modes of production. I.e., class antagonisms are being framed as a question of symbolic exchange instead of material repression of the working class. This saps revolutionary potential among the people because it miseducates them and thus splits any focus on a single material capitalist structure in favor of pursuing abstract academic Marxism. The impact of such revisionism upholds the ideological hegemony of the imperial “left,” whose focus is not invested in the direct liberation of the people. In other words, these forms of theorizing capital do not work as revolutionary strategies and abandon the immediate material struggles of black, brown, and indigenous proletarians. After all, theory without practice that is not axiomatically rooted in material and militant resistance of the U.S. empire and vice versa are all gateways to new forms of liberalism. So, how should we approach understanding this relationship between capitalism and semiotics? Linguistics and Economics by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi help us here by exploring the material relationship between semiotics and capitalism. Landi identifies social reproduction as a material process in which the needs and conditions of material life determine just about everything. [6] Under this assumption, even if the exchange of signs is non-material, that exchange can only happen with the production and reproduction of bodies and objects from which the signs are born. For example, the premise “Will is silly” relies on the signifier Will existing. Landi also suggests that the sign value of communication is contingent upon satisfying the demand within the dialectical market that satisfies bourgeois needs and desires. [7] This indicates that capitalism may alter how we consume signs. However, the material conditions under capitalism shape the power dynamic that demands particular types of exchange. We must then conclude that only a revolutionary line of action rooted in materialism and helping the masses can resolve capitalism on both the “semiotic” and material levels. This does not deny semiotic coding onto black and brown bodies. Instead, opponents of capitalism should not precisely sever capital from the material, and remember that the coding of deviancy can only be born from the meaning derived from physical bodies. An increasingly digital age should not distract us from material lines of praxis and theory. Revisionism has plagued academic circles to continue producing liberal idealism and deviate from an analysis that promotes action that directly helps the people. Lip service to semiotics does not change the reality that capital is still, in fact, rooted in the material. Additionally, the ability to produce and reproduce information or bodies that produce meaning is still reliant on the material structure of capitalism in which the setter bourgeoisie continue to maintain their profits. Works Cited [1] Berardi, Franco B. “Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance During the Twentieth Century.” e-flux vol.39 (November 2012). [2] Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff, Chevolution, 2008 [3] Ibid. [4] Berardi. “Emancipation of the Sign.” [5] Ibid. [6] Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. Linguistics and Economics. The Hague: Mouton, 1977. 51 [7] Ibid., 58 AuthorWill White recently received a bachelor of arts in history from UCLA. They spent lots of time in forensics during undergrad dedicated to researching political theory from authors like Bataille, Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Marx. Will is currently applying to grad programs in hopes to continue investigating how to use Marxism to study rhetoric. Archives February 2022 “Greed- for lack of a better word- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.” Guess the quote. Those infamous lines were uttered by actor Michael Douglas back in 1987, when he portrayed Wall Street villain Gorden Gekko in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street. Even as the film aims to show the pitbulls and spiral of the game that is capitalism, it does highlight a great American notion we still live by today, 34 years later- that greed is good. Capitalism as an economic system relies on both infinite resources and conspicuous consumption. In order to continue consuming conspicuously, we- the American consumer- must pay for everything. In the United States, we pay for university, healthcare, parental leave, childcare, even vacation days. Americans pay for so much, that we often do not think about the one need we do not pay for, at least not directly- primary education. If you live in the United States, you know that public education from kindergarten to senior high school comes at no direct costs to families, and is paid for through property taxes and state funding. Free primary and secondary education is somewhat a source of pride for many Americans. We are constantly told how fortunate we are to receive this education for free. These statements are usually juxtaposed by stories of those who have immigrated to the U.S. or have children who are first generation Americans, as many coming from “developing” nations often had to pay for primary and secondary education out of pocket. However, nothing in America is free (not even healthcare), so why don’t American citizens pay for primary care, arguably one of the most necessary institutions in any society? Is there an invaluable purpose to making primary education free for the most impressionable Americans? America: The Imperial Core Imperialism is defined as “a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through diplomacy or military force”. Spoken about by those living in the imperial periphery (non-Western, economically underdeveloped and often exploited nations) imperialism is a crime against humanity. Imperialist nations start wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, overthrow democratically elected leaders in other countries, install puppet dictators, and economically ravage entire global regions. Yet, in the United States, a country guilty of all of these accusations, and a nation with nearly 800 military bases outside its own borders, citizens live in a blissful denial that borders on delusion, refusing to acknowledge what the rest of the world sees as self-evident: America is an imperialist nation. What the United States has tactfully done throughout its existence , is create a culture of hegemony. Cultural hegemony, a theoretical concept coined by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, says that the rule of the dominant group or dominant social class is achieved by the spread of ideologies through social institutions such as churches, court, media, and lastly, education. The need for Hegemony in Imperialism Educational hegemony is necessary for imperialism because the state needs all citizens to believe in its political and military agendas. The most effective way to indoctrinate citizens to have unwavering allegiance to the State’s political ideals is to teach them from youth and constantly drill into each person that the State’s political and economic will is what is best for them, and for the world. Public education then becomes the State's most effective propaganda tool: it reaches the masses, and marinates in the individual’s and, by extension, the public's psyche. By the time a child reaches adulthood, they have had twelve years of accepting the most egregious assumptions. They internalize messages about the necessity of capitalism, the necessity of war, and the necessity of poverty. The US knows it cannot justify its endless international wars, mass incarceration and mass unemployment rates to any reasonable demographic of citizens, so it uses public education to manufacture consent for its atrocities. Under this indoctrinating teaching, imperialism is taught as patriotic, and war criminals are called “Leaders of the Free World.” Free public education means the US is allowed to spread its imperial political agenda without fear of majority dissent- because the people have already been conditioned to see the State’s agenda as the norm, as ‘common sense policies.” What is the Cost? In short: the mind . The indoctrination of the American psyche through public education costs both bodies and souls. The current system prepares the majority of citizens to be laborers-an asset only to the corporations the nation itself is beholden to- and to accept political and economic inertia as immutable realities. The cost of an educated mass is too great, the US must use indoctrination to quell even the slightest dissatisfaction with the status quo. A true education is supposed to help lift citizens out of poverty, expand their knowledge of the world, and open their mind to the possibility of a new society. The State’s imperialist agenda will always take priority over the wellbeing of its citizens; the state is not charging you money for education, because the taking of your mind is endlessly more valuable and necessary. AuthorRebecca Elliott is a writer, a nd public health professional currently residing in the Boston area. A policy analyst by profession, Rebecca has been trained in public health research, policy, and law. She has a deep love of knowledge, and believes that education is and always should be inherently revolutionary. When she is not diving into the politics of education, she enjoys reading, cooking, and finding the best ice cream spots. Archives February 2022 When you think of Western capitalism and imperialism, what usually comes to mind are aggressive superpowers such as the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and so forth. Northern European nations such as Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, on the other hand, are seen as good-natured and insular, often used as examples of the way governments around the world should treat their citizens. There is no denying that their policies at home are more progressive than say the U.S., but it's due in large part to strong unions and their decades of struggles to win such rights. Scandinavian workers have won policies that guarantee basic social safety in healthcare, education, employment and housing. However, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are not being seen in this period of refugee crisis as welcoming nations for those fleeing war and poverty. In the 2016 presidential debates, Bernie Sanders pointed to them as model nations that the U.S. should “learn” from. A close examination of the region will demonstrate that Scandinavia largely maintains itself through violent imperialist policies just like other Western nations. In 2008, Norwegian communications multinational, Telenor — partly owned by the state — was exposed in a documentary as partnering with a Bangladeshi supplier that employed child labor in horrendous conditions. The report also uncovered that the children were made to handle chemical substances without any protection and one of the workers even died after falling into a pool of acid. Not only was the treatment of workers unacceptable, they also ruined the crops of farmers in the surrounding areas with the waste from the plant. Like other Western multinationals that deliberately go to the developing world looking to save money on labor and operations costs, the company washed its hands of the accusations, denying knowledge about their partner's inhumane practices. Similarly, Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil, also partly owned by the state, has been involved in multiple corruption cases around the world — especially in underdeveloped countries — where they have bribed state companies and government officials in order to obtain licenses for extraction. Their involvement is not only limited to these aggressive economic practices, they are also deeply involved in the West’s military exploits. Norway dropped 588 bombs on Libya but scarcely is mentioned as being part of these imperialist operations. Statoil has since started joint extractions operations worth millions in the ruined country. Sweden’s foreign policy record is no better. Technology firms like Saab, BAE Systems, and Bofors compete with the U.S. and Israel in their development of a large variety of weapons that are sold to 55 countries around the world in deals worth billions. It seems that Sweden, like their Norwegian neighbor, actively participates in denying human rights to millions across the globe and especially in underdeveloped nations. The Swedish clothing giant H&M can retail affordable products in rich nations and make huge profits only because they exploit and underpay workers in impoverished nations such as Bangladesh. As John Smith points out in his book "Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century," only 0.95 euros of the final sale price of an H&M T-shirt remains in Bangladesh to cover the cost of the factory, the workers, the suppliers, and the government. The remaining 3.54 euros goes for taxes and transportation in the market country, with the bulk going to the retailer. In other words, Western nations capture most of the profit although it is the poor workers and nations that have put most of the input in terms of labor and resources. The Danish-British firm, G4S is the world’s largest security company and is known for its long list of controversies. They have supplied services to Israeli prisons and checkpoints, they have been accused of mistreatment of immigrants in detention centers, they have also played a huge role in protecting Western imperialist interests such as oil refineries and the territory around the Dakota Access pipeline. However, since the U.K. is known as the most aggressive of the two nations, the Danish component is frequently swept under the rug despite the fact that they were the founders and developers of the company. It is no surprise then that the Nobel Peace prize, which was founded in Sweden and based in Norway, has given known war-mongers such as President Barack Obama and Colombian President Manuel Santos, among others, the award in what some argue are highly political moves. The ‘Nordic Model’, as it has come to be known is hardly a system that we should look to for inspiration. No model, system, or structure that depends on the exploitation and domination of others can be ethical. Western nations and their people — if they are to be taken seriously by the rest of the struggling world — must begin to think about developing socialist political and economic structures that are internationalist and crucially, anti-imperialist at their foundations. The social gains won by Western nations cannot and should not be