​In his early writings against censorship, Karl Marx proposed that it is insufficient to simply criticize censorship on the basis of how it depicts a limitation of our freedoms and rights. Far more important, he held, was the critical inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of censorship. Censorship, clearly, does not arrive out of thin air. It is produced by certain conditions which call it forth as a necessity for the dominant order.
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In our age, where censorship is the order of the day, and expresses itself in diverse forms, we too must ask – what are the conditions which make this censorship necessary? While it is, indeed, essential to call out the hypocrisy of the enunciated values of the capitalist ruling class and the violation of these in reality, simply doing this is insufficient to help us understand, explain, make sense of, why it is that that censorship is so prevalent in the first place.

I think it is clear, when we observe the decaying trust in ruling institutions, in the media (which, for instance, only 11% of the population trusts), in politicians, etc., that the ruling elite have on their hands a crisis of legitimacy.

Censorship is, then, a clear product of a failure of bourgeois ideology, a deterioration of their hegemonic control over the spontaneous worldviews of the mass of people. The narratives produced by the ruling institutions of the capitalist class are no longer uncritically and spontaneously accepted by the mass of people.

Most regular Americans, especially the youth, intuitively understand that the media and other ideological apparatuses of the ruling class are not there to tell us the truth. Quite the opposite. Their whole purpose is to distort the world in such a way that it allows us to make sense of it through the narratives upheld by the ruling elite.

To employ a technical term we use in the Marxist tradition, their whole purpose is to systematically reproduce a form of false consciousness – a consciousness which turns the world on its head on the basis of superficial one-sided facts, distortions, and lies. Somehow Israel is the victim, China the imperialist, and Cuba the state sponsor of terrorism.

This is not simply a problem of epistemic hygiene, as the scholar Vannessa Wills has called it, but an objective social reality of the capitalist form of life. It is a system that, in order to reproduce itself and obtain the consent of the governed, requires that people understand the world in topsy-turvy ways. It is an order that requires a distorted refraction of itself in the realm of ideas, not an accurate, corresponsive reflection.

Working class Americans, and even some dissidents from more privileged classes, are beginning to intuitively understand this reality – even if it is not, or at least not yet, comprehended with the concreteness and systematicity a Marxist worldview can provide. Nonetheless, even these spontaneous and often incoherent forms of dissent find themselves under the boot of censorship by a ruling elite too fragile to allow any form of dissent on the principal issues of empire. They much prefer, and frankly need, a compatible form of dissenters (whether from the right or left) who might criticize politicians, capitalism, ‘the matrix,’ etc. but who on issues of imperialism fall faithfully in line with the narratives of the ruling class.

These issues of empire, corresponding to the Neo-imperialist stage of capitalism we find ourselves in, are the Achilles heel for the contemporary elite. The vast majority of those who have been censored over the last few years have been attacked and maligned precisely because of their challenges to the imperialist narratives. No one, that I know of, has been censored on the basis of calling for the raising of the minimum wage, for Medicare for all, or for loan forgiveness – important though these issues are for the vast majority of working-class Americans.

The voices which are censored are those that have challenged the narratives of empire on key issues such as the proxy war against Russia, the New Cold War against China, the unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others, and of course, the most pivotal issue of our day, the genocide of the Palestinians by the fascist state of Israel, the U.S.’s colonial outpost in West Asia.

I speak today not as an outsider simply interested in issues of censorship, but as the director of an institute that has had to battle tooth and nail against censorship for the last few years.

Three years ago, when the July 11 color revolution “protests” in Cuba were occurring, we used our institute’s TikTok to dispel the imperialist myths aimed, as always, at regime change. Our following at the time was nearing 300 thousand, and the videos we were making were reaching millions of people. Within a couple videos discussing the situation our account would get temporarily suspended, a reality we faced throughout the whole summer. As is often the case, because they could not beat us at the level of ideas, their only option was censorship.

Within months the special military operations would occur, representing a new moment in the imperialist West’s battle against Russia. At the time, we used our Institute’s TikTok platform to push back against the NATO imperialist narratives painting Putin simply as a blood thirsty maniac. We contextualized the SMO in the long history of U.S./NATO expansion towards Russia, the war on the people of the Donbass since 2014, the expansion, backed by the West, of Nazi-Banderism and its incorporation into the Ukrainian state amongst other factors necessary to properly access the actions that occurred in February 2022 – all factors which in previous years the imperialist media, and various U.S. officials, themselves accepted.

For exposing these truths, challenging to the imperialist narrative, our account (this time nearing 400 thousand followers) would be permanently banned. In the subsequent year we would create seven new accounts, a few which also surpassed the 100 thousand follower mark, only to be banned as soon as we once again were capable of reaching millions.

As the investigative work of Alan Macleod showed, the year the censorship against the Institute started the Biden administration would force ByteDance (the Chinese company with the people-centered algorithms that allowed us to grow) to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. It was revealed in Macleod’s report that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. TikTok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as our Institute.

The censorship we have faced, however, has been far from limited to TikTok (an app that, although managed by the state department, has been unable to fully control the dissenting attitudes to imperialism the youth put out – the real reason why they have been moving to ban the app, and why, even though we’ve been banned more than seven times, we’ve been able to rebuild a new account with well over 200 thousand followers and with millions of views on various videos).

In the middle of February of this year, while we were covering the death of the West’s beloved far-right racist Navalny, we received news that our YouTube was demonetized. This was one of the central sources of revenue for the Institute – a place people would donate through and ask questions in our live broadcasts. This, of course, was a unique form of censorship – a targeting of the financial foundation which allows us to do the work we do.

This is merely the tip of the iceberg of censoring attacks we, and many others like us, have faced when our ideas not only challenge the dominant narrative, but do so in a way that reaches hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of people.

Social media has, as I have tried to outline in my recent writings, become one of the central ideological fields where the war of position, i.e., the war of ideas for the hearts and minds of people, has to be waged. It is an area people spend 3-4 hours a day surfing, and which is central to spontaneously developing the views people come to hold on relevant political issues. Despite its tubular character and the leakages of dissenting views that spring up here and there, it has become the most important apparatus of narrative control for the ruling class – a space where they can boost their narratives (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through bots) and shut down the dissenting ones (again, sometimes directly through bans, sometimes indirectly through demonetization, and sometimes more insidiously, through shadowbans, as has occurred to various other directors at our Institute).

In the face of this censorship, it is the duty of Marxists to contextualize its emergence in the crisis of legitimacy and empire we have before us. It is also our duty, if we wish to win the war of positions, to use to our favor the gap between the lofty enunciated values of the ruling class (most of which are accepted in the common sense of our people) and the reality their order creates. The fact that, on one hand, the elite proclaim the right to free speech, media, etc., and that on the other, they censor all voices which challenge the dominant narrative (especially on issues of war and peace) is an objective contradiction we must explain to the American people, and exploit in our favor. We must help them achieve coherence in the dissenting attitudes they already hold – aid them in understanding why the ruling class and its institutions ought to be distrusted and challenged.

Lenin’s question – freedom (or freedom of speech) for whom and to do what? – must always be asked. Freedom, of speech or of any other kind, is an abstraction that contains an obscured class content. Freedom of speech for the elite is the freedom of their speech, their freedom to distort reality and keep us ignorant cogs in a machine they own, profit off of, and hope to continue to keep running.

Freedom of speech for us, the vast majority of people, is fundamentally rooted in the ability to speak truth to power, to challenge the narratives of those who cloak themselves under the auspices of ‘fighting misinformation’ while it is they who are the great liars, deceivers, and misinformers. 

This requires that we stand against censorship of all kinds, not just of those who already hold our Marxist worldview. Anyone challenging empire, regardless of how anachronistic their views might be, ought to have their rights to free speech and media protected. As Marxists, that is, as the ultimate enemies of the ruling order, we cannot stand in favor of the state’s cracking down of dissenting voices on issues of empire, even if, outside of those issues, we find some of these dissenters’ views abhorrent.

In our era of blatant censorship, us Marxists ought to defend the right to free speech endowed to us in our bourgeois constitution – even if we are able to understand, and explain to others, the systematic reasons why the capitalist ruling class will always, in times of crisis, have to violate the democratic rights it enunciates with its emergence on the historical scene.
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​Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations in 1955, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961 and signed a pact with the European Economic Community in 1972. The United States and Europe worked closely with the Salazar and Caetano governments, turning a blind eye to their atrocities.
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Over a decade ago, I visited Lisbon’s Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom, which was a torture site for political prisoners from 1928 to 1965. During this time, tens of thousands of trade unionists, student activists, communists, and rebels of all kinds were brought there to be tortured, and many were killed – often with great cruelty. The ordinariness of this brutality permeates the hundreds of stories preserved in the museum. For instance, on 31 July 1958, torturers took the welder Raúl Alves from Aljube Prison to the third floor of the secret police’s headquarters and threw him to his death. Heloísa Ramos Lins, the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Portugal at the time, Álvaro Lins, drove by at that moment, saw Alves’ fatal fall, and told her husband. When the Brazilian embassy approached the Portuguese Interior Ministry to ask what had happened, the Estado Novo dictatorship responded, ‘There is no reason to be so shocked. It is merely an unimportant communist’.

It was ‘unimportant communists’ like Raúl Alves who initiated the revolution of 25 April, which built on a wave of workers’ actions across 1973, beginning with the airport workers in Lisbon and then spreading to textile workers’ strikes in Braga and Covilha, engineering workers’ strikes in Aveiro and Porto, and glass workers’ strike in Marinha Grande.

Around this time, the dictator Caetano read Portugal and the Future, written by General António de Spínola who was trained by commanders of the fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, led a military campaign in Angola, and was formerly the Estado Novo’s governor in Guinea-Bissau. Spínola’s book argued that Portugal should end its colonial occupation since it was losing its grip on Portuguese-controlled Africa. In his memoirs, Caetano wrote that when he finished the book, he understood ‘that the military coup, which I could sense had been coming, was now inevitable’.

What Caetano did not foresee was the unity between workers and soldiers (who themselves were part of the working class) that burst through in April 1974. The soldiers were fed up with the colonial wars, which – despite the great brutality of the Estado Novo – had failed to quell the ambitions of the people of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The advances made by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were considerable, with Portugal’s army losing more soldiers than at any time since the eighteenth century. Several of these formations received assistance from the USSR and East Germany (DDR), but it was through their own strength and initiative that they ultimately won the battles against colonialism (as our colleagues at the International Research Centre on the DDR have documented).

On 9 September 1973, soldiers who had been sent to Guinea-Bissau met in Portugal to form the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In March 1974, the MFA approved its programme Democracy, Development, and Decolonisation, drafted by the Marxist soldier Ernesto Melo Antunes. When the revolution erupted in April, Antunes explained, ‘A few hours after the start of the coup, on the same day, the mass movement began. This immediately transformed it into a revolution. When I wrote the programme of the MFA, I had not predicted this, but the fact that it happened showed that the military was in tune with the Portuguese people’. When Antunes said the ‘military’, he meant the soldiers, because those who formed the MFA were not more senior than captains and remained rooted in the working class from which they had come.
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In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the ‘necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestation’. This position was rejected by the Estado Novo regime. On 3 August 1959, Portuguese colonial soldiers fired on sailors and dockworkers at Pidjiguiti at the Port of Bissau, killing over fifty people. On 16 June 1960, in the town of Mueda (Mozambique), the Estado Novo colonialists fired on a small, unarmed demonstration of national liberation advocates who had been invited by the district administrator to present their views. It is still not known how many people were killed. Then, on 4 January 1961, a strike at Baixa do Cassange (Angola) was met with Portuguese repression, killing somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 Angolans. These three incidents showed that the Portuguese colonialists were unwilling to tolerate any civic movement for independence. It was the Estado Novo that imposed the armed struggle on these parts of Africa, moving the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO to take up guns.

​Agostinho Neto (1922–1979) was a communist poet, a leader of the MPLA, and the first president of independent Angola. In a poem called ‘Massacre of São Tomé’, Neto captured the feeling of the revolts against Portuguese colonialism:

It was then that in eyes on fire
now with blood, now with life, now with death,
we buried our dead victoriously
and on the graves recognised
the reason for these men’s sacrifice
for love,
and for harmony,
and for our freedom
even while facing death, through the force of time
in blood-stained waters
even in the small defeats that accumulate towards victory
Within us
the green land of São Tomé
will also be the island of love.

That island of love was not just to be built across Africa, from Praia to Luanda, but also across Portugal. On 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro, a forty-year-old waitress, was working at a self-service restaurant called Sir in the Franjinhas building on Braancamp Street in Lisbon. Since it was the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, the owner decided to hand out red carnations to the customers. When Celeste told him about the revolution, he decided to shut down Sir for the day, give employees the carnations, and encourage the employees to take the carnations home. Instead, Celeste headed to the city centre, where events were unfolding. On the way, some soldiers asked her for a cigarette, but instead, she put a few carnations into the barrels of their guns. This caught on, and the florists of Baixa decided to give away their in-season red carnations to be the emblem of the revolution. That is why the 1974 revolution was called the Carnation Revolution, a revolution of flowers against guns.

Portugal’s social revolution of 1974–1975 swept large majorities of people into a new sensibility, but the state refused to capitulate. It inaugurated the Third Republic, whose presidents all came from the ranks of the military and the National Salvation Junta: António de Spínola (April–September 1974), Francisco da Costa Gomes (September 1974–July 1976), and António Ramalho Eanes (July 1976–March 1986). These were not men from the ranks, but the old generals. Nonetheless, they were eventually forced to surrender the old structures of Estado Novo colonialism and withdraw from their colonies in Africa.

​Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), who was born one hundred years ago this September and who did more than many to build the African formations against Estado Novo colonialism, did not live to see the independence of Portugal’s African colonies. At the 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, Cuba, Cabral warned that it was not enough to get rid of the old regime, and that even more difficult than overthrowing the regime itself would be to build the new world out of the old, from Portugal to Angola, Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. The main struggle after decolonisation, Cabral said, is the ‘struggle against our own weaknesses’. This ‘battle against ourselves’, he continued, ‘is the most difficult of all’ because it is a battle against the ‘internal contradictions’ of our societies, the poverty borne of colonialism, and the wretched hierarchies in our complex cultural formations.
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Led by people like Cabral, liberation struggles in Africa not only won independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo colonialism and helped bring democracy to Europe. But that was not the end of the struggle. It opened new contradictions, many of which linger today in different forms. As Cabral often said as the closing words to his speeches, a luta continua. The struggle continues.

Warmly,

Vijay

​By the early 1960s the Portuguese empire was almost as big as western Europe—22 times the size of Portugal itself. Then, protests and confrontations in its various territories metamorphised into anti-colonial wars, led by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, Frelimo in Mozambique and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.

The toll was immense: nearly half of the Portuguese government budget went to the military, at the cost of education and the public services. A country of nine million inhabitants was supporting an army of 200,000, which suffered 8,300 casualties over 12 years. At least ten times that number of Africans were killed.

Junior army officers from the clandestine Armed Forces Movement (MFA), sick and tired of the failing wars, organised a coup on 25 April 1974. In overthrowing António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo regime, they toppled 48 years of authoritarian fascist rule. The importance of the coup can hardly be exaggerated. It put a question mark over not only the future of Portugal itself but also that of its neighbour Spain and the whole of southern Africa.

People power

From the outset, people poured onto the streets despite being ordered to ‘go to their homes and remain in the utmost calm’. They clambered onto tanks and inserted red flowers into rifle barrels, giving the carnation revolution its name. People met and talked where they lived and worked, and fraternised with the soldiers. Confidence grew daily as people organised everywhere, in all sorts of ways.

First, they occupied housing. Previously, the authorities had distributed housing based on loyalty to the regime and bribes. Within the first 15 days of the revolution, thousands of people who lived in shacks or bedsits seized 2,500 units around the country, mainly in large blocks of new public housing. There were 97 workplace strikes in the first week—more than in any one-year period under the old regime. Significantly, two-fifths of the strikes demanded saneamento—the purging of those who had links to the former fascist regime. More than 12,000 people were purged or suspended.

Workplace occupations followed, almost immediately at Timex and at the enormous Lisnave shipyards—multinational corporations that had set up gigantic complexes around Lisbon and sourced cheap labour under Salazar’s rule. The scale of factory occupations, at least 600, recalled Italy in 1920 and Catalonia in 1936.

Several thousand workers’ commissions (comissões de trabalhadores) and more than 100 residents’ commissions (comissões de moradores) emerged simultaneously across cities and towns. Workers connected with one another. In one small example, half a dozen women who had taken over their firm, which produced children’s clothes, went to the bank and asked for a loan, whereupon the bank workers gave them access to the English- owned firm’s deposits.

In some workplace occupations the workers became depoliticised because, as new managers, they struggled to make ends meet. In others, the workforce used occupation to control and monitor the owners and managers. In 1975, I visited the Edifer construction company offices in Lisbon. A workers’ committee member took me into the boardroom and gestured to the drinks’ cabinet. ‘We don’t drink this,’ he said.

We are keeping it so that people can see what the managers did. We run the place but we keep the managers here to make sure they do their job.

Shipyard workers at the foreign-owned Setenave put it another way:

We don’t have workers’ control. How can we if we don’t control the banks? Our attitude is that we want to know everything. We don’t believe that we can have workers’ control alone.

Democracy from below flourished. People learned how to govern themselves. They set up and even built health centres, community organisations and cultural centres. One organiser, Maria, told how she and other women had persuaded the military police to help occupy an empty villa and set up a creche for working mothers. The military police fitted it up with electrics, provided a stove and furniture. When the local priest gave a sermon about the creche, warning it would poison people’s minds and decrying its meetings about family planning and abortion, Maria struck back and forced the priest to let her talk from the pulpit. Her speech on abortion and contraception raised 800 escudos for the creche.

The army and the people

Throughout the whole period, indeed until April 1976, there was no stable government. There were six provisional governments. The MFA revolutionary council appointed the presidents and prime ministers, all members of the military, and created uneasy partnerships with the conventional political parties to form the governments. Much to the dismay of western capitalism, the Communist Party always had representatives.

The impact of the people’s movement on the armed forces—and vice versa—came to be an integral part of the Portuguese story. The interaction drove a wedge between the MFA on the one hand, and the ‘civil’ authorities, including the main political parties, on the other.

Workers’ commissions, the main drivers behind the strike waves, were a thorn in the side of successive governments—who tried to contain them by using the military. But at times the MFA, and even more often ordinary soldiers, sided with those in struggle—notably when defending the country from right-wing coup attempts on 28 September 1974 and 11 March 1975.

The rebuffing of the latter precipitated large-scale nationalisation. Bank workers occupied branches and demanded the nationalisation of Portuguese banks. The MFA’s revolutionary council announced their decision to do so the following day. Next were the insurance companies. Then, on 15 April 1975, the fourth provisional government nationalised dozens of companies in sectors including petroleum, electricity, gas, tobacco, breweries, steelworks and cement. Some nationalisations were used to stop the exodus of capital and risk of bankrupting the country, however, and to avoid direct workers’ control.

By this point, Portugal’s traditional conservatives were in disarray. Their strategy of coups and authoritarian modernisation was not working. For Portuguese capitalism an alternative line of attack was emerging: that of installing a west European-type social democracy within a parliamentary framework. This agenda was spearheaded by the Socialist Party, which talked of abolishing capitalism while undermining popular forms of power by insisting that only parliamentary politics were legitimate.

Parliamentary democracy, alongside direct democracy, attracted many. The first anniversary of the overthrow of the old regime, 25 April 1975, was chosen for Portugal’s first ever election based on universal suffrage. Nearly 92 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote. The Communist Party, cautious and conservative in its strategy and highly authoritarian in its internal regime, polled a meagre 12.5 per cent. The real victor was the Socialist Party, which won 37.9 per cent. Its status was transformed: from having just 200 members in April 1974, it had grown to become the leading parliamentary party in Portugal within a year.

Constitutionally, however, the ultimate power still lay with the MFA. The Socialist Party relentlessly pursued the interrelated themes of ‘socialism’, ‘power to those elected’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of speech’. Both the NATO powers and the Portuguese ruling class now preferred the option of building a ‘stable’ bourgeois parliamentary system. Progressive sections of Portuguese capitalism wanted to join the EEC (forerunner of the EU), which demanded democratic credentials.

The election results and turnout were a humiliation for many MFA officers, who had naively called for an election boycott and were suspicious of the mainstream political parties. In response, the MFA forged a new ideology, poder popular (popular power), through a national network of popular assemblies, comprising delegates from workplaces, barracks and residents’ commissions, as an alternative to parliamentary democracy. The MFA’s conception also included arming the people.

At least 100 embryonic popular assemblies were set up in urban areas over summer and autumn 1975. However, they tended to see themselves as subordinate to the military—which is how the MFA saw them too. They also set out to be ‘above parties’ (apartidária). For some, this was a licence to be ‘anti- party’, which led to an overestimation of the role of the movement and dismissal of how political parties could contribute to it. These proposals led to the Socialist Party, followed by other key parties, walking away from the government in early July.

New forces emerge

The Socialist Party grew in confidence over the ‘hot summer’ of 1975. In tandem with the Catholic church, it led a violent suppression of the left, trade unions and the Communist Party in the north. This fostered renewed self-assurance and even arrogance among the many career military men who, although not fascists, had largely remained outside the MFA. Their innate conservatism had been obscured since the revolution by the sheer prestige of the MFA.

At the same time, soldiers began to demand redress of the inequalities between them and the officers and agitated for pay increases and free transport—for many, a single visit to their families could cost almost a month’s pay. In September, conscript soldiers formed a rank-and-file orgnisation, SUV (Soldados Unidos Vencerão—Soldiers United Will Win), which shifted dynamics enormously.

By the autumn of 1975, troops in other European countries were also becoming restless. In Italy, more than a thousand soldiers, in uniform with handkerchief masks, demonstrated in support of Portuguese workers and soldiers. The rebellion of rank- and-file soldiers scared the Portuguese—and wider west—establishment like nothing else.

On 25 September 1975, the SUV held a 100,000-strong demonstration in support of the Lisbon residents’ and workers’ commissions. A group of 4,000 demonstrators requisitioned buses to drive 15 miles and free soldiers imprisoned for possession of SUV leaflets.

The revolutionary process continued to ebb and flow as different groups led acts of dissent. The same month, for example, a group of disabled soldiers occupied the Abril 25 suspension bridge, diverting the day’s toll charges to República newspaper, which was then under workers’ control.

That autumn, another group, the rural proletariat, joined the fray. Most of the large latifúndios (privately owned landed estates) were taken over by the workers. Tellingly, they increased the number of tractors from 2,630 to 4,150, and of harvesting machines from 960 to 1,720. There had been nothing like this in Europe since Hungary in 1956.

The most impressive example of a workers’ council was the Comité de Luta (Committee of Struggle) in Setúbal, 30 miles south of Lisbon. It included residents and representatives from the two local barracks. Here, the revolutionary left set the pace, united in common activities such as encouraging workers to take over the local paper and distributing food from agricultural co-operatives.

Portugal’s retreat from the colonies, meanwhile, meant that over half a million bitterly disillusioned ‘retornados’ had to be re-integrated into a population of nine million. These right-wing exiles would have a similarly toxic effect to the ‘pieds noirs’ in French politics. Nonetheless, the movement from below continued to challenge the state.

Perhaps the most powerful example came late in the process, in mid-November 1975. The Portuguese parliament had been held hostage at São Bento in Lisbon by a rally of almost 100,000 people, mostly construction workers, demanding a wage rise. The besieged prime minister, Admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo, asked the commandos to rescue him and his ministers. They refused. He then requested a helicopter to rescue just a few of them. The military police overheard the request and alerted the building workers, who prevented the helicopter from landing.
After 36 hours, the prime minister conceded all the workers’ demands, to take effect by the end of the month. The paralysis of formal government was so total that, on 20 November 1975, the government declared it was not going to do anything ‘political’, announcing:

We are on strike, everybody is on strike, the government is also on strike.

Understanding the collapse

Portugal’s carnation revolution ended five days later when a group of reformist officers, by means of a small new elite unit, quenched a number of insubordinate barracks. There was remarkably little bloodshed. It did not mark the return of fascism—an enemy that had united everyone. But fear of fascism also blinded many in the movement, leading to an underestimation of the capacity of capitalism to adapt and reform.

On 25 November 1975, neither the officers ‘on the side of the people’ nor the multiple and varied left groups called for strikes, occupations or barricades. Such action—especially by a powerful group of workers such as those at the Lisnave shipyards—might have inspired waverers in the armed forces and other workers’ groups to follow. The leading workers’ organisations, most notably the Communist Party, were however not prepared to take on the state or give full support to the radical demands of factory and rural workers. The popular power movement was never strong enough nor sufficiently coordinated at the national level.

Some argued that the lack of a revolutionary party had been the left’s downfall. A proliferation of grupúsculos had aspired to become such parties, but they were young and unschooled—and some became too embroiled in the intrigues of the military. The lack of a reformist tradition in Portugal had allowed the left to flourish, but without the experience of how to work alongside reformists—who some called ‘social fascists’. The anti-party ideology, as articulated through the pact known as the Aliança Povo-MFA, had meant that it was difficult for those involved from the far left to comment on or even discern the variety of views and weaknesses that existed in the ‘movement’.

The slogan ‘Unity of the people and the MFA’ was also double-edged. Not only did the people influence the army, but the revolutionary movement’s reliance on radicals in the army proved part of its undoing. As Tony Cliff put it in ‘Portugal at the Crossroad’, by ‘acting as a surrogate, as a substitute, the MFA prevented the workers (and soldiers)’ from developing real workers’ councils. The ‘brilliant’ achievements of the struggle did not mean that Portuguese workers had by-passed reformism or were permanently immune from it, however—simply that many workers lacked the experience, organisation and judgement to prove otherwise.

Legacies and lost memories

Fundamentally—although by no means clear at the time—the revolution was not defeated through violence or the imposition of dictatorship. It was ended by consensus and with very large social reforms won by the working class. Despite Portugal’s new leaders arresting hundreds of soldiers and militants from the left (usually only briefly) and denationalising some of the bigger corporations, the end of the revolution did not pave the way for neoliberalism, thanks to the enduring strength of the movement from below.

A national health service was entrenched. Everyone retained free access to school and university. Many cooperatives continued operating. Social rights, including universal suffrage, were extended. Portugal joined the EEC. Conscription was abolished. Rents were capped for many years. Women’s rights were also established—although it took another 32 years to legalise abortion. The revolution ended the colonial wars and led to the independence of Portugal’s colonies in Africa. It inspired the strikes against Francoism in Spain, those combating the military junta in Greece and those fighting apartheid in South Africa

Over subsequent decades, the victors have airbrushed the revolts by working people and their creation of power from below. The ‘official’ narrative focuses on representative democracy, flaunted as part of modernisation. The fact remains, however, that during those 19 months, hundreds of thousands of workers took over their workplaces, land and houses, and tens of thousands of soldiers rebelled.

