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: Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives April 2024
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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 Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 Understanding the Laws Underlying the Development of Chinese Civilization. By: Qiu PingRead NowAt 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. 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. Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 Science and Freedom: Toward a New Revolutionary Epistemology. By: Sambarta Chatterjee and Purba ChatterjeeRead NowPaul 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:
Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 ​ON THE GENERAL DISCUSSION DOCUMENT FOR THE CPUSA’S 2024 NATIONAL CONVENTION. PART THREE: THE FASCIST DANGER. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowGDD 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 Author Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Tom is the Counseling Director for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022), Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism (2022), The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: Friedrich Engels on G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach (2023), On Lenin's Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (2023), and Early Christianity and Marxism (2024) all of which can be purchased in the Midwestern Marx Institute book store HERE. Archives April 2024 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. Archives April 2024 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! 4/21/2024 Totalitarianism: On Liberalism's Wrongful Equating of Stalin and Hitler. By: Marc-Antoine DupuisRead NowThe Soviet Union will be accused of many evils by the West. The author of "The Gulag Archipelago," Solzhenitsyn, even going as far as accusing the USSR of having killed 110 million people (Le Monde 1976). This is an exaggerated case but symptomatic of Cold War propaganda. One of the most well-known discourses stemming from the Cold War is the comparison between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin: they are totalitarian twins. Popularized by Arendt (1907-1975), she identifies Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR as the only two totalitarian regimes. More precisely, Germany after 1938, and the USSR in the 1930s (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 56-57). In "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), Arendt describes the typology of totalitarianism. Her methodology is derived from Montesquieu (Ibid: 16 and 28.). The latter designates three types of regimes: the Republic, the Monarchy, and Despotism. Here is his definition of despotism: "(...) in despotic rule, one person, without law or rule, drives everything by his will and whims." (Montesquieu 2019 [1748]: 70). This regime is characterized notably by the imposition of terror, fear (Ibid: 51). For Arendt, the terms totalitarian and despotic are almost similar: "The proximity between totalitarian governments and despotic regimes is quite evident and extends to almost all areas." (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 48). The totalitarian regime differs from the despotic regime in that, while the despotic regime is without law or rule, the totalitarian regime obeys the great Laws of history and any opposition to progress, justified by these great laws (historical materialism, racism, etc.), will be eliminated. (Ibid 41-42). The aim here is not to debate whether, firstly, the term totalitarian is relevant to describe a political regime and whether, secondly, the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian regime. In fact, the question is whether the comparison between Hitler and Stalin, made under the banner of totalitarianism, is pertinent. The thesis is that, as described by Arendt and as propagated during the Cold War, this comparison is not relevant. Among other reasons, because this term is biased by Cold War propaganda, the Nazi regime is, in many respects, much closer to the American and British regimes, Nazi extermination camps are far from comparable to Soviet gulags, and, far from being a homogeneous bloc, the Soviet Communist Party was a place of numerous heterogeneous debates and did not have the technical means to impose a totalitarian regime. The Cold War The use of the term totalitarianism does not specifically come from Arendt. Before her, authors like Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Adorno (1903-1969) speak of totalitarianism to draw parallels between the Third Reich and the extreme violence of Western capitalist countries towards colonies and the poorest within the metropolises (Losurdo 2004: 115-116). Simone Weil (1909-1943) will compare Nazi Germany to the USSR, but will draw more comparisons between the Third Reich and colonial empires (Ibid). According to Weil, the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) is already marked by a proto-totalitarianism, due to its "reckless and unscrupulous expansionism" (Ibid: 116). It is necessary to first understand that Arendt's typology of totalitarianism spans three works. In the first two volumes, she includes countries like France, due to its antisemitism, and England for its colonial empire, or denounces the totalitarian practices of Israel towards Arab populations in 1948 (Losurdo 2004: 118-119). It is only in the third volume that she draws a comparison between the USSR and Nazi Germany, published at the beginning of the Cold War. Thus, countries like Mussolini's fascist Italy (1922-1943), which even claimed to be totalitarian, will not be considered totalitarian regimes, nor will Franco's Spain (1936-1975) or Salazar's Portugal (1932-1968) (Ibid: 119). Two of these countries, Portugal under Salazar and Italy, will join NATO, whose main goal is to defend against the USSR. For Arendt, these regimes become "only" single-party dictatorships (Ibid: 124). As she indicates in "The Origins of Totalitarianism": "Neither Lenin nor Mussolini were totalitarian dictators, and they did not even know what totalitarianism really meant" (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 53). Thus, after 1951 and the beginning of the Cold War, criticisms of Western countries ceased, and the only "politically correct" thesis became the one that targeted only the Third Reich and the USSR (Losurdo 2004: 119). In essence, for Western