made at the expense of exploited nations and people in the Global South. This social-imperialist dynamic seen in Scandinavian nations will ultimately fail in the long-run as it is harming much more people than it is benefiting. Those most likely to deal a deadly blow to capitalism today are those in the most dreadful conditions, which find the current Nordic Model directly in the way, rather than in the lead, of world progress. AuthorOriginally published in TeleSur. Archives February 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet for talks in Beijing, Feb. 4, 2022. Putin on Friday arrived in Beijing for the opening of the Winter Olympic Games and talks with his Chinese counterpart. The two leaders issued a joint statement calling for an end to NATO expansion. | Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool Photo via AP Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, issued a joint demand Thursday that NATO halt its plans for further expansion and end their continued push to whip up a “Cold War mentality.” Putin met with Xi in China, only a day before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. As the two nations issued their statement, the U.S. ignored the call for peace and sent a seventh planeload of offensive weapons, including missiles and anti-tank rockets, into Ukraine. NATO, via member state Turkey, sent more drones to the Ukrainian military. Turkish drones have been used by Ukraine in the past to kill Russian-speaking separatists in the People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian government refuses to recognize those regions as autonomous, even though it agreed to so in 2014 in the Minsk Declaration. Right-wing and outright fascist entities, with the approval of the government in Kiev, continue to kill civilians in the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine. “The parties oppose the further expansion of NATO and call for the North Atlantic Alliance to refrain from ideological approaches from the time of the Cold War,” the joint Russian-Chinese statement reads. It also urges NATO “to respect the sovereignty, security, and interests of other countries,” and, referring to Russia, “the diversity of their civilizational and cultural-historical ways; and to deal with the peaceful development of other governments objectively and fairly.” The two countries also emphasized the need for cooperation between governments around the world, given the challenges of a fast-moving global economic situation, political upheavals, and a pandemic that continues to threaten millions and affect international security. The joint statement backs Moscow on what it has been saying for months now—that it needs security guarantees limiting the expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Georgia, effectively barring the two former Soviet republics from membership. Pallets of ammunition, weapons, and other equipment bound for Ukraine are loaded on a plane by members from the 436th Aerial Port Squadron during a foreign military sales mission at Dover Air Force Base, Del., on Jan. 30, 2022. | Senior Airman Stephani Barge / U.S. Air Force via AP Documents leaked to the Spanish newspaper El Pais this week show that the U.S. had formally rejected any such agreement. Instead of seeking a compromise to end the crisis, the U.S. and NATO have followed up with another round of new weapon and troop deployments to eastern Europe. Some U.S. lawmakers did their part to raise tensions Thursday and Friday rather than to work for peace. They continued to try to rush through Congress powerful sanctions against Russia that could be levied immediately, not waiting for any Russian troops to actually cross the border into Ukraine. Some are resisting, however, saying sanctions should be levied only after an invasion actually occurs. Beijing has committed to working with Moscow to develop financial systems that are resistant to sanctions and minimize dependency on the U.S. dollar. While Russia would certainly welcome such help, it has already taken measures to protect against U.S. sanctions. Russia’s economy is largely prepared already to resist sanctions, having drastically reduced its dependence upon U.S. dollars over the last several years. The country has piled up enormous currency reserves of almost $700 billion, mostly denominated in euros, which can shield the ruble from collapsing under U.S. pressure. The national debt in Russia is far lower than the amount in the currency reserves, which further strengthens their ability to ride out sanctions. Another hitch in the U.S. economic warfare plan is Europe, which is heavily dependent upon natural gas and oil from Russia and has been reluctant to go along with the harshest possible sanctions. That means Russia can likely count on continued income from those countries, especially Germany, which has a joint pipeline with Russia under the Baltic Sea. The improved condition of the Russian economy, however, works both ways. It is actually another reason why war hawks in the U.S. and NATO want to strike out against the country sooner rather than later before it becomes even more costly for the West to do so. In order to steer attention away from the huge infusion of new weapons and drones into Ukraine Thursday, the U.S. put out additional alleged intelligence reports that the Russians were planning another false flag attack on either themselves or Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine. It involved a fabricated video that would supposedly be used by Moscow to make the case for invading Ukraine. The U.S. claimed the video involved the use of actors playing mourners and piles of corpses. On Friday morning, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser John Finer backed off a bit from this after members of the press objected that the U.S. government had provided no proof of the production of any such video. “We don’t know definitely that this is what they (the Russians) did, but we do know that they have a history of doing this type of thing,” Finer told the media. Members of the press have noted that it was their job to be skeptical, reminding U.S. government spokespeople of the false reports about weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the U.S. attack on Iraq years ago only to discover later that there were no such weapons. The Russians said the reports about a video, like previous reports of false flag attacks allegedly being mounted by them, were false and designed, in fact, to lay the ground for military action against Russia by the West. Another problematic issue for the war hawks in the U.S. and NATO is the steady flow of reports of how the Ukrainian people on the streets are going about their business as usual, not particularly worried about an impending Russian “invasion.” To counter the disconnect between what Washington says is happening and the apparent reality on the ground in Ukraine, MSNBC on Friday sent a camera crew to a pizza shop in Kiev. There were no customers at all visible, but the network’s reporters talked to the owner who, they said, has offered free pizza to anyone who goes out and buys a gun to shoot Russians when they invade. The pizza proprietor assured MSNBC that the Russians will indeed invade and that the guns will be needed. Serving up pizza…and propaganda? With money from an American investor, former Ukrainian army serviceman Leonid Ostaltsev founded Veterano Pizza cafe in Kiev. The proprietor, seen here in a 2015 photo, is also host of a military radio program and is the go-to guy for Western journalists seeking a quote in support of the Ukrainian government’s war against Russian separatists in the east. | Sergei Chuzavkov / AP The network did not give the name of the pizza shop, but Leonid Ostaltsev, a former Ukrainian army serviceman and founder of Veterano Pizza in Kiev has been a reliable anti-Russian voice in media outlets for years. He started the restaurant with money from “a Ukrainian-American investor,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s restaurant and food reporting team. As host of the radio program Army FM, he has been a vocal advocate of the Ukrainian government’s fight against separatists in the eastern part of the country. And whether it’s the Associated Press, the New York Times, Slate, or apparently, MSNBC, Ostaltsev has established a reputation as the go-to guy whenever a Western reporter needs a “man-on-the-street” to speak up for war. A few moments after the pizza shop segment, Admiral James Stravridis, the U.S. officer who formerly commanded all NATO forces, appeared on MSNBC and declared, “I want to associate myself with the remarks by the pizza store owner in Kiev.” Good reporting or well-planned nonsense? AuthorJohn Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. John Wojcik es editor en jefe de People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York. This article was originally published in People's World. Archives February 2022 What every progressive should know about this much praised organization beloved of liberals, moderates, and some conservatives as well. Just what is the National Endowment for Democracy? It is often quoted in the MSM and its supporters are presented as experts on “democracy” and how it should be promoted around the world. Wikipedia describes it thusly: “ The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a non-governmental organization in the United States that was founded in 1983 for promoting democracy in other countries by promoting democratic institutions such as political groups, trade unions, free markets and business groups. NED is funded primarily by an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress.The NED was created by The Democracy Program as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation, and in turn acts as a grant-making foundation.” Note that it is “a non-governmental organization” AND it is funded primarily” by the U.S. government (Congress). This is a case of having your cake and eating it too. Also note that, according to Wikipedia, the NED has, since, 2004 “granted US$8,758,300 to Uyghur groups including the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Campaign for Uyghurs and The Uyghur Transitional Justice Database Project. It has also supported Chinese dissidents. For example, between 2005 and 2012 it gave small grants to the China Free Press NGO and in 2019 it gave about $643,000 to civil society programs in Hong Kong”. Several years ago a director of the NED published a book about how this group operates. I noted the book at the time and have updated a few remarks on it as it is still relevant in pointing out just how the MSM and the U.S. government work together to actually undermine democracy. Larry Diamond’s THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY noted by Thomas Riggins This work by one of the directors of the NED [National Endowment for Democracy] has the subtitle “The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World.” A better subtitle would have been “The Struggle to Help the CIA Overthrow Governments Averse to American Domination.” Here is Diamond’s take on “Venezuela’s Pseudodemocracy.” Even though Hugo Chavez had been elected by, and his policies supported by, free elections by the people (and his big defeat in a referendum was accepted as a rejection of proposed policy changes by his government), Venezuela is called a “pseudodemocracy”. Diamond prefers his own NED supported “scholars” and their reports in his house organ, “The Journal of Democracy” and allied views (including spokespeople for the opposition) to the judgments of the Carter Center and the Organization of American States on the fairness of elections. This book appears to be nothing but 448 pages of imperialist propaganda by Diamond (a fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford and advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad (the puppet government set up by the U.S. in Iraq) —democracy through the barrel of a gun. This book follows the NED line. What is the NED? It is a CIA front organization funded by the US government. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein (Ronald Reagan was another) said of it: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (Wikipedia). The “democrats” overseas that the NED supports have one thing in common: they support U.S. corporations and their investments in their countries. NED has not supported any groups or individuals who are opposed to US corporations unrestricted investment rights. NED gives grants and other financial support (mostly US government money) to those struggling to build “free” societies. A prime example is the $250,000 they gave to CANF [Cuban American National Foundation] an anti-Castro terrorist group funded by the US government and allied with the Republican Party. What is really galling is the page of Gandhi quotes that appears before the table of contents, one of which reads, “The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.” This quote is offered up from someone who worked in Iraq for the Bush regime. This should be enough to give you an idea about what the NED is all about. Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy, New York, Times Books: Henry Holt and Company, 2008, pp. 448, index, $28.00, ISBN 13:976-0-8050-7869-5 AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives February 2022 US Embassy in Havana, photo: Bill Hackwell Last week, the United States decided to recognize for the first time in five years that the phenomenon baptized as “Havana Syndrome” is nothing more than a big farce. On Thursday, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) admitted that its allegations against Cuba for the so-called “health incidents” against its diplomats in Havana back in 2016 were not caused by “a deliberate attack.” A report released by the CIA on the events confirms what the scientific community in Cuba and the rest of the world has said to exhaustion, “There is no evidence that an attack of such magnitude was planned by a government.” “The new study confirms Cuba’s position, strongly held since the first alleged cases came to light,” Johana Tablada, deputy director-general for the United States at the Cuban Foreign Affairs Ministry, told local journalists. According to the CIA security report, the symptoms – nausea, drowsiness, fatigue, headaches, and hearing and vision problems – cannot be attributed to a common cause and even less to such a far-fetched hypothesis as a “sonic attack.” That hypothesis has been advocated by the Donald Trump administration and his successor, the current president, Joe Biden and has been used as the primary justification for keeping Cuba on their list of countries supporting terrorism, slapping on over 240 sanctions, cutting the staffs of the embassies to skeleton crews while maintaining in full force the over 60 year blockade on the island nation. Experts overwhelmingly agree that for an ultrasound to be capable of destroying molecular tissue, it would need to involve huge weapons. They explained that such devices would have to be placed close enough to the target to avoid being blocked by walls but hidden as much as possible to cause such damage invisibly. In January 2019, biologists with expertise in tropical insects suggested that the most plausible explanation would be that the noise perceived by the diplomats was the mating song of one particularly noisy species, the short-legged guinea fowl crickets. Now, the U.S. intelligence agency acknowledged that most cases could be categorized as “environmental causes, undiagnosed medical conditions, or stress.” The information dismisses the “attacks” being perpetrated by Russia or other enemy foreign powers, as U.S. politicians have tried to make them seem during the last five years. Consequences of such lies Cuba denounced to exhaustion the political manipulation behind this scandal due to the lack of scientific foundations and the proliferation of increasingly less credible excuses, such as the use of microwaves and supersonic weapons, as if we were dealing with a James Bond movie. The United States relied on the disease to apply a battalion of sanctions against Cuba that are still in force today. The “syndrome,” which seems more a phenomenon of collective hysteria than a disease per se, complicated the process of visa applications by Cubans wishing to travel to the country. Washington decided to transfer those procedures to embassies in other nations, a situation that is still maintained along with other measures that were born to “weaken relations between the two countries,” Johana Tablada explained. “Although incidents have been reported in several countries, the United States has only taken Draconian measures against Cuba, which has had a negative impact on the Cuban family,” she complained. Why is the U.S. discourse changing now? There was never a scientific consensus on the issue. The United States was never able to prove that this symptom exists but that didn’t stop them from punishing Cuba on a failed assumption. Today, five years later, the great farce has become untenable. The new report does not mean that the neighboring country will cease its hostilities against the island, nor that they will stop investigating the alleged events recorded in their diplomatic community. In fact, the CIA assured that, although it is not a “deliberate event,” they will continue to analyze specific cases. They maintain the rhetorical hook to continue encouraging the anti-Cuban far-right in Florida, key voters for the new administration. Just last week, US Foreign Affairs Minister Antony Blinken assured that the US was continuing to “get to the bottom” of the issue to find out who was behind the attacks. He said so after the country documented new cases in Geneva Switzerland, and Paris France. But this sudden decision to acknowledge that Cuba, Russia, and other “enemies” are not behind the events is the first stone they lift in the Hollywood movie story they no longer have a way to sustain. The report is also an effort to contain the cascade of denunciations and new cases that have proliferated in various parts of the world since the US Congress approved in September 2021 a resolution to grant economic aid to diplomatic officials afflicted by the alleged syndrome. Why hasn’t the White House dismissed this fantasy altogether? Because they do not want to admit that the “phenomenon” has become a boomerang for them, bringing them more losses than gains. They want to make the whole story go away in a fade, without recognizing the great ridicule. They neither want to admit that it has been a farce, because they know that, historically, whatever story they make up against Cuba, the world will believe it without asking questions, even if it includes supersonic weapons, murderous microwaves, deafening sounds in the middle of the night, or malicious short-legged crickets. Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English AuthorThis article was republished from Resumen. Archives February 2022 2/6/2022 Examining the Gulf Between the Left and the Working Class in the US. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowThis is an elongated transcript of a lecture presented at the Platypus Affiliated Society Panel: "Class and the Left". Introductory CommentsI would like to first thank the Platypus Affiliated Society for the invitation to speak and participate in this wonderful panel. The gulf we have experienced over the last half a century between the left and the working class in our country is a problem that my comrades and I have been trying to grapple with over the last few years of organizing. The flaws we have observed in the dominant left-wing spaces of our country culminated in our efforts to create Midwestern Marx over a year ago – an eclectic project wherein through collective and interdisciplinary discourse we attempt to overcome some of these flaws. For this discussion, I wish to focus on the three central flaws we observed in the dominant socialist left. I would like to preface that although we considered, and still do, these three flaws to be dominant, we nonetheless do not claim that it effects all organizers or organizations to the same extent. These flaws, although dominant, are not absolute. I would also like to preface that I will be using ‘left’ as a broad umbrella term for anything from Bernie Sanders social democrats, democratic socialists, and communists of various kinds. However, I will divide the classification of the three flaws into two categories – those which fall under right-wing deviationism and those which fall under left-wing ultraism. De-centralizing the Working ClassThe first flaw is the de-centralization of the working class. I encountered the nakedness of the first flaw in my time organizing for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2020. There was a constant tension between the efforts of my comrades and I to canvass in the working class and lower income neighborhoods in Dubuque, Iowa, and the demands of the Bernie staff, which chose were to organize not based on the class position of the individuals, but previous voting records. To be fair, this is not a complaint of the specific staff members – many of these folks were sympathetic with us, they were merely following the orders from above. The result, however, was that we were being sent into petty bourgeois and professional managerial class neighborhoods because these folks had a record of voting ‘democrat’. Here I encountered the stark reality of a socialist campaign which under the banner of making a political revolution had no space in their revolutionary praxis for class analysis. The organization of the working class was not their priority, getting votes was. Hence, the universalist fallacy of the bourgeois theorist was replicated in their socialist praxis – we were all ‘voters’, not concrete individuals with different relations to the mode of production and the apparatuses grounded on these. The instances in which the working class was emphasized, the concept itself was broader, and subsequently vaguer, than it was decades ago. The working class was understood through the lens of the Occupy Wall Street bifurcation of the 99 versus the 1 percent. It was understood, in essence, in terms of income. This understanding of class is only quantitatively different than the general liberal understanding of class as income categories – the liberals have various brackets; the socialists have two. Either way, it was a departure from the traditions of communists, socialists, and anarchists in our country who found a meeting place grounded on a shared Marxist understanding of class as a group’s relation to the means of production. The diluting of the concept of the working class has its roots in the general composition of the left. We must ask, if the left and the working class are severed, then what is the class composition of the left? I have not seen any sociological study done on this, at least not one with an understanding of class appropriate for our dilemma. However, from personal experience I dare to say that a great part of the left consists of academics and students, and on the other hand, the greater lumpenized mass of what constituted once the working class, but which has been reduced to precarious forms of work thanks to neoliberalism’s Walmartization of labor. These precarious workers, who usually occupy positions in the service industry, although part of what we have called the ‘working mass’, have a fundamentally different relationship to the working class which engages in the direct moment of production, and from whose extraction of surplus value the subsequent moments of distribution, exchange, and consumption, are maintained. The working class, as such understood, serves as the point of departure and as the condition for the possibility of the work done in the greater parts of the working mass whose labor exists in post-production moments in the circulation of capital. This is not to say that this larger group of the working mass is not exploited, oppressed, and facing the wretchedness of today’s capitalism. Further, this distinction between working mass and class does not mean the former are not necessary for a revolutionary movement. Revolutionary movements, although spearheaded by a particular class, require the involvement of classes with shared interests – or at least non-antagonistic relations – to the class leading the revolutionary movement. In the Marxist tradition at least, the working class is posited as the revolutionary agent not because they are the most oppressed, for Marx often comments about how sectors of the peasantry live in greater wretchedness than many parts of the working class; instead, the working class is posited as the class with universal emancipatory potential because of its relation to the capitalist mode of production, that is, because of what makes it the ‘working’ class. It is this class which, because of its position in the contradiction between the relations and forces of production, can burst asunder the integument of capitalist production. For the existing left this class, as it is understood in the Marxist tradition, no longer exists – the individuals which de facto compose it are merely a part of the 99%. This blurs any understanding of the pressure points of capital, and hence, of which sectors of the working mass sustain more power against capital than others. Because of the left’s inability to organize this class, the natural periodic cycles of crisis and popular dissolution have led this class to express their systemically rooted discontent via right-wing pseudo populism which diverts that revolutionary instinct towards reactionary ends. Then, after this class turns towards reactionary sectors because of the absence of a working class grounded left, they immediately become unorganizable and get tagged with the fascist badge so often handed out by the left today. This is a recipe for more of what we’ve had in the last 50 years – failures. If the left wishes to remove the gap that separates it from the working class it must first regain the Marxist understanding of class, and then regain the patience which allowed them once to organize individuals with imperfect views and to fix these imperfections in the process of collective class struggle. Further, it must move away from a new-left pessimism which drags along the incorrect judgement that the comfort American capitalism has created for workers has made them revolutionary futile. This wasn’t just wrong when preached in the 60s, but today, after the neoliberal tick has drained the century long struggled-for gains of the working class, holding such a view is delusional. This is the first component in need of rectification to reclaim a position as a substantial threat to American capital. Pro-Imperialist SocialismThe second central flaw we observed in the leading socialist movement was its pro imperialist stance. As with the first flaw, I encountered the second one in its utmost nakedness in the DSA, Haymarket, and Jacobin sponsored 2019 Socialism conference in Chicago. Here I found self-proclaimed socialists panelists condemning the ‘so-called’ authoritarianism of socialist countries like China, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. I remember the disappointment my comrades and I, then working within our local DSA, felt upon hearing this. It was a blatant internalization of the state departments narrative, used and abused so often to bring havoc upon countries who chose a path that deviates from the interests of American imperialism. Shortly after we encountered a report from the Grayzone’s Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal which showed the pro-imperialist panelist speakers had received aid from various state department agencies, including the notorious Reagan founded new arm of the CIA – the National Endowment for Democracy. Although I hoped these destructive, state-department touting tendencies were merely within these few corrupt spokesmen, the reality was this wasn’t the case. Instead, the positions they expressed on socialist states were generally accepted by most on the ‘left’. The crowd seemed to be acceptant of it, and the organizations that sponsored the event clearly were too. We thought to ourselves, how can anyone be a socialist if they genuinely think each time a socialist or communist party has been in power, it has resulted in great failures? What sort of arrogance is required to claim that everyone in the third world has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous West, we are the ones who will succeed! This phenomenon, which has been funded and promoted by the US state department since the cold war – so much so that it has virtually dominated the ‘left’ of the last 50 years, - I identify in my work as the western left’s “purity fetish”. This means that western socialists in general, and American socialists in particular, have had their assessment of socialism determined by the Parmenidean metaphysical understanding of the true as the one, pure, and unchanging which has dominated western thought since ancient Greece. As a consequence, when a successful socialist revolution is forced to take certain measures to defend itself from the