It was an astonishing period, captured by the sign put up on an exclusive golf club in the rolling hills outside Lisbon: ‘This golf course is now open to everyone—except members.’ Yet this revolutionary turmoil has almost been forgotten, dismissed as a dream. Fifty years on, the carnation revolution should serve as an inspiration for all of us who want to change the world.

This article first appeared in Issue #243 Palestine.

Author

Peter Robinson worked in Portugal in 1975-6 as an organiser for the British International Socialists. He is author of Portugal 1974-75: The Forgotten Dream (Socialist History Society, 1999) and editor of A People’s History of the Portugese Revolution (Pluto, 2019)

Republished from MR Online.

​Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 am she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.
​
She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.

She wonders where she will spend the night.

The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.

“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”

Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage—many are facing suspension and expulsion—that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students—many of those protesting are Jewish—but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.

Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.
Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations—including weapons manufacturers—and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children. They have allowed the abusers—the Zionist state and its supporters—to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue—genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.

Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.

The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department. The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as antisemites, according to student activists.

As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”

The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

But if the students again attempt to erect tents—they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning—it seems certain they will all be arrested.

“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”

Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment.

“Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.”

These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.

Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”

“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”

She starts to cry.

A few minutes after 7 am, police distributed a leaflet to the students erecting tents with the headline “Princeton University Warning and No Trespass Notice.” The leaflet stated that the students were “engaged in conduct on Princeton University property that violates University rules and regulations, poses a threat to the safety and property of others, and disrupts the regular operations of the University: such conduct includes participating in an encampment and/or disrupting a University event.” The leaflet said those who engaged in the “prohibited conduct” would be considered a “Defiant Trespasser under New Jersey criminal law (N.J.S.A. 2C:18-3) and subject to immediate arrest.”

A few seconds later Sivalingam heard a police officer say “Get those two.”

Hassan Sayed, a doctoral student in economics who is of Pakistani descent, was working with Sivalingam to erect one of tents. He was handcuffed. Sivalingam was zip tied so tightly it cut off circulation to her hands. There are dark bruises circling her wrists.

“There was an initial warning from cops about ‘You are trespassing’ or something like that, ‘This is your first warning,’” Sayed says. “It was kind of loud. I didn’t hear too much. Suddenly, hands were thrust behind my back. As this happened, my right arm tensed a bit and they said ‘You are resisting arrest if you do that.’ They put the handcuffs on.”

He was asked by one of the arresting officers if he was a student. When he said he was, they immediately informed him that he was banned from campus.

“No mention of what charges are as far as I could hear,” he says. “I get taken to one car. They pat me down a bit. They ask for my student ID.”

Sayed was placed in the back of a campus police car with Sivalingam, who was in agony from the zip ties. He asked the police to loosen the zip ties on Sivalingam, a process that took several minutes as they had to remove her from the vehicle and the scissors were unable to cut through the plastic. They had to find wire cutters. They were taken to the university’s police station.

Sayed was stripped of his phone, keys, clothes, backpack and AirPods and placed in a holding cell. No one read him his Miranda rights.

He was again told he was banned from the campus.

“Is this an eviction?” he asked the campus police.

The police did not answer.

He asked to call a lawyer. He was told he could call a lawyer when the police were ready.

“They may have mentioned something about trespassing but I don’t remember clearly,” he says. “It certainly was not made salient to me.”

He was told to fill out forms about his mental health and if he was on medication. Then he was informed he was being charged with “defiant trespassing.”

“I say, ‘I’m a student, how is that trespassing? I attend school here,’” he says. “They really don’t seem to have a good answer. I reiterate, asking whether me being banned from campus constitutes eviction, because I live on campus. They just say, ‘ban from campus.’ I said something like that doesn’t answer the question. They say it will all be explained in the letter. I’m like, ‘Who is writing the letter?’ ‘Dean of grad school’ they respond.”

Sayed was driven to his campus housing. The campus police did not let him have his keys. He was given a few minutes to grab items like his phone charger. They locked his apartment door. He, too, is seeking shelter in the Small World Coffee shop.

Sivalingam often returned to Tamil Nadu in southern India, where she was born, for her summer vacations. The poverty and daily struggle of those around her, to survive, she says, was “sobering.”

“The disparity of my life and theirs, how to reconcile how those things exist in the same world,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. “It was always very bizarre to me. I think that’s where a lot of my interest in addressing inequality, in being able to think about people outside of the United States as humans, as people who deserve lives and dignity, comes from.”

She must adjust now to being exiled from campus.

“I gotta find somewhere to sleep,” she says, “tell my parents, but that’s going to be a little bit of a conversation, and find ways to engage in jail support and communications because I can’t be there, but I can continue to mobilize.”

There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against Indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labour movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.

The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.

History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.

Since the explicit Israeli colonisation of historic Palestine in 1948 supported by colonialist and imperialist powers, namely Britain and the US, the Palestinian struggle has become a global cause. Resistance was a natural response to the invasions and incursions better known as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”.

Even before then, as the military occupation entrenched itself at the hands of pre-state Zionist militias and paramilitary units, massacres and forceful expulsion were committed, leading to the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe, of the loss of the Palestinians’ homeland. The 1967 Naksa, or “set back”, followed with the defeat of Arab armies.

Displaced indigenous Palestinians were forced to live in refugee camps in makeshift tent cities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, relying on food hand-outs provided by UNRWA.

At first they assumed that they would one day return to where they had been driven out by force. During the Nakba, some 500 towns and villages were wiped off the map as they were looted. Today, 70 years later, the displaced and dispossessed are still waiting for the implementation of that dream – “the right of return”.

Amid all the developments at the time, a sense of revolt began to emerge among Palestinians to defend their land.

“Fedaeyyeen” – the Arabic term for “freedom fighters” – began to assemble and carry out reprisal attacks against occupying Israeli forces. Some fighters infiltrated the security border fence from neighbouring Arab countries.

Horrendous massacres followed, most notably in 1953, 1955 and 1956, in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed at the command of Ariel Sharon, then a hawkish army general charged with uprooting the Fedaeyyeen and punishing the refugees for supporting them.

Revolutionary spirit in Egypt

Egypt, known then as “The United Arab Republic”, had administered the Gaza Strip between 1948 and 1967 and lost dozens of its soldiers, police and security officers, especially in south Gaza’s Khan Younis and Rafah towns during a triple-pronged offensive against Egyptian forces by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, following Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal.

The spirit of revolution was running high in Egypt under leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the godfather of pan-Arabism, who was known for his anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist stance. Nasser, who dominated Arab politics and the imagination of the Arab masses at the time, extended an invitation to none other than Ernesto Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, to visit Cairo.

It’s not known if visiting Gaza was on Che’s agenda, or if it was Nasser’s idea. But the timing of the visit was of great importance for the Palestinian national movement which was comprised of Fedaeyyeen. The movement drew inspiration from guerrillas in Latin America, Vietnam and Algeria.

The ideology of the Palestinian Fedaeyyeen was mainly left-wing nationalist, socialist or communist, and their proclaimed purpose was to defeat Zionism and liberate Palestine through armed struggle to establish it as “a secular democratic state“.

The idea of liberation gained momentum as Palestinians had never achieved any form of real national independence in their homeland, and a few years later, in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed and led by Ahmad Shukeiri. Yasser Arafat became the PLO’s chairman in 1969 until his death in 2004.

Che Guevara in Gaza

After accepting Nasser’s invitation, Guevara was sent to the region by Cuba’s Fidel Castro on a three-month tour of 14 countries. A one-day visit was dedicated to Gaza which was then under Egyptian rule. Guevara landed in Gaza wearing his dark military fatigues on 18 June 1959 after travelling about 450km from Cairo.

He received a hero’s welcome from the Egyptian de facto governor of Gaza, General-Lieutenant Ahmad Salim, as well as from Palestinian officials and heads of municipalities and many ordinary people.

During his short visit, he toured several Palestinian refugee camps including Al-Buraij camp, where he was welcomed with chants from the Cuban revolution. Cuba went on to welcome the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, making official contact with it in 1965.

One of Che’s goals for the visit was to support Arab and Palestinian national liberation and revolutionary movements against western imperialism and colonisation.

Zulfiqar Swirjo, an official affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stated during a previous interview that his father was there during that historic visit that aimed to share Guevara’s beliefs and revolutionary ideas with Gaza’s fighters. They had wanted to put together a strategic plan for a popular struggle to fight the Israeli forces using guerrilla warfare tactics.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is a small slice of the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea in the southern part of historic Palestine, bordering Egypt to the south-west and Israel to the east and north. At 45km long and between 5 and 12km in width, it has a total area of just 365 square km – around the same size as the city of Bakersfield, California (pop. 380,000).

Today, two-thirds of Gaza’s two million inhabitants are refugees, ethnically cleansed from their original homes.

According to Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, after Guevara’s visit to Gaza, Cuba gave scholarships to Palestinian students, granted citizenship to stranded Palestinians and held many conferences in support of Palestine. And as Palestine has become a symbol of struggle against colonialism, it’s no surprise that India’s first prime minister and anti-British colonialist Jawaharlal Nehru also visited Gaza in 1960 and met with the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), whose presence was to protect the old armistice line between Israel and Egypt.

The Argentinean revolutionary leader was summarily executed by Bolivian forces in October 1967, nearly four months after the “six-day war”, when Gaza was annexed from Egyptian control and came under total Israeli occupation.

Che became an icon of resistance, especially for leftist Palestinian resistance movements such as The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People’s Party.

His legacy endures and, for many Palestinian activists, he remains a source of inspiration, as a popular icon of rebellion against imperialism, colonialism and military occupation.

Despite efforts to quash pro-Palestinian protests on campus, students continue to organise and demand divestment from companies with ties to Israel, as the US witnesses an "Ivy League spring."

For the past week, Columbia University has emerged as one of the latest epicenters of the global struggle to save Gaza from the Axis of Genocide. Israel with full economic, diplomatic and military support of the United States and other Western colonial powers, has been starving, dehydrating and carpet-bombing Gaza for 200 days now.

Inspired by the pain that every free-thinking human being feels at the sight of emaciated and burnt children and families, Columbia students took on big personal risk when taking a stand and building a Gaza Solidarity Encampment in the centre of campus last week.

Their goal: to get the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

After Columbia's president disbanded the protests by calling the police, another encampment has already popped up on campus. In addition to divestment, demonstrations are now calling for the removal of police presence and the reversal of disciplinary action taken against protesters involved in the first encampment.

The enormity of this image: pic.twitter.com/SfuaLlP4dV
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 18, 2024 

​I am a Columbia University alum and fired John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who has joined in, spending time listening and learning from this fearless generation of student fighters. I cut my teeth as a student organiser at Columbia College from 1996 to 2000 and at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) from 2004-2006.

In 1997, we shut down the campus with a giant human circle in support of striking workers on campus who were mistreated and underpaid. The ongoing struggle for more classes on anti-colonial struggles and ethnic studies included a banner drop during graduation, highlighting some of the voices marginalised by Columbia’s core curriculum.

On October 4, 2006 we shut down the racist, anti-immigrant group the Minutemen who were pushing white supremacy and anti-immigrant hysteria on campus.

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment follows a storied history of students standing up for what is right, just like the 1968 generation did in protest of racism against Black America and the US war in Vietnam, in which we dropped 6 million tons of napalm and bombs on the Southeast Asian country from 1962 to 1975.

The Baroness Shafik

At the centre of the struggle for free speech and a free Gaza is the new president of Columbia, Manouche Shafik, who is trying to finish her first year on the job. She justified siccing riot police on peaceful student protestors by saying, "the safety of our community was my top priority and we needed to preserve an environment where everyone could learn in a supportive context."

​Despite mainstream media distortions and lies, there are no documented incidents of hate speech associated with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

Hailing from a background of extreme privilege, Shafik is literally a "Baroness," following her employment with the Bank of England. She has a track record of defending free speech when it comes to white supremacists.

She has long served global elite interests. She sits on the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There is no disguising where she stands on the global division of humanity: she's on the side of the global 0.1 percent.

As former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, the same bank that stole $1 billion dollars in Venezuelan gold reserves at the behest of the US government in 2019.

In an age where identity politics and hypocritical liberal diversity rhetoric dominate the US political scene, the Baroness is seen as a strategic asset to Columbia.

In her testimony before the House of Representatives about rising anti-Semitism concerns on campus last week, Shafik looked comfortable engaging in the charade.

Aware of the consequences of not bowing down to pro-Israel and pro-genocide Republicans and Democrats, like the president of my college Karol Mason, Shafik engaged in the McCarthyite hearings.

Determined not to be taken down like the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, college presidents like Shafik and Mason are willing to scrap academic freedom and our first amendment rights to please powerful Zionist and foreign policy establishment interests.
​
In a recent interview, Rebecca Jordan-Young, a Columbia and Barnard professor, explained the significance of the televised hearings: "What happened at those hearings yesterday should be of grave concern to everybody. What we got was a live performance (of President Shafik) throwing the entire university system under the bus."

Another professor from the college, Nara Milanich, warned: "Antisemitism here is being used as a wedge. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a very different political agenda."

As the cynical circus played out in the nation's capital, students seized the national and international moment to escalate the struggle to halt the genocidal madness raining down on Gaza.