leaders: "(...) the ideological goal was to equate Stalin and Hitler, even presenting them as 'twin monsters'." (Losurdo 2020: 156). In essence, far from being neutral, this narrative served well during the Cold War to equate Stalin and Hitler, rejecting any other regime that could have fit into the totalitarian category. The Hitlerian colonial project and the complicity of the West. In 1953, Arendt describes the world as "The struggle between the free world and the totalitarian world" [emphasis added] (Arendt 2018 [1953]: 87). But what exactly is the free world? Let's first recall that the United States still operates under apartheid, and France still holds a large number of colonies, and fights, or will fight, to keep them. This so-called "free" world actually has strong ties to Hitler's pre-war regime. Already in Mein Kampf, Hitler regards the United States, a country of white race with "unprecedented inner strength" (Losurdo 2010). In fact, Hitler's colonial project is rather simple, aiming to replicate in the East what the United States did in the West (Losurdo: 2004). The American Indians will be compared to the Slavs of Eastern Europe, a region which, for the Nazis, becomes the new Wild West (Ibid). And American colonization served as a motif to justify Nazi colonization in the East (Whitman 2017: 9). This comparison is evident from the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Indeed, for Hitler, the United States is a "healthily racist" country and serves as a model for the implementation of laws (Whitman 2017: 2). Nazi leaders visiting New York during the New Deal era saw it as a country of white supremacy (Ibid: 28). Many Americans traveled to Germany after 1933 on "study trips and ideological pilgrimages" (Losurdo 2004). More than just an ideological connection, there was even real complicity between the West and Nazi Germany. For the British, a division of spheres of influence between their empire and the Third Reich was considered a reasonable proposal (Shypley 2020: 155). British and Canadian interests encouraged Hitler's expansion project to the East, as long as it did not interfere with their affairs (Ibid: 156-157). When Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King (1926-1948) visited Hitler in 1937, he praised him, especially for his legal repression of communism (Ibid: 155). It is also worth noting that the British, French, Americans, and Japanese intervened in the USSR after the revolution, until 1922, to support the White Army. Thus, nearly 3000 Canadians were sent to counter the Bolsheviks (Ibid: 117). Anticommunism was therefore a common factor between fascism and liberal democracies. And as soon as these fascists came to power, they sabotaged labor rights and privatized many public enterprises, to the detriment of German and Italian workers (Parenti 1997: 7). In fact, it was to preserve capitalist interests that the British (and Canadians) fought against the Boers in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902 (Ibid: 110). As for the First World War, it was primarily a fight between colonial empires, to see who would take the largest share of the cake (Ibid: 115), at the expense of colonized peoples. It was for these same interests that Americans and Canadians supported right-wing coups in South America or Japanese fascism (Ibid: 132). During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Western countries simply turned a blind eye, hoping that the socialists would not take power (Ibid: 146-147). Thus: "We must reconcile with a difficult-to-digest fact: fascism was never ideologically far from the positions of the so-called Western democracies" (Shypley 2020: 149). The elimination of the individual for progress among the English and Americans. In Nazi Germany, Hitler would use the infamous death camps in his Final Solution as early as 1941. Among others, nearly six million Jews (including 1.3 million Soviet Jews), about six million Soviet civilians, and three million Soviet prisoners of war would be killed in this campaign [1]. The Eastern Front alone would see approximately 40 million casualties out of the 70 to 85 million deaths of the Second World War [2]. A colossal toll for what was essentially a colonial expansion project. For Arendt, a key element of totalitarianism is the elimination of the individual in favor of progress and the grand Laws of History: any hindrance must be crushed (Arendt 2018 [1951: 71-73). Thus, Stalin and Hitler are equated because both the Soviet leader and the führer used extermination methods to achieve their goals (Ibid: 41-42). However, thanks in part to archives, we know that the gulags have nothing to do with Nazi extermination camps, which have more in common with Western practices. Let's first examine the case of the United States and the British Empire. Firstly, if the concept of totalitarianism is to be adequate, it must be able to explain the use of concentration camps elsewhere than in Nazi Germany, such as those used by Europe in the colonies (Losurdo 2004: 142). Often it is non-Western researchers who have compared the treatment of colonial peoples to the genocidal practices of the Third Reich, rather than to the Soviet Union: for example, the deportation of indigenous peoples under Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt's attitude toward non-Whites, or England's treatment of the Irish, which will be similar to the treatment that indigenous peoples will undergo (Losurdo 2020: 156). Let's go back to the United States, which, as a reminder, is an inspiration for Hitler. For their expansion to the West, a recent estimate puts the number of deaths caused by the "American Holocaust" at 13 million (Smith 2017: 13). An expansion also marked by the annexation of part of Mexico, French and Russian possessions, and distant islands such as Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (where orders were given to kill all those over ten years old) (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 15). After the Second World War, 2 million North Koreans, 3 million Vietnamese, nearly 500,000 Cambodians, 1.5 million Angolans, or 1 million Mozambicans would be killed by Americans (Parenti 1997: 25). It is also nearly 500,000 to 1 million communists killed in the Philippines between 1965 and 1966 by the regime supported by the CIA (Vann 2021). The wars against terrorism, after September 11, would cause nearly 4.5 million casualties (Berger 2023): unpopular wars and often without international support (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 64). In fact, the United States acts as a godfather: "The United States cannot tolerate any country, regardless of its size, successfully challenging it." (Ibid: 65). Examples abound where the United States eliminates individuals for the advancement of its interests, yet it is not classified as a totalitarian regime. As for the British, one need only look at the horrors committed in India. Simply through Churchill's policies, in 1943, nearly 3 million Indians died in the Bengal famine (Safi 2019). Taking into account the excess mortality in India between 1820 and 1920, compared to its pre-colonial period, the number of victims rises to nearly 165 million people. (Sullivan and Heckel: 2023). In reality, even if this does not represent the number of direct deaths, which is rather estimated at tens of millions of people (Ibid), it is an interesting indicator. The British simply deindustrialized India and pillaged its wealth, regardless of the number of victims generated by this process, much like they imposed, at gunpoint, the opium trade in China (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 69). They eliminated individuals for progress, but are not classified as totalitarian regimes. The USSR: the Gulags and the Purges Now let's move on to the Soviet Union, which is supposed to be equivalent to the Third Reich. Fundamentally, the Gulags and the Nazi extermination camps had nothing in common. The opening of archives after the fall of the USSR allows us to observe some important elements about the Gulags. At its peak, about 3 million people were incarcerated in the USSR, for a population of 164 million people. Approximately 1.5 million people died in these camps, more than half of them between 1941 and 1943 during the German invasion. In fact, during this invasion, the Soviet government created a special food fund for the Gulags, and the conditions of the prisoners improved as the war turned in favor of the Soviets. Far from being a tool to eliminate the bourgeoisie, the majority of detainees were there for non-political reasons and with sentences of less than five years. And in the Gulags, at least until 1937, most deaths occurred mainly due to malnutrition and poor organization: "(...) it was not the intention of homicide that horrors were caused: it is a significant example of how things can go wrong due to lack of adequate planning" (Losurdo 2020: 130). Unlike Nazi camps, there was no systematic extermination, no gas chambers or crematoriums, and the majority of prisoners were reintegrated into society. (Parenti 1997 : 79). However, these places remained prisons, with very difficult conditions and where numerous abuses against prisoners took place. It is important to place these camps, inherited from tsarist Russia, in their context. Unfortunately, Soviet Russia did not have the privilege of being a "normal" state: there was always a danger, a state of emergency. We have noted the Allied invasion, from 1918 to 1922, after the Revolution, in a country devastated by the First World War. There was also the war against the Kulaks, the threat from Japan and Germany from the 1930s, or the Trotskyist front which called for a Second revolution just before the Nazi invasion. The German threat should not be taken lightly: the Third Reich openly called for the "Germanization" of Eastern Europe and the enslavement of its millions of inhabitants, with the complicity of the Western powers. There was also the need to industrialize the country, under penalty of death. Joseph Stalin declared in 1931, ten years before the German invasion: "Lenin said on the eve of October: 'Either death or catching up with and surpassing the advanced capitalist countries.' We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed." Far from being a homogeneous bloc, the 1930s in the USSR and within the party were marked by immense chaos at the administrative level: "If the Soviet government was a dictatorship, or tried to be, it certainly was not totalitarian" (Getty 2009 [1985]: 198). At the local level, the authorities were marked by disastrous incompetence, and Moscow sought more to know "what exactly was happening" than to impose a totalitarian rule. Stalin's role was that of an executor: to intervene occasionally, to correct certain policies, to consult experts, etc. It is in this confused, chaotic Soviet Union, threatened from the outside, that the Moscow Trials took place, where 681,000 people were executed. These purges were not the result of Stalin's own planning, but the result of this chaotic bureaucracy, internal party rivalries, the incompetence of certain politicians, etc. (Getty 2009 [1985]: 205-206). Stalin "... was an executive and reality forced him to delegate most of the authority to subordinates, who had their own opinions, interests, and clienteles" (Ibid). This is an extremely large number of individuals, and the authoritarian character of the Soviet regime should not be dismissed. However, these facts call into question Arendt's narrative that Stalin succeeded in rising to power after a fierce struggle against the peasants, and then against his political opponents. If the elimination of these individuals constitutes a criterion for placing the USSR in the category of totalitarian regimes, then we must include the United States and the British Empire. *This article was translated from French by the author using Chat GPT. Monographs and periodical articles Arendt, H. (2018 [1951]. La nature du totalitarisme, dans Idem, La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (11-84), Paris : Éditions Payot. Arendt, H. (2018 [1953]. Religion et politique, in , La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (87-140), Paris : Éditions Payot. Chomsky, N. et Prashad, V. (2024). Le retrait : La fragilité de la puissance des États-Unis : Irak, Libye, Afghanistan. Montréal : Lux éditeur. Getty, J. A. (2009 [1985]). Origins of the Great Purges : The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge University Press. Getty, A. J, Rittersporn, G. T. et Zemskov, V. K. (1993). Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years : A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. The American Historical Review, 98(4), 1017-1049. Losurdo, D. (2004). Pour une critique de la catégorie de totalitarisme, Actuel Marx, 1(35), 115-147. Losurdo, D. (2020). Stalin : The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo, D. (2010). The International Origins of Nazism. Montesquieu (2019 [1748]). De l’esprit des lois: Anthologie. Paris : Flammarion. Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and Reds : Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco : City Lights Books. SHIPLEY, Tyler A. (2020). Canada in the World. Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, Ottawa : Fernwood Publishing. Smith, D. M. (2017). Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present. Sullivan, D. et Heckel, J. (2023). Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World Development 161(Janvier 2023). Whitman (2017). Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law New Jersey : Princeton University Press. Web pages American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front » https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#. Berger, M. (15 may 2023). Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terror-911-deaths-afghanistan-iraq/ Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution Le Monde. (23 march 1976). « Soljenitsyne estime que les Espagnols vivent dans la " liberté la plus absolue. ». https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1976/03/23/soljenitsyne-estime-que-les-espagnols-vivent-dans-la-liberte-la-plus-absolue_2961304_1819218.html Neygebauer, J. (18 february 2023) «Rattraper et dépasser»: le rôle de l’Allemagne dans l’industrialisation soviétique des années 1930, Russia Beyond, https://fr.rbth.com/histoire/89324-industrialisation-urss-aide-allemagne Safi, M. (29 march 2019). Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study. Vann, M. G. (23 january 2021). The True Story of Indonesia’s US-Backed Anti-Communist Bloodbath. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/indonesia-anti-communist-mass-murder-genocide [1] Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution [2] American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front » https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#. Author Marc-Antoine Dupuis, political scientist at the University of Québec in Montréal, Canada. Archives April 2024 Traditional societies usually had restrictions to prevent self-support land from being alienated outside of the family or clan. By holding that the essence of private property is its ability to be sold or forfeited irreversibly, Roman law removed the archaic checks to foreclosure that prevented property from being concentrated in the hands of the few. This Roman concept of property is essentially creditor-oriented, and quickly became predatory. Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the wealthiest and most aggressive families grabbed such land for themselves in violation of early law. Patricians Versus the Poor The die was cast in 486 BC. After Rome defeated the neighboring Hernici, a Latin tribe, and took two-thirds of their land, the consul Spurius Cassius proposed Rome’s first agrarian law. It called for giving half the conquered territory back to the Latins and half to needy Romans, who were also to receive public land that patricians had occupied. But the patricians accused Cassius of “building up a power dangerous to liberty” by seeking popular support and “endangering the security” of their land appropriation. After his annual term was over he was charged with treason and killed. His house was burned to the ground to eradicate memory of his land proposal. The fight over whether patricians or the needy poor would be the main recipients of public land dragged on for twelve years. In 474 the commoners’ tribune, Gnaeus Genucius, sought to bring the previous year’s consuls to trial for delaying the redistribution proposed by Cassius. He was blocked by that year’s two consuls, Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius, who said that decrees of the Senate were not permanent law, “but measures designed to meet temporary needs and having validity for one year only.” The Senate could renege on any decree that had been passed. A century later, in 384, M. Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul (in 392) was murdered for defending debtors by trying to use tribute from the Gauls and to sell public land to redeem their debts, and for accusing senators of embezzlement and urging them to use their takings to redeem debtors. It took a generation of turmoil and poverty for Rome to resolve matters. In 367 the Licinio-Sextian law limited personal landholdings to 500 iugera (125 hectares, under half a square mile). Indebted landholders were permitted to deduct interest payments from the principal and pay off the balance over three years instead of all at once. Latifundia Most wealth throughout history has been obtained from the public domain, and that is how Rome’s latifundia were created. The most fateful early land grab occurred after Carthage was defeated in 204 BC. Two years earlier, when Rome's life and death struggle with Hannibal had depleted its treasury, the Senate had asked families to voluntarily contribute their jewelry or other precious belongings to help the war effort. Their gold and silver was melted down in the temple of Juno Moneta to strike the coins used to hire mercenaries. Upon the return to peace the aristocrats depicted these contributions as having been loans, and convinced the Senate to pay their claims in three installments. The first was paid in 204, and a second in 202. As the third and final installment was coming due in 200, the former contributors pointed out that Rome needed to keep its money to continue fighting abroad but had much public land available. In lieu of cash payment they asked the Senate to offer them land within fifty miles of Rome, and to tax it at only a nominal rate. A precedent for such privatization had been set in 205 when Rome sold valuable land in the Campania to provide Scipio with money to invade Africa. The recipients were promised that “when the people should become able to pay, if anyone chose to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the state.” Nobody did, of course. “The private creditors accepted the terms with joy; and that land was called Trientabulum because it was given in lieu of the third part of their money.” Most of the Central Italian lowlands ended up as latifundia cultivated by slaves captured in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia and imported en masse after 198. This turned the region into predominantly a country of underpopulated slave-plantations as formerly free peoples were driven off the land into overpopulated industrial towns. In 194 and again in 177 the Senate organized a program of colonization