counterrevolutionary forces of their national owning classes and the alliances they make with imperialism, the western left touts the slogans of a socialist betrayal, and the cries of authoritarianism arise. As soon as a country encounters the necessity of using force to protect its popular revolution, these measures break with the purity of the western left’s conception of socialism, and henceforth, lead to its rejection and to the left’s internalization of the empire’s narrative. This flaw will be overcome when the left breaks with this metaphysical lens and embraces a dialectical method of analyzing a dialectical world. Here they will see that purity is non-existent; that all things must desecrate themselves and tarry with their opposites to overcome the contradictions that arise; that the quantitative and qualitative expansion in democratic life brought about by socialism must be united with the dictatorial measures necessary to prevent the counterrevolutionary forces from coming into power and overthrowing the gains of the revolution. This is not a betrayal of socialism; this is the natural course it must take in a world still dominated by capital. Once the left understands this, they’ll be able to remove the blinders which have prevented them from seeing the immense successes socialist experiments in the 20th and 21st century have brought their people, and hence, they will be able to show this to their national working masses who are in dire need for similar gains. Communism as Death to AmericaThe third flaw we observed in today’s left is an attitude which argues that the goal of the communist movement in our country is the abolition of America. This flaw is conjoined with their favorite slogan: “death to America”. Whereas the previous two flaws emerge from the social democrat or democratic socialist flank of the left, this flaw arises as a reaction to the right-wing deviationism of the former and is characterized by its ‘ultra-leftist’ positions on issues concerning the national movement towards socialism. This is predominant in various Maoist, Third Worldist, anarchist and even some Marxist-Leninist spaces. As with the case of the purity fetish, what we have here is a deficiency in dialectical thought. The American experiment is understood one-dimensionally, that is, the US for them is reducible to its history of settler colonialism, genocide, enslavement, and imperialism. Although this is definitely the history of the owning classes and their bourgeois state, this is not the history, however, of ALL of America. In the underbelly of this history lies its opposite – a long, arduous history of struggle against the various forms of exploitation and oppression of the former. This is the history of figures like Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Daniel DeLeon, August Willich, Eugene Debs, Bill and Harry Haywood, Elizabeth Flynn, William Foster, Martin Luther King, and thousands more. This is the history, further, of the abolitionist movement, of the workers movement, of the suffrage movement, of the various socialist, communist, and anarchist organizations that emerge in the late 19th and early 20th century. This is the history, in essence, of the struggle against capital, the state, and the various tactics used to keep the working mass divided among race, sex, and other factors which hinder the collective class struggle. An honest glance at our history will help one recognize that the country has been composed of a unity of two opposed struggling poles – one which fights to defend the interests of the accumulation of capital, the other which seeks to defend the interest of working and oppressed peoples. The history of those who have fought for socialism, peace, workers’ rights, indigenous, black, and women’s rights, is not a separate history which stands outside of America fighting against it. Instead, this history is an immanent extension of the injustices that have permeated our country. The folks who partook in these struggles, in their great majority, saw themselves as the real representatives of the American people and of the American values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, sovereignty, and the right to revolution. They saw themselves as taking the progressive side of the revolutionary tradition to socialism, its practical and logical conclusion. They were not ‘Anti-American’ or working under slogans such as “death to America”. They saw the owning classes, their state, and the various bourgeois apparatuses as the real anti-Americans, as the ones who keep our population alienated, exploited, and oppressed while periodically sending them to wars abroad, were they lose limbs and lives to fight people whom they have more in common with than those who sent them to war. If this tradition is forgotten, we will be doing the owning classes a favor – for this is what they’ve done to the tradition in the history books taught in our schools, it has either been erased, or, at best, whitewashed. If we ignore this tradition, we tear the historical legs off the socialist movement and yield to what McCarthyism has been erroneously propagandizing the American working masses to believe – namely, that socialism and communism are foreign and antagonistic to America. No working-class person will support a struggle which aims at bringing about the annihilation of their country. They would, however, support the sublation, i.e., the overcoming, of our present bourgeois state by a workers state. This is how our dialectical materialist tradition understands qualitative change – not as a full-fledged annihilation, but as the partial cancelation and partially metamorphosed preservation of the old into the new. Only if we are historically honest about the deep and rich traditions of socialism in the US, and of the roles it has played in securing the programs and comforts our people enjoy the most – and those they enjoyed before neoliberal rollbacks – only then will our working masses be able to identify themselves with the socialist project. Only then will the truth emerge, affirming as the famous saying goes – that socialism is as American as apple pie. ConclusionIn the US, the objective conditions for revolution couldn’t be any riper. We are seeing the decline and delegitimation of the empire, the global shift of power to the socialist east, the intensification of capitalism’s periodic crisis via a global pandemic, rising levels of national discontent and political dissatisfaction, and millions of workers who’ve dissented via strikes and en masse quitting. All that is missing for the activation of this objectively revolutionary potential in our masses is their organization along class conscious lines. The precondition for this, I have argued, is the rectification of the left’s three central flaws presented here. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American graduate student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, and early 19th century American socialism. His academic work has appeared in Critical Sociology, The Journal of American Socialist Studies, and Peace, Land, and Bread. Along with various editors from The Journal of American Socialist Studies, Carlos is currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. His popular theoretical and political work has appeared in Monthly Review Online, CovertAction Magazine, The International Magazine, The Marx-Engels Institute of Peru, Countercurrents, Janata Weekly, Hampton Institute, Orinoco Tribune, Workers Today, Delinking, Electronicanarchy, Friends of Socialist China, Associazione Svizerra-Cuba, Arkansas Worker, Intervención y Coyuntura, and in Midwestern Marx, which he co-founded and where he serves as an editorial board member. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba) he has been interviewed by Russia Today and has appeared in dozens of radio interviews in the US and around the world. Archives February 2022 2/6/2022 Rail Unions Are Bargaining Over a Good Job Made Miserable. By: Joe DeManuelle-HallRead NowIt used to be unheard-of to leave a railroad job before retirement. But in a frenzy of cost-cutting, the railroads have created a crisis: they've laid off so many people that many of those who remain consider the situation unbearable. Photo: Jim West/jimwestphoto.com Contract negotiations covering 115,000 rail workers in the U.S. are expected to heat up in 2022. Workers are seething over the impact of extreme cost-cutting measures. Rail unions are escalating through the slow steps of negotiations under the Railway Labor Act—toward a resolution, a strike, or a lockout. Rail remains one of the most heavily unionized industries in the country, and rail workers maintain the arteries of the economic system. In 2018, U.S. railroads moved 1.73 trillion ton-miles of freight, while trucks moved 2.03 trillion. (One ton-mile is one ton of freight moved one mile.) A slim majority of rail freight consists of bulk commodities, ranging from grain to mined ores to automobiles; slightly less is made up of consumer goods. COST-CUTTING FRENZYIn the flurry of reporting on what’s slowing down the supply chain, little has been said about one contributing factor—the years-long squeeze that major railroads have put on their operations and workforces. Precision Scheduled Railroading is a nebulous term that has come to cover many measures aimed at cutting costs and increasing profits. (Although the name refers to trains operating on a set schedule, that’s just one piece.) All the railroads engage in elements of it. PSR is basically the railroad version of lean production—the methodology of systematic speedup and job-cutting that caught on in manufacturing in the ’80s and spread to many industries. The railroads have done it by cutting less-profitable routes; closing and consolidating railyards, repair barns, and other facilities; running fewer, longer trains; and laying off tens of thousands of workers while demanding the remaining workers do more. Class I railroads—the companies with annual revenues over $900 million—employed fewer workers this January than any month since 2012, falling below even the early-pandemic slump. Railroads have cut as many as 35 percent of workers in some titles over the past several years. Overall there were 160,795 Class I rail workers in December 2015, and only 114,499 by December 2021. At the same time, individual freight trains were hauling, on average, 30 percent more tonnage in 2020 than in 2000. But all these practices add up to a system that doesn’t function well under pressure—the pressure of a global pandemic, or even just the pressure of normal operations. In stretched-out, just-in-time supply chains with no room for error, delays cascade into more delays. JOB MADE UNBEARABLEFor the workers who remain, PSR has transformed their jobs for the worse. Workers have fewer days off and even more irregular schedules than they’re used to. Longer trains are harder to operate and more prone to derailments. The railroads have cut back on inspections. They have deferred and outsourced maintenance that was traditionally done by union workers. And they are continuing their push to reduce the crews of these ever-longer trains from two people to one. All in all, the railroads have created a crisis: they’ve laid off so many people that many of those who remain consider the situation unbearable. Workers report that some of their co-workers have already quit before retirement, and many are looking for other jobs—actions that were once unheard-of in a highly desirable and steady line of work. Glassdoor, a site that lets workers review their employers, released a list in 2020 of the worst companies in the U.S. to work for. Three of the top five were Class I railroads. FLUSH WITH CASHAnd yet, because of all the cost-cutting measures and sleight of hand like stock buybacks (more on this below), financially the Class I railroads are performing incredibly well. For instance, Union Pacific (UP) reported in the fourth quarter of 2021 that it had cut costs and posted a 23 percent profit increase over the previous fourth quarter—even though its on-time delivery performance was down, fuel prices were up, and it had staffing shortages. From 2011 to 2021, UP sliced its operating ratio, which is expenses over revenue, from 70.7 to 57.2 percent (a lower ratio means higher profits). Its stock price and dividend payouts quintupled. And it cut its workforce from 45,000 to 30,000. CSX went from a recent high of 36,000 workers in 2006 to 20,500 in 2021. In those 15 years its stock price rose a staggering 1,526 percent, dividends went up 1,850 percent, and operating ratio dropped from 78 to 54 percent. Class I railroads are also enriching their shareholders by funneling money into stock buybacks and dividends—mechanisms that companies use to put more money into shareholders’ pockets. When a company buys back some of its own stock, the shares remaining in the market are more scarce, so their value increases. UP alone spent $8.2 billion on stock buybacks in 2018, and $5.8 billion in 2019. According to the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE), whose members build and maintain tracks and bridges, UP, CSX, and Norfolk Southern all spent more money on stock buybacks than wages and benefits over the 33 months leading up to December 2021. DIVIDED BARGAININGMost of the Class I railroads bargain together through the National Carriers Conference Committee: UP, NS, CSX, BNSF, Kansas City Southern, and Canadian National. (Two Class I railroads—Canadian Pacific and Amtrak—bargain separately.) On the union side, things are more divided. The 13 unions representing the various rail crafts are split into two coalitions that separately bargain with the NCCC. The larger is the Coordinated Bargaining Coalition, made up of 11 unions. The smaller coalition is two unions: the BMWE and SMART Mechanical Division (SMART-MD). And even this reflects a recent consolidation—in the last negotiations, there were three union coalitions. Jurisdiction and union politics can be messy. BMWE and the Engineers (BLET) are both Teamsters affiliates, yet they bargain separately; it’s the same for SMART’s two affiliates. Rail and airline unions are governed by the Railway Labor Act. Passed a decade before the National Labor Relations Act, the RLA gives the federal government a much heavier hand in negotiations and adds many more steps. Unions can’t strike during contract negotiations until after they have been “released” by the government to do so, and that comes only after they have exhausted other steps--and if Congress doesn’t intervene to block a strike. The last national railroad