Hundreds of students erected tents on East Lawn of Columbia’s 116th street campus. Student activists reiterated in their speeches and posters: "Stay Focused!" insisting on not allowing anything to distract them from what gave birth to the encampment, the asymmetrical war on Gaza.

Palestine is everywhere

What's happening at Columbia actions has inspired a wave of solidarity protests at Harvard, Yale, the New School in New York, New York University, the University of Michigan and across the world.

On Saturday, student groups led a march against displacement, connecting the 76-year war on Palestine to the evictions that thousands of uptown New York City families have endured at the hands of one of New York City's biggest landlords, Columbia University.

After more than 100 students from Barnard College and Columbia University were arrested at an encampment calling for the school to divest from Israel amid the country's deadly assault on Gaza, similar encampments have begun across the United States. pic.twitter.com/DfK2MXbYx3 — Democracy Now! (@democracynow) April 22, 2024

Columbia students are facing unprecedented threats and repression. In January, former Israeli soldiers sprayed student protestors with a chemical called skunk, resulting in hospitalisations. Shafik has suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace clubs - and is being sued for it.

Meanwhile, the media accuses us of supporting terrorism. An NYPD drone hovered over last week's encampment. Organisers encouraged everyone to wear masks to protect their identity.
​
Private detectives have harassed students. One undercover officer threatened us with his gun.

Has US society stopped to think of the impact of the genocidal violence raining down on Gaza on Palestinian-American students?
​
If your family, community and nation was being dehydrated, starved, blockaded and bombed out of existence, how would that impact your preparation for exams and term papers?

The Columbia administration's response has been to ignore the students (the true protagonists) and resort to the age-old trick of blaming "outside forces."

One-sided mainstream news coverage contains a lot of misinformation about the student protests, going as far as to try to link them to Hamas. There is a fresh and full barrage of mainstream headlines about anti-semitism and the encampment "making it unsafe for Jewish students at Columbia."

​This week, Columbia has gone as far as to cancel in-person classes, creating headlines such as "Jewish students told to leave Columbia after Passover warning." Isolated and despised by humanity, the forces of genocidal Zionism dig their holes ever deeper.

Many faculty members have expressed their dismay at Shafik's crackdown on free speech. The wider movement participated in jail support. All the way from Gaza, the Palestinian resistance has recognised the heroic sacrifices and contributions of the student movement.

"Your people are my people. Our struggles align"

Students have been eager to hear from activists from past generations who stood up at Columbia. One of the protestors from 1968 spoke at a teach-in on the East Lawn over the weekend.

🚨UPDATE: Cornel West has joined the students occupying the West Lawn at Columbia University in support and solidarity with the students arrested in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and the Palestinian struggle!!! pic.twitter.com/hfMOds7Qi0— sebas 🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇵🇬 (@cybersebb) April 18, 2024

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, third party presidential hopeful Dr. Cornel West and faculty who were fired from other universities addressed the encampment. This was in the spirit of the Liberation Classes of 1968, when students organised teach-ins around local and global issues left out of Columbia’s "core curriculum."

On behalf of a generation of student leaders and fighters who came before you, thank you to the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other student organisations who have not stood down in the face of genocidal lies and bombs.

Both of these student groups have been suspended for working to expose and stop the genocide. Their bravery and organisation of this leadership at Columbia has given us all – from Gaza to Harlem – more hope and determination that we can stop the genocidal, colonial zionist war machine.

Stay strong Columbia students! You are not alone! Suspended students, doxed employees, fired professors: We are all in this together. We got your back!

​Martin Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Virtually all areas of philosophy, along with many other disciplines as well, have had to tackle in one form or another the questions he poses, and the insights he provides. His work grasped the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s for most of continental philosophy. It is a tour de force Marxist philosophers must face head on. Simply calling it ‘bourgeois,’ ‘Nazi’, or the expression of the middle-class state of being in post WW1 Germany is not enough. While it is important to situate Heidegger in his proper historical and class context, and while it is essential to show the Nazism and antisemitism he was undoubtedly committed to for a significant period of his life, this is insufficient to defeat the thought of this giant.

Other leftist scholars have already made tremendous inroads in this area. Since at least the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, but especially now with the publication of Richard Wolin’s recent text, Heidegger in Ruins, the intimate connection between Heidegger and Nazism is indisputable – even though many, including those working within his Gesamtausgabe (collected works), have tried to paper over it. Certainly, to borrow an expression Domenico Losurdo uses to describe Nietzsche scholarship, there has pervaded a “hermeneutic of innocence” in Heideggerian scholarship which tries to divorce his work from the essentially political context that embeds it. Its political horizon, its class basis, its connection with Nazism, these are all things any Marxist discussion on Heidegger should include. But we must ask, is this enough to ‘defeat’ Heidegger? If he was simply a ‘Nazi,’ why hasn’t he, like Emmanual Faye suggests, been taken off philosophy shelves and put next to Goebbels?[1]
​
Why have so many leftist scholars in the Global South and East, thinkers aware of Heidegger’s Nazism, turned in various parts of their work to Heidegger for insights? Unlike the tradition of Western Marxism, where the eclecticism is intimately connected to a politics that throws on the support of imperialism a radical veneer, a lot of these scholars are fervent critics of U.S. imperialism and have stood for decades on the side of socialist construction. Why does, for instance, the late Bolivian Marxist, Juan Jose Bautista Segales, find that he can incorporate insights from Heidegger’s critique of modernity into the process of understanding the dimensions of the indigenous struggle for socialism, a struggle that must, necessarily, tarry with the question of capitalist modernity?  Why does the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of the radical, Christian Socialist liberation theology tendency, central to so many socialist and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin American, turn to Heidegger to discuss the question of care in ethics?

In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci reminds us that:

"A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems."[2]

Gramsci would go on to lambast Nikolai Bukharin, in part, for failing to address in his ‘Manual’ the critics of Marxism in their utmost coherence, i.e., for failing to deal with the best bourgeois philosophy and science had to offer, opting instead to obtaining the quick victories one gets when they challenge an opponent of a lower caliber. Gramsci says that while reading Bukharin’s text, “one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear.”[3]

Unfortunately, a similar fatal flaw can be observed in the traditional Marxist-Leninist critiques of Heidegger. Far from engaging with him honestly and comprehensively, we have opted for quick victories based on dismissals of his thought as petty-bourgeois, subjectivist, Nazi, etc. While components of this critique are certainly true, they are not enough – i.e., they are not worthy of proper Marxist-Leninist critique. Yes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin name-called their opponents and spoke of the class positions and subsequent political interests they often spoke from – but in conjunction with this was always a thorough demolishing of their arguments along the kind described by Gramsci previously. Additionally, how these thinkers expressed in their work and concerns a class position was something that was proved, i.e., there was a concrete study of the relationship between the base and superstructure, between the class the thinker represents and the ideas they enunciate. This refined analysis has often been missing in our tradition’s treatment of Heidegger. Far too often conclusions that have to be proven are accepted simply at face value. As R. T. De George, who did an umbrella study of Marxist-Leninist writing on Heidegger up until the mid-1960s, argued,

"The failure of Marxist criticism of Heidegger, as well as of other Western philosophers, is not necessarily that it has been wrong; but rather that most of it has been shallow, polemical, beside the point, and poor Marxism. Marxist criticism is difficult. Marxist-Leninist criticism has become too easy. It would perhaps be too much to ask that Marxists follow Lenin's advice and criticize not in the manner of Feuerbach but in the manner of Hegel, i.e. not by merely rejecting views but by correcting them "deepening, generalizing, and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept". But this presumably is what Marxist and Marxist Leninist philosophy should do."[4]

De George is, of course, not a Marxist. But he is right to call us out on this shortcoming. In doing so he is being a good ideological enemy, an enemy that, to use an obscene American expression, wants us to get our shit together.

​In the 20th century, the best inroads into the Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger would be made by Georg Lukács, who situates him within the irrationalism of the imperialist period in his seminal Destruction of Reason. Here Lukács is correct about what it takes to carry forth this critique in a proper Marxist manner. He writes:

"To reveal [a thinker’s] social genesis and function is of the greatest importance, but in itself by no means sufficient. Granted, the objectivity of progress will suffice correctly to condemn as reactionary an individual phenomenon or orientation. But a really Marxist-Leninist critique of reactionary philosophy cannot permit itself to stop at this. Rather it must show in real terms, in the philosophical material itself, the philosophical falsity and the distortion of basic philosophical questions, the negation of philosophy's achievements and so on… To this extent, an immanent critique is a justified and indeed indispensable element in the portrayal and exposure of reactionary tendencies in philosophy. The classic Marxist authors have constantly used it. Engels, for example, in his Anti-Duhring and Lenin in his Empirio-Criticism. To reject immanent criticism as one element in an overall survey also embracing social genesis and function, class characteristics, exploration of the true nature of society and so on is bound to lead to a philosophical sectarianism, to the attitude that everything which is axiomatic to a conscious Marxist-Leninist is also immediately obvious to his readers…[Therefore, while] the antithesis between the various bourgeois ideologies and the achievements of dialectical and historical materialism is the self-evident foundation of our treatment and critique of the subject-matter, [we must still] prove in factual, philosophical terms the inner incoherence, contradictoriness, etc., of the separate philosophies [as] also unavoidable if one wants to illustrate their reactionary character in a truly concrete way."[5]
​
This is precisely the task that Lukács sets for himself in this monumental text. However, as he tells us, it is a task that cannot possibly be completed in one book, even an 800 page one. The Heidegger section, for instance, is a mere 25 pages. Even shorter is his treatment of Heidegger in Existentialism or Marxism, published a few years after. Nonetheless, it is on the basis of this limited work that a proper Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger can be developed.

​Lukács tells us that with Heidegger phenomenology “turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period.”[6] He performed a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism,” a “transference of purely subjective-idealist positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones.”[7] His “ontological materiality” and claims to concreteness “remained purely declarative,” dominated through and through by irrationalistic arbitrariness and an “epistemological hocus pocus.”[8] Even in the aspects of his thought that are ‘historical’, what is operative, Lukács argues, is the “transformation of real history into a mythified pseudo-history.”[9] In Heidegger the “Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach,” intuitivist and irrationalist though it might have been in its own right, had now “faded completely.”[10] Philosophy’s task was “to keep investigation open by means of questions.”[11] The discipline is turned into a big question rigamarole centered on a question of Being that had already been answered by the discipline more than a century prior in Hegel’ Science of Logic, where it was shown, in its indeterminacy, to be indistinguishable from nothing, impelling us to move beyond pure being into being as coming to be and seizing to be, being as becoming, determinate being, and all the subsequent categories unfolded out of these in the Logic.
​
The context which situates the rise of Heidegger, Lukács writes, is akin to the post-1848 context which saw the rise of Soren Kierkegaard’s romantic individualist agony: “Kierkegaard's philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel's idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy [i.e., Heidegger and et. al.] were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings.”[12] This mood of despair, for Lukács, produced like it had decades prior, an “ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, of anxiety” which “was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers” on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power.[13] It was a “yearning to rescue naked existence from universal collapse.”[14] Philosophically it was marked by an attempt at ‘third ways’ beyond idealism and materialism and rationalism and irrationalism, but in each instance, idealism and irrationalism ultimately showed their dominance.

While his phenomenology and ontology were, in Lukács’s words, little more than “abstractly mythicizing” a “vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask,”[15]it nonetheless provided, he admits, an “often grippingly interesting description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period.”[16] In his phenomenological description of the inauthenticity of everyday existence, pervaded by Verfallensein, a state of falling prey, we come under the “anonymous dominance of das Man” (the one or they).[17] Lukács argues that Heidegger’s detailed description of this fallen state “constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of Being and Time, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book’s broad and profound effect… [It is] here, with the tools of phenomenology, [that] Heidegger [gives] a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the worldview of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years.”[18] While he was fundamentally unable to understand the socio-historical causes that grounded such experience, Lukács holds that the value of his account is seen in the fact that it “provides – on the descriptive level – a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of the post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences.”[19]

Here Heidegger follows to the T the tradition of irrationalism which preceded him and of which he becomes a central figure of in the 20th century. As Lukács writes in Existentialism or Marxism:

"In times of the crisis of imperialism, when everything is unstable, everything is in disarray, when the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to observe, as the next day refutes what seemed indestructible today, it is faced with a choice. It must admit either its own defeat or the defeat of reason. The first path means recognizing your inability to comprehend reality in thought. Here it would be the turn of reason, but it is from this rationality that bourgeois thinking must withdraw. It is impossible to recognize this defeat from a bourgeois standpoint, for that would mean a transition to the camp of socialism. Therefore, at the crossroads, the bourgeois intelligentsia must choose a different path; it must proclaim the collapse of reason."[20]

​While the scope of the work leads Lukács to sometimes move too quick in his critique of Heidegger, his situating of him in the tradition of irrationalism and its rejection of the enlightenment is a thread that must be picked up and developed by Marxist scholarship on Heidegger. The best place I have seen this done is in Domenico Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War, published first in Italian in 1991, and in English a decade after. Here it is lucidly shown how Heidegger and the Nazis inherit the Kreigsideology (War ideology) of the post-WW1 period, rooted in a mythical Gemeinschaft (community) inhibited by an equally dubious notion of fate (Schicksal) and a fetish of death and its proximity as central to authentic life. Reason, which is tied to civilization and society (Gesellschaft), is lambasted for tearing communal bonds and breaking from the community’s destiny.[21] The enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism, which takes the rational kernel of the former to their historical and logical conclusion, are necessarily condemned.[22]
​
The rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment has been a fad in Western academia for decades. Heidegger alone is not to blame. But he is, as a fellow traveler of the tradition of irrationalism, a key voice in the anti-modernity and anti-Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment, although imperfect and filled with contradictions, brought with it the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in as rational creatures, that provides for us the ability to see and fight for progress in history. It represented the thought of the bourgeoisie in its most progressive moment, before it undeniably turns into a force of reaction after the 1848 revolutions. The universalist ideals of the enlightenment have been given concrete content through the various progressive struggles of the last three centuries – from the American revolution to the French to the Haitian and to the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century. Those who have stood against it have been the forces of reaction – those who deny our common humanity in favor of tribalism (usually of a hierarchical and supremacist kind). It has been the reactionary and conservative forces who have historically rejected the use of reason and the notion of progress, since both of these can provide challenges to the ruling order… an order which can become the object of critique through reason, and which can be shown, through an appeal to the progressive dialectical unfolding of history (or, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, through the arch of the moral universe that bends towards justice) to be just a moment in humanity’s development towards greater freedom.