that sent about 100,000 peasants, women and children from central Italy to more than twenty colonies, mainly in the far south and north of Italy. The Gracchi and the Land Commission In 133, Tiberius Gracchus advocated distributing ager publicus to the poor, pointing out that this would “increase the number of property holders liable to serve in the army.” He was killed by angry senators who wanted the public land for themselves. Nonetheless, a land commission was established in Italy in 128, “and apparently succeeded in distributing land to several thousand citizens” in a few colonies, but not any land taken from Rome’s own wealthy elite. The commission was abolished around 119 after Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus was killed. Civil War and Landless Soldiers Appian describes the ensuing century of civil war as being fought over the land and debt crisis: “For the rich, getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands, and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbors’ allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force, came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army. At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in number and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service.” Dispossession of free labor from the land transformed the character of Rome’s army. Starting with Marius, landless soldiers became soldati, living on their pay and seeking the highest booty, loyal to the generals in charge of paying them. Command of an army brought economic and political power. When Sulla brought his troops back to Italy from Asia Minor in 82 and proclaimed himself Dictator, he tore down the walls of towns that had opposed him, and kept them in check by resettling 23 legions (some 80,000 to 100,000 men) in colonies on land confiscated from local populations in Italy. Sulla drew up proscription lists of enemies who could be killed with impunity, with their estates seized as booty. Their names were publicly posted throughout Italy in June 81, headed by the consuls for the years 83 and 82, and about 1,600 equites (wealthy publican investors). Thousands of names followed. Anyone on these lists could be killed at will, with the executioner receiving a portion of the dead man’s estate. The remainder was sold at public auctions, the proceeds being used to rebuild the depleted treasury. Most land was sold cheaply, giving opportunists a motive to kill not only those named by Sulla, but also their personal enemies, to acquire their estates. A major buyer of confiscated real estate was Crassus, who became one of the richest Romans through Sulla’s proscriptions. By giving his war veterans homesteads and funds from the proscriptions, Sulla won their support as a virtual army in reserve, along with their backing for his new oligarchic constitution. But they were not farmers, and ran into debt, in danger of losing their land. For his more aristocratic supporters, Sulla distributed the estates of his opponents from the Italian upper classes, especially in Campania, Etruria and Umbria. Caesar likewise promised to settle his army on land of their own. They followed him to Rome and enabled him to become Dictator in 49. After he was killed in 44, Brutus and Cassius vied with Octavian (later Augustus), each promising their armies land and booty. As Appian summarized: “The chiefs depended on the soldiers for the continuance of their government, while, for the possession of what they had received, the soldiers depend on the permanence of the government of those who had given it. Believing that they could not keep a firm hold unless the givers had a strong government, they fought for them, from necessity, with good-will.” After defeating the armies of Brutus, Cassius and Mark Antony, Octavian gave his indigent soldiers “land, the cities, the money, and the houses, and as the object of denunciation on the part of the despoiled, and as one who bore this contumely for the army’s sake.” Empire of Debt The concentration of land ownership intensified under the Empire. By the time Christianity became the Roman state religion, North Africa had become the main source of Roman wealth, based on “the massive landholdings of the emperor and of the nobility of Rome.” Its overseers kept the region’s inhabitants “underdeveloped by Roman standards. Their villages were denied any form of corporate existence and were frequently named after the estates on which the villagers worked, held to the land by various forms of bonded labor.” A Christian from Gaul named Salvian described the poverty and insecurity confronting most of the population ca. 440: “Faced by the weight of taxes, poor farmers found that they did not have the means to emigrate to the barbarians. Instead, they did what little they could do: they handed themselves over to the rich as clients in return for protection. The rich took over title to their lands under the pretext of saving the farmers from the land tax. The patron registered the farmer’s land on the tax rolls under his (the patron’s) own name. Within a few years, the poor farmers found themselves without land, although they were still hounded for personal taxes. Such patronage by the great, so Salvian claimed, turned free men into slaves as surely as the magic of Circe had turned humans into pigs.” The Church as a Corporate Power Church estates became islands in this sea of poverty. As deathbed confessions and donations of property to the Church became increasingly popular among wealthy Christians, the Church came to accept existing creditor and debtor relationships, land ownership, hereditary wealth and the political status quo. What mattered to the Church was how the ruling elites used their wealth; how they obtained it was not important as long as it was destined for the Church, whose priests were the paradigmatic “poor” deserving of aid and charity. The Church sought to absorb local oligarchies into its leadership, along with their wealth. Testamentary disposition undercut local fiscal balance. Land given to the Church was tax-exempt, obliging communities to raise taxes on their secular property in order to maintain their flow of public revenue. (Many heirs found themselves disinherited by such bequests, leading to a flourishing legal practice of contesting deathbed wills.) The Church became the major corporate body, a sector alongside the state. Its critique of personal wealth focused on personal egotism and self-indulgence, nothing like the socialist idea of public ownership of land, monopolies, and banking. In fact, the Crusades led the Church to sponsor Christendom’s major secular bankers to finance its wars against the Holy Roman Emperors, Moslems, and Byzantine Sicily. Author Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history on the Observatory. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives April 2024 Japan being drawn into any conflict over Taiwan is essential for the US ability to maintain Combat Air Patrol capabilities over Taiwan. Control over the skies is imperative for any US military operation near there.The US carrier fleet, while the strongest in the world, is still incapable of contending with the land based air power that China can bring to bear over Taiwan, especially since China continues to invest in the research and development of stronger long range anti-ship missiles, and is building more and more of them. Therefore, the US will always choose to strengthen Japanese military capabilities and give Japan whatever it asks in a desire to maintain the 85 military facilities that it currently has within their territory. But this is all a given for anyone who’s been keeping track. The real question that we should ask about this move is if it was explicitly an ask of the Japanese Government, or if it came as a result of American political pressure. A deeper question still is if this is the genuine desire of the Japanese people or if this shift has been fostered by a bloc of interests solely within the military industrial complex’s section of the ruling class. We know for Japanese citizens living in Okinawa the public sentiment for decades has been against the US military bases on their island. On the core islands of Japan, however, public opinion towards a more expansive/defensive military has grown. According to the official press release, the weapons systems being delivered are “defensive in nature” but we should realize that American military bases in Japan are already an aggressive act from the United States, aimed at other sovereign states in the region, such as China and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Due to this, any attempt by the US to arm Japan, even with defensive armament, is a further entrenchment of Japan as a military air strip for the US empire. We should also remember that the Japanese government is only putting its own citizens at risk by accepting this deal. As we have seen in Ukraine, the U.S. ruling class has no issue with sacrificing an entire generation of other countries’ young men in order to pursue its foreign policy goals. Ironically, the Japanese purchase of defensive armaments emboldens that same ruling class in the theater and may lead to open conflict over Chinese territorial waters and Taiwan. Therefore, if Japan truly wants to ensure that its people are protected it should first remove the American military presence from its own nation and end its relationship as a lackey for US imperialism. Only in this way can Japan ensure its own safety, which would also go a long way towards ensuring a more peaceful planet, in general, in the long run. Author Kyle Pettis is a Teamsters Steward and the Chief Labor Analyst for the Midwestern Marx Institute. Archives April 2024 Sanctions are political, not legal instruments. Their goal is to cause pain and suffering in order to force populations to overthrow their own governments and surrender their sovereignty. After Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s death on March 5, 2013, Washington began an economic siege to impede the continuation of the Bolivarian Process and the newly elected Nicolás Maduro government. The first war-like measure was Executive Order 13692, signed by President Barack Obama on March 8, 2015, which declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. Although downplayed as inconsequential by the corporate media, the Obama decree began the “toxification” of Venezuela, with international investors and companies recoiling from doing business with a nation targeted by the world’s largest financial and military power. In 2016, Citibank was the first institution to do so by closing accounts of Venezuela’s Central Bank and the Bank of Venezuela after conducting a risk management review. Caracas, despite stubbornly servicing its foreign debt, also faced rising borrowing costs. However, the fiction of Venezuela being a “threat” was just the basis for the upcoming full declaration of war, a unilateral and illegal one. EO 13692 provided the “legal” grounds for the U.S. Treasury Department to impose a wide-reaching sanctions program against the country, its economy and its people. Because the Obama decree has no expiration date, the siege can be perpetuated indefinitely. Maximum pressure In 2017, President Donald Trump announced a “maximum pressure” campaign to block any chance of economic recovery and accelerate Venezuela’s social collapse. Trump likewise began to threaten that “all options were on the table”. The siege especially targeted the country’s main source of revenue: the oil industry. In August 2017, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed financial sanctions against state oil company PDVSA followed by an export embargo in January 2019. With crude production falling from 1.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 to 350.000 bpd in 2020, GDP shrank by more than 65% between 2014 and 2019, hurting essential imports as the country entered hyperinflation. The primary and secondary sanctions combo led to severe fuel shortages as well. Without diesel fuel to power thermal generators, the country became over-reliant on hydroelectric power generation, which was also hit by a lack of access to imported equipment. As a result, a massive electricity crisis broke out in March, 2019. With Venezuela sitting on the world’s second-largest certified gold reserves, the mining sector was the next major target. In March 2019, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Venezuela’s General Mining Company (Minerven), blocking trade with U.S. persons and companies. Caracas was using gold reserves to pay for food, fuel, medicine and other imports. The ban on the gold trade was followed by embargoes against the Venezuelan public banking system. In April that year, the U.S. Treasury blacklisted the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) to restrict transactions and prohibit its access to U.S. dollars. Other executive orders resulted in the closure of several Venezuelan bank accounts in international financial