strike took place in 1991, and lasted a single day before Congress and President Bush sent the strikers back to work. A FRIENDLIER BOARD The current bargaining with the major rail carriers has been going on since 2019, when the contracts came up for amendment. Rail contracts don’t expire. Until recently, the National Mediation Board—the three-member body that oversees the RLA—was dominated by Republican nominees, who were more likely to side with the railroads. But in December the Senate confirmed President Biden’s pick Deirdre Hamilton, creating a 2-1 majority of Democratic appointees. Hamilton had previously worked for the Association of Flight Attendants and the Teamsters. Unions can now be expected to push the process forward more quickly than before. The Coordinated Bargaining Coalition finally requested mediation in January. The BMWE/SMART-MD coalition has been in mediation since July. Yesterday it declared impasse and called for the next step: the creation of a Presidential Emergency Board. Biden has the power to create a PEB once mediation is exhausted and if either side refuses binding arbitration. The PEB would have 30 days to issue a recommendation, followed by a 30-day “cooling-off” period. At the end of this period, a strike or lockout could take place—or Congress could step in. Given the national attention on the supply chain and the economy, Democratic politicians would be under significant pressure to resolve a dispute without a strike. WHAT’S A WEEKEND?Meanwhile, outside of negotiations, other disputes are escalating. At Norfolk Southern, one of the companies that has made the deepest cuts, engineers were forced to work out of craft as conductors—to plug staffing shortages that were the employer’s own fault. (While there are many rail crafts, the biggest two are engineers, who operate the trains, and conductors, who are responsible for a variety of tasks like radio communications and switching cars.) BLET and SMART-TD sought an injunction to stop the practice and reinstate engineers who had refused to work out of title. If the courts rule that this is a “major dispute” under the RLA, the unions could potentially strike; if they rule it a “minor dispute,” the best they can hope for is arbitration while the policy remains in place. BNSF announced a new points-based attendance policy for its engineers and conductors, who already have irregular schedules with inconsistent days off. Conductors and engineers work “on call,” working many days in a row and getting called in at wildly different times. Workers have difficulty taking even earned time off, and railroaders don’t have paid sick days. Under the new system, as one worker described it, after taking off a Saturday and a Sunday together you would have to work weeks or months straight, with no day off, to dig yourself out of the hole. BLET and SMART-TD, the unions representing the 17,000 workers in these crafts at BNSF, announced that they would call for a strike over the unilateral policy change. BNSF sought, and got, an injunction in federal court against a strike. But while the issue gets fought over in the courts, BNSF implemented the attendance policy on February 1. Everyone is on edge—worried about safety as corners get cut; run ragged by increased workloads, understaffing, and the totalitarian enforcement of disciplinary policies. The railroad workers I spoke to were convinced that their co-workers would stick it to their employers one way or another—whether by rejecting contracts that aren’t satisfactory, by walking away from a career, or by going on strike. AuthorJoe DeManuelle-Hall is a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes. This article was republished from Labor Notes. Archives February 2022 2/6/2022 Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin-The Dialectical Biologist. Reviewed by: Martina ValkovićRead NowIt is not every day that one comes across a brand-new review of a book that was published almost forty years ago and still demands further scrutiny. The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin is one such book. One reason why this review came to be decades after said book’s publication involves the loss of Richard Lewontin, the great American geneticist and evolutionary biologist, who passed away last July at his home in Cambridge at the age of 92. Lewontin was a truly towering figure, one of the greatest thinkers in evolutionary theory and responsible for some of the earliest work in population genetics. He was also a long-standing critic of sociobiology, and did not shy from social and political critique, both in his written works and in public lectures for a wide audience (such as the Santa Fe lecture series from November 2003), discussing topics ranging from genetic determinism, research on IQ, ‘scientific’ racism, to the politics of agricultural research. In his writings and lectures, Lewontin comes across as opinionated and unapologetic, sharp-witted and often sharp-tongued, a man with as much sense of humour (exemplified by the writings of Isidore Nabi) as full of conviction. During his long and fruitful career, most of which was spent at Harvard, Lewontin surrounded himself with scholars from diverse disciplines, and was much admired and beloved by many of his students and colleagues –even if there were, of course, others like Edward O. Wilson who admired him somewhat less. André Ariew, one of the last associates in Lewontin’s lab, describes Lewontin as an excellent philosopher of biology, part of whose lasting legacy is the way he collaborated, mentored and communicated, together with the fertile atmosphere he fostered in his lab. Lewontin was, in his words, very generous with his time, non-hierarchical, inexhaustible, kind and, above all, a mensch. The news of Lewontin’s passing shook me deeply, surprisingly so considering both his advanced age and the fact that I have never even met him. As a first-year doctoral student, struggling to make sense of my very rudimentary ideas and the sea of literature sprawling in front of me, I came across the brilliant Biology as Ideology. The effect which that little gem of a book had on me and my work I can only attempt to describe as my own personal paradigm shift. Considering the book was hardly fresh from the shelves –and was, in fact, first published a year before I was born– makes this experience even more noteworthy. It can only be seen as a testament to the book’s sharpness, originality and enduring relevance that the ideas I encountered on those yellowed pages had such a mesmerising effect. Published seven years before Biology as Ideology, The Dialectical Biologist, co-written with the late ecologist Richard Levins, discusses many of the same topics. The latter is comparably more technical, not to mention more than twice as thick. Rather than presenting us with a strictly coherent whole, the book is a representative collection of essays on various topics, all of which illustrate doing biology in a self-consciously dialectical way, which the authors claim has been ignored and suppressed for political reasons. Levins and Lewontin diagnose the dominant view of nature as a reflection of the nature of social relations in the last six centuries, or ‘the social ideology of bourgeois society,’ according to which individuals are ontologically prior to the social, have their own intrinsic properties, and create social interactions as they collide (1). Thus, to understand society it is necessary to analyse the properties of individuals, since, after all, the society is taken to be just the outcome of the individual activities of the individuals that are taken to make it up. The claim is that this ‘bourgeois view of nature’ was explicitly formulated in Descartes’ Discours, making the science we practice therefore ‘truly Cartesian’ (1). While this Cartesian method of reduction has been successful in various sciences, including physics, chemistry, and several areas of biology, this should not be taken to imply that it truthfully describes the whole of reality. Indeed, the commitment to this method also leads one to overlook the problems and phenomena which do not yield to it easily, such as the structure and the function of the central nervous system and various aspects of development (2-3). Levins and Lewontin describe four ontological commitments of ‘Cartesian reductionism,’ which all affect knowledge creation (269-70). These amount to the claim that there is a natural set of homogenous parts of which any system is made up, that are all ontologically prior to the whole –that is to say, they all exist independently and come together to make the whole– with their intrinsic properties, which they hold in isolation. Additionally, causes and effects are separate, with causes being the properties of subjects and effects the properties of objects. The world described by these Cartesian principles Levins and Lewontin term the alienated world, ‘in which parts are separated from wholes and reified as things in themselves, causes separated from effects, subjects separated from objects,’ and which ‘mirrors the structure of the alienated social world in which it was conceived,’ according to which individuals are social atoms colliding in the market (269-70). Levins and Lewontin criticise contemporary science as blind to the fact that social forces influence, and often even dictate, the scientific method, theories and facts (4). Levins and Lewontin ascribe this to the Cartesian social analysis of science which, much like the Cartesian analysis of science, alienates science from society, making scientific method and fact objective and free from social influence (4). In contrast, Levins and Lewontin see science as a social process both caused by and causing social organisation: in their eyes, science is fundamentally political for it is the dominant ideologies that ‘set the tone for the theoretical investigation of phenomena, which then becomes a reinforcing practice for the ideology itself’ (268). In fact, to deny this interpenetration would itself be political, since it would give ‘support to social structures that hide behind scientific objectivity to perpetuate dependency, exploitation, racism, elitism, colonialism’ (4). This line of thought is vividly illustrated by the example of deciding on the cause of tuberculosis (270): The tubercle bacillus became the cause of tuberculosis, as opposed to, say, unregulated industrial capitalism, because the bacillus was made the point of medical attack on the disease. The alternative would be not a ‘medical’ but a ‘political’ approach to tuberculosis and so not the business of medicine in an alienated social structure. Having identified the bacillus as the cause, a chemotherapy had to be developed to treat it, rather than, say, a social revolution. Levins and Lewontin are aware of the fact that they too, like other scientists, are not free of preconceptions. However, the authors aim to make their pressupositions explicit, which is why their essays are written from an openly Marxist perspective. In contrast with the Cartesian worldview, Levins and Lewontin present a dialectical world, in which things are ‘assumed from the beginning to be internally heterogeneous at every level’ (72). One way the authors suggest to liberate ourselves from the hold of Cartesian science is to take a better look at our concepts of part and whole (3). Importantly, parts and wholes cannot exist without each other. Parts are defined by the whole and they generally acquire their properties as a consequence of being parts of that particular whole (273), that they would not have on their own or as part of a different whole. In other words, ‘[i]t is not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts acquire new properties’ (3). The other side of the coin is that, as parts acquire new properties, they also impart new properties to the whole, which then affect changes in the parts themselves, and so the process continues. In other words, parts and wholes both evolve as a consequence of their relationship, as does the relationship itself (3). This makes them dialectical: they cannot exist with one another, they acquire their properties from their relation, which evolves due to their interpenetration. In this view, change is central: ‘Because elements recreate each other by interacting and are recreated by the wholes of which they are parts, change is a characteristic of all systems and all aspects of all systems’ (275). The book is divided in three parts. The first part comprises three essays on evolution, as both a theory and ideology, as well as the question of adaptation and the organism as its subject and object. The three essays in the second part all concern analysis, while the final part illustrates that science is a social product which in turn results in social product. Essays here discuss topics such as the political economy of research in agriculture, pesticides, community health and human nature. While several of the essays in the collection retain a primarily historical relevance, such as the essays on Lysenkoism and doing applied biology in the ‘Third World,’ most remain socially relevant today. These include the analysis of the penetration of capital into agricultural production (ch.9) and of the myopic and reductive approaches to public health (ch.12), but maybe especially the account of the commoditization of science (ch.8) which rings just as, if not more, true today. Levins and Lewontin describe how research has become a business investment (200) with scientists ‘scientific manpower’ (202) that is ‘increasingly proletarianized’ (202) in the name of cost management. The relation between grants and research has been reversed: ‘whereas initially the grant was a means for research, for the entrepreneurs of science, the research has become the means to a grant’ (204). Scientific publishing has come to depend ‘on the publisher’s and editor’s need to fill the journal and the author’s need to be published in time for tenure review, a job hunt, or a raise,’ while the necessity of publication is rarely questioned (205). Furthermore, Levins and Lewontin characterise a coherent implicit bourgeois ideology among scientists, which is individualist, asserting that ‘progress is made by a few individuals (who just happen to be “us”)’ (205), as well as elitist in a profoundly antidemocratic way, ‘encouraging a cult of expertise, an aesthetic appreciation of manipulation, and a disdain for those who do not make it by the rules of academia’ (206). On the whole, the reason for The Dialectical Biologist’s ongoing relevance is not primarily the particular sample of the themes that the essays explore, but rather its radical approach, which remains as disregarded today as in the time of its publication, making the book all the more exceptional and significant. It is this distinctive approach that merits reassessment in the light of the problems we face today in our alienated world. I would like to thank André Ariew for sharing with me his memories of Dick Lewontin. 