Central to any Marxist critique of Heidegger, then, is also considering how this foundational rejection of the enlightenment – necessary for bourgeois philosophical irrationalism and its turn towards indirect apologetics of the system – takes alternative forms after Heidegger. John Bellamy Foster has done important work in this area, showing how currents dominating contemporary social sciences in Academia like postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, etc. all share a foundation in philosophical irrationalism and its indirect apologetics of the dominant order.[23] Although with certain downfalls, the work of Susan Neiman in Left is Not Woke also does a swell job in showing how the tribalism central to contemporary wokeism is fundamentally rooted in the reactionary, anti-modernist and anti-enlightenment tradition which Heidegger is a central figure of. For all the claims to being ‘woke’, this dominant ideology in the liberal wing of capital is deeply ignorant of the reactionary philosophical foundations underlaying their worldview – a worldview that serves to reinforce the dominant order under the delusion that it is waging an emancipatory attack on it.
​
A Marxist critique of Heidegger, therefore, must also contain an awareness of how the tradition he works through has seeped into the Academic and activist left, often giving its deeply reactionary philosophical foundation a seemingly progressive gloss. For this we must also study the work of our colleague Gabriel Rockhill, who outlines the political economy of knowledge that has facilitated and promoted this eclecticism to counter the genuine communist left.

In sum, while necessary, exposing Heidegger’s Nazism and his thought’s class basis is insufficient to defeating him. As Gramsci and Lukács have argued, we must also beat these monumental figures of contemporary bourgeois thought in the realm of ideas as well – showing how the problems they pose are baseless, or how the response they provide to real problems are insufficient. These are things that must be shown, not just taken axiomatically for granted simply because we understand the Marxist worldview to be the most advanced humanity has given rise to. If in questions of ethics or meta-historical narratives comrades of the left (like the two I previously mentioned) turn to Heidegger, it is not sufficient to just lambast them for taking partial insights from a problematic thinker. We must also inquire into what deficiency is there in our answering – or even asking – of the problem that led them to turn to Heidegger. How can the Marxist worldview extend itself to commenting concretely on every possible topic of intellectual inquiry such that the need to turn to Heidegger, or any other bourgeois thinker, is superfluous for those within our tradition.

This requires an explicit turn away from the Western Marxism accepted in the Academy. This so called ‘Marxism’, imbued with postmodernist sensibilities, cringes at the description of Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. They wish to limit Marxism to the sphere of history and social analysis, rejecting the dialectics of nature and the fruitful insights the dialectical materialist worldview can provide in any sphere of investigation. In China, where Marxism-Leninism has been able to develop relatively peacefully since at least 1949, the tendency is towards the contrary. The more fields the Marxist worldview can be present in the merrier. I would like to conclude with a quote from Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic,

"Marxism is a telescope through which we can clearly see the trends according to which reality develops, and a microscope through which we can see its crucial details. It is a set of night-vision goggles through which we can see light and hope in the darkness, a set of diving goggles through which we can see things at a deeper level, a fluoroscope through which we can see into the nature of the matter beyond the level of appearance, and a megaloscope through which we can make sense of blurred images. Marxism is a reflector through which we can see the truth behind things, a polygonal mirror that enables us to see the diversity and unity of opposites, an asymptotic mirror that allows us to see things near and far with multiple focal points and a monster-revealing mirror in which, if we have sharp eyes, we can see mistakes clearly."[24]

This should help to get us to see Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. A worldview which, as Lenin told the Young Communists in 1921, absorbs and develops upon the “knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”[25] When we are successful in this task, the need for anyone in the camp of the genuine progressive forces to turn to Heidegger or any other bourgeois thinker would be superfluous, since they would find a much more concretely explicated account for their inquiry within the tradition itself… or, at the very least, the tools to do so themselves ready-to-hand (pun intended).

Notes

[1] Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 5
[2] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 433.
[3] Ibid.
[4] R. T. De George, “Heidegger and the Marxists,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 5(4) (1965), 294.
[5] Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), 5-6.
[6] Ibid.,489.
[7] Ibid., 496, 494.
[8] Ibid., 495-6, 493.
[9] Georg Lukács, “Heidegger Redivivus,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive//lukacs/works/1951/heidegger.htm
[10] Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 497.
[11] Ibid. 498.
[12] Ibid. 491.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., 493.
[15] Ibid., 498, 497.
[16] Ibid., 498.
[17] Ibid., 498-9.
[18] Ibid., 500.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Georg Lukács, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1948/bourgeois-philosophy.htm
[21] Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and The Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 15-40.
[22] I am happy to see my friend, Colin Bodayle, recently take this task up. I have known no other Marxist who has studied Heidegger’s work as closely as he has (and in the original German). For more, see the series titled “Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought,” published through the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. Part one is here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/why-the-left-should-reject-heideggers-thought-part-one-the-question-of-being-by-colin-bodayle
[23] John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74(9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/
[24] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 20.
[25] V. I. Lenin, “The Task of the Youth Leagues,” in Collected Works Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 287.

​Watch the ‘Heidegger and the Left’ panel, hosted by the Critical Theory Workshop and the Midwestern Marx Institute, here:

On 18 May the Security Council was seized of a resolution that would have granted UN membership to Palestine. Twelve members of the SC voted in favor of the resolution, while two countries – the UK and Switzerland – abstained. The US vetoed it.[1]

I would have been surprised if the US had voted in favor or abstained.  The voting record at the Security Council documents dozens upon dozens of unjustified vetoes by the US, mostly to shield Israel from being called to account, from being subjected to sanctions as once another Apartheid State, South Africa, was[2].

The intransigent attitude displayed again and again by the United States is contrary to the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, in particular articles 1, 2, 4 and 27.  What to me would seem more urgent would be a resolution to expel Israel from membership in the United Nations, as provided for in Article 6 of the Charter.  But, of course, the US would also veto such a hypothetical resolution.

Nonetheless, I could envision the General Assembly withdrawing the accreditation of the Israeli diplomats at the United Nations.  This is within the GA’s competence and does not require a Security Council resolution, as was the case when the credentials of South African Ambassadors were rejected in the 1970s and 80s because of their Apartheid policies[3].  Rejecting Israeli credentials would be justified, since Israel is guilty not only of Apartheid but also of genocide.

Whereas the Global Majority condemns Israel, three cases are before the International Court of Justice, and several have been submitted to the International Criminal Court, the US persists in its negationism of Israeli crimes and evidently enjoys its exceptionalism in being “one-man out”?

It seems that the US is trapped in its own political and psychological web. The US has lost the capacity to think and act outside the box, it is condemned to committing the same errors and exacerbating the already toxic situation.  Many American observers including myself have indicated that after the US government took the unwise decision to enter into an alliance with Israel, this effectively meant subordinating US interests to those of Israel.  It is and was predictable that situations would arise where the US would not be free to pursue its own priorities, but would be bound to support geopolitically unwise policies, abuse the veto power in the Security Council, and act contrary to the letter and spirit of the UN Charter.

For decades the US has supported patently illegal Israeli measures at an exorbitant cost to the US economy and US prestige in the world stage. The Global majority perceives the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to the peace and security of mankind[4].  US actions in the UN and elsewhere have cemented this perception.

The US and Israel are rightly perceived as dangerous bullies.  There is no love lost for the US and Israel. No doubt, the US alliance with Israel has caused the US to lose authority and credibility in the eyes of the Global Majority, precisely because the US has defended the indefensible, justified the unjustifiable, engaged in apology of genocide.  The US alliance with Israel makes it complicit in the illegal Israeli settler-colonialism, in its Apartheid policies, in all the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel. This complicity triggers civil and penal liability, which in due course will have to be addressed. The International Law Commission’s Draft Code on State responsibility [5] will someday be applied against the United States, and Israel which will owe trillions of dollars to the billions of human beings who have been victims of US imperialism and neo-colonialism.

In the history of the United States, nothing has been as damaging as its “alliance” with a retrograde State that pretends to implement Biblical prophecies and destroy its Arab neighbors.  Three thousand years after the conquest of the “promised land”, Prime Minister Netanyahu is now following the narratives of the book of Joshua and the destruction of the Canaanites[6].  It is not surprising that Netanyahu relies on Biblical stories of the destruction of the people of Amalek by the Israelites[7]. Amid the genocidal excesses committed by Israel on the people of Gaza, Netanyahu quoted from First Samuel 15:3, saying, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. ‘Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’ It is little wonder that the International Court of Justice is now confronted with this statement – one of so many – that illustrate the Israeli “intent” to destroy “in whole or in part” the targeted group.[8]

Although the US and Israeli interests do not converge, there is a dynamic of complicity and one crime begets another.  Friedrich Schiller wrote in his Drama Piccolomini — das ist der Fluch der Bösen Tat, dass sie fortzeugend Böses muss gebären — that is the curse of the evil act, that it will continue to engender further harm[9].   In fact, the US government has gradually become dependent on its “alliance” with Israel, which is more of a one-way road. Notwithstanding the daily efforts of the mainstream media to whitewash Israeli crimes and to give a veneer of legitimacy to the genocide, more and more Americans are coming to understand that “there is something rotten in the state”[10].   In practice, the US government is quasi in the service of Israel and not in the service of the American people.

The United States is caught in abstruse ideologies that escape all rationality. Israel is not only an Apartheid State, it is a neo-colonial State with policies that are incompatible with the UN Charter, the 1949 Geneva Red Cross Conventions, the 1977 Additional Protocols, and with international law in general.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that the American people are essentially disenfranchised, because both political parties are caught in the Israeli web.  Whether you vote Republican or Democrat, you only get candidates that will continue supporting Israel.  Indeed, saying a good word about the right of Palestinians to have their own State, the idea of seeing the Palestinians as human beings entitled to the same human rights as we claim for ourselves, is rejected by the mainstream media.  Whoever supports the Palestinians is ostracised and accused of anti-Semitism.

The American people are prey to the Orwellianism of the New York Times and Washington Post. Whether you vote Republican or Democrat, it is the military-industrial-financial-academic-media-digital complex that rules over us.  Indeed, those who are elected do not govern, and those who do govern are not elected.

Notes.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148731
[2] https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/information
https://sahistory.org.za/dated-event/un-lifts-mandatory-sanctions-against-sa
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/06/archives/south-africa-is-rebuffed-by-un-but-not-expelled-south-africa.html
[4] https://truthout.org/articles/people-worldwide-name-us-as-a-major-threat-to-world-peace-heres-why/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/05/us-threat-democracy-russia-china-global-poll
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/7/un-secretary-general-invokes-article-99-on-gaza
[5] https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_6_2001.pdf
[6] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua%201&version=NIV
[7] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-31/biblical-story-amalek-south-africa-icj-genocide-case-israel/103403552
[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/netanyahu-openly-calls-for-genocide-citing-the-bible-go-attack-the-amalekites/ar-AA1j282g
[9] https://archive.org/details/thepiccolomini06786gut
[10] Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act-I, Scene-IV

Author

​Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18. He is the author of twelve books including “Building a Just World Order” (2021) “Countering Mainstream Narratives” 2022, and “The Human Rights Industry” (Clarity Press, 2021).

Republished from Counterpunch

​At a meeting on cultural inheritance and development held in Beijing, June 2, 2023, President Xi Jinping put forward a holistic and systematic explanation of the distinctive features of Chinese civilization—consistency, originality, unity, inclusiveness, and a peaceful nature. President Xi's profound exposition has granted us a deeper understanding of the laws underlying the development of Chinese civilization by shedding light on its intrinsic characteristics.
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Chinese civilization is distinguished by a remarkable level of consistency, being the sole ancient civilization to endure without interruption and develop as a nation down to the present day. With history in China encompassing a million years of humanity, ten thousand years of culture, and more than five thousand years of civilization, the Chinese nation boasts a distinctive, deep, and wide-ranging civilization and value system. The consistency of Chinese civilization is the outcome of carrying forward our culture by building on past achievements and signifies the high degree of unity defining Chinese civilization both as a whole and in every specific stage.

Chinese civilization is set apart by its outstanding originality, which is based on discarding the outdated in favor of the new, moving in step with the times, and ceaselessly pursuing self-improvement. Originality is the fundamental reason why Chinese civilization has flourished among the civilizations of the world. As a civilization, we have tended to discard the outdated in favor of the new, move with the times, and ceaselessly pursue self-improvement. Moving with the times is in fact a core tenet of our civilization. These three qualities have kept Chinese civilization moving forward in a material, institutional, and cultural sense, allowing it to reach one height after another.

