Shakerism is not, as many would claim, an anachronism; nor can it be dismissed as the final sad flowering of 19th century liberal utopian fervor. Shakerism has a message for this present age–a message as valid today as when it was first expressed. It teaches above all else that God is Love and that our most solemn duty is to show forth that God who is love in the World- Sabbathday Lake Maine -Shaker Congregation Most Americans know Shakerism, if they are aware of it at all, as a peculiar cult that mostly existed in the nineteenth century and ultimately died out due to their celibacy doctrine. Mother Ann Lee took over the Wardley Society in the 1760s to lead the Shakers who would later be known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing by declaring herself the earthly manifestation of divine light. It was not until after her death her followers claimed her to be the second coming of Christ’s appearing. Sometime in the early 1770s, Mother Ann declared a revelation from God proscribing sexual intercourse saying, “I felt the power of God flow into my soul like a fountain of living water. From that day I have been able to take up a full cross against all the doleful works of the flesh.” Far from dying out after this revelation, the Shakers' numbers grew exponentially from a handful of followers in 1770 to around 6000 almost a century later. The Era of Manifestations, when they received elaborate gifts from heaven in trance states, was the peak of Shakerdom’s popularity. However, into the 20th century Shakers continued to have relatively stable numbers and had a great deal of commercial success in their many businesses. Many Americans may be familiar with the Shaker peg, Shaker broom and Shaker chair without realizing the historical and spiritual significance of these simple but brilliant inventions. By the mid-20th centuries they numbered in the hundreds. By the end of the 20th century only a handful remained. Today there are two practicing Shakers, Brother Arnold Hadd and Sister June Carpenter who live and worship at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine. They still hold services on Sundays and a small, but more liberal, congregation usually attends the public services. Most of the other 18 Shaker villages throughout the country are today museums. Mother Ann said, “A strange gift never came from God.” The Shakers made a practice of welcoming strangers and the Sabbathday Lake Shakers still do today. In fact, as practicing Inspriationist Peter Hoehnle pointed out, of all the groups that transcendentalist writer Charles Nordhoff visited for his 1875 book The Communistic Societies of the United States only the Inspirationists in Amana, Iowa and the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine still have active congregations. So what does Shakerism have to teach us today? What is its enduring relevance for today’s world? How can Shakerism help heal America? The first lesson of Shakerism is community, or, that is today, communitarianism, believing in community and living it. Friedrich Engels wrote of the Shakers, “For communism, social existence and activity based on community of goods, is not only possible but has actually already been realized in many communities in America….” The Shakers lived what they preached. They worked communally and shared everything in common. They called each smaller subset of the village a family, whether or not they were biologically related (usually not). They called each other Brother and Sister as a title, but in a sense, they were all one family. It was not unusual to see a Shaker Brother or Sister gardening the herb garden, washing the dishes after a communal lunch, shoveling manure or leading a prayer service. Because of their separate gendered spheres, it was necessary for everyone to do a little bit of everything. That meant domestic, agricultural and industrial duties on a rotating basis. The male and female elders’ co-governance of the communities meant that men and women had equal say in the overall affairs. Although today, we may not take with us the Shakers celibacy or their gender segregation, Shakers were truly equal. They governed their communities based on love, not on sexual attraction. By giving up sex they freed themselves to truly love each other as brothers and sisters in one holy family all working for a common goal. So often even (and especially) those who espouse communitarian values, socialist economics and the correction of historical injustices fail to see others as their brothers and sisters in the human family. Che Guevara, despite leading an army that killed others, said, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” How are we exhibiting universal love for humankind in our daily lives? Do we shun those with whom we disagree? Do we dehumanize and degrade our enemy. Jesus commanded his followers to “Love thy enemy.” The Shakers practiced love in everyday living as a precious example to future generations of what is possible when you let your heart be guided by love and not by division, prejudice, bitterness and hatred that clouds judgment and makes us see “through a glass darkly,” as the bible says. They shared all things in common. One of the things I was most impressed with most about the Shaker village in Canterbury, New Hampshire is their system of numbering laundry. They numbered everything and assigned each member a corresponding number. That way they could make sure that each member had all the clothing and other necessities that they needed. The communal laundry was a large undertaking. The Shakers would collect the laundry of everyone in the village and wash it all together. Then they would sort it according to the numbering system. They even invented a washing machine to make the task easier. The job was assigned on a rotating basis to both women and men. Today we struggle through hard times. The Shakers too lived through hard times and economic panics. However, their communist economy helped them weather the economic storms. By uniting they were able to have economic security. There was also no class division in Shaker society. Today we are divided primarily by economic class, but also by race, gender, sexuality and religion. Although we may reject the strictness of Shaker belief and discipline, we can respect that for Shakers giving of themselves to the greater community and to God was the greatest gift. They believed that God presented them with gifts from heaven as reward for their pious life. How many of us have rejected all morality and virtue because we have suffered from abuses of religious and secular authorities, only to find that sin for sin’s sake leaves us unhappy, no matter how many excuses we try to make for why our behavior is actually ethical. How many of us invent new kinds of morality and ethics to fit what we ourselves want to do? How many of us feel we have to constantly express our deepest thoughts no matter how hurtful they may be to others? How many of us narcissistically feel that the world owes it to us to cater to our every idiosyncrasy? The Shakers were separatist. They took seriously Jesus’ command to be in the world, but no part of the world. To follow Jesus, they made their own heaven on earth to prepare the way for the end of the world, when all of earth would be restored to a paradise like the Garden of Eden. Although we may find it necessary to engage with society and fight for what is right, we can also be in the world but no part of it in our own way. We can refuse to accept the terms of the debate the way the rulers frame it. Instead of Democrat vs Republican, left vs right, individualist vs collectivist, black vs white, North vs South, West vs East, we should see it as humanity struggling to survive by any means it can. The rulers who are destroying the planet are destroying their own and their own children’s futures. Shakers were simple. Shakers believed that simplicity was the closest thing to divinity. Despite some Americans’ misconception, the Shakers were not against technology. Shaker villages were in fact some of the first to have electric generators. As I mentioned earlier, they even invented an electric washing machine. However, the beauty of Shaker innovation was in its simplicity. Shaker meetinghouses, with their simple design, offer as much transcendence and grace as a massive Gothic Cathedral. Shaker pegs have a little button on the end so that you can put things on them and they do not fall off. A very simple invention, but imagine how much easier it made peoples’ lives? Can you imagine trying to hang your coat on just a straight dowel peg? It would just fall off! How many of us justify our overuse of toxic, mind poisoning social media and garbage entertainment as being for some greater purpose? How many of us feel like if we do not post then we have not done our part for the issue of the day? How many of us know consciously that the algorithms are purposefully designed to manipulate our thinking, but remain addicted to the manipulation nonetheless? The internet has revolutionized communication, and in many ways, for the good. It has made archival documents and scholarly research available to millions that would have never had access to such information in the past. At the same time, the capitalist nature of technological development has led to some extremely destructive trends in human communication. Verbal abuse and reprehensible behavior have become the norm. It is not just online anymore, it has bled into everyday life. We have merged our consciousness with the consciousness of the cold, calculating, bean counting machine. We need to remember to turn off and enjoy simplicity. We need to turn off the computer and go for a walk. Get some fresh air. Literally hug a tree and literally touch some grass. Nature grounds us in creation. It reminds us of our belonging and oneness with the universe. It reminds us that our lives literally depend on the lives of others - other people, plants, animals and other living beings. Shakers were peaceful. They sought in all their affairs to have peace and tranquility. This included their neighbors. Where Shaker settlements ended up in the way of land disputes between natives and settlers, Shakers maintained friendly relations with both. They revered the indigenous as holy peoples close to God and communicated with the spirits of dead chiefs in trances during the Era of Manifestations. They lived both outside of governmental authority and nonresistant to outside governmental authority. Even though they opposed slavery and mostly were supportive of the Union, they refused military service during the Civil War. They did act as medics, but felt they must provide care to both the Confederate and Union sides. Lincoln ended up exempting them from the draft, making them some of the first conscientious objectors in American history. Today we must remember peace is a better solution than war. Our disagreements with our neighbors may be strong, but it is virtuous to settle disagreements with diplomacy and negotiation rather than violence and coercive force. We must oppose wars between nations, we must seek peace rather than escalation of conflict, we must avoid nuclear war. Those of us who are already anti-war must remember to be patient with those whose eyes are clouded by the fog of war. We must remember to talk to each other as human beings rather than lash out at every chance we get. We must also remember that, as the bible says, there is a time to speak and a time to listen. There is a right time for everything. Be patient, forgiving and kind. It does not mean we do not boldly speak truth to power and decry injustice when we see it, but we must not misdirect our anger at those who, like us, are just trying to survive. We must see that the only way to change our society is to get the majority of the people to understand the universal experience of mystery that an illogical, unjust system based on greed, not love, offers and then offer a beautiful, glorious, yes! utopian alternative. Let us finally take it upon ourselves, each and every one of us, to shine brightly as bold examples showing that God is Still Love and to bring forth into the world that God that is love. AuthorMitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Archives March 2023
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3/5/2023 How Howard Schultz Made Starbucks the Poster Child of Corporate Abuse By: Sonali KolhatkarRead NowThe billionaire CEO returned to Starbucks to curb union activity. His union busting has been so egregious that the company’s already poor reputation is now in tatters. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in a recent interview with CNN’s Poppy Harlow, proudly showed off his newest invention: a tablespoon of olive oil added to a cup of coffee to bring out rich, complex flavors. The conversation took place in Italy and was meant to showcase Schultz’s commitment to the innovation and quality of Starbucks coffee as he gets ready to step down as CEO of the company for the third time. When Harlow asked him why he was in Italy doing interviews rather than sitting down with representatives from Starbucks Workers United (SWU) to negotiate a contract, he responded, “We want to and are willing to enter into bargaining, but we want to do it face to face. That’s what we think is the right thing to do.” Schultz was referring to the fact that negotiating meetings were taking place virtually over Zoom—the way that most meetings took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the way that many continue to be conducted. The union sees his demand for in-person meetings as an excuse to delay negotiations. According to Axios’s Emily Peck, the issue could end up being decided by a court. However, she pointed out, “Arbitration is often done virtually, as are court hearings. It would be unusual for a court to prohibit this at the bargaining table.” Indeed, Schultz has been playing dirty during his latest tenure as CEO, operating as union-buster-in-chief of the iconic corporation while trying to paint himself as a sympathetic character. Harlow’s interview with Schultz began in Sicily and ended in Brooklyn, New York, at the public housing project where he grew up—an obvious juxtaposition intended to showcase how the CEO of one of the most well-known American brands knows what it’s like to struggle in a working-class environment. CNN’s camera remained trained on Schultz’s face as he pointed out the stairwell in which he would hide from an abusive father. “I could almost cry, actually,” he said. This sort of sympathetic profiling of self-made billionaires--Schultz is worth $3.7 billion—is intentional. The implied narrative is that if someone from a low-income background who faced abuse at the hands of a parent could turn into a successful billionaire, surely Starbucks’s young, educated workers could improve their circumstances on their own. In fact, in Schultz’s worldview, hardship was the impetus for his success. “I never would have had the drive to do what I’ve done and have the success I’ve enjoyed if I didn’t come from this place,” he said. There is, once again, an implied narrative: hardship builds character, and Starbucks workers ought to be grateful for the chance to struggle. But workers, rightly, think they deserve better. Since the first group of Starbucks workers unionized a café in Buffalo, New York, in late 2021, more than 278 stores have done the same, according to SWU. Still, the number of unionized cafés remains a tiny fraction—about 3 percent—of all stores. Apparently, Schultz takes even this tiny trend personally, as if Starbucks’s failure to keep workers happy was a design flaw rather than an inherent characteristic of corporate America. He addressed workers early on in the union campaign and said that the company had failed to give them the tools they needed, such as better staffing and training, according to a New York Times report. Schultz admitted to Harlow that he returned to Starbucks as CEO in April 2022 directly in response to the wave of union activity at cafés across the United States. But instead of responding to workers, Schultz’s strategy was to create an uneven playing field and punish workers for daring to demand better conditions. In 2022, Schultz reportedly rewarded nonunion workers with better wages and benefits, as well as credit card tipping, and denied the same to people working in union stores. As a result, the New York Times reported, “Filings for union elections dropped from more than 60 a month in March and April to under 10 in August.” In other words, the drive to unionize worked to improve conditions—at least for some workers. But Schultz’s petty punishment also worked to slow down the union’s momentum. Starbucks’s retaliation against workers has gone further than uneven benefits. The company is firing union leaders such as Starbucks worker Hannah Whitbeck in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her termination prompted a lawsuit and a federal judge’s decision that, initially, prohibited Starbucks from firing workers for union activity nationwide. Shortly afterward, the judge in question, in a remarkable move, retroactively limited his ruling to just the one store where Whitbeck worked rather than applying it to all Starbucks stores nationwide. The company has also been understaffing stores that are unionizing, a move that the union says is a deliberate ploy to make workers’ lives more difficult. Schultz has also been closing down entire stores that have dared to take up union activity, including the first store in Seattle to unionize (Seattle is the city where Starbucks was founded). The company is citing “safety issues,” but SWU sees it as clearly retaliatory. “This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more,” warned Schultz in July 2022. Schultz is proving workers’ point. As long as an employer can abuse workers as Starbucks is doing, there is a need for unions. And union activity is surging, with a 50 percent increase in strike activity in 2022 compared to the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CEO sees himself as above the law. He refused to testify about his company’s 75 documented violations of federal labor laws in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders responded to the refusal with a pithy observation: “Apparently, it is easier for Mr. Schultz to fire workers who are exercising their constitutional right to form unions, and to intimidate others who may be interested in joining a union than to answer questions from elected officials.” Sanders has now hinted that he may subpoena Schultz. Indeed, companies like Starbucks won’t voluntarily treat workers well. They have to be forced into doing so, and unions are a powerful way for workers to stand firm against abusive CEOs like Schultz. There are lessons for workers and corporations in the recent union negotiation between Japanese automaker Toyota and the union representing Toyota workers. The union asked for its largest pay hike in 20 years. Remarkably, the company agreed to all the union’s demands in the very first round of negotiations. Toyota’s head Koji Sato said the move was intended as an example “for the industry as a whole,” and that it reflected his “hope that it will lead to frank discussions between labor and management at each company.” It worked. Hours after Toyota’s announcement, Honda accepted its workers’ union’s demands in full. Schultz has ruined Starbucks’s reputation as a company that cares about its workers and become the poster child, even in the business world, of what not to do when faced with union activity. Instead of fighting the union tooth and nail, Schultz could take a page out of Toyota’s book and embrace worker demands. In his CNN interview, he admitted that what Starbucks workers want more than anything is “a seat at the table.” He also said, “It’s hard to walk in someone else’s shoes, but you’ve got to do that a little bit.” Instead of experimenting with olive oil in coffee, he could try something else that’s new for him—treating workers with the same respect that he commands. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives March 2023 3/3/2023 Iran and Bolivia united against the unilateral hegemony of the US By: Sdenka Saavedra AlfaroRead NowThe fight for a common front framed in the multilateralist vision, which strengthens the peoples with conscience and worldview against the hegemonic American and European terrorism, which only thinks of invasions, interference, looting and exploitation of natural resources at the cost of death, pain, misery; It is the fundamental strategy in the relations between the countries that today face the blows and the inhuman sanctions of the policies and pressures of imperialism, such is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran that with its 44 years of resistance has been supporting progress and independence of the countries not only of Asia; but also throughout the Patria Grande. In this sense, the expansion of bilateral relations between Iran and Bolivia are an example of the alliance between these two States that share an identical revolutionary consciousness in strengthening and cooperation in the face of unilateralism; the same widely deepened and put into debate by the Iranian Vice Foreign Minister for political affairs, Ali Bagheri Kani, who in recent days on his official visit to the Andean country took the opportunity to present the foreign policy of his country in the main hall of the Political Science career and Public Management from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA). In his speech, Bagheri emphasized that Iran is sharing its experience of more than four decades of its resistance against the pressures and sanctions imposed against it by the US hegemon, after the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran; those that have led it to consolidate due to its advances and achievements, in science, medicine, education, obtaining fourth place in robotics and nanotechnology worldwide or being the first country to nationalize its oil, also being a power in technology and production of drones, missiles, satellites, rockets, as well as being ranked 18th among the largest economies in the world. As Iran is a regional power, it plays a key role in the fight against terrorism in Western Asia, being a fundamental pillar in the entire Axis of Resistance. The Persian political system is no longer a “mere culture, but an integral and efficient model to govern a State” that does not carry out coups, that does not intervene; but it supports the countries that are sanctioned, blocked. Today, in the 21st century, it is urgent to join efforts in unity, in the integration of peoples, “because if we do not align ourselves, we will not be able to defeat the common enemy,” said the Iranian Vice Foreign Minister, recalling that his country defeated terrorist groups such as ISIS (DAESH in Arabic), Al Qaeda, Al Nusra Front, created in the US breeding ground, which has been the cause of the largest humanitarian disasters in the Middle East and the world, whose consequences have exceeded the borders of countries paradoxically being a problem for international society due to the wave of terrorist attacks by the misnamed “Islamic State”, who were created by the US, as Donald Trump pointed out when he stated that Obama and Hillary Clinton are its “co-founders” —who also added— “Obama is the founder of Daesh, and (…) that Hillary Clinton is the co-founder”. At the same time, Bagheri made reference to Iranophobia, the media war created by the US, Europe and their lackeys to cultivate an anti-Iranian policy, we see this in the manipulation, in the misrepresentation of the news, in the constant fake news; since the international news that comes from Iran is not direct, but by news agencies such as Reuters, which is based in the United Kingdom, also France-Presse (AFP) based in Paris, and Associated Press (AP) based in United States, which are influenced by imperialist policies; therefore public opinion is not well informed of Washington’s inhumane measures that go against the Charter of the United Nations. Today, the struggle of the peoples with a multilateralist, anti-imperialist vision that watches over the rights of all international actors is regaining strength; In this sense, the policies of solidarity and brotherhood are a tangible reality, since the country of the Ayatollahs collaborates and alleviates the sanctions and hybrid coups that the US and Europe inflict against Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua, countries to which today it cooperates by sending aid; such as the arrival of gasoline tankers to blockaded Venezuela, the establishment of Iranian hospitals in Bolivia, assistance in oil, energy, agricultural and livestock matters to Nicaragua, or to Cuba in fishing, biotechnological and water resources matters, strengthening ties of friendship and cooperation not only with these countries; but even with those who do not have the same ideological position, since solidarity and brotherhood should follow this frank and sincere line in the face of world peace against the totalitarian, rebellious and warmongering positions of the enemies of the free peoples of the world. AuthorThis article was republished from Kawsachun News. Archives March 2023 Mark Glyptis and dozens of other union leaders went into contract negotiations with Cleveland-Cliffs in 2022 determined not only to win wage and benefit enhancements for their coworkers but also to protect thousands of family-sustaining steel mill jobs for years to come. The United Steelworkers (USW) negotiating team ultimately delivered a historic contract requiring the company to invest $4 billion in 13 union-represented facilities, including about $100 million at the Weirton, West Virginia, mill where Glyptis and his colleagues rely on ever more sophisticated equipment to make precision tin plate. Unions fight for financial commitments like these to safeguard workers’ sweat equity—the time and labor they invest in their workplaces for decades at a stretch. Capital upgrades keep employers accountable and plants viable, preserving family-sustaining jobs while also laying the groundwork for future growth. “Steel mills are being built across the world, and we’re definitely competing on a worldwide basis,” observed Glyptis, president of USW Local 2911, noting the overseas facilities feature the “most modern technology.” “We’re the best steelworkers in the world. We can compete. But we have to keep up with capital investments,” continued Glyptis, who helped to represent about 12,000 USW members from six states in the talks with Cleveland-Cliffs in 2022. Glyptis and other Local 2911 members fought for new equipment that they need to produce “perfectly flat and flawless” tin plate for food containers. Based on members’ input, other local unions--supplying the military, highway contractors, aerospace, and numerous other industries—went into negotiations with their own requirements for upgrades. Members overwhelmingly ratified a new, four-year contract last fall. The vote reflected their satisfaction with the $4 billion in investments—to be allocated among the 13 worksites—as much as it did the 20 percent raises and benefit enhancements the agreement provides. “You can have the best health care in the country or in the world, but if you can’t compete because of technological deficiencies, you’re going to be an also-ran,” Glyptis pointed out. “Maintaining a competitive facility is just as important.” “It all goes into a decision about whether this is a fair contract. It would be difficult to have a contract passed if it didn’t have a commitment to capital investments attached,” he said, adding that the company continues hiring many younger workers who see the upgrades as crucial to raising families and putting down roots. Unions also negotiate capital investments to protect workers from companies that might otherwise abandon plants on a whim or run them to failure while wringing out every last penny in profit. “They don’t have to live with the long-term impact of what they do. We do. Union workers do,” declared Andrew Worby, president of USW Local 2-209, referring to “profit-taker” CEOs who line their pockets on workers’ backs before moving on to their next jobs. Once a company commits resources to a location, it’s more likely to stick around, said Worby, recalling that he and his coworkers at the Harley-Davidson plant in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, upped their demands for capital investments after a cavalier executive threatened to move the facility during a contract dispute. The local’s most recent contract requires Harley-Davidson to invest $65 million in the Menomonee Falls powertrain manufacturing site over five years. The company also has to invest another $10 million at a Tomahawk, Wisconsin, plant where workers are represented by USW Local 460. The impact is already evident. The company recently announced that workers in Wisconsin are “tooling up and readying to produce” the powertrains for a new line of electric motorcycles. “There’s a much bigger and broader picture to the impact of a union contract,” said Worby. “It doesn’t just affect the union members. It affects the families. It affects the community. It affects the state we’re in.” The security provided by union-won investments means that “a new worker, instead of renting, is willing to buy a house,” he explained. “Now he’s paying property taxes. He’s going to send his kids to the school district. He’s going to buy a refrigerator from the local