2 February 2022 AuthorMartina Valković is a Research Assistant and a doctoral candidate at Leibniz University Hannover, and a Visiting Researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen. She works on cultural evolution and norms. This article was republished from Marx & Philosophy. Archives February 2022 It’s easy to say, but it’s been six very hard decades that began with disconcerting lightness and the belief that the United States government’s blockade of Cuba would not last long—a couple of years, maybe. On February 2, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy called his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and gave him an urgent task: “I need a lot of [Cuban] cigars.” “How many, Mr. President?” “About a thousand,” Kennedy replied. Salinger visited the best-stocked stores in Washington and got 1,200 H. Upmann Petit Corona cigars rolled by hand in the fertile plains of Pinar del Río, at the western end of the island. “The next morning, I walked into my White House office at about 8 a.m., and the direct line from the President’s office was already ringing,” Salinger told Cigar Aficionado magazine years later. “‘How did you do, Pierre?’ he asked, as I walked through the door. ‘Very well,’ I answered. … Kennedy smiled, and opened up his desk. He took out a long paper which he immediately signed. It was the decree banning all Cuban products from the United States. Cuban cigars were now illegal in our country.” The media outlets of the time reported quite accurately what that decision meant. The Nation wrote: “Cuba’s economy… depended on the United States for such essential items as trucks, buses, bulldozers, telephone and electrical equipment, industrial chemicals, medicine, raw cotton, detergents, lard, potatoes, poultry, butter, a large assortment of canned goods, and half of such staple items in the Cuban diet as rice and black beans. … A nation which had been an economic appendage of the United States was suddenly cut adrift; it was as if Florida had been isolated from the rest of the country, unable to sell oranges and cattle or to bring in tourists, gasoline, automobile parts, or Cape Canaveral rockets.” There were 657 days between February 3, 1962—when Kennedy issued a blockade on trade between the U.S. and Cuba—and November 22, 1963, when he was assassinated. Kennedy was killed before he could burn his arsenal of Cuban cigars one by one and before the negotiation agenda was finalized to perhaps reverse or ease the blockade, a process that was underway at the time of the Dallas assassination. Two key factors that determined the start of negotiations were the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961—the invaders had to be exchanged for food and tractors—and the 1962 October missile crisis that involved the U.S., the USSR and Cuba. A memorandum sent by Gordon Chase, National Security Council specialist for Latin American affairs, to McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to President Kennedy, on April 11, 1963, cynically recommended: “If the sweet approach [to Castro] turned out to be feasible and, in turn, successful, the benefits would be substantial.” Kennedy’s attempts at rectification were of no use, nor were the calls, not just for elementary justice, but for pragmatism. Dozens of analysts, officials and even former U.S. presidents have since demanded sanity to prevail in order to prevent the punishment imposed on the Cuban people from these continuing embargoes, which are based on the sadistic drive, inertia or simply on the arrogance of a bunch of politicians. But Washington has continued to show vital signs of not backing down. Wayne Smith, who was head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and one of the strongest voices against the blockade imposed unilaterally by his country, concluded that Cuba seems to have “the same effect on American administrations that the full moon has on werewolves.” Those who were born when Kennedy, with his hidden reasons and a secret stash of cigars, signed Executive Order 3447, which decreed a total blockade on Cuba, now have grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Some of those Cubans have died and many will die without knowing how a country works under normal conditions—the old one or the new one with COVID-19, it no longer matters. They will never understand how it has been possible for the U.S. to act against millions of people for so long and with so much hatred, a hatred without limits or rational explanation. AuthorRosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist and founder of the site Cubadebate. She is vice president of both the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) and the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP). She has written and co-written several books including Jineteros en la Habana and Our Chavez. She has received the Juan Gualberto Gómez National Prize for Journalism on multiple occasions for her outstanding work. She is currently a weekly columnist for La Jornada of Mexico City. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives February 2022 Sarah Broad was 14 years old and just several months into her job at a McDonald’s in southwestern Canada when a customer berated her about cold fries, started swearing and threw a hamburger at her. No matter how often she encountered that kind of cruelty there, or in jobs at Walmart or Starbucks over the next 12 years, callous managers expected her to just smile through the abuse and keep working. But when the risk of COVID-19 made the daily outrages all the harder to bear, Broad realized that she needed to take control of her future. She and her fellow baristas at the Starbucks in Victoria, British Columbia, met for dinner one night and decided to join the growing ranks of young workers who are unionizing to build better lives and stronger communities. Today, about 18 months after becoming members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 2009, Broad and about 30 coworkers watch with pride as their peers at other Starbucks in the U.S. and Canada form their own unions. But this generational wave of unionism transcends any one employer or industry. Increasing numbers of millennials and zoomers in the public sector, tech field, gig economy, nonprofit community, education and other sectors also view collective action as the path to a brighter future. Amid a broken economy that’s left millions behind, these workers want decent wages and benefits, along with a voice on the job and the respect their labor earns. Too often, workers struggle to make ends meet, sometimes despite juggling two or more part-time jobs, while enduring the kinds of abuse that Broad encountered at one employer after another. “This isn’t unskilled labor,” Broad said, referring to service workers. “They are working very hard.” Just as Broad and her colleagues hoped, the union made a quick and crucial difference, helping the workers achieve not only wage increases but also a much safer work environment. Early in the pandemic, a manager ordered one of Broad’s coworkers to remove a face shield—saying it wasn’t company-approved personal protective equipment (PPE)—even though the barista feared passing COVID-19 to an immunocompromised roommate. Broad said that incident infuriated other workers and helped to catalyze the union drive. In the end, they negotiated a contract that established a health and safety committee, giving them real input into PPE and other protections. And Broad, who’s serving as Local 2009 unit chair, noted that the contract ensures the implementation of a company policy banning customers who harass workers. “The policy was always there,” she said, “but it was never followed.” After joining unions, young members keep fighting for justice inside and outside of the workplace. Tim Brazzel took up videography as a hobby when he was 13 and continued learning the craft as he got older. Last year, he jumped at the chance to put those skills to work for his fellow members of USW Local 7600 during a vital contract fight with Kaiser Permanente. The health care giant wanted to implement a two-tier wage system that would pay less to new hires, exacerbate staffing shortages and threaten patient care. Ignoring the union’s demand for wage justice, Kaiser also intended to continue paying Local 7600 members—many of them workers of color—less than counterparts doing the exact same jobs at facilities in other communities. “I felt like it was an insult,” said Brazzel, a master scheduler at Kaiser, noting the health system had previously praised the workers for putting their lives on the line during the pandemic. “They were calling us ‘heroes’—that was the term they threw around—but they weren’t treating us like heroes,” he added. “They were looking to downgrade our benefits and everything we worked so hard to bargain for.” Brazzel created a series of gripping videos relating workers’ sacrifices and the drive for a fair agreement. The videos helped to sustain members during the months-long battle and got the workers’ story out to the public. “We’re fighting,” he said he wanted fellow union members to remember each day. “We kept voicing that. ‘We are fighting against the wage gap. We are trying to close it.’ I really needed to do my best to keep my brothers and sisters inspired and energized,” Brazzel said. In the face of the membership’s unwavering solidarity, Kaiser dropped demands for a two-tier wage system and agreed to a fair contract that, among other improvements, makes significant progress toward addressing the wage disparities. Brazzel considers it an important victory in a much wider battle for social justice. Today’s young workers grew up amid the push for a $15 national minimum wage and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some, like Brazzel, experienced their own mistreatment at the hands of the police. They share a desire for change. And they see unions as a way to achieve it. Unions fight favoritism and discrimination. They raise pay for women and people of color. Union workers have affordable, quality medical insurance, raising the overall health of their communities. And union members work hard to lift up the marginalized, as Brazzel and his coworkers have done by rallying for civil rights and holding monthly food distributions for struggling families. “Everyone matters,” Brazzel explained. Broad and Brazzel feel immense gratitude for the previous generations of union activists who struggled to build a fairer society. Now, they feel a responsibility to continue the fight and help raise up the next wave of leaders. “This is about our future and the future of those who come after us,” Brazzel said. AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives February 2022 2/3/2022 The Hypocrisy of the ‘Diplomatic Boycott’ of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. By: Charles XuRead NowWhich human rights matter enough to put politics above sports? For decades, the United States and its European allies have gotten to decide the answer at their convenience. On February 4, the 2022 Winter Olympics are set to open in Beijing. With this, the Chinese capital will become the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Games. It will also make the People’s Republic of China the first country in the Global South ever to host the Winter Olympics, which have historically been dominated by Europe and North America (home to the top 14 countries in the all-time medal table). China remains the only Asian host nation in history besides Japan and South Korea. These milestones have gone almost entirely unremarked-upon in Western media coverage leading up to the Games, which instead paints China as a uniquely “authoritarian” and therefore undeserving host. The United States led the way in announcing a “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing Olympics on December 6, 2021, citing allegations of “genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.” It was followed by Britain, Canada, and Australia (i.e., all but one of its “Five Eyes” allies), as well as Japan and a smattering of small north European countries. The Five Eyes, which constitute a majority of “boycott” hangers-on, are united not just by the English language but by a common history of settler colonialism, Indigenous genocide, and violently enforced regional and global hegemony. And Japan remains largely unrepentant for its brutal invasion and colonial rule over much of East and Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century, which killed around 20 million people in China alone. The authors of this dismal spectacle are therefore in no moral position to levy such charges against China—charges which themselves have been repeatedly and thoroughly exposed as a mixture of gross exaggerations and outright falsifications, not least by hundreds of Uyghurs’ testimonials from within Xinjiang. This is just one expression of the pervasive orientalist erasure of Chinese voices other than archetypal “perfect victims,” who clamor for Western salvation from Communist Party despotism. It operates at every level from whole nationalities like the Uyghurs to solitary individuals like tennis star Peng Shuai, whose Weibo post regarding her extramarital affair with former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli went viral in November 2021. The post’s rapid deletion, and Peng’s subsequent absence from social media, led to a veritable torrent of performative concern over her safety—pushed by all corners of Western sports media as well as Steve Simon, the white American chairman of the Women’s Tennis Association. No amount of personal assurances from Peng herself, in public and impromptu interviews, sufficed to tamp down the now-universal speculation around her “forced disappearance” or the willful mistranslation of her post to imply sexual assault. This lurid story’s timing and implication of Chinese sports in particular made it irresistible to boycott campaigners, who are predictably using it to fearmonger over athlete safety and surveillance at the Games themselves. China’s official responses to the diplomatic boycott have combined ridicule at apparent backtracking by the United States (which quietly requested, and received, visas for 46 consular officials) with boilerplate appeals to avoid politicizing the Games. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, for instance, objected that the move “seriously violates the principle of political neutrality of sports established by the Olympic Charter.” While this is to be expected at an official level, it elides the manifestly and unavoidably political nature of international sport, and the modern Olympics in particular. The Sordid Racial and Colonial History of the Olympics The following historical overview draws extensively on Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics (2016) by Jules Boykoff, a former professional soccer player and current professor of political science at Pacific University in Oregon. He is perhaps the foremost critic of the Olympics and its often baleful social impact on host cities. Boykoff points out that white supremacy and a particularly aristocratic vein of Eurocentrism were inscribed into the modern Olympics from the very beginning. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who in 1894 founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC), lamented what he called “the natural indolence of the Oriental.” Nonetheless, he pressed for the inclusion of African athletes, if only because they were supposedly wracked by “a thousand jealousies of the white man and yet, at the same time, the wish to imitate him and thus share his privileges.” The 1904 St. Louis Olympics featured the grotesque spectacle of the Anthropology Days, an event intended (and rigged) to “prove” through head-to-head athletic contests that “primitive men are far inferior to modern Caucasians in both physical and mental development.” These tendencies reached a sinister climax with the unabashed Nazi propaganda coup that was the 1936 Berlin Games. Some have condemned the blatant hypocrisy of the U.S. government leading a symbolic “boycott” of the 2022 Beijing Games after wholeheartedly endorsing the 1936 Berlin Games; opposing commentators treat the latter as the original “Genocide Olympics” and a precedent for the former. Easily forgotten in all these comparisons is that a robust campaign was mounted for a U.S. boycott in 1936. It was ruthlessly quashed by American Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, who said that “Boycotts have been started by the Jews which have aroused the citizens of German extraction to reprisals. Jews with communistic and socialistic antecedents have been particularly active, and the result is that the same sort of class hatred which exists in Germany and which every sane man deplores, is being aroused in the United States.” After his election in 1952 as president of the IOC, Brundage wrote admiringly that “Germany in the 1930s had a plan which brought it from almost bankruptcy to be the most powerful country in the world in a half dozen years. Other countries with dictators have accomplished the same thing in a smaller way.” His embrace of overtly white nationalist regimes extended during his presidency to apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia—which he fought fiercely if futilely to keep in the Olympic fold—and to the Jim Crow South in his home country. So synonymous was his name with white supremacy in sport that he earned the moniker “Slavery Avery.” In 1967, Black American athletes organized through the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) explicitly demanded “removal of the anti-Semitic and anti-Black personality Avery Brundage from his post as Chairman of the International Olympic Committee.” The OPHR issued a novel call to boycott the 1968 Mexico City Games not over the choice of host, but rather the anti-Black racism pervading the entire IOC apparatus. No such boycott occurred, but Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ iconic Black Power salute on the Olympic podium nonetheless immortalized the campaign. Brundage was predictably apoplectic at this gesture, which he labeled a “nasty demonstration against the United States flag by Negroes,” and ordered both athletes suspended from the U.S. team. While the OPHR did not achieve all its aims—Brundage lasted four more years as president—it was instrumental in securing the expulsion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympic movement. And its boycott call anticipated the principled withdrawal of 29 mostly African countries from the 1976 Games, after the IOC refused to ban New Zealand for permitting its rugby team to tour South Africa. The IOC remains to this day a self-selected and self-perpetuating bastion of Euro-American chauvinism and aristocratic privilege. Fully one-tenth of its active and honorary members hold hereditary royal titles (though these now include a strong Gulf Arab contingent), and its only “honor member” is Henry Kissinger. Every IOC president save for Brundage has been European; French and English remain the only working languages. Thus, for the first eight decades of their existence, efforts to boycott the Olympics emanated almost exclusively from the oppressed peoples—and were met with ferocious condemnation from the United States and its allies. When those same forces of reaction now call for a “boycott” of the 2022 Beijing Games, they leave no doubt as to what they actually fear: a rising China challenging their heretofore untrammeled domination of global sport. Even Jules Boykoff, in an otherwise highly critical commentary that readily accepts many Western attack lines on China, takes pains to point out: “In the U.S., China has become a bipartisan punching bag, with politicians on both sides of the aisle making evidence-free claims that would make McCarthy blush. This feeds oversimple narratives that juxtapose a freedom-loving USA against a diabolical Chinese state. In turn, this sanctimonious outlook stokes the U.S. war machine… This saber-rattling ignores the fact that the U.S. has around 750 military bases circling the world while China has only one, and it comes at a time when U.S.-China cooperation is vital on climate change and other security matters.” AuthorCharles Xu is a member of the Qiao Collective and of the No Cold War collective. This article was first published on Qiao Collective and was adapted in partnership with Globetrotter. Archives February 2022 After a life of power behind the scenes, Pinochet’s wife recently died at 98. María Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez and her husband Augusto Pinochet circa 1974 (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, Wikimedia) On December 16, María Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez passed away at Santiago's Military Hospital due to heart failure where she had been a regular visitor for the past few months. Also known as Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, Lucía was the wife of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal Washington-backed dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. Since Pinochet’s death in 2006, Hiriart had rarely been seen in public. “At the age of 99 and surrounded by family and loved ones, my beloved grandmother passed away,” wrote her granddaughter Karina Pinochet on Twitter. Many wondered whether the right-wing administration of President Sebastian Piñera would give the former first lady an official state memorial, but Hiriart’s funeral was held in private. Meanwhile thousands of Chileans took to Santiago’s Plaza Italia to celebrate the death of “la vieja” (the old woman), as she was called by her opponents. While outside the country little attention was given to the passing of the general’s wife, she played an important role in Chilean politics, specifically in influencing her husband to support the September 11, 1973 military coup against the country’s socialist president Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens. Hiriart was born on December 10, 1923 into a wealthy family in the north of Chile in the city of Antofagasta. Her father, Osvaldo Hiriart Corvalán was a lawyer, a former senator for the Radical Party and the ex-Interior Minister for president Juan Antonio Ríos. Hiriart’s family looked down upon Augusto Pinochet who she married in 1943 and who, as a then Chilean army Infantry School lieutenant, they considered beneath her class.
When Pinochet was sent on a military mission to Quito, Ecuador in the mid 1950s, Hiriart was further hurt when she discovered that her husband was having an affair with the Ecuadorian pianist Piedad Noé. Pinochet’s promotion to General Commander of the Santiago Army Garrison in January 1971 changed Hiriart’s fortunes. She had long pushed her husband to rub shoulders with the upper echelons of the military—often breaking military protocol—while being careful to hide his own reactionary stripes. When Hiriart’s husband was again promoted to commander-in-chief of the army on August 23, 1973 by president Allende, most accounts report Pinochet debating whether to join the coup the following month. According to Pinochet’s own memoir, “One evening, my wife took me to the bedroom where our grandchildren were sleeping.” There, Pinochet said, Hiriart turned to him and stated: “They will be slaves because you haven’t been able to make a decision.” In 2003, according to Matus, Hiriart herself confirmed Pinochet’s anecdote. By 1974, the coup against the Popular Unity government had succeeded, and fascism was firmly in place. For her duties as first lady and head of the charity Centro de Madres Chile (Center of Chilean Mothers, or CEMA), Hiriart organized an entire floor in the Diego Portales building where Pinochet then ruled. There, according to Matus, Hiriart had a staff of close to one hundred women, mostly volunteers, which included a press secretary, a hair stylist, a makeup artist, and a photographer. She also had a vast wardrobe of dresses, and she was known to wear several each day to different functions.
Hiriart is also said to have developed a friendship with Manuel Contreras who headed the DINA and would inform her of imagined or real threats. When the wives and relatives of people who were arrested or kidnapped wrote to CEMA asking for any information of their whereabouts, Lucía simply repeated explanations that Contreras provided. Hiriart also obtained information—either from Contreras or others in the intelligence community—concerning which members of the regime were disloyal to their wives. Since she was unable to curtail Pinochet’s infidelities, other members of the regime were said to have been demoted or dismissed for theirs. Only Contreras was given a pass when he left his wife for his secretary. After the DINA assassinated Allende’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in 1976, Pinochet dismissed Contreras due to pressure from the United States. Displeased with Contreras’ dismissal, Hiriart left Pinochet for several weeks, the largest crisis in their marriage since his affair in Ecuador. Throughout the remaining years of the dictatorship, Hiriart continued to head the CEMA, promoting her version of conservative Catholic values. These were in sharp contrast to those of the feminist movements that had surfaced prior to 1973 and have resurfaced even more strongly in recent years. Merging her views on politics and gender, Hiriart argued that a woman’s place was in the home and that mothers had the responsibility to provide a firm hand over their children who should grow up within the order established by the military regime. In 2005, fifteen years after Hiriart’s husband stepped down from power, over $21 million were found in 125 accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington under a variety of aliases used by her children. That same year she was sued by Chile’s Internal Tax Service for tax evasion over $2.5 million and was arrested with her son Marco Antonio. In 2007, along with all of Pinochet’s children and 17 other people that included two generals, one of Pinochet’s ex-lawyers, and his secretary, Hiriart was arrested in relation to the Riggs case on the charges of embezzlement and use of fake passports. In October of that same year, the court of appeals ruled in favor of the general's widow and 14 other defendants while in November the Supreme Court ratified the sentence. According to Middlesex University lecturer Francisco Dominguez, an expert on Leftist governments and Right-wing reactions in Latin America, “The Concertacion's shameful cowardice prevented Chileans from prosecuting Pinochet and indict the whole junta, and led them to turn the blind eye on the Pinochet's family, including Lucia's proven and colossal levels of corruption," he wrote in an email. When Hiriart’s charity terminated its operations in 2019, it handed over 108 properties worth 7.6 billion pesos to the state. By this stage, a disgruntled Lucía only had three full-time staff to attend to her personal needs because the military could no longer justify her previous entourage of sixty staff members. Commenting on Hiriart’s life in his 2002 book Wives of the Dictators, the Argentine journalist Juan Gasparini considered Hiriart narcissistic, fickle, and relatively uncultured for her position as first lady. In his view, the human rights violations committed by the Pinochet dictatorship were by no means softened with Hiriart’s presence within the regime. After a church service on September 11, 2012, Hiriart was surrounded by angry protesters that called for her death and had to be escorted by police to safety. Since then, Hiriart rarely left her place of residency. Recently, on December 20, Leftist candidate Gabriel Boric won the Chilean presidency by a 12 percent margin, after running on the promise of dismantling Pinochet’s neoliberal economic legacy. Just a few days before he won, Boric commented on Hiriart’s death, tweeting, “Lucía Hiriart dies in impunity despite the deep pain and division she caused our country. My respects to the victims of the dictatorship of which she was a part. I do not celebrate impunity or death, we work for justice and a dignified life, without falling into provocations or violence.” Lucía Hiriart’s survivors include her children Marco Antonio, Inés, Augusto, María Verónica and Jacqueline Marie, along with several grandchildren. AuthorRodrigo Acuña is an independent journalist on Latin American politics and host of Alborada’s Indestructible Podcast. He holds a PhD from Macquarie University. You can follow him on Twitter at @rodrigoac7. This article was republished from nacla. Archives February 2022 Marxism, we are told, is Eurocentric and has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars and activists. Some have even denounced Marxism as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa. Vladimir Lenin is implicated in this critique. In a far-reaching study of Lenin’s ideas, Joe Pateman argues Lenin placed Africa at the centre of his analysis of imperialism and contemporary capitalism. Here, the author reflects on the key aspects of his analysis. Following this, Pateman’s full article in the ROAPE journal can be accessed for free. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the father of Bolshevism, never stepped foot in Africa, but his influence upon the continent has been tremendous. Alongside the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Lenin’s revolutionary theories provided the framework for an entire generation of African socialists during the twentieth century. By drawing upon Lenin’s writings, in addition to the practical experience of the October Socialist Revolution, millions of African freedom fighters were able to smash the shackles of Western imperialism, and in doing so, slice off some of the longest tentacles of parasitic Western capitalism. Although, today, many socialists are hesitant to defend Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, the leaders of twentieth century African socialism were not ashamed of acknowledging their intellectual debt to Lenin, as well as the achievements of the world’s first workers’ state. Many of these leaders proudly announced themselves as Lenin’s African disciplines, and as African Leninists, contributing to the global struggle for human freedom, equality, and socialism. African socialist governments demonstrated their Leninist heritage by, amongst other things, placing gigantic portraits, busts, and statues of Lenin in the halls of power seized from the European colonialists. Lenin’s presence was especially prominent in post-revolutionary Ghana, where the Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah portrayed himself as an African Lenin. As part of his campaign to honour Lenin’s legacy, Nkrumah devoted his pioneering study on Neo-imperialism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism, to Lenin’s seminal work of Marxist theory, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. This book’s penetrating analysis of global capitalism remains as relevant today as it did when Lenin published it in 1917. Imperialism has provided especially profound insights for scholars of African political economy. In recent years, however, some have challenged the relevance of Lenin’s legacy for the study of Africa. This challenge has comprised part of a concerted and coordinated effort to denounce Marxism as a Eurocentric doctrine, one that both marginalises and misunderstands the history of non-Western peoples. Lenin, alongside Marx and Engels, has been tarred with this brush. Many scholars have used Eurocentrism as a weapon to discredit Marxist ideas. The concept of Eurocentrism found its most famous expression in Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which caused shockwaves amongst racist Western academics when he published it in 1978. In this book, Said used the term Orientalism to describe the West’s commonly contemptuous depiction of the ‘Eastern’ ‘Orient’, or in other words, the societies and peoples of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Orientalism constructed a stark contrast between a white-skinned Western ‘us’ and a non-white eastern ‘other’, whilst claiming that the West was racially, politically, socially, economically, and culturally superior. This distinction underlined the perpetuation of racist stereotypes in the Western scholarship of Eastern peoples, since Orientalism judged them in accordance with the standards of ‘superior’ white Western civilisation. In the discipline of international political economy (IPE), Said’s conception of Orientalism has been re-formulated as Eurocentrism or Western centrism. Many scholars have denounced the leading theories of IPE as Eurocentric. John Hobson, a prominent proponent of this view, has identified four characteristics or stages in the development of Eurocentrism: 1) the splitting of the East and West into two separate and self-constituting entities; 2) the evaluation of the West as superior to the East, in the sense that the West is endowed with rational characteristics, including liberal democracy and capitalism; whilst the East is endowed with irrational ones, such as barbarism and slavery; 3) the ‘Eurocentric Big Bang theory’, which accords a monopoly of global developmental agency to the West; and 4) an imperialist politics, in which imperialism is either i) ignored, or presented as a benign civilising mission; or ii) empire is critiqued (direct imperialism), but the Western universalism of the theory renders its politics as a form of indirect imperialism (see Hobson 2013). Hobson has accused Marx himself of endorsing these four characteristics of Eurocentrism. In doing so, he and many others have echoed the sentiments of Cedric Robinson, who provided a detailed defence of this narrative in his book Black Marxism. When it was originally published in 1983, Robinson’s study didn’t cause a stir. In recent years, however, Black Marxism has provided the foundation for the renewed critique of Eurocentric Marxism. Robinson’s ideas are all the rage nowadays, and scholars routinely endorse his claim that Marxism miscomprehends the history of Black and African peoples. As a result of these focused efforts, Marxism has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars of African political economy. Some have denounced Marxism outright as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa, whilst others claim that Marxism requires a fundamental reconstruction to remove its Eurocentric assumptions. Lenin’s ideas are of course implicated in this critique of Marxism. Scholars have reemphasised the Eurocentric basis of Marxism since the rise of Black Lives Matter, a movement that has highlighted the systemic nature of anti-black racism in developed capitalist societies. Likewise, the global campaign to decolonise academia, by exposing and denouncing Eurocentric figures and theories, has further emboldened the critique of Marxism as a fundamentally Western-centric approach. It is not an exaggeration to say that these attacks- which have come from both anti-communists and self-professed ‘Marxists’- constitute an all-out assault on the fundamental premises of communism and Marxism. Once again, the revolutionary theory of the fighting working class is being demonised. Not everyone has jumped on this bandwagon, despite the fact that doing so has been an effective method of getting published and advancing one’s academic career. Not all left-wing scholars have sold out and joined the witch-hunt for Eurocentric Marxism. Some have resisted the tide; and have sought to highlight the fundamentally non-Eurocentric foundations of scientific communism. One such person is Biko Agozino (2014), who in 2014 published a hugely important article in the ROAPE, ‘The Africana paradigm in Capital: the debts of Karl Marx to people of African descent’. In this article, which he summarised in a blogpost for roape.net in 2020, Agozino demolishes Robinson’s claim that Marx ignored and misunderstood Africa and its peoples. Agozino shows that Marx gave Africa an important place in Capital, his magnum opus, by making hundreds of references to the continent and the ‘negro’. In my own article, which is published in ROAPE, and can be read for free, I provide a sequel to Agozino’s contribution by making a similar argument for Lenin, a figure whose influence upon African studies has been just as significant. Contrary to the views of Robinson and his followers, Lenin showed a profound concern for Africa. In fact, he placed Africa at the centre of his theory of imperialism, and this theory is fundamentally non-Eurocentric. For one thing, Lenin was an astute analyst of colonialism in Africa from the earliest stages of his intellectual development. Already in the Development of Capitalism in Russia, published in 1899, Lenin compared Russia’s colonial exploitation of its minority nationalities to Germany’s African colonies. In both cases, he noted, an exploiting core sought to drain the resources of an exploited periphery. Moving forward to 1912, Lenin denounced Italy’s colonial invasion of Libya, including its brutal massacres of defenceless women and children. These actions showcased the fraud of Italy’s claim to be a civilised nation. Lenin argued that Italy’s predatory seizure of Libyan territory was fuelled by capitalist greed. Italian capitalism needed new territories to exploit in order to survive. At the same time, Lenin noted the bravery of the fierce Arab tribes, who would keeping fighting and never surrender, no matter the cost. From 1915 to 1916, Lenin conducted a vast amount of research on Africa in preparation for his upcoming book on Imperialism. The Soviet Union published his notes as volume 39 of his Collected Works, under the title Notebooks on Imperialism. In these notebooks, which run to 768 pages, Lenin made comments and remarks on hundreds of scholarly books on imperialism, many of which focused upon Africa. Lenin amassed a vast amount of statistical data on Europe’s colonial activities in Africa, including the amount of capital invested and the length of railways built there. He meticulously studied the various treaties and deals signed between the imperialist powers over the partition of Africa from the late nineteenth century onwards. In doing so, Lenin acquired a detailed overview of the continent’s position under imperialism, one based on empirical evidence. More crucially, he repeatedly remarked that colonialism in Africa lay at the centre of imperialism; and was not merely a phenomenon of marginal importance. Lenin did not only offer description and analysis. He was critical throughout the notebooks, offering scathing descriptions of the chauvinist apologists of African imperialism, as well as the colonial leaders themselves. Moreover, Lenin remarked on the resistance of African peoples, such as the Hottentot and Herero revolts, which were violently crushed by colonial troops. Contrary to what Robinson argues in Black Marxism, Lenin was fully aware of the ‘black radical tradition’. Upon the basis of his Notebooks on Imperialism, Lenin placed Africa at the heart of his analysis in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. The centrality of Africa in this work has been insufficiently acknowledged in the literature, but it is essential to recognise, because it undermines the claim that Lenin was Eurocentric. To start with, Lenin argued that the colonial conquest of Africa heralded the rise of imperialism, which he defined as a new stage of capitalism characterised by military conflict over territory. Imperialism required Africa’s subordination in order to thrive. Second, Lenin argued that Africa’s repartition was the objective content of the Great War. The belligerent European powers – and Germany in particular – were fighting primarily for greater slices of the African pie. In making these two points, Lenin established that Africa was a continent of unparalleled geopolitical significance. For as long as Africa was colonised, imperialism would be able to suppress European socialism, but if Africa achieved its liberation, then the European socialist movement would achieve a dramatic increase in power. The fate of global socialism and global capitalism depended upon Africa’s freedom. During the Great War, Lenin became a leading critic of European colonialism and an uncompromising supporter of African independence. He judged socialists in accordance with their stand on these issues. Lenin denounced the chauvinist opportunists in Europe who abandoned their anti-capitalist struggles to support their national war efforts. Lenin insisted that the war was an imperialist conflict, and a symptom of moribund capitalism. It was the duty of socialists to oppose the war and show solidarity with their African brothers and sisters. Lenin abandoned the Second International and founded the Third International precisely because the former failed to oppose the colonial plunder of Africa and the predatory war waged over it. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Third International made anti-colonialism a condition of membership, and it identified African independence as an indispensable part of the global proletarian revolution (see Matt Swagler’s analysis here and here). Yet, Lenin was not a saint. He lived during a time when European thinking on Africa was overwhelmingly racist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lenin was not a scientific racist, though he did, very rarely, express the widely promoted view that African peoples and societies were ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, and underdeveloped, more so in the centre of the continent. It is important to recognise that these remarks were marginal in Lenin’s thought, and they did not shape his theoretical framework. Lenin spent far more time exposing the barbaric nature of European civilisation, than he did commenting on Africa’s alleged backwardness. For this reason, there is little basis for the view that Lenin was Eurocentric. Such a view ignores the vast amount of evidence to the contrary, including Lenin’s record in championing Africa’s liberation struggle. In both theory and practice, the founder of Soviet communism eschewed Hobson’s four characteristics of Eurocentrism. First, Lenin did not separate the West from Africa. He envisioned imperialism as a global system, one that intimately connected European and African peoples. Second, Lenin did not view the West as superior to Africa. although not fully consistent, he often portrayed Africans as more civilised than the European imperialists, who showed higher levels of violent barbarism. Third, Lenin did not endorse the ‘Big Bang’ theory of European development. He recognised that Western capitalism relied for its expansion upon the subjugation of Africa. Finally, Lenin did not endorse imperialism. In contrast to the chauvinists of his era, Lenin was a consistent supporter of African independence. As such, Lenin’s legacy remains relevant for the study of Africa today. His book on Imperialism will continue to provide profound insights for both the study of African political economy and the socialist struggles of African peoples. AuthorJoe Pateman is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-author of Public Libraries and Marxism (Routledge, 2021). This article was republished from Review of African Political Economy. Archives February 2022 |
Details
Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|