Chinese civilization enjoys remarkable unity, featuring great diversity, internal cohesion, and solidarity. Over its more than 5,000-year history, Chinese civilization has gradually developed the concept of great unity. This principle of governance and institutional design has been widely acknowledged in the political process for thousands of years, greatly contributing to the stability of China as a unified multiethnic country. Within a politically unified framework, Chinese culture, as the collective creation of all China's ethnic groups, is manifested in a colorful and wide range of forms.

Chinese civilization is characterized by exceptional inclusiveness, bringing together a diverse array of elements and maintaining openness to exchanges. Chinese civilization came to maturity in a historical environment featuring the simultaneous existence of numerous ethnicities. The history of Chinese development is thus defined by the convergence of diverse ethnic cultures. The openness and inclusiveness of Chinese civilization enabled the Chinese people readily to absorb the best of what other nations had to offer in both a material and cultural sense at every level. At the same time, the best of traditional Chinese culture spread to neighboring regions and further afield.

Chinese civilization is distinguished by a peaceful nature, advocating concord between oneself and others, advancing harmony through dialogue, promoting coexistence and shared progress, and upholding peace. Chinese civilization advocates a world of harmony based on a moral order and believes in fostering concord between oneself and others while putting others before oneself, embodying the spirit of collectivism. The Chinese have always been a peace-loving people. China does not subscribe to the notion that a country is bound to seek hegemony when it grows in strength. Aggression and hegemony are simply not in the blood of the Chinese people; rather a love of peace is imprinted on our character.

Paul Robeson, speaking of the scientific achievements of the West which have formed the bedrock of its claim to supremacy, posed a question for the 20th century: “having found the key, has Western man—Western bourgeois man—sufficient strength left to turn it in the lock?”1
​
Today, as we witness the spectacular and terrifying unraveling of the West, this question takes on a new urgency. Western epistemology, rooted in white supremacy and domination, has proved to be woefully inadequate at explaining the rapidly changing world, or answering the great moral and ideological questions of our time. Why is there unbridled poverty and homelessness in the richest nations? Why are Western democracies suffering the biggest crises of legitimacy in their history, with ordinary people utterly distrustful of experts in every field? Why has liberal democracy not made freedom real? What is the way forward for humanity, and for knowledge? 

Barely three decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of the “End of History.” He was articulating the thesis of the triumphant post-Cold War Western ruling elite that the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”2 Ironically, the U.S. imperialist state and its allies could only sustain this end point by waging endless wars and coups throughout Asia and Africa, in “defense” of Western standards of “freedom” and “democracy.” It is clear that the logic and assumptions of liberal democracy have failed miserably to explain the world, and the aspirations of the masses. The vast majority of the world’s people, weary of war and striving for a new path forward, will not respect or be controlled by these false standards any longer. They do not see Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump as the enemy, nor Ukraine and Israel as bastions of democracy. 

However, the political decline of the West has not yet translated into a commensurate decline in the influence of Western science and academia, which shares and serves to perpetuate the logic and assumptions of the Western ruling class. The dominant view of science, which is the white view of science, is that science is the concern of a select few “experts,” who must pursue it as a disinterested activity, even as their careers secure their place among the ruling elite. The scientist, in choosing what he works on, must be neutral and unconcerned with moral questions, even as his research is funded by, and often aids, war. And the purpose which science must serve is rarely discussed, even as “academic freedom” is passionately defended as “the bedrock of the American university.”

The question of how we know, or epistemology, is necessarily preceded and informed by the question of why we know, or the purpose of knowledge. As such, scientific inquiry has never been and can never be a purely rational and objective endeavor. It is dishonest to pretend that science can remain neutral in the face of war and the degradation of humanity. Whether it be the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the use today of Artificial Intelligence in ensuring the maximum civilian casualties in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the practice and use of science has always collided with the moral choice. 

The question facing us today is this: how can science, the vanguard of human knowledge and the method to know the truth, be freed from the confines of the compromised scientist? And in what way will humanity—on its path to a new stage in history—bring forth the next revolution in science?

The question of how science relates to society is at least as old as the modern world, although it takes on qualitatively new forms in every epoch. A close look at the history of the philosophical debates that have shaped science as we know it today delineates two epistemological frameworks for science—one compatible with the striving for the broadest measure of freedom for the people, and another which seeks to free the individual scientist from their responsibility to society.

Lenin, Materialism, and PositivismTen years before the October Revolution, Lenin argued that materialism, which is the philosophical framework rooted in the existence of an objective, material reality outside the human mind, was the basis for advancing human knowledge.3 Central to this framework is the historical lesson that human knowledge has always crossed hitherto unknown frontiers—frontiers never completely predicted by existing knowledge, but nevertheless anticipated. Of course, Lenin was defending not a mechanical understanding of a fixed external world, but a dialectical relationship between an evolving external world and human action. He saw knowledge as a prerequisite to human freedom, and his defense of materialism was a revolutionary step to further freedom. In order to make freedom real, epistemology had to be rooted in the historical lesson that human beings are capable of knowing the world and hence acting to change it. 

The materialist framework was opposed and attacked by adherents of the positivist school of philosophy. Positivism argues that Truth is subjective, and the totality of human knowledge is determined by what human beings can observe or sense alone. Positivism as a framework has developed over historical time. In the 18th century, Bishop George Berkeley argued that the idea that the external world exists independent of our perception, is a “manifest contradiction.” He argued, “what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these [objects that we perceive], or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?” He revealed that his philosophical line was ultimately a defense of the Church as the sole arbiter of Truth, when he identified materialism as “the main pillar and support of Skepticism… Atheism and Irreligion.” More than 150 years later, Ernst Mach reinvented Berkelian categories to posit the external world as a “complex of sensations.” Instead of the material world, Mach argued that “sensations,” which lead to the external world, should be the object of scientific study. This was of course a reaction to the revolutionary science of his time, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, which sought to study and understand the concrete, changing world.

Thus, although positivism had different manifestations in different epochs, its uniting essence could be found in its adverse relationship to revolutionary thought of the time. At every stage, positivism was revealed to be a reactionary philosophy that denies the existence of an objective world independent of human experience, thereby obviating the striving to understand the world in its movement. 

Lenin noted that from the positivist framework, “It inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea. Starting from such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the existence of other people besides oneself: it is the purest solipsism.” Lenin’s argument helps explain the worldview from which Europe has historically related to the rest of the world. As long as the European idea of the world was the only one that mattered, Europe did not need to care about the existence of the rest of humanity, who could be enslaved, colonized, and written out of history. 

Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, and the Battle Over the Nature of Reality

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, believed that in order to bring forth new scientific discoveries, the scientist cannot proceed “without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday thinking.”4 Science is then a specialized articulation of humanity’s striving to know itself and the world, reflecting and shaping everyday thinking. 

It was Einstein’s groundbreaking discovery of the wave-particle duality of light that ushered in one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the modern world. The quantum realm, having been discovered, necessitated new theoretical and epistemological formulations, because the laws of classical physics could no longer explain the physical world in its entirety. 

Following Einstein’s new theory of light, Niels Bohr had proposed a new model for subatomic particles, which disobeyed classical laws but verified patterns of light emitted by matter when heated. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg independently advanced two statistical theories to substantiate Bohr’s model, in which the electron existed at all times in a superposition of states. While the transition between states explained the statistical phenomenon of light emissions, these laws said nothing about direct measurement of the electron itself. Eventually, it was Max Born who proposed a physical world-picture emerging from these theories, in terms of probabilities of finding the electron in a given state. The trouble was, measurement always found the electron in a single state. 

Born’s interpretation of statistical laws as definitive ones, necessarily implied that the electron, and by extension material reality itself, was fundamentally indeterminate. This was the Copenhagen interpretation, which was eventually championed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Born, despite their different formulations of the theory itself. Instead of investigating the inconclusive aspects of this new theory, the partial success of quantum mechanics was used to canonize it as the ultimate description of reality. It is only the act of measurement, or observation, that determines reality. An objective Truth does not exist independent of our observations. Thus once again, the debate over the nature of reality was invoked, and positivism found its new heroes in the defenders of this interpretation.

Einstein categorically rejected this interpretation.5,6 He, like Lenin, believed in the existence of an objective world independent of the human mind, that could be known. Our understanding of the natural world surely depends on how we probe it, but the “curve of knowledge” bends towards the most accurate description of objective reality. He considered quantum mechanics to be an incomplete theory because even though it found “external confirmation,” it lacked an “inner perfection”—the harmony and beauty that he saw in the arc of natural science in its movement toward Truth. He refused to accept the Copenhagen interpretation because he saw in it “the end of physics as we know it.” For him, to accept that objective reality didn’t exist was to stop striving to know it. 

The Cold War Capture of Science

The period after the Second World War was ripe with the possibility of solidifying the commitment of science to human freedom. The Soviet Union was admired by scientists the world over for its heroic role in the defeat of fascism and the call for planned scientific and technological development of society. The rising anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa further created conditions for a view of science that was concerned with the uplift of the masses from poverty and the immiseration of war. Scientists embraced their moral responsibility, flocking to the defense of Peace and global disarmament. At the same time, Soviet science made remarkable strides in working out the ramifications of the unresolved epistemological questions brought forth by quantum mechanics.7

This was also the period of the Cold War, and science did not escape the scourge of the anti-communist witch-hunt in America. A carefully planned propaganda campaign launched by the CIA breached all sections of intellectual activity, and a new view of science, separated from questions of politics and ideology, began to take shape in the Western academic establishment. The scientific framework of the Soviet Union was demonized and portrayed as the enemy of “academic freedom” of the individual scientist. With the fall of the Soviet Union, this view of science as a narrow technical pursuit was declared victorious. Peace and hunger were no longer worthy concerns of the scientist, who was encouraged to “shut up and calculate.”

Theoretical physics in particular was completely cut off from the philosophical and moral questions that had thus far been instrumental in shaping its historic arc. With the passing of Albert Einstein, the epistemological battle over the interpretation of quantum mechanics was forgotten, its implications for the nature of reality remaining unresolved. The failure to address this question charted a trajectory for theoretical physics that sought to understand, not the concrete material world, but only an abstraction of it.  

This pathology is perhaps most starkly reflected today in the fate of String Theory. Based on the idea of replacing point-like elementary particles with one-dimensional objects called “strings,” this theory held out hope to unify quantum mechanics with the gravitational force, and thereby furnish a “theory of everything.” After decades of research however, no evidence supporting the existence of strings could be found, and string theorists concluded that four dimensional space-time was too narrow for a description of reality. Peter Woit, in his book Not Even Wrong, says that string theory “required postulating the existence of many extra unobserved dimensions, and by different choices of the properties of these extra dimensions, one could get just about anything one wanted.”8 Once more, one is reminded of Lenin’s assessment of positivism, that “the whole world is but my idea.” What was outstanding, however, was that the theory was not discarded despite the absence of experimental proof. Woit goes on to say, “the term ‘superstring theory’ really refers not to a well-defined theory, but to unrealised hopes that one might exist. As a result, this is a ‘theory’ that makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the whole subject to survive and flourish.” 

What does this view of science have to offer today, especially to the youth who must understand the world in all its complexity, as well as their place and role in it? It tells us that the world cannot be known in any useful way, and hence gives us no way to imagine a new future. It denies the possibility of the yet unknown, including the possibility of revolutionary change. Is science then to be altogether rejected in our search for the way forward? What happens to centuries of progress in human thought which Western science inherited, and yet lost its way?

Science and the Human Being

History is meaningful to the living if it can be used. The history that has shaped science makes one thing clear, that the current crisis in science is rooted in a crisis of epistemology. As such, it cannot be resolved purely within the domain of science. The deep philosophical and moral questions at its heart must be engaged with and answered. Returning to where we began, the question of how we know cannot be separate from the question of why we know, and for whom? 

Science is not separate from society, it assumes the values and contradictions of the society that produces it. W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of modern sociology and the first to scientifically study race in America, wrote, “Science is a great and worthy mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves; one thing there is greater than knowledge, and that [is] the Man who knows.”9 If it is the human being that science serves, then in order to address the crisis in science we must first investigate the relationship of the society that shapes science, to the human being.

How is the human being regarded in American society? We are encouraged to keep him at a safe distance, and only see him through layers of abstraction, e.g. through categories of identity. The ordinary human being does not have the capacity to understand what the expert knows, and hence the expert must speak for him. However, in order to speak for him, it is enough for the scientist to “observe” him and his life-world from the lofty heights of the ivory towers of academia. He does not need to descend to the ground and get his “hands dirty.” Not equipped or even required to know the human being, the scientist is then free to cast doubt on the possibility of knowledge itself, and thereby abdicate his responsibility to the human being.

This lies at the heart of postmodernism, which asserts that Truth is multiple and subjective—it belongs to and is shaped by an individual’s experience and identity, and thus cannot be known by the “other.” Postmodern theories are packaged as radical and progressive, claiming to serve the broadest measure of freedom to the individual in society. However, the freedom they offer is the freedom of the individual from society, and not of society itself. By separating people into increasingly narrow and mutually exclusive categories of experience, this worldview obliterates the possibility of unity, of people coming together to form a consensus about the Truth and social change.