appliance guy. It’s huge.” When companies do threaten to close worksites, unions step up to preserve jobs and protect communities. The USW, for example, intervened when Domtar announced plans to close a Kingsport, Tennessee, paper mill where union members made uncoated free sheet. Some workers, including USW Local 12943 President Keith Kiker, worked there for decades. Union leaders knew Domtar wanted to enter the recycled containerboard market, so they successfully pushed the company to overhaul and reopen the Kingsport facility for that new product line. The union’s advocacy resulted in a $350 million investment, saving about 150 jobs and ensuring a competitive facility for decades to come. Workers produced their first roll of recycled containerboard in January 2023. “Everybody who wanted to come back got to come back,” said Kiker, noting company officials “knew what they had” in a skilled and dedicated workforce committed to ensuring a successful mill conversion. “This has been a good place to work. It’s still the best insurance in the region,” he added, noting other companies in the Kingsport area must match USW-negotiated health benefits to retain their own workers. Worby and his coworkers at Harley-Davidson see “a lot of new equipment coming in” right now, giving them the sense of security that they sought in the last round of contract talks. But they realize that the fight for facility investments, like the battle for fair wages and benefits, never ends. “You want to keep the positive energy flowing,” Worby said. “Longevity is very important to us.” AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives March 2023 3/3/2023 March 3, 2023 - Two years after the revolution: Thomas Sankara on Franco-African relations By: Thomas Sankara; translation by Maxime Delafosse-Brown and Gabriel RockhillRead Now" This article was originally published on Liberation School on February 27, 2023" Translators’ introductionThis is the first English translation of an interview with Thomas Sankara, originally published here in French under the title, “We vote for Le Pen too much in Ouagadougou.” The interview took place on August 5, 1985 and was first printed in Le Matin de Paris (a publication close to the French Socialist Party). This is the fifth installment in Liberation School’s Thomas Sankara translation project. This series is the result of a collaboration with ThomasSankara.net, an online platform dedicated to archiving work on and by the great African revolutionary. We would like to express our gratitude to Bruno Jaffré for allowing us to establish this collaboration and providing us with the right to translate this material into English for the first time. The contentious Franco-Burkinabe relationship (as framed by Le Matin de Paris)Relations between Thomas Sankara and the French government have been “heated” since 1983. France, the principal provider of funds in the Upper Volta, has often been annoyed by the “anti-imperialist” speeches made by Prime Minister Sankara, which have called its status into question. Arrested at the time by the president Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo, Thomas Sankara accused the advisor of the President of France, Guy Penne, then present in Ouagadougou, of having overseen his arrest. In June 1984, following the execution of seven people in Ouagadougou for “conspiracy,” the French Socialist Party refused to receive the Burkinabe Minister of State, Blaise Compaoré, in Paris. Finally, there was the Sigué Affair: Sankara’s Head of Security, who was of French descent through his mother, was arrested by the French police while he was traveling through Roissy for common law crimes that he had been blamed for in France. France is, moreover, accused by Burkina Faso of backing opponents to their regime. “We vote for Le Pen too much in Ouagadougou:” Interview with Thomas Sankara by Etienne GingembreLe Matin: You have applauded the measures taken by France against Pretoria [1]. Do you think France, whom you qualify as an imperialist power, is going in the same direction as you? Thomas Sankara: If there is one fundamental critique that has to be leveled against the French Socialist Party’s African policy, it is that they continue to use the same ways of thinking for Africa. However, these ways of thinking are outdated and only misunderstanding can come about. Each time France makes a decision that does not seem just to us, we will firmly combat it. People with bad intentions call this systemic obstruction, or an anti-French politics. We think that it is the most sincere way to establish a healthy rapport with the people. However, we do not hesitate to support France when it takes a position that we believe to be just. For example, when France withdrew from Lebanon, we were the first and the only Africans to send them a message. And when France decided to boycott Pretoria, we not only made a declaration but we asked our ambassador in New York to mobilize the non-aligned, which allowed the French measure to pass. Le Matin: So you are no longer “disappointed with socialism”? Thomas Sankara: In the left project, there were some courageous options that we have appreciated. Unfortunately, because the power of the Left has let itself be carried away by some predictable political contradictions, it is today bound hand and foot and is incapable of fulfilling a certain number of promises. This power compromised itself in France, and it compromised itself outside of France. Le Matin: You have just received Bernard Stasi [2]. Do you have good relations with certain French personalities? Thomas Sankara: Stasi told me that he had a very positive impression of his stay and had noted the big changes that were made in the country. I appreciated the man. Otherwise we have relationships with non-governmental organizations that are sometimes very positive (just recently, by the way, we decorated a French progress volunteer). Unfortunately, for a very long time, a French oligarchy came here to reach agreements with a Burkinabe oligarchy on the backs of the people. You’ll understand that our people have ended up throwing back on the French people the negative actions committed in Africa by French leaders. This is what provokes sectarian and ultimately racist rejections. Our two people have no interest in harming one another, quite the contrary, but the French government must take another approach today. Le Matin: Which one, for example? Thomas Sankara: As long as your representatives think that Burkina Faso is its exclusive territory or that its voice must go through certain African capitals or through men who have been fossilized in institutions by several decades of power… Le Matin: Because these men no longer represent their people? Thomas Sankara: A group of African leaders can ask France to intervene in Chad, but if you do a poll, you will see that the African popular masses totally reject, as a whole, this intervention. This is why France will always commit an error when they neglect the masses by saying: “It was your presidents that asked us to do this.” Tomorrow, the socialists will need to answer for these acts, in perfect agreement with the African leaders but in disagreement with the masses. Let’s not repeat what happened in Algeria. Le Matin: But if tomorrow the Right replaced the Socialist Party in power in France, don’t you fear that this would make your relations with France more difficult? Thomas Sankara: I would not be honest if I said that we did not dread this. We will take on our responsibilities. But you know, the Right, we are already living with it here: we vote for Le Pen too much in Ouagadougou. Every day the right strives to harm the revolution here, to poison our relations with France, to make it so that foreigners think that Ouagadougou is a cordoned-off city where all it takes is white skin to be rounded up. When we take note of this bad faith, we understand what the situation could be like if these people had more power. We hope for our part that those who will have the power to guide the destiny of France, whether they are on the Right or the Left, will be committed to not provoking an international coalition against France as a result of the racist and colonialist behaviors of their compatriots in Africa. In Burkina Faso, we will not remain idle with our arms crossed in the face of these repeated provocations. Le Matin: Does this mean that you will take action? Thomas Sankara: For now, I will only stand by this declaration. But we will fulfill our responsibilities to the end: those who attack our people, we will attack them. Le Matin: Does this mean that your patience is reaching its limits? Thomas Sankara: It’s starting to reach that point… Le Matin: Amnesty International has reproached you for human rights violations: arbitrary imprisonments, torture, disappearances. Is this disinformation? Thomas Sankara: This reaction on the part of international opinion is normal because it’s founded on the information to which it has access. Unfortunately, this is conditioned information. You cannot know the number of plots we have foiled in the last two years. At first, we weren’t taken seriously. However, we do what we say. And what we do is assessed from the outside, to the point that a demand is formulated. Then they decide to slaughter us. And they recount all kinds of things to international opinion. In other African countries, people disappear into dungeons without any protest in France. Better yet, France celebrates and congratulates some of these countries. I’ll cite for you the case of the Agence France-Presse, whose representative in one country keeps coming to write in Burkina Faso… Le Matin: That of Niamey? Thomas Sankara: I did not want to name the country. He keeps coming to write about what he sees as negative in Burkina Faso, but he never writes about other countries, even the one where he resides. This is a double standard. It should come as no surprise, therefore, if today international opinion is more interested in what happens in Burkina Faso. Le Matin: But do you nevertheless accept criticisms? Thomas Sankara: Yes, but these criticisms do not correspond to reality. You are told that some people were arrested, tortured and even killed. We have, several times, heard talk about people killed, while they are here and they are playing cards with their guards. We are in a very politicized country, so our opposition focuses international opinion on things done here that they judge to be negative. Because they can no longer speak publicly due to the risk of being properly put back in their place by whoever is concerned, our opposition calls international opinion to its aid in order to spread claims against the Burkinabe. Le Matin: But does your opposition still have legal rights in Burkina Faso? Thomas Sankara: We really do not fight this opposition as firmly as we say we do. Even when we are pushed to the limit, and we arrest certain people, we do not fail to release them. And this opposition itself is falling apart because it is no longer credible. This is why, from the Left as from the Right, these people do not hesitate to plot against us. And most of these plots are remote controlled from abroad… Le Matin: By who? Thomas Sankara: For now, we choose not to disclose this information. Le Matin: Do you think, like it has often been said here, that France and the United States have supported these plots? Thomas Sankara: We reaffirm that powerful support has come from these countries. But we will catch these thieves red-handed. Le Matin: Are all measures for national reconciliation currently excluded? Thomas Sankara: No, and the people know that we do not hesitate to extend help and support to those who want to take us up on them. Militants find this to be sentimentalism, while our detractors take it to be weakness. They are trying to discredit us by engaging us in an escalation of violence. They manipulate people who provoke us. A provocation that, if repeated, would drive us to commit extremely violent acts, as a last resort. Le Matin: What do you have in mind? Thomas Sankara: I am thinking, for example, of death sentences. Le Matin: Do you envision carrying them out today? Thomas Sankara: No, I don’t want us to have to do that. But we are being pushed in that direction so that we can then be denounced. Either you kill your adversaries, in which case you are condemned for violating human rights, or you do not kill them, in which case your opponents overthrow you. Le Matin: Last year, you said that you committed one error per day. Is that still the case? Thomas Sankara: This year, we are committing more than three per day, because we are doing even more things, and we are making more decisions. If, out of 3,000 decisions, 2,800 are bad, there are nonetheless 200 that are good. And if, out of 9,000, we only have 500 good decisions, then this progression has not improved the ratio, but, all the same, that makes 300 more good decisions. This is why we are still committing more errors. References [1] In July 1985, the South-African President Pieter Botha, an outspoken opponent of communism and democracy for Blacks, declared a state of emergency in certain districts as a purported response to mobilizations on the part of the Black community. The French government responded by recalling its ambassador, enacting a moratorium on new French investments in South Africa, and submitting a resolution to the UN Security Council condemning Pretoria (which was ratified). – Trans. [2] Stasi was a French politician generally affiliated with the Christian democratic Right or center Right. – Trans. AuthorThomas Sankara; translation - Maxime Delafosse-Brown and Gabriel Rockhill Archives March 2023 3/1/2023 The Global South Refuses Pressure to Side With the West on Russia By: Vijay PrashadRead NowAt the G20 meeting in Bengaluru, India, the United States arrived with a simple brief. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at the February 2023 summit that the G20 countries must condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and they must adhere to U.S. sanctions against Russia. However, it became clear that India, the chair of the G20, was not willing to conform to the U.S. agenda. Indian officials said that the G20 is not a political meeting, but a meeting to discuss economic issues. They contested the use of the word “war” to describe the invasion, preferring to describe it as a “crisis” and a “challenge.” France and Germany have rejected this draft if it does not condemn Russia. Just as in Indonesia during the previous year’s summit, the 2023 G20 leaders are once again ignoring the pressure from the West to isolate Russia, with the large developing countries (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa) unwilling to budge from their practical view that isolation of Russia is endangering the world. The next two G20 summits will be in Brazil (2024) and South Africa (2025), which would indicate to the West that the platform of the G20 will not be easily subordinated to the Western view of world affairs. Most of the leaders of the G20 countries went to Bengaluru straight from Germany, where they had attended the Munich Security Conference. On the first day of the Munich conference, France’s President Emmanuel Macron said that he was “shocked by how much credibility we are losing in the Global South.” The “we” in Macron’s statement was the Western states, led by the United States. What is the evidence for this loss of credibility? Few of the states in the Global South have been willing to participate in the isolation of Russia, including voting on Western resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. Not all of the states that have refused to join the West are “anti-Western” in a political sense. Many of them—including the government in India—are driven by practical considerations, such as Russia’s discounted energy prices and the assets being sold at a lowered price by Western companies that are departing from Russia’s lucrative energy sector. Whether they are fed up with being pushed around by the West or they see economic opportunities in their relationship with Russia, increasingly, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have avoided the pressure coming from Washington to break ties with Russia. It is this refusal and avoidance that drove Macron to make his strong statement about being “shocked” by the loss of Western credibility. At a panel discussion on February 18 at the Munich Security Conference, three leaders from Africa and Asia developed the argument about why they are unhappy with the war in Ukraine and the pressure campaign upon them to break ties with Russia. Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira—who later that day condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a tweet--called upon the various parties to the conflict to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Billions of dollars of arms have been sent by the Western states to Ukraine to prolong a war that needs to be ended before it escalates out of control. The West has blocked negotiations ever since the possibility of an interim deal between Russia and Ukraine arose in March 2022. The talk of an endless war by Western politicians and the arming of Ukraine have resulted in Russia’s February 21, 2023, withdrawal from the New START treaty, which—with the unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019—ends the nuclear weapons control regime. Vieira’s comment about the need to “build the possibility of a solution” is one that is shared across the developing countries, who do not see the endless war as beneficial to the planet. As Colombia’s Vice President Francia Márquez said on the same panel, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers, and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.” The most powerful statement in Munich was made by Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict” in Ukraine, she said, “so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.” When asked why Namibia abstained at the United Nations on the vote regarding the war, Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, “Our focus is on resolving the problem… not on shifting blame.” The money used to buy weapons, she said, “could be better utilized to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships.” A Chinese plan for peace in Ukraine--built on the principles of the 1955 Bandung Conference--absorbs the points raised by these Global South leaders. European leaders have been tone-deaf to the arguments being made by people such as Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell had earlier shot himself in the foot with his ugly remarks in October 2022 that “Europe is a garden. The rest of the world is a jungle. And the jungle could invade the garden… Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us.” In the February 2023 Munich Security Conference, Borrell—who is originally from Spain--said that he shared “this feeling” of Macron’s that the West had to “preserve or even to rebuild trustful cooperation with many of the so-called Global South.” The countries of the South, Borrell said, are “accusing us of [a] double standard” when it comes to combating imperialism, a position that “we must debunk.” A series of reports published by leading Western financial houses repeat the anxiety of people such as Borrell. BlackRock notes that we are entering “a fragmented world with competing blocs,” while Credit Suisse points to the “deep and persistent fractures” that have opened up in the world order. Credit Suisse’s assessment of these “fractures” describes them accurately: “The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganizing to pursue its own interests.” This reorganization is now manifesting itself in the refusal by the Global South to bend the knee to Washington. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives March 2023 3/1/2023 The Comprehensive Crisis in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Way Forward By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowThis article was originally published in the Second Issue of the Journal of American Socialist Studies (Winter 2022) pp. 1-16. The United States tells the world and its citizenry that it is the best country on the planet, where freedom and democracy reign, and where an American dream exists which affords all the opportunity to live flourishing ‘middle class’ lives with white picket fence homes and two automobiles. However, for the working masses of the United States, as the great comedic critic George Carlin noted, “it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”[1] When awake, what the American masses experience is the American nightmare; lives plagued by stagnant wages, inflation, and various forms of crippling debt. In the era of an empire in decline, the inhabitants of the belly of the beast find their conditions more and more unbearable. What the American working class is experiencing is an era of comprehensive crisis which has infiltrated every sphere of the capitalist mode of life. The Marxist position on social revolution recognizes that there are two central factors, or conditions, which must exist for a revolution to take place. The first are the objective conditions, or what is also referred to as a “revolutionary situation;”[2] the second are the subjective conditions, which corresponds to the consciousness and organization of the working masses and the vanguard party. In this section I will argue that the objective conditions for revolution are largely present in the US, and that whatever might be missing will arrive with the forthcoming general crisis of capital, expected to hit sometime in the next two years. However, I will argue that the emergence of the subjective conditions are fettered by the purity fetish which prevails in the socialist movement. Since it is the militants in this movement which are tasked with bringing the masses into the struggle for socialism, the overcoming of this purity fetish presents the precondition for a successful counter-hegemonic project. Lenin and the experience of the Bolshevik revolution shows that “the role of the vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.”[3] It is dialectical materialism, that outlook which Engels called Marxism’s “best working tool [and] sharpest weapon,” which can both cure the purity fetish of the socialist movement and afford it the means to realize its historically revolutionary role.[4] Objective Conditions in The U.S.There are a plethora of factors which, when analyzed comprehensively, can point to the existence of objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S. “Since the late 1970s,” as the Economic Policy Institute reports, “wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution.”[5] In no state of the US is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country.[6] With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.[7] Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes.[8] It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year.[9] As it becomes more difficult for working class Americans to survive, more and more have been forced to turn to borrowing. Currently, the average American “has $52,940 worth of debt across mortgage loans, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, credit card debt, student loan debt, and other debts.”[10] Additionally, because the US is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare, the commodification of medicine has left more than half of Americans with such crippling medical debt that many have been prevented from “buying a house or saving for retirement”.[11] This same for-profit healthcare system found it unprofitable to take the measures necessary to properly prepare for the Covid pandemic, the result of which has been that the U.S., while being only 4% of the global population, accounts for more than 16% of the Covid deaths.[12] Meanwhile, socialist China has had only a very tiny fraction of the deaths found in the U.S. (0.49%) and has four times more people. Although the U.S.’s post-WWII rise to the dominant imperialist force in the world afforded it the means to plunder its way into becoming the richest country on the planet, what one finds today is a decrepit empire with crumbling infrastructure consistently rated in the ‘D’ range.[13] While more than half of federal spending goes to sustaining the world’s most expensive military (spending more than the next 10 countries combined), many cities in the U.S., inhabited by millions of Americans, lack access to clean drinking water.[14] Additionally, the U.S. has been experiencing a “historic decline” in life expectancy; so much so that today the average Cuban, despite six decades of illegal blockades and hybrid warfare against their socialist project, lives around three years more than the average American.[15] The hardships faced by the American people are intensified by the experience of living in one of the most economically unequal societies in human history, where even by conservative numbers the “top 0.1 percent hold roughly the same share of [the] wealth as our bottom 90 percent.”[16] In the U.S., the richest 59 Americans own more wealth than the poorest half of the population (165 million people).[17] While the majority of working class Americans face difficulties in meeting their everyday needs, the richest monopolists in the country, those who own what we watch, buy, and eat, have been getting richer than ever before.[18] However, the crisis most Americans are facing is not limited to their economic conditions. It is, instead, a comprehensive crisis which has rippled into all spheres of life, expressing itself through profound psychological and social ills. These can be seen in the millions affected by the opioid epidemic; in the rise in violent crime rates and school shootings; and in the mental health crisis where nearly a third of American adults are struggling with depression and anxiety.[19] All of these conditions are expected to be worsened by the forthcoming financial crisis, and of course, by the climate crisis and the effects it will produce in terms of migration and resource scarcity in various parts of the world.[20] For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that “the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[21] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page show, In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[22] Far from being the ‘beacon of democracy’ it fancies itself to be, what the U.S. has is a “democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich,” which is the essence of bourgeois democracy.[23] Or, in other words, what the U.S. actually has is an oligarchy. However, the American people, burdened by the conditions of moribund imperialism, have been catching up to the lies pundits and ideologues disseminate to sustain bourgeois hegemony. The U.S. has some of the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world; around 40% of the population eligible to vote does not participate in presidential elections, and in local elections this number increases to around 73%.[24] More than 60% of Americans are dissatisfied with the two-party system and are ready for third party alternatives, and only around 20% approves of what congress does.[25] Naturally, it is difficult to participate in a political process one does not feel represented in. However, our two imperialist parties have reacted to this public dissatisfaction by cracking down on voting rights and on the ability for third parties to be on the ballot.[26] In addition, only 11% of Americans trust the media, 90% of which has been consolidated under the control of six companies.[27] Considering the aforementioned state of the American people, it is not surprising that despite countless resources dedicated to propagandize them against socialism, more than 40% of adults have a favorable view of socialism, and amongst millennials, polls show 70% would vote for a socialist candidate.[28] In his pamphlet, “The Collapse of the Second International,” Lenin describes the symptoms of a revolutionary situation in the following manner: What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action. Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible.[29] These conditions constitute the objective factors one can generally find in a social revolution. In essence, as Lenin later stated concisely in Left-Wing Communism, “revolution is impossible without a nationwide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).”[30] We have seen in the assessment above how the American masses are suffering more than usual, and additionally, how poll after poll has shown that they are unwilling to continue to live in the old way (e.g., immense disapproval of congress and the two-party system). These conditions are developing into what Gramsci called a “crisis of authority,” namely, the moment of a crisis when the “ruling class has lost its consensus [and] is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant.’”