Postmodernism employs language and jargon to obscure the truth, and this tendency has become rather commonplace in science today. Woit, pointing out the similarity between how string theory research in physics and postmodern theories in the humanities are pursued, says, “In both cases, there are practitioners that revel in the difficulty and obscurity of their research, often being overly impressed with themselves because of this. The barriers to understanding that this kind of work entails make it very hard for any outsiders to evaluate what, if anything, has been achieved.” An illuminating example is the Sokal Affair. In 1996, the academic journal Social Text published physicist Alan Sokal’s “hoax” article attacking the legitimacy of science, which mimicked postmodern language and positionalities, but made no scientific contribution or even common sense. Sokal’s intent was "to bury postmodernism,” and the fact that one of the most prestigious postmodern journals in America could not tell his deception apart from a serious work of scholarship, proved the absurdity and obscurantism that pervades postmodern ideas and theories.

Perhaps even worse than the conclusion that there is nothing more to know, is the assertion that it is the human being who doesn’t have the capacity to know. This was the premise of John Horgan’s The End of Science,10 a book which claims that all discoverable knowledge has been discovered, and the limitations on human cognitive ability preclude any further progress. He proposes the concept of an “ironic science” going forward, which cannot produce new knowledge, but takes inspiration from postmodernism “to invent new meanings, ones that challenge received wisdom and provoke further dialogue.” This same worldview forms the basis for the current craze about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), which seeks to replace the human being with the machine, the former having served his limited purpose. The “A.I. revolution” is rooted in the pathetic and sinister hope that the machine can achieve what the human mind, inadequate and stagnated, cannot—produce new knowledge, and hence the next revolution in science.

Now, machines may well be able to do a great many things that human beings cannot, but they cannot think for you. A.I. can at best interpret and consolidate the existing body of human knowledge, but it cannot produce anything new or revolutionary. That task still falls squarely on the shoulders of Man, if he can yet find the courage and tenacity to carry it. However, this requires serious philosophical work. It requires an assessment of the anti-human assumptions on which today’s intellectual activity is based, and the limitations they impose on the human capacity to know and change the world. It also requires the rejection of these assumptions in favor of a new epistemology rooted in the human being, that will realign the purpose of knowledge with the strivings of ordinary people.

King and Baldwin: Towards a New Revolutionary Epistemology

At this point, we will make a bold proposition. Perhaps there is something yet in the revolutionary history of this country that can show us the path forward. America, which declared “the end of history” when it emerged as the principal hegemon of the Western world at the turn of the 21st century, also produced a philosophical and epistemological tradition that may yet take history forward, and that is the Black Radical Tradition. It is in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin that the world of Man, and hence the world of science, may find the key to the future.​

​What has King, a preacher and a Civil Rights leader, got to do with science, one may ask? Everything possibly, if the thesis that science and philosophy are tied at the hip holds muster. King was a philosopher and a revolutionary. Deeply troubled by the suffering and indignity of his people, he embarked on a scientific study of philosophy, seeking the basis for a method of social change. While moved by the best of the European tradition, it was in Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence that King found intellectual and moral satisfaction saying, “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”11
​
King’s touchstone for knowing the world, and the nature of reality, was the life-world of the Black working poor, whom he loved. It was this worldview, rooted in the condition of the human being, that led him to conclude that war was the biggest enemy of the poor, and that the struggle for racial justice in America could not be separated from the struggle for Peace in the world. He asserted that “there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws.”12 He saw clearly that scientific advance without concern for the moral progress of man had led to “guided missiles and misguided men.” For him, non-violence was a revolutionary framework that could forge a new kind of human being. This new human being, by refusing to conform to the standards of an unjust society, could compel society to transform in order to fit him.

James Baldwin, similarly, must be regarded not just as a writer, but as a philosopher and a revolutionary. He explains that the American sense of reality, or lack thereof, is a pathology firmly rooted in the failure of white America to confront its history of slavery—“one of the most obscene adventures in the history of mankind.” Thus, what the white man does not know about the world and the human being, is precisely what he does not know about the Black man—having trapped himself into the necessity of denying the Black man’s humanity in order to justify his enslavement. 

Baldwin’s primary concern is the Human—man’s knowledge of himself leading to knowledge of the world, and how to act in it. His writings on the Civil Rights Movement can be read as a sociological study of human capacity—what produced figures like King, Rev. James Lawson, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Diane Nash? How is it that from the life-world of the descendants of slaves, a great revolution could emerge that threatened to fundamentally alter American society, and bring forth a New American People? 

Baldwin writes, “The rock against which the European notion of the nation-state has crashed is nothing more—and absolutely nothing less—than the question of identity: Who am I? And what am I doing here?”13 He finds the response to this universal question in the Blues, the only original music to ever be produced in America. The Blues are an articulation of a people’s striving to reclaim their captive humanity, to make of their despair and suffering a song, and to use their history and experience to create a unique identity and a personal authority, that rejects every standard of their captor. And this music “begins at the auction block.” 

Is it possible then, that at the auction block, which was “the demolition, by Europe, of all human standards,” was also forged a way to know the human being and the world that might be our salvation? Consider nonviolence, which the great civil rights leader Diane Nash called the greatest invention of the 20th century. Could nonviolence have been invented if Man had not been compelled, at great personal cost, to look white supremacy in the face, and see in its insistence on brute force and domination, the spiritual and moral undoing of Man? Can this not explain why Gandhi’s philosophy and method was forged in the crucible of apartheid South Africa, and why he was able to see that the true meaning of nonviolence would be revealed to the world by the Black Freedom Movement, a prophecy that King brought to fruition?

If it can, then from this wellspring of thought and ideas can emerge a new revolutionary epistemology that articulates the strivings of today’s human being. Centered on the human being, this way of knowing the world will once again create the possibility of liberatory knowledge, and offer answers to the philosophical questions that confront science. However, this is a unique moment. One thing is certain, Asia and Africa will never again be colonized, enslaved and starved for the benefit of Asia’s peninsula, nor will neo-colonization and war be accepted by dark humanity as the birthright of the West for much longer. For the first time in history, the majority of the world’s peoples, and not just Europe, will have to work out the answer for all humanity.

References:

1. Paul Robeson, “Primitives,” 1936 ↩︎
2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, 1989 ↩︎
3. V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908 ↩︎
4. Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” 1936 ↩︎
5. Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine, 1906-1955 ↩︎
6. B.G. Kuznetsov, Albert Einstein, 1965 ↩︎
7. Vladimir A. Fock, “On the interpretation of quantum mechanics” in V.A. Fock – Selected Works: Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, ed. L. D. Faddeev, L. A. Khalfin, and I. V. Komarov, 2004 ↩︎
8. Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, 2006 ↩︎
9. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Galileo Galilei,” 1908 ↩︎
10. John Horgan, The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age, 1996 ↩︎
11. Martin Luther King Jr., “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 1958 ↩︎
12. Martin Luther King Jr., “Rediscovering Lost Values,” 1954 ↩︎
13. James Baldwin, “Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption” ↩︎

GDD 3 Part Three— THE FASCIST DANGER  [part one here, part 2 here]

First, what is fascism? According to THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY it is  ‘’A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.”


Trump, MAGA, and Republicans are often called ‘’fascists.’’ It would seem that, under this definition, that’s not quite the right word. The last thing the MAGA folks/ Republicans are advocating are ‘’stringent government controls’’ of the capitalist economy — it’s just the opposite. We Communists are the ones who advocate that to control and eventually, one fine day, to abolish capitalism.  


As far as ‘’violent suppression of the opposition’’ is concerned, THE PEOPLE’S WORLD (the advocate of Bill of Rights Socialism), maintains that Trump, MAGA, and Republicans are part of the Fascist Danger and quotes approvingly from the Communist leader Dimitrov  ‘’the creation and fortification of a united front, one determined to ‘resist and smash fascist bands’ and motivate government, even a bourgeois one, ‘to adopt measures of defense against fascism.’ As he advocated: ‘Arrest the fascist leaders. Close down their press, confiscate their material resources and the resources of the capitalists who were financing the fascist movement’.’’PW 11-7-2022 


This is certainly PC as far as dealing with fascists is concerned. The PW was lamenting the perceived leniency the January 6, 2021 Capitol rioters were receiving. But we have to be sure that we are dealing with actual fascists and not just crying wolf over the actions of typical American right-wing extremists and racists that appear to be endemic to the US bourgeois version of liberal democracy. There were certainly fascist elements at the Capitol but the majority were seemingly opportunistic rioters and people milling around outside watching. It was definitely a Trump inspired riot but it was too amorphous and ill planned to qualify as an ‘’insurrection.’’  


Marxists have their own definition of ‘’fascism’’ given in the same PW article—‘’Fascism, as described by Dimitrov, is ‘the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital’.’’ It is highly unlikely, if Trump becomes President again since not only the Pentagon as well  as ‘’the deep state’’—i.e., the FBI, CIA, and the intelligence community in general, consider him an incompetent and many states will be under control of the Democrats, more importantly the vast government bureaucracy is hostile to him, that the next four years will see ‘’an open terrorist dictatorship’’ as capitalism is doing just fine without one [so far]. Even the PW recognizes this— ‘’there will likely come a time when the ossified ruling class will be unable to rule in the old way, and when the enlightened ruled masses no longer wish to be ruled in the old way. Should that revolutionary moment arrive, capital may openly resort to fascism to save itself.’’ The CPUSA should be spending its time trying to bring about that mass enlightenment that both major parties are infected with the virus that causes fascism and we need a viable workers party, not telling us Genocide Joe has our backs. 


Anyway, the GDD, plays down Trump and company as the major fascist threat. “Rather, the threat stems from a mass neo-fascist movement organized by the most reactionary sections of the billionaire class. It’s been nurtured over decades, first in the evangelical right’s Moral Majority, then in the Tea Party, and now in the MAGA movement.”


MAGA is just the tip of the iceberg of a mass neo-fascist movement fomented by elements of the “billionaire class (sic).”  Again, it is  a bourgeois, not a Marxist, view of class to view it as based on wealth rather than its relation to the means of production.  So, where does the source of neo-fascism come from? The answer of the GDD is based on the aforementioned PW article. It turns out to be practically every private and public entity listed on any of the stock markets or conducting business of any sort in the country, as well major educational institutions, everything from the local chamber of commerce to the Fortune 500. 


In other words, almost the entire American economy and its supporters are behind, or part of, this faction of the billionaire pseudo-class. Since the overwhelming majority of voters identify with and/or vote for one of the two major parties which are controlled by the ruling class which controls the economy, the whole frigging country logically, willing or unwilling, is part of this neo-fascist movement. It appears that the author(s) of the GDD is too extreme in the description of the fascist threat. There is  a serious neo-fascist movement at work in the country but it will not take over as a result of the 2024 election. We have time to organize against it, but not by advocating electoral support for one of the two leading parties which follow de facto neo-fascist lines of thought. 


The GDD paints a picture of both parties following a bipartisan neo-fascist foreign policy but domestically the GDD sees a difference, but it obfuscates what it is. It’s basically Good Cop versus Bad Cop and all the revisionist BS in the world won’t change the nature of monopoly capitalism’s ruling parties. Good Cop will not (most of the time) use sticks and stones to break your bones, but you are still going to jail. 


Well, let the GDD and its class collaborationist position speak for itself.
As U.S. imperialism strives to adjust to an increasingly multi-polar world, their positions [ the DP & RP] may coincide to some degree on foreign policy, but governing domestically is another issue. Coincidence of position in one arena does not necessarily imply convergence in others. Understanding why positions at times correlate and in other instances diverge is key to learning how to exploit these contradictions in the course of ongoing democratic struggles over policy. And it’s the ongoing struggles over policy that are key to advancing the cause of the working-class and people’s movement. It’s also key to defeating the fascist threat. The role of the Communist Party is to bring these issues forward and organize around them.


 The role of a CP is just the opposite. Here the role is seen as concerning itself with the squabbles between the leaders of the DP and RP over which policies better reflect the interests of the ruling class  and using the contradictions between them to further the ‘’democratic struggle’’ — we will see shortly that this consists in de facto support for the DP and, pari passu, whether we like its or not, support for the genocide in Gaza because, like love and marriage (so they say) with Genocide Joe and the DP, you can’t have one without the other. The CP is supposed to advance the cause of working people and defeat the fascist threat by exploiting the differences between two groups of fascists to see which one will throw us more crumbs from the table. The real role of the CP is to denounce and expose both imperialist parties and have others join with us to build a working class alternative party not muck around with some mythical ‘’all peoples front’’ full of self-styled socialists, progressives and also various centrists and even anti Communist liberals all working at cross purposes with the only common denominator being they are anti-Trump.


Here is what the GDD is worried about. Millions on the left are disgusted with Biden and the DP and their wholehearted support for the apartheid Zionist state and its genocide waged against the people of GAZA. Many people will vote against Biden and the DP or just stay home on Election Day. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t allow their distaste for genocide and the murdering of thousands of innocent and helpless children stand in the way of their civic duty of electing Genocide Joe as president for four more years (inshallah).


Because of all this Genocide stuff ‘’the election’s outcome may now be in serious jeopardy.’’ Yes, indeed it is. ‘’A significant part of the anti-fascist coalition is in danger of splintering off, precipitating a serious crisis.’’ Not to worry. The ‘’anti-fascist coalition’’ is a fiction of the Webbite revisionists. There is no such coalition, i.e., an alliance entered into for joint action e.g., a coalition government, or an alliance of unions. Talk of our coalition or our coalition partners, save for one or two tiny groups, is pure rubbish to give the membership the illusion the leadership is actually doing something. In reality there are many large and small organizations and civil society groups that are, for their own many and manifold reasons, opposed to Trump and the RP and want to see them defeated in November. But they have not created any sort of official coalition to work together for this common end. They may support each other’s marches and demonstrations but that’s about it. Most of them wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you asked them, ‘’Are you in a coalition with the CPUSA?” after you explained to them what the letters CPUSA stood for. Nevertheless, yet again like the Emperor in his new clothes, the leadership will continue to refer to ‘’our’’ coalition. Anyway, the next part of the GDD deals with how the party should meet ‘’the serious jeopardy.’’


Coming up Part 4, and last, WHAT IS TO BE DONE

​Within just 24 hours of the horrific mass shooting in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22nd, which left at least 137 innocent people dead and 60 more critically wounded, US officials blamed the slaughter on ISIS-K, Daesh’s South-Central Asian branch. For many, the attribution’s celerity raised suspicions Washington was seeking to decisively shift Western public and Russian government focus away from the actual culprits - be that Ukraine, and/or Britain, Kiev’s foremost proxy sponsor.
​
Full details of how the four shooters were recruited, directed, armed, and financed, and who by, are yet to emerge. The savage interrogation methods to which they have been, and no doubt continue to be subjected are concerned with prising this and other vital information from them. The killers may end up making false confessions as a result. In any event, they themselves likely have no clue who or what truly sponsored their monstrous actions.

Contrary to their mainstream portrayal, as inspired purely by religious fundamentalism, Daesh are primarily guns for hire. At any given time, they act at the behest of an array of international donors, bound by common interests. Funding, weapons, and orders reach its fighters circuitously, and opaquely. There is almost invariably layer upon layer of cutouts between the perpetrators of an attack claimed by the group, and its ultimate orchestrators and financiers.

Given ISIS-K is currently arrayed against China, Iran, and Russia - in other words, the US Empire’s primary adversaries - it is incumbent to revisit Daesh’s origins. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere just over a decade ago, before dominating mainstream media headlines and Western public consciousness for several years before vanishing, at one stage the group occupied vast swaths of Iraqi and Syrian territory, declaring an “Islamic State”, which issued its own currency, passports, and vehicle registration plates.

Devastating military interventions independently launched by the US and Russia wiped out that demonic construct in 2017. The CIA and MI6 were no doubt immensely relieved. After all, extremely awkward questions about how Daesh were comprehensively extinguished. As we shall see, the terror group and its caliphate did not emerge in the manner of lightning on a dark night, but due to dedicated, determined policy hatched in London and Washington, implemented by their spying agencies.

‘Continuingly Hostile’RAND is a highly influential, Washington DC-headquartered “think tank”. Bankrolled to the tune of almost $100 million annually by the Pentagon and other US government entities, it regularly disseminates recommendations on national security, foreign affairs, military strategy, and covert and overt actions overseas. These pronouncements are more often than not subsequently adopted as policy. 

For example, a July 2016 RAND paper on the prospect of “war with China” forecast a need to fill Eastern Europe with US soldiers in advance of a “hot” conflict with Beijing, as Russia would undoubtedly side with its neighbour and ally in such a dispute. It was therefore necessary to tie down Moscow’s forces at its borders. Six months later, scores of NATO troops duly arrived in the region, ostensibly to counter “Russian aggression”. 

Similarly, in April 2019 RAND published Extending Russia. It set out “a range of possible means” to “bait Russia into overextending itself,” so as to “undermine the regime’s stability.” These methods included; providing lethal aid to Ukraine; increasing US support for the Syrian rebels; promoting “regime change in Belarus”; exploiting “tensions” in the Caucasus; neutralising “Russian influence in Central Asia” and Moldova. Most of that came to pass thereafter.

In this context, RAND’s November 2008 Unfolding The Long War makes for disquieting reading. It explored ways the US Global War on Terror could be prosecuted once coalition forces formally left Iraq, under the terms of a withdrawal agreement inked by Baghdad and Washington that same month. This development by definition threatened Anglo dominion over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, which would remain “a strategic priority” when the occupation was officially over. 

“This priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war,” RAND declared. The think tank went on to propose a “divide and rule” strategy to maintain US hegemony in Iraq, despite the power vacuum created by withdrawal. Under its auspices, Washington would exploit “fault lines between [Iraq’s] various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts”, while “supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran”:

“This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces…The US and its local allies could use nationalist jihadists to launch proxy campaigns to discredit transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace…This would be an inexpensive way of buying time…until the US can return its full attention to the [region]. US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict…by taking the side of conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”

‘Great Danger’So it was that the CIA and MI6 began supporting “nationalist jihadists” throughout West Asia. The next year, Bashar Assad rejected a Qatari proposal to route Doha’s vast gas reserves directly to Europe, via a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometre-long pipeline spanning Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. As extensively documented by WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables, US, Israeli and Saudi intelligence immediately decided to overthrow Assad by fomenting a local rebellion, and started financing opposition groups for the purpose.

This effort became turbocharged in October 2011, with MI6 redirecting weapons and extremist fighters from Libya to Syria, in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s televised murder. The CIA oversaw that operation, using the British as an arm’s length cutout to avoid notifying Congress of its machinations. Only in June 2013, with then-President Barack Obama’s official authorisation, did the Agency’s cloak-and-dagger connivances in Damascus become formalised - and later admitted - under the title “Timber Sycamore”.

At this time, Western officials universally referred to their Syrian proxies as “moderate rebels”. Yet, Washington was well-aware its surrogates were dangerous extremists, seeking to carve a fundamentalist caliphate out of the territory they occupied. An August 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report released under Freedom of Information laws observes that events in Baghdad were “taking a clear sectarian direction,” with radical Salafist groups “the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

These factions included Al Qaeda’s Iraqi wing (AQI), and its umbrella offshoot, Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The pair went on to form Daesh, a prospect the DIA report not only predicted, but seemingly endorsed:

“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria…This is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime…ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create great danger.”

Despite such grave concerns, the CIA inexorably dispatched unaccountably vast shipments of weapons and money to Syria’s “moderate rebels”, well-knowing this “aid” would almost inevitably end up in Daesh’s hands. Moreover, Britain concurrently ran secret programs costing millions to train opposition paramilitaries in the art of killing, while providing medical assistance to wounded jihadists. London also donated multiple ambulances, purchased from Qatar, to armed groups in the country.

Leaked documents indicate the risk of equipment and trained personnel from these efforts being lost to Al-Nusra, Daesh, and other extremist groups in West Asia was judged unavoidably “high” by British intelligence. Yet, there was no concomitant strategy for countering this hazard at all, and the illicit programs continued apace. Almost as if training and arming Daesh was precisely the desired outcome.

Author

Kit Klarenberg, Investigative journalist.

Republished from Al Mayadeen.

​United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference,

“Decolonization and the Fight Against Imperialism”.

April 5 – April 7, 2024

The recent 2024 United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference, brought together an international group of activists from member organizations who are mobilizing against imperialism, racism, and neo-liberal policies around the world.

​What did people say at the UNAC? They said: “Stop the wars at home and abroad.” The conference spent a weekend talking about war - a war waged by capitalists, racists, and imperialists against humanity.

These people are the modern-day class descendants of those who had ravaged the continent, themselves, for hundreds of years. Here in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest public execution in US history took place December 26, 1862, during which 38 Lakota men were hanged.

They were killed for resisting the genocide against their people in the so-called Lakota War. Outside the window of the conference’s venue, the Mississippi River is in full view, flowing all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Mississippi was one of the largest means of transit in the domestic, internal slave trade, as human beings were sold along this route in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Everything that was discussed over this weekend has its origins in these stories of stolen land, stolen human beings, and wars against humanity.

More recently, it was here in Minnesota in 2020 that a man named George Floyd was murdered by the police. His killing sparked the mobilization of activists across the country and around the world!

The capitalists, the imperialists, and the racists are in the process of killing all life on the planet with money forced out of our hands in the form of government subsidies. A few days the media featured a headline, “Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated.” Every month in the past year has been the warmest month since records were kept. March 2024 was the warmest March in history, and February 2024 was the hottest in history, and so on. Of course, a country with 800 military bases around the world plays a primary role. What quantity of fossil fuels is needed to fly jets, operate ships, and run military bases? We talked about that issue here at this conference.

Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was also on the agenda. Life in the belly of the beast is more apparent than ever looking at Gaza, as the same Joe Biden who says he is defending democracy has given Tel Aviv a blank check to kill thousands of people with the help and support of Congress.

Even after tens of thousands of dead civilians, including aid workers like those of the World Central Kitchen, Israel will continue to receive weapons. And their deaths would not even have been brought to the public’s attention without grassroots resistance.

To their great credit, the Palestinian people have shown us their dead – no trigger warnings whatsoever. They have shown the world these victims and accelerated the political crisis necessary to end these war crimes.

UNAC understands the importance of bringing people together from all over this country and the world, as exemplified by the two ambassadors we had for the conference, from Nicaragua and the Western Sahara, the Polisario front.

The US government and its allies in corporate media hide the rest of the world from us. The UNAC attempts to do the opposite and bring the information we need to see to light. Specifically, the same people who fight against the sovereignty of African nations and who want to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution are the same people who build police-state cities.

The same people who speak of “collateral damage” committed by the IDF are the same people who dismiss the around 1,000 police killings that take place in the country as mistakes. Yes, 1,000, an average of 3 people have been killed every day by police in the US for at least the past 5 years.

Everyone who attended the conference knows that they are a revolutionary. The word revolutionary used to scare me. I felt it was a word I could not live up to. But sharing information about these issues and working on them - these are revolutionary acts. By taking part in UNAC member organizations, we know who our enemies are and we know that wishful thinking reformism is a road to failure. Gatherings like this give us renewed focus and concentrate our efforts.​

​It is also important to acknowledge what we are doing ourselves and for one another when we come together like this. The ruling capitalist class wants us to be atomized, to be separate, to feel estranged from one another. We’re always told nobody wants to listen to us – that nobody believes what we believe. Sometimes when attempting to engage with people it can be difficult, especially for those who are in denial or are susceptible to propaganda. This can be very frustrating, but the worst thing we can do is to believe that we are alone when we’re not.

Millions around the world do not want the public’s resources to be used for war. They know that their needs aren’t being met precisely because of the violence of war-mongers and the greed of profit-grubbing capitalists.

People know that they are not living well. They know they are struggling. The worst thing we can do is to think that we are special people in a unique bubble. There are plenty of people who understand what we have been talking about and others who are desperate to hear from us, which is why they marginalize and censor us. They know that people do want to hear what we say. 

So, I will close by saying, “Power to the people!” and by calling on the European Appeal to the World community, the UN, the BRICS Alliance, the multipolar World, and the Global South to convene a Global Peace Conference!

​The current conflicts in the world tend to escalate and expand geographically. The countries of the capitalist/imperialist center (USA, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, France, the FRG, in general, the EU) are participating in these wars.

The essence of the escalation and expansion of these conflicts (Ukraine-Russia, Palestine-Israel, Yemen) is an attempt to overcome stagnation in the imperialist world, revive the economy of global capitalism as a whole, and in particular to bring super-profits to the main arms manufacturers – the USA, Great Britain, France and the EU as a whole.

Also, when employing modern weapons systems in conflict zones, highly qualified personnel specialists for the maintenance of such machines are necessary. This applies primarily to personnel who manage and operate air defense systems, missile defense systems, and missile weapons. Thus, many local personnel in Ukraine cannot properly operate the latest Western weapons systems, which are different from Soviet weapons. Due to this difference, there is a need to perform service to these systems by representatives of the supplying countries, sometimes with whole crews.

In the course of the Ukraine conflict, personnel working with new Western weapons have become legitimate and priority targets for the influence of opponents of the Kiev authorities. It should also be emphasized that by attracting the latest weapons and trained personnel from the weapons-supplying countries, the Kiev regime is not able to ensure the safety of these personnel.

It is already quite apparent that not only volunteers or mercenaries but also active officers (and maybe soldiers and officers) of the NATO armies and civilian specialists of weapons companies are among the employees of the latest weapons systems being sent to Ukraine. Therefore, these persons were sent to the conflict zone solely out of their official duty.

On January 16 of this year, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported an attack on the temporary transfer points of the foreign military in Kharkov, in which 60 people were killed, presumably mostly French. This tragic example shows the full extent of the irresponsibility not only of the Kiev authorities but also of the French authorities, who send their citizens to the conflict zone because of the excess profits of arms corporations. The French leadership is also trying to deny these facts.

Not only mercenaries, but also personnel and civilian experts from the USA, Great Britain, Germany, and other EU countries could have just as easily stood in the place of the dead French.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent statement calling for the deployment of troops from European countries to the conflict zone in Ukraine is extremely alarming, as expressed by the French ruling circles' intention to draw their citizens into the fire of the conflict and thus resolve part of France’s internal contradictions.

​In this regard, we, the peace-loving peoples of the world, turn to the UN, the European Parliament, the US Congress, the parliaments of the EU, and the United Kingdom to call for:

A.  Immediate and unconditional ceasefires in the existing conflict zones – Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen!

B.  Stop the practice of sending soldiers and civilian specialists from the USA, France, Great Britain, Germany, and other EU countries to conflict areas to generate the super profits of large arms manufacturers!

C.  Stop arms deliveries to Israel and Ukraine from the EU! Europe should not be dragged into a spiral of conflict, sacrificing its citizens for the benefit of partners from abroad!

D.  To achieve a comprehensive peace, a Global Peace Conference should be convened as soon as possible!

​Author

Michael Rotenshtern
 
Republished from Revolution Report