[31] As he famously argued, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”[32] However, the masses’ dissatisfaction and their inability to live in the old way does not exhaust, as Lenin noted, all the conditions for an objectively revolutionary situation; first, the masses must not only be dissatisfied with the idea of continuing to live in the old way, they must also show the willingness to act, and secondly, the ruling class must itself be shaken by the crisis and in a position where they too cannot continue to rule in the old way. The willingness of the dissatisfied masses to act can be seen in a variety of places: from the 2020 summer uprisings, where 25-35 million Americans protested the racist police state following the murder of George Floyd; to the 2021 ‘Striketober’ wave where hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike; to the mass unionization efforts coming from workers in Starbucks, Amazon (which is the second largest employer in the U.S.) and other industries; to the current crisis in the railroads, where the self-proclaimed ‘most pro-worker president’ (i.e., Biden) forced upon rail workers a contract they voted against, leading unions like Railroad Workers United to call for the nationalization of the railroads (amongst other radical demands).[33] However, all of these have been spontaneous movements (some less ephemeral than others) which have been largely unable to be elevated to the level of revolutionary consciousness and organization.[34] They represent, nonetheless, the prime matter with which a revolutionary organization may form a successful mass struggle for power. Have any of these conditions shaken the American ruling class? Do they find themselves unable to rule in the old way? Our response should be a resolute yes! The American empire, with its 900 bases around the world, used to be able to overthrow governments outside of its imperial sphere of influence with relative ease. In the international community, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the eastern socialist bloc, it achieved unparallel global hegemony, only opposed in the 1990s by Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. All things in this world, however, are in a constant state of flux, and sooner or later, it was expected that ‘the end of history’ would itself end, and that U.S./NATO imperialist unipolarity would be challenged. It is our era of flowering multipolarity which marks the fall the American empire, and with it, the ability of its rulers to ‘rule in the old way’. Imperialism, it must be remembered, is not a separate political-military phenomenon governed by the set of foreign policies a nation takes. Instead, it is a stage of capitalism, where “the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”[35] If the U.S. state, an instrument of American and transnational finance capital, is unable to internationally govern in the ways it used to – that is, if it is unable to continue the expropriation and superexploitation of the peoples of the world – this is not simply a ‘foreign policy’ crisis, but a crisis in the integral state. From failed coup attempts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries; to the failed ‘Summits of the Americas’; to failing proxy wars against Russia and China; it becomes an undeniable fact that the ruling class cannot continue ruling in the old way, that the age of American imperialist unipolarity is over. As the world continues to turn towards China for win-win relations in international trade; as la Patria Grande continues its leftward turn and its hemispheric unity against the U.S.’s Monroe Doctrine style engagement with the region; as movements towards de-dollarization occur across the planet; as European citizens continue to protest the exacerbation of their material conditions by the U.S. and NATO’s proxy war against Russia; this crisis in the ruling class will show itself to be more pronounced. Additionally, what greater depiction of this crisis of legitimacy than the fact that both parties, over the last two presidential election cycles, have committed themselves to challenging the election results? First, with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – a victory of course which was garnered while losing the popular vote – the democrats spent the next four years pushing the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia, and even attempted to impeach him over this. This, along with a long-standing history of anti-Soviet and anti-Russia propaganda, set the ideological grounds – especially amongst previously ‘anti-war’ liberals – for the Russia hysteria and Putin demonization driving the liberal thirst for WWIII now. Then, in 2020, the same was done by a significant portion of the republican party and by most of the MAGA base, who argued that the election was stolen by the democrats. As Marxists know, democracy in liberal bourgeois states is limited to the peaceful transfer of power from one faction of the ruling class to another through elections. Today we can say that even this superficial appearance of democracy is crumbling. In doing so, we can see here another symptom of the ruling classes not being able to rule in the old way. In essence, by every standard the Marxist tradition uses to assess objectively revolutionary conditions, we can say that the U.S. currently meets all of them and is heading towards making them only more pronounced in the coming months and years. However, “social revolution demands unity of objective and subjective conditions.”[36] As Lenin noted, “revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over.”[37] Subjective Conditions in the US The development of the subjective conditions for revolution is, in essence, synonymous with the development of a successful counter-hegemonic project – that is, with the development of an intellectual and moral vanguard that can win over the masses’ minds and hearts to the struggle for socialism. For Gramsci, “the starting point” of every counter-hegemonic struggle “must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent” by Marxist philosophy.[38] As Jean-Pierre Reed and myself have argued, The intellectual leaders of a counter-hegemonic project will find that their theoretical weapon – the philosophy of praxis [dialectical materialism] – is null in persuading the masses insofar as it does not begin with a critical rearticulation of the popular beliefs the masses already hold. Within the incoherent, fragmentary, and contradictory clusters of beliefs which the masses hold, the intellectual leadership must find the kernels out of which socialist consciousness and emotions may develop… This educative process is comprehensive in character: the intellectual leadership does not simply wish to elevate the masses to a “higher conception of life,” but to a higher form of life in general – it is a transformation which modifies the outlook the masses have towards the world, and, alongside this, changes the masses’ desires, passions, emotions, and ethical life.[39] For the ideological and emotive rearticulation of the masses’ common sense and feelings, what is required from the intellectual leadership (i.e., the vanguard party) is a “dialectical and referential” relationship with the masses.[40] In order to successfully educate the masses, the vanguard must be grounded in them, they must learn from the masses and know them concretely. Its relationship with the masses must be “active and reciprocal,” such that “every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher.”[41] “The educator,” as the young Marx had noted, “must himself be educated.”[42] This fundamental grounding in the working class is absent in the socialist ‘left’ in the U.S. There exists a profound gulf between the working class and socialist organizations, and what often comes to dominate in the latter is what Gus Hall called “petty bourgeois radicalism” – a mode of political practice and thinking which reflects the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and, especially today, what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).[43] We may refer to these class positions under the broader term of ‘middle class’. Nonetheless, what is important to note is that the class composition of the left in the US is dominated by this middle class. This is not a new phenomenon. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich argued in the late 1970s, This ‘middle-class’ left, unlike its equivalent in early twentieth-century Europe or in the Third World today, is not a minority within a mass working class (or peasant) movement, it is, to a very large extent, the left itself.[44] Although it is perfectly fine to include professionals, managers, and part of the petty-bourgeoisie in the socialist struggle, the base of any socialist organization must be the working masses, not these other classes which, although hurt by state-monopoly capital, bring with them class biases (some which are antagonistic to the working class) into the workers movement. Marx had already warned about the negative influence professionals could bring into the labor movement, and held that the precondition for professionals to be allowed within socialist organizations must be that “they should not bring with them the least remnant of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but should unreservedly adopt the proletarian outlook”.[45] It is impossible for these conditions to be met as the left stands today, where the PMC segment of the middle-class is the most dominant, and is composed of Salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.[46] This class functions and develops its political culture through what has been called the iron triangle institutions of academia, the media, and NGO’s.[47] Its engagements with the working class often leave the latter feeling as if they were approached by Human Resources (HR). The HR atmosphere estranges and repels working people while providing a warm home for more PMC individuals. This creates positive feedback loops that proliferate the influence of the PMC in socialist organizations. As Noah Khrachvik has argued: It does not matter how nice or just the petty bourgeois radical’s ideas sound. It does not matter how many petty bourgeois radicals cancel the working class for not living up to [their] fantasy, or try to bully it into silence or subjugation to the lofty places the professionals and petty bourgeoisie occupy within their own minds–if the class interests of the proletariat are not being fulfilled–and more, if the proletariat does not see and understand that its interests are being fulfilled, then there will be no revolutionary motion or movement. There will be stagnation at best, and reaction at worst.[48] However, the dominance of the PMC within socialist organizing in the U.S. is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is grounded on a century of state sanctioned anti-communist attacks which have purged communists from trade unions and infiltrated socialist organizations to promote factionalism and forms of socialism which are compatible with the existing order. The work of Gabriel Rockhill on the “global theory industry” shows how, through groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the works of classical authors from the Western Marxist tradition were propped up by a “political economy of knowledge” that was and is backed by Western capitalist state departments and intelligence agencies (as well as by major capitalist foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, etc.) which benefit from the dissemination of a compatible, anti-Communist ‘Marxism’ which, although critical of capitalism, denounces every socialist experiment seen around the world and justifies the wars of empire from the ‘left’ when it needs to.[49] These are the objective forces grounding what I have called the purity fetish outlook of Western Marxism; an integrative term I use to comprehensively examine the abstract, idealist, and metaphysical obsession with only supporting or working with that which is pure. “For Western Marxists,” as I’ve previously argued, the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be condemned.[50] This is not only the only ‘Marxism’ which is acceptable within the American academy and civil society, but it has itself become an indispensable component for the defense of the existing order. This is a natural result of the fact that, if they genuinely consider (as they do) communism to be as evil as fascism, then bourgeois liberal democracy is, like the world Leibniz’s God has created, the best of all possible worlds. This makes it the ideal form of controlled opposition; an opposition that buys fully into Thatcher’s TINA (there is no alternative), and hence, will never substantially oppose the existing order, for it considers its alternative far worse. From a Gramscian perspective, this shows how controlled forms of ‘counter-hegemony’ have become necessary to sustain the hegemony of the existing order; and how the dominant institutions have been able to get ahead of the discontent capitalism creates by diverting dissenters into organizations and pathways of critique which don’t substantially threaten capitalist-imperialism. This position is pervasive in the Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialist movement which composes the largest chunk of ‘socialist’ organizing in the US. For instance, in the 2019 socialism conference, hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America, Jacobin, and Haymarket Books, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were condemned as ‘authoritarian.’ Long behold, the following week a report from Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal would show that some of the hosted panelists had received aid from various imperialist organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy.[51] This raises an interesting paradox I have previously explored: “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!”[52] This purity fetish position concerning socialist states is not only verifiably false, but revolutionary futile! Why would the working class follow something which has always failed? Especially since the working class under discussion has been generationally breastfed anti-communist propaganda. When workers ask the purity fetish Marxists: ‘why would I organize for socialism if the media, schools, and my family have always told me that it leads to poverty, genocide, and societal failure?’ what can the response of these ‘socialists’ be? Considering they themselves accept the same propaganda the workers have been force-fed to believe, it would look something like: ‘yes, yes, that is all true, the problem is that those attempts at socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in its pure form in my head’. To accept struggling for socialism, the worker under discussion would have to be as infantile and simple-minded as the socialist he speaks to. Instead of this, socialists and communists should be using the immense successes achieved by socialism in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Bolivia, etc. as examples for what socialism can achieve even while under the boot of constant hybrid warfare from the global imperialist system. We must be able to show our working class what socialism has and can provide for the mass of people. Before this can be achieved, the left must be able to remove the blinders which have dogmatically made it have a narrow, imperialist-friendly, view of socialist and anti-imperialist states. They must be able to engage in a concrete study of past and present socialist experiments, to learn from their successes, and to understand their mistakes within their proper context, not in an abstract and ahistorical manner. In the context of the US, the purity fetish also manifests itself in the assessment of which parts of the working class are ‘pure’ enough to organize, and which must be left alone in fear of contamination. If a large chunk of the working class is socially conservative, and henceforth, fails to meet all the purity markers the enlightened PMC left has set as the a priori conditions for approval, they will be rejected as – in the words of Hillary Clinton – a “basket of deplorables,” or worst, as ‘fascists’ uncapable of being brought to the socialist movement. For these Marxists the traditional communist slogan is no longer “workers and oppressed people of the world unite,” it is “socially enlightened workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” These ‘Marxists’ don’t see in the millions of working class Americans who voted for Trump a group of people deceived by Trump’s shallow and fake anti-establishment discourse; they don’t see that what is implicit in that vote is a desire for something new, something which only the socialist movement, not Trump or any bourgeois party, could provide. Instead, they see in this large chunk of the working class a bunch of racists bringing forth a ‘fascist’ threat which can only be defeated by tailing the democrats. Silly as it may sound, this policy dominates the contemporary communist movement in the U.S. The purity fetish preeminent in Western Marxism forgets that, as Lenin said, one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.”[53] Communists cannot pop into existence a ‘pure’ working class from a void, they must learn how to organize all workers irrespective of the differences the ruling class foists on the working masses to divide them. Communists must understand that the backwardness the working class may have will not be overcome if one ignores them – this will only lead them into the hands of the fascists, who are always a contending force in capitalism’s moments of crisis. Instead, it must be acknowledged that only through class struggle can the most backward elements of the working class evolve. This does not mean you ‘tail’ behind them, but that you understand that because of their class position they are objectively revolutionary, and therefore, that their consciousness and emotions can always be elevated and rearticulated towards socialism. If communists do not have confidence in their ability to convince workers who don’t already agree with them to struggle for socialism, how can they consider themselves communists? What are they doing besides preaching to the choir?[54] As Lenin eloquently noted, It would be an egregious folly to fear this “reactionism” or to try to evade or leap over it, for it would mean fearing that function of the proletarian vanguard which consists in training, educating, enlightening and drawing into the new life the most backward strata and masses of the working class and the peasantry. On the other hand, it would be a still graver error to postpone the achievement of the dictatorship of the proletariat until a time when there will not be a single worker with a narrow-minded craft outlook, or with craft and craft-union prejudices… The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly “Left” slogans.[55] The purity fetish ‘Marxists’, however, see the world statically and through an essentialist framework; they do not understand the struggle for socialism as a process – to them the forces that exists currently will always remain where and as they are. This outlook is fundamentally antagonistic with the task bequeathed to communists by history, namely, to develop the subjective conditions for revolution. However, this outlook is not eternal, it too is subject to change and can be overcome through the development of the dialectical materialist worldview. When one consistently applies in their revolutionary practice the understanding that the world is “dominated by change and interconnection, and that if we study the world concretely, we may begin to decipher the forms and structures through which change and interconnection take place,” the anti-dialectical essence of the purity fetish can be overcome.[56] There is a second unique form the purity fetish takes in the US. Gramsci’s work helps us understand that communists must appeal to the common sense understanding and feelings of the masses, and from there critically rearticulate kernels towards socialism. If rejecting socialist experiments abroad and large chunks of the working class at home was not enough, the purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept. Bombastic and ultra-left slogans such as “Abolish America” have become more and more popular in American communist spaces. For them and their one-sided outlook, the U.S. is reducible to settler colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, slavery, and all the crimes of the ruling class and its state. Since US history is not pure enough for their purity fetish outlook, it must be discarded wholesale. This is done through synecdochally treating the history of the owning class and its state as the whole history of America. Paradoxically enough, although US history is too impure for US communists to accept, it was always praised by the leaders of the global communist movement, from Marx to Lenin to Mao to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel. For instance, in his 1918 ‘Letter to American Workers,’ Lenin would say that The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world A century and a half after the American Declaration of Independence from the English crown, in 1945, Ho Chi Minh would quote its ideals in the Vietnamese declaration of independence from France and Japan, where he sums them up in the following manner: “All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”[58] Almost a decade after, in 1953, Fidel Castro would quote this document at length in his eminent ‘History Will Absolve Me’ defense, following the assault on the Moncada barracks. A little more than a decade after, Mao Tse-Tung would say in a 1965 interview with American journalist Edgar Snow that the US Had first fought a progressive war of independence from British imperialism, and then fought a civil war to establish a free labor market. Washington and Lincoln were progressive men of their time. When the United States first established a republic, it was hated and dreaded by all the crowned heads of Europe. That showed that the Americans were then revolutionaries.[59] For all the undeniable and condemnable flaws of the ruling class’s history, we must not forget that in the underbelly of this history lies its opposite – a long, arduous history of struggle against various forms of exploitation and oppression. This is the history of figures like Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, August Willich, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debs, Bill and Harry Haywood, Elizabeth Flynn, William Foster, Henry Winston, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., 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 amongst race, sex, religion, and other factors which hinder the collective class struggle. This is a history which should raise the spirits of today’s communists with pride, letting us feel that the struggles we wage today redeem those who for centuries have fought the same fight in the same land. It should offer our struggles a new dimension of historical urgency, grounded on the commitment to not let struggles of previous generations of compatriots go in vain. 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. These poles represent the political struggles of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “two Americas” – one which is “perishing on a lonely island of poverty” in the “midst” of the other, which delves in “a vast ocean of material prosperity”.[60] 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 workers 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, the right to revolution and to a government genuinely of, by, and for the people. They saw themselves as taking the progressive side of the 1776 revolutionary tradition to socialism, which they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion. As the late historian Staughton Lynd wrote, For almost two hundred years all kinds of American radicals have traced their intellectual origins to the Declaration of Independence and to the Revolution it justified. They have stubbornly refused to surrender the memory of the American Revolution to liberalism or reaction, insisting that only radicalism could make real the rhetoric of 1776.[61] The progressive and socialist struggles of our country’s past 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, where they lose limbs and lives to fight people whom they have more in common with than those who sent them to war. We must recall the words of the great Paul Robeson as he was being tried by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956: “Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be here.”[62] And when he was asked about the patriotism of his friend, Ben Davis, a Communist Party leader and New York City councilmen, he said “that he is as patriotic an American as there can be, and you gentlemen belong with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the nonpatriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves”.[63] 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, where it has either been erased, sanitized, or domesticated. If we ignore this tradition because of its lack of purity, 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. We would (as we currently are) tear ourselves off from establishing any connection with the masses and their common sense understanding and feelings. 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 worker’s state. This is how the communists of the past, guided by the dialectical materialist worldview, understood their connection to their history and their masses. The qualitative transformation involved in a revolution is not a full-fledged annihilation, something is always preserved and elevated into the new society. For American communists this has meant a fight to eliminate the evils of capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and so on, while preserving and having pride in the history our people have in fighting against the former. In the process of doing this, communists in generations past would lead the masses to understand, as the saying goes, that socialism is as American as apple pie! This is something that, if we can overcome the purity fetish, we may do once again. ConclusionToday we may safely say that the US is under objectively revolutionary conditions, expected only to intensify in the near future. These conditions provide fertile soil for a revolutionary transformation. However, objective conditions are not enough, it is necessary for the subjective factor (i.e., the masses’ development of socialist consciousness with the aid of a revolutionary vanguard) to develop into revolutionary organs of power grounded in the working class. In the U.S., the purity fetish which predominates in the outlook of communists presents a fetter for the actualization of this subjective factor. Only by overcoming this outlook can the subjective conditions for revolution develop, and hence, can social revolution genuinely be put on the table. This requires, however, three processes to occur. I must note that the following three processes should not be thought of separately, but dialectically, the development in one simultaneously brings forth the development in another.
[1] George Carlin, “Life Is Worth Losing,” (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q [2] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 21 (New York: International Publishers, 1974) 213. [3] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1977) 370. [4] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1990) 383. [5] Lawrence Mishel, “Causes of Wage Stagnation,” Economic Policy Institute (January 06, 2015): https://www.epi.org/publication/causes-of-wage-stagnation/#:~:text=Since%20the%20late%201970s%2C%20wages%20for%20the%20bottom,entire%20bottom%2090%20percent%20of%20the%20wage%20distribution [6] “Minimum Wage is not Enough: A True Living Wage is Necessary to Reduce Poverty and Improve Health,” Drexel University Center for Hunger-Free Communities (2021): https://drexel.edu/hunger-free-center/research/briefs-and-reports/minimum-wage-is-not-enough/ [7] Meghan Parsons, “Report: 58% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck,” Spectrum News (September 17, 2022): https://spectrumnews1.com/ma/worcester/news/2022/06/28/more-americans-living-paycheck-to-paycheck [8] “Homeless Population,” USA Facts: https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/poverty/public-housing/homeless-population/ ; “Homelessness and Empty Homes – Trends and Covid-19 Impact,” Self: https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/ [9] “Facts About Hunger in America,” Feeding America: https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america ; “Food Waste in America in 2022,” RTS: https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/ [10] Liz Knueven, “The Average American Debt by Type, Age, and State,” Insider (May 25, 2021): https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-american-debt [11] Mike Winters, “Over Half of Americans Have Medical Debt, Even Those with Health Insurance – Here’s Why,” CNBC (March 11, 2022): https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/11/why-55percent-of-americans-have-medical-debt-even-with-health-insurance.html [12] “Covid-19 Pandemic Death Rates by Country,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country [13] “Infrastructure Categories,” 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categories/ [14] Dave Lindorff, “Your Tax Dollars at War: More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military,” Common Dreams: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/04/13/your-tax-dollars-war-more-53-your-tax-payment-goes-military ; Ashik Siddique, “The U.S. Spends More on its Military Than the Next 10 Countries Combined,” National Priorities Project (April 30, 2020): https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/04/30/us-spends-military-spending-next-10-countries-combined/ ; Robin Lloyed, “A Growing Drinking Water Crisis Threatens American Cities and Towns,” Scientific American (September 09, 2022): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-growing-drinking-water-crisis-threatens-american-cities-and-towns/ [15] Deidre McPhillips, “US life expectancy continues historic decline with another drop in 2021, study finds,” CNN (April 08, 2022): https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/07/health/us-life-expectancy-drops-again-2021/index.html ; Rob Minto, “Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans,” Newsweek (September 02, 2022): https://www.newsweek.com/americans-can-now-expect-live-three-years-less-cubans-1739507#:~:text=In%20Cuba%2C%20life%20expectancy%20is%20now%20nearly%20three,could%20expect%20to%20live%20to%20around%2070%20years [16] Cyndi Suarez, “With the Highest Inequality in Human History, Societies Are Ripe for Social Change,” NP (September 22, 2017): https://nonprofitquarterly.org/highest-inequality-human-history-societies-ripe-social-change/ ; Bob Lord, “Inequality in America: Far Beyond Extreme,” Inequality.Org (October 12, 2020): https://inequality.org/great-divide/inequality-in-america-far-beyond-extreme/ [17] Noah Manskar, “Just 59 Americans own more wealth than half the country, data shows,” New York Post (October 08, 2020): https://nypost.com/2020/10/08/just-59-americans-own-more-wealth-than-half-the-country-data/ [18] Bruce Livesey, “As the pandemic continues, the rich are getting richer than ever before — and economists are getting concerned,” Toronto Star (August 17, 2020): https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/08/15/as-the-pandemic-continues-the-rich-are-getting-richer-than-ever-before-and-economists-are-getting-concerned.html [19] Azadfard M, Huecker MR, Leaming JM, “Opioid Addictio,” National Library of Medicine – StatPearls (January 2022): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448203/ ; Emma Colton, “Violent Crimes on the Rise in 2022, Following Previous Unprecedented Spike in Muders,” Fox News (May 18, 2022): https://www.foxnews.com/us/major-cities-violent-crimes-data-murders-shootings ; Donna St. George, “School shootings rose to highest number in 20 years, federal data says,” The Washington Post (June 28, 2022): https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/28/school-shootings-crime-report/ ; Gaby Galvin, “Coronavirus Survey: One-Third of U.S. Adults Have Symptoms of Depression or Anxiety,” U.S. News (May 27, 2020): https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-05-27/one-third-of-us-adults-have-signs-of-depression-anxiety-during-pandemic For a systematic critique of the ‘serotonin’ theory of depression and the dominant bourgeois scientific outlook see: Carlos L, Garrido, “ The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis,” Science for the People (September 09, 2022): https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/the-failed-serotonin-theory-of-depression-a-marxist-analysis/ [20] Dan Weil, “Economist Roubini: ‘Severe’ Recession, Financial Crisis Coming,” The Street (25 de julio del 2022): https://www.thestreet.com/investing/roubini-severe-economic-financial-crisis [21] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 6, 486. [22] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595 [23] V. I. Lenin, CW Vol. 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1977) 465. [24] “Why Is Voter Turnout In The United States Lower Than That In Most Developed Nations?” World Atlas: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/why-is-voter-turnout-in-the-united-states-lower-than-that-in-most-developed-nations.html ; Ashma Khalid, et. al., “On The Sidelines Of Democracy: Exploring Why So Many Americans Don’t Vote,” NPR (November 18, 2018): https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/645223716/on-the-sidelines-of-democracy-exploring-why-so-many-americans-dont-vote ; Sarah Midkiff, “Voter Turnout On The Local Level Is Plummeting. It’s Time To Change That,” Yahoo!Life (June 19, 2020): https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/voter-turnout-local-level-plummeting-130012607.html [25] Christopher Ingraham, “How to fix democracy: Move beyond the two-party system, experts say,” The Washington Post (March 01, 2021): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/01/break-up-two-party-system/ ; “Congress and the Public,” Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx [26] Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “Voter Suppression: The Republican War on Facts, Snacks and Democracy,” Democracy Now (May 13, 2021): https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/13/voter_suppression_the_republican_war_on ; Howie Hawkins, “The Democrats’ Third-Party Massacres,” CounterPunch (July 15, 2022): https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/15/the-democrats-third-party-massacres/ [27] Benjamin Norton, “Polls show almost no one trusts US media, after decades of war propaganda and lies,” Multipolarista (July 30, 2022): https://multipolarista.com/2022/07/30/trust-us-media-war-propaganda/#:~:text=Very%20few%20people%20in%20the%20United%20States%20trust,in%20newspapers.%20It%E2%80%99s%20quite%20easy%20to%20understand%20why. ; Ashley Lutz, “These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America,” Insider (July 14, 2012): https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6 [28] Julia Manchester, “Majority of young adults in US hold negative view of capitalism: poll,” The Hill (June 28, 2021): https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/560493-majority-of-young-adults-in-us-hold-negative-view-of-capitalism-poll/ ; Stef W. Kight, “70% of millennials say they’d vote for a socialist,” Axios (October 28, 2019): https://www.axios.com/2019/10/28/millennials-vote-socialism-capitalism-decline [29] Lenin, CW Vol. 21, 213-214. [30] Lenin, CW Vol. 31, 85. [31] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 275-6. [32] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 276. This interregnum which emerges in the more spontaneous and immediate moments of a crisis of authority contains both the potential for a revolutionary rearticulation of the masses towards socialism and a counter-hegemonic project, but also the potential for reaction and the fall into fascism. Some have argued that the rise of Trump and the Make America Great Again movement symbolizes such a reaction. However, every reactionary measure the Republicans (GOP) has taken could have been prevented by Democratic (DNC) governments from Biden to Obama to Clinton, and were not (e.g., roe v wade, voting rights, privatization of the economy and the roll back of workers’ rights through the Taft Hartley slavery act and the ‘right to work’ laws within it). In fact, in many cases the DNC is as much a protagonist as the GOP. The DNC is the major force behind the funding of neo-Nazis in Ukraine; they are today the favorite party of finance capital (it is undeniable that Trump was elected as a fluke in the system – but a fluke the DNC very much preferred to the milquetoast social democracy of Bernie Sanders); the DNC is the party most militantly working to make it impossible for third parties to be on the ballot, a fundamental bourgeois-democratic right; the DNC is the party of the security state, funding and proliferating the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.; the DNC is the party that acts nice but plays mean when it comes to police violence and the militarization of our police state (for all the Black Lives Matter slogans they take up, they are continuing to EXPAND, not DEFUND, the police – which presents a threat to all poor and working class communities, especially black and Latinos which are disproportionately attacked by the police). All of these conditions show that, besides being the socially liberal wing of the imperialist machine responsible for the destruction of unions and the popular gains working people have made over decades and centuries of struggle, the DNC is as fascistic as the GOP. In fact, an argument can be made that they are MORE fascistic, for the most reactionary sectors of FINANCE capital back the democrats and their masked, sheep-dressed-wolf form of governance. As Glen Ford used to say, there is nothing about them that is ‘less evil,’ what they are is the smarter evil. [33] Larry Buchanan, et. al., “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” The New York Times (July 03, 2020): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html ; Daniel Thomas, “100,000 workers take action as ‘Striketober’ hits the US,” BBC News (October 14, 2021): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58916266 ; Noam Scheiber, “A Union Blitzed Starbucks. At Amazon, It’s a Slog,” The New York Times (May 12, 2022): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/business/economy/amazon-starbucks-union.html [34] As Lenin noted, spontaneity, “in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.” Lenin, CW Vol. 5, 274. [35] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 22 (New York: International Publishers, 1974) 266-267. [36] F. V. Konstantinov, et. al., The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982) 326. [37] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 21, 214. [38] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 421. [39] Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido, “Intellectuals, Ideology, and the Ethico-Political,” In The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci, edited by William K. Carroll (Elgar Publishing Co., Forthcoming 2023). [40] Jean-Pierre Reed, “Theorist of Subaltern Subjectivity: Antonio Gramsci, Popular Beliefs, Political Passion, and Reciprocal Learning,” Critical Sociology 39(4) (2012) 561–591, 565: DOI: 10.1177/0896920512437391 [41] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 350. [42] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976) 4. [43] Gus Hall, “Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism,” Political Affairs (1970): https://www.marxists.org/archive/hall/1970/crisis-petty-bourgeois-radicalism.htm [44] Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11(2) (March-April 1977), 7. [45] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and Others (September 17-18, 1879),” In MECW Volume: 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 268. [46] Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class.” 13. [47] Class Unity, “The Left’s Middle-Class Problem.” [48] Noah Khrachvik, “Modern Petty Bourgeois Radicalism: A Tribute, Exposition, and Modern Application of the Theory of Gus Hall,” Journal of American Socialist Studies 2 (Forthcoming 2022). [49] For more see: Gabriel Rockhill: “The CIA and the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism” Philosophical Salon (June 27, 2022); “Foucault: The Faux Radical” Philosophical Salon (October 12, 2020); “Foucault, Anti-Communism, and the Global Theory Industry: A Reply to Critics” Philosophical Salon (February 01, 2021). [50] Carlos L. Garrido, “A Critique of Western Marxism’s Purity Fetish,” Midwestern Marx Institute For Marxist Theory and Political Analysis (October 13, 2021): https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/a-critique-of-western-marxisms-purity-fetish-by-carlos-l-garrido [51] Ben Norton and Marx Blumenthal, “DSA/Jacobin/Haymarket-sponsored ‘Socialism’ conference features US gov-funded regime-change activists,” The Grayzone (July 06, 2019): https://thegrayzone.com/2019/07/06/dsa-jacobin-iso-socialism-conference-us-funded-regime-change/ [52] Carlos L. Garrido, “Examining the Gulf Between the Left and the Working Class in the US,“ Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis (February 06, 2022): https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/examining-the-gulf-between-the-left-and-the-working-class-in-the-us-by-carlos-l-garrido [53] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 31, 50. [54] I’d like to thank my comrade James Befaunt from the Revolutionary Blackout Network, who brought up this analogy of preaching to the choir, lending a colorful image for this phenomenon, when he interviewed me in December 2022. [55] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 31, 51. [56] Carlos L. Garrido, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press), 51. [57] V. I. Lenin, CW Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 62, 69. [58] Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings Vol. 3 (New York: New American Library, 1967), 141. [59] Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works Vol. 9 (Peking: Foreign Language Publishers, 1994), 458. [60] Martin Luther King Jr. The Radical King, edited and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 237. [61] Staughton Lynd. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7. [62] Paul Robeson, “Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, June 12, 1956,” History Matters https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440/ [63] Robeson, “Testimony.” AuthorCarlos L. Garrido teaches philosophy in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he received his M.A. and is currently finishing his PhD. He is an editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and the author of Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism. Archives March 2023 It’s no shock to most leftists that the United States has been running a smear campaign against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since even before the Korean War. From insane allegations of Kim Jong-Un claiming that he never has to use the bathroom to defectors being paid by the US and South Korean governments to exaggerate and even completely fabricate their stories about leaving the country, there really isn’t a single thing that the west won’t accuse the DPRK of doing if it makes the socialist country look bad. Often playing the “totalitarian” card, there have been a multitude of news stories and false testimonies telling of mass executions or people even being killed simply for watching a movie made in the United States. These claims of people being executed left and right are more often that not blatant falsehoods that are easily proven to be wrong. News stories about these supposed executions are commonly published with no legitimate primary sources, usually citing “an anonymous source” or only having information from defector claims, tabloid magazines, and the Korean CIA. Sometimes western sources even take pieces from satire and parody sites and push them as factual. By looking at a handful of news stories that claim someone was murdered by the DPRK for little to no reason that turned out to be false, the hope is that maybe these examples of news outlets publishing blatantly false stories will help provide a little more nuance in how people should approach western so-called information about the DPRK. Hyon Song-Wol Starting off we have a claim from 2013. Published in the conservative South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, the story goes that Marshal Kim Jong-Un ordered to have his alleged ex-girlfriend and patriotic pop singer Hyon Song-Wol, members of the Unhasu Orchestra, along with members of the Wangjaesan Light Music Band, executed by firing squad. According to this article, Hyon Song-Wol and orchestra leader Mun Kyong-Jin were arrested for releasing a sex tape, or some other action that would be in violation of the DPRK’s anti-pornography policies. In true anti-DPRK tabloid fashion, Chosun Ilbo claimed that all of the involved parties were gunned down with machine guns in front of their fellow musicians and family members and then the family members of those who were executed were themselves thrown into prison. This story would go on to circulate uncritically throughout western outlets. The only citation found in this article comes from “sources in China.” What sources? There’s no actual news article or report from an actual organization claiming knowledge of the DPRK or any form of concrete documentation to prove that this claim is real. Even if Chosun Ilbo cited an actual document the validity of this claim would still be up in the air considering the anti-communist character of this newspaper. Plus Chosun Ilbo is generally considered by many an unreliable source in on the DPRK in general. This claim of a mass execution of course turned out to be a massive lie. In May of 2014, around 8-9 months after Hyon Song-Wol was claimed to be killed by firing squad, she resurfaced on DPRK TV. Appearing at the 9th National Convention of Artists in Pyongyang, Hyon proved to be alive and well, effectively dispelling the rumors of her death. Kim Kyong Hui According to a defector from the DPRK referred to only as “Mr. Park,” as cited in a 2015 CNN article, Kim Jong-Un carried out orders to have his aunt Kim Kyong Hui executed in 2014 in response to her “angrily complaining” about her husband Jang Song Thaek being executed for counter-revolutionary activity in 2013. Mr. Park here claims that Kim Kyong Hui was poisoned by Kim Jong-Un, this is after several other baseless claims were made regarding her whereabouts. Prior claims include that she had been in a vegetative state after undergoing brain surgery, that she committed suicide, she had a stroke, or she had a heart attack. But, as expected, this all turned out to be as some may call it, fake news. A 2020 article by Alan Macleod for MintPress News highlighted that Kim Kyong Hui was spotted on North Korean Television enjoying the Lunar New Year festivities in the DPRK with her nephew. This woman would’ve been dead for 6 years at the time of this article’s publication. Unless the physicians and other similar personnel have access to technology reminiscent to that of Victor Frankenstein, it’s hard to believe that this woman would be resurrected after over half a decade of being dead. This article also touches briefly upon a couple other examples of supposed executions being carried out in the DPRK turning out to be nothing more than fabrications. Ri Yong-GilMoving on we have an execution allegation that finally doesn’t involve a member of Kim Jong-Un’s family. According to an article from the BBC, citing only the vague institution of “South Korean media,” army chief of staff Ri Yong-Gil was executed in early 2016 for charges of corruption and “factional conspiracy.” By now we should understand that if the source of western article is a “source in South Korea” or a “source in China,” or even in some cases they just use the term “anonymous source,” then it’s most likely that the story is a farce. The kicker in this BBC article is that right at the beginning of this piece, the report from “South Korean media” that they cite even claims to be unconfirmed. This unconfirmed claim would of course turn out to be a fib. In May of 2016 as reported in a CNN article, Ri Yong-Gil turned up alive and well at a Workers Party Congress. How can a dead man appear at a party congress 3-4 months after he was apparently executed by the state? A newspaper in the DPRK even confirmed his being alive by listing him as a member of the Central Committee’s Politburo. In fact, Yong-Gil was the recipient of a promotion from deputy Army Chief of Staff to the official Chief of Staff in 2018. Are you starting to notice a pattern here? Let’s cover a few more just to really hammer down how idiotic these claims that have been made against the DPRK are. Kim Hyok-Chol/Kim Yong-Chol The Daily Mail is a tabloid that very rarely if ever publishes something that’s actually worth reading. So it should be no shock to anyone that a media outlet built on misleading headlines and misinformation would use Chosun Ilbo, a media outlet built on misleading headlines and misinformation, as the source for one of their sensationalist articles. The Daily Mail claimed in a 2019 article that after the debacle that was the summit in Hanoi, Vietnam with then president Donald Trump, Kim Jong-Un ordered special envoy to the US Kim Hyok-Chol to be executed by firing squad and to have several other officials involved placed under arrest and placed in a prison camp. Is there any sort of truth to this story? Not at all. As it was later revealed, Kim Hyok-Chol was never put to death. In fact, only about a week after this story was initially released the Korean Central News Agency reported that Hyok-Chol had very recently attended a concert with Kim Jong-Un. The two of them were even photographed sitting near each other during the concert. Western sources say that he was still subjected to some odd form of self-criticizing punishment but just like these accusations of political murder those claims are completely unfounded. And as a little bonus in this story, Kim Yong-Chol, a general and member of the Central Committee who was also involved in the Hanoi summit was reported to have been purged from the Workers Party and sentenced to hard labor. But guess what? That didn’t turn out to be true either. Kim Yong-Chol was shown to be attending an artistic performance that was also attended by Kim Jong-Un only two days after these claims of being purged had surfaced. This isn’t a false accusation of death, but this is still a prime example of how western media is designed to demonize the DPRK by any means. Piranhas? No particular individual is named in this claim, but this one in particular is of extreme absurdity. In 2019 The Daily Star released an article claiming that an unnamed military general in the DPRK was executed in a way that was taken from a James Bond film from the 1970s. Apparently Kim Jong-Un killed one of his generals by having their chest cut open and throwing them into a tank full of piranhas. The Daily Star also included that people have apparently been fed alive to tigers and blasted with flamethrowers among other methods of execution. Even beyond the claims of this James Bond scenario, the article says that piranhas can rip the flesh of off something in a matter of minutes which has been proven to be an urban legends. There was even an episode of the populat show “Mythbusters” about this. Thankfully though this story was met with ridicule and sarcasm by a significant number of people. Kim Jong-Un Wrapping this up with the biggest one of the last couple of years, the claim that the man himself, Kim Jong-Un, was dead. In April of 2020, reports started coming out from outlets such as the always credible TMZ that the DPRK leader had died. TMZ cited a social media post made by an unnamed woman who worked as the vice director of a Hong-Kong based news program claiming Kim Jong-Un was dead. This post on Weibo of course didn’t have any legitimate citations, simply referring to a “very credible source” as confirmation. Pieces from NED-funded institutions such as Daily NK would likewise parrot claims of Kim’s death. There’s even an article published by the Anadolu Agency in Turkey where someone who defected from the DPRK in 2006 had been “informed” that Kim Jong-Un had died. The problem with this though is that Ji Seong-ho, the defector in question who would go on to hold a minor political office in South Korea, did not disclose in any way what source was telling them that Kim had died. Even Donald Trump acknowledged that claims of his death were unconfirmed and that they shouldn’t be taken at face value. Of course as we all know now, the leader of socialist Korea was never dead and is still alive and well to this day. South Korean officials would confirm that just because Kim hadn’t been seen all that much at the time of these rumors, that does not mean that he is dead. Ultimately this rumor, like many others surrounding the DPRK, are the product of a mass global media campaign from the capitalist world to demonize and destabilize countries that don’t want to blindly play along with the USA’s interests. Any attempts at holding onto autonomy and sovereignty are met with NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy funneling money into pro-western, anti-communist media outlets in attempts to manufacture consent for illegal regime change. Ben Norton has a great article on the anti-DPRK media cycle and how it applies to other countries published by The Grayzone. Conclusion None of this is to say that there have never been executions or that there aren’t issues within the DPRK that need to be addressed. Those issues, however, should be addressed by the people of Korea and should not in any way be decided by western powers. That being said, there’s a pattern of disinformation here that everybody needs to be aware of. Western powers and media are consistently spreading lies about the DPRK among other places including Venezuela and China as a means of trying to build popular support for political and economic attacks as a means of instigating regime change. The US wants to create puppet governments and they will do try to do that in whatever way they see necessary. Have people been executed in North Korea? Yes that can’t be denied. But plenty of people in the United States have been executed via both legal and extralegal means. And in the DPRK, there are so many instances of stories claiming someone was executed turning out to be a baseless fabrication with lackluster sources, if any sources are even mentioned. It is implored that people look at these patterns of lies, and try to see outside of the Western bubble. Yong-hyun, Ahn. “Kim Jong-Un's Ex-Girlfriend 'Shot By Firing Squad'.” The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea - North Korea, August 29, 2013. http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/08/29/2013082901412.html. O'Carroll, Chad. “North Korean Singer ‘Executed by Firing Squad’ Shows up Alive and Well in Pyongyang.” NK News, May 16, 2014. https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/north-korean-singer-that-was-executed-by-firing-squad-shows-up-alive-and-well/. Hancocks, Paula. “North Korean Leader Ordered Aunt to Be Poisoned, Defector Says.” CNN, May 12, 2015. https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/11/asia/north-korea-kim-aunt-poisoned/. Macleod, Alan. “North Korea: Kim Jong-Un's Aunt Appears Alive after Six Years of Media Saying He Killed Her.” MintPress News, January 27, 2020. https://www.mintpressnews.com/north-korea-kim-kyong-hui-appears-alive-after-six-years-media-coverage/264364/. “North Korea 'Executes' Army Chief of Staff Ri Yong-Gil.” BBC News, February 10, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35543364. Pearson, Michael. “North Korean General, Reported Executed, Turns up at Party Congress.” CNN, May 10, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/10/asia/north-korea-army-chief-ri-yong-gil-alive/. “Previously 'Executed' North Korean Official Promoted to Military Chief.” Sputnik International, June 4, 2018. https://sputniknews.com/20180604/Executed-Korean-Promoted-Chief-1065095830.html. Ibbetson, Ross. “Kim Jong-Un Executes His Man in America: Special Envoy to Us Is Killed by Firing Squad.” Daily Mail Online, May 31, 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7088941/N-Koreas-Kim-Jong-Un-carrying-purge-Hanoi-summit-collapse-Chosun-Ilbo.html. “Fake News? 'Executed' North Korean Seems to Resurface Alive, Another Shows up at Concert.” RT International, June 4, 2019. https://www.rt.com/news/461089-north-korea-official-alive/. Carey, Jim. “Kim Yong-Chol: North Korea Lies on Repeat in Western Media.” Geopolitics Alert, June 5, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20210815013652/https://geopoliticsalert.com/kim-yong-chol-north-korea-lies. Ward, John. “Kim Jong-Un Executes General by Throwing Him in Piranha-Filled Fish Tank.” Dailystar.co.uk, June 9, 2019. https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/kim-jong-un-execute-general-17210070. “How Far Is Too Far? UK Tabloids Mocked for Claiming Kim Fed General to Piranhas.” RT International, June 10, 2019. https://www.rt.com/news/461473-kim-piranhas-execution-tabloid/. “N. Korea Dictator Kim Jong-Un Reportedly Dead After Botched Heart Surgery.” TMZ, April 25, 2020. https://www.tmz.com/2020/04/25/north-korea-dictator-kim-jong-un-dead-dies-heart-surgery-reports/. Alam, Sorvar. “N.Korea Defector Claims '99%' Sure Kim Jong-Un's Dead.” Anadolu Ajansı, May 1, 2020. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/nkorea-defector-claims-99-sure-kim-jong-uns-dead/1825795. “Kim Jong-Un Is 'Alive and Well,' Top South Korean Security Advisor Says.” SBS News. Special Broadcasting Service Australia, April 27, 2020. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/kim-jong-un-is-alive-and-well-top-south-korean-security-advisor-says/fp5tgajnv. Norton, Ben. “Anatomy of a Fake News Campaign: Media Spreads Lie from US Govt-Funded Korean Outlet That Kim Jong-Un Died.” The Grayzone, May 4, 2020. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/04/fake-news-ned-north-korea-kim-dead/. AuthorJymee C is an aspiring Marxist historian and teacher with a BA in history from Utica College, hoping to begin working towards his Master's degree in the near future. He's been studying Marxism-Leninism for the past five years and uses his knowledge and understanding of theory to strengthen and expand his historical analyses. His primary interests regarding Marxism-Leninism and history include the Soviet Union, China, the DPRK, and the various struggles throughout US history among other subjects. He is currently conducting research for a book on the Korean War and US-DPRK relations. In addition, he is a 3rd Degree black belt in karate and runs the YouTube channel "Jymee" where he releases videos regarding history, theory, self-defense, and the occasional jump into comedy https://www.youtube.com/c/Jymee Archives February 2023 |
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