institutions as well as a loss of access to credit. According to the Venezuelan government, since 2019 more than US$8 billion worth of Venezuelan assets and funds remain frozen or blocked by banks in the U.S., Portugal, Spain, Britain, France and Belgium, including nearly $2 billion in gold retained at the Bank of England. Washington alone has blocked the use of $342 million in accounts from BCV. The entire sanctions program was reinforced by notifications issued by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in September 2017 and May 2019, warning institutions not to deal with the Venezuelan state, even for essential imports. The new executive order banned all transactions with Venezuelan state entities and blocked state assets on U.S. territory, prohibiting them from being “transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in”. In February 2020, Venezuela’s state airline CONVIASA was blacklisted as well. The economic siege came alongside a ludicrous political gambit as the Trump administration supported the self-proclamation of Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Guaidó as “Interim President” in January 2019. The “parallel government” act lasted until early 2023. Guaidó was granted control of Venezuelan bank accounts and state assets seized by Washington and allies to fund his coup efforts, including $10-billion-worth U.S.-based oil subsidiary CITGO and $269-million-worth Colombia-based fertiliser Monómeros. In 2021, President Joe Biden took the reins of the medieval-type siege against Venezuela and left it essentially intact, including one particular perverse aspect: the “starvation sanctions”. Starvation as foreign policy Food purchases became an obstacle course as Venezuela’s public and private sectors lost access to the international system of payments and banks discontinued services out of fear of running afoul of U.S. sanctions. For example, in November 2017, Puerto Rico’s Italbank closed an account with Venezuela’s Central Bank because of “concerns about reputational risk”. The small bank was used by Caracas to process food and medicine payments. In July 2019, Washington fully established starvation as a main foreign policy goal by targeting a host of individuals and companies allegedly connected to Venezuela’s Local Food Supply and Production Committees (CLAPs), created by the Maduro government in 2016 to distribute low-cost food boxes to working-class families. One notorious case was Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab, who was targeted for allegedly profiting from overvalued state contracts. In September 2019 and January 2021, the U.S. Treasury announced more sanctions against three individuals and almost 30 companies for supplying the CLAP program. The starvation tactics were exacerbated in June 2020, when Trump nixed oil-for-food swap deals. As a result, an estimated 6-7 million working-class families suffered the consequences of fewer and lower quality CLAP products while food insecurity became widespread amidst shortages and soaring prices. The human costHunger came alongside diminished access to healthcare and other basic human rights as the Venezuelan people were hit by these invisible bombs called sanctions. Yet, to this day there is no systematic way to track casualties. There are, however, three studies that provide an approximation of the devastation caused by Washington and its allies. An April 2019 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, estimated that U.S. economic sanctions were responsible for 40,000 deaths between 2017 and 2018 and placed hundreds of thousands of chronic patients at risk due to the impossibility to get medicines or treatments in the upcoming years. In September 2021, following a visit to Venezuela, UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan reported that more than 2.5 million Venezuelans were suffering food insecurity after imports dropped 73% between 2015 and 2019, while fuel and diesel scarcity endangered food production and transportation. Douhan also warned that the insufficiency of basic medicines and their rising prices placed some 300,000 people at risk while thousands of cancer, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis patients were in dire need of treatment. Surgical procedures were reduced for lack of anesthesia and antibiotics, and due to only 20% of hospital equipment functioning. Additionally, the UN expert attested to an increase in teenage pregnancies and HIV/AIDS cases while 2.6 million children were deprived of vaccines. The report noted that the impact of sanctions on the economy led to an unprecedented migration wave, resulting in a brain drain of “doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, technicians and others”. According to the UN, 7.1 million Venezuelans have migrated due to the crisis between 2015 and 2023. Venezuelan human rights organisation SURES reported that Citibank and Euroclear were rejecting transactions to buy insulin doses and dialysis treatments, while pharmaceutical companies like Baxter, Abbot, and Pfizer repeatedly refused to issue export certificates for cancer treatments for Venezuelan patients. SURES highlighted the case of several children dying since early 2019 after not receiving liver, kidney, and bone marrow transplants abroad because banks and private companies became overly cautious in dealings with Venezuela. Venezuelan children had been beneficiaries of a humanitarian program financed by oil subsidiary CITGO, seized by Washington. Finally, SURES stated that women, children, indigenous communities and people with disabilities were the most affected by the economic crisis exacerbated by U.S. sanctions. The latter group has seen prosthetic donations reduced, with NGOs and government social programs unable to import them. The three studies agree that it is not possible to fully grasp the damage caused by sanctions against the Venezuelan people, but all the evidence points to one simple truth: sanctions kill and will continue to do so. [This is an abridged and edited version of an article which appears in A War Without Bombs: The social, political and economic impact of sanctions against Venezuela. Andreína Chávez Alava is based in Caracas and writes for Venezuelanalysis.] AuthorAndreína Chávez Alava This article was republished from Monthly Review. Archives April 2024 4/15/2024 On the General Discussion Document of the CPUSA's 2024 National Convention. Part 2. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowPart one commented on the general crisis of capitalism as described in the main general discussion document [GDD] of the 32nd convention of the CPUSA. This part continues that discussion but from a Marxist perspective. The GDD contends that the crisis in the US boils done to a struggle between two contending ‘’concepts’’ one based on ‘’capitalism’s drive for maximum profits, class struggle and the system’s inherent racial and gender inequality.’’ It’s true that Capitalism, based on commodity production for a market, strives to maximize its profits in competition between the capitalists but ‘’racial and gender inequality’’ are not inherent within the system. The system is based on the exploitation of a class, workers, who create surplus value expropriated by the capitalists. This system will work fine in a uni-racial environment or multi-racial environment of equal rights. It will also work in a society without sexual or gender discrimination. These features are extraneous to capitalism itself but are secondary characteristics derived from the historical context in which the system developed. This is why bourgeois reforms on these issues are possible as long as worker exploitation remains the basis of the system. This is why the civil rights movement of the last 70 years or so has made great reform advances but is not a ‘’revolution’’ in a Marxist sense — an overthrow of a ruling class and its economic system. The other concept is based on ‘’the fraternity of the working class and its conceptions of freedom, democracy and human equality.’’ This is difficult to understand. The US working class is only 10% unionized and 2020 exit polls showed that 40% of unionized workers voted for Trump vs 57% for Biden. The idea that there is in material reality now a ‘fraternal’ working class with its own concepts of freedom, democracy and human equality opposed to the bourgeois versions propagated by the capitalist ruling class has no basis in fact or Marxist theory, it is, perhaps well meaning, but in reality it is bourgeois reformist idealism dressed up, like the emperor’s new clothes, as Marxism. This is standard Webbism. Communists have to work to bring these ideas to the working class, not assume they are already present. The GDD presents two choices in the fight based on the concepts above— ‘’Indeed, the path ahead is fiercely contested: Does it lie with austerity cutbacks or union rights and a Green New Deal? Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again or Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community?’’ MAGA or Dr. King’s philosophy. This is very strange to find in a Communist document. No disrespect for Dr. King but his ‘’Beloved Community’’ is a Christian theological concept of universal human brother/sisterhood based on nonviolence and its roots are in bourgeois philosophical notions of liberalism and personalism— it is Dr. King’s deepest expression of his Christian faith. It is a noble expression of Idealism and definitely the opposite of MAGA but it’s not Marxism or anything to do with how Marx, Engels, or Lenin thought capitalism should be opposed, it’s really a throwback to pre-Marxist utopian idealism. It also shows how far the authors have detoured off the Road to Socialism. They are taking the party down the road paved with good intentions. We are told that ‘popular fronts’ have developed in support of the extreme right and of the broad left and center all striving for political power and this boils down to two basic groups— the MAGA group supported by about 1/3 of the country and the anti-MAGA majority of the broad left and center. The problem is there is no real ‘left,’ or ‘center’ for that matter. The capitalist control of the US is so overdetermined that the most ‘left’ politics we have (outside of many little groupings such as our own with no real power to determine policy) is practically confined to ‘’the squad’’ in the Democratic Party. Both major parties are conservative pro imperialist supporters of foreign wars and fascist governments serving US economic interests abroad. The DP is made up of basically moderate to extreme conservatives who will back some socially liberal reforms, while the Republican Party has been taken over by the extreme right and some neofascist elements hostile to any meaningful reform politics. This is a worrisome domestic development but by no means a sign that ‘’the GOP is arguably the most dangerous political party in history.’’ The policies of both parties are extremely dangerous when it comes to increasing the threat of a new world war, increasing the dangers of climate change, supporting genocide to further US interests and the support of Zionism, and both mock real democracy and ignore the general will of the people— the Republicans openly, the Democrats behind closed doors. Both parties will turn to actual fascism the minute the masses begin to move in a progressive way that threatens the domination of the ruling class. The only way to defeat the drive to fascism is to build an independent working class party as an alternative to the current duopoly of right wing control of the country. Next we are told ‘’A mass radicalization process has been quietly at work throughout, molding class consciousness and anti-monopoly sentiment, in turn, giving rise to a “socialist moment” among its most advanced contingents. Yes, a rising multi-racial and multi-gender “red generation” of young workers and students is coming into being. It is filling the ranks of anti-racist and pro-abortion movements, leading strikes, and, most recently, joining anti-war initiatives in response to the Israeli razing of Gaza.’’ There is little evidence that this is true— i..e., that this is evidence of a generational shift towards socialism as all these movements are compatible with reformed capitalism. The ‘’socialist moment’’ was an expression referring to Bernie’s surge in popularity running as a socialist in the Democratic Primaries but that moment expired with Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary. There was an afterglow in the growth of DSA but membership is now down and Bernie has endorsed Genocide Joe in 2024. With Genocide Joe and neofascist Trump as the putative main presidential candidates it’s difficult to conger up an image of a ‘’red generation’’ of young workers and students coming into being unless you are talking about the growth of MAGA young Republican clubs. This is not to down play the importance of the growth of youth participation in mass movements to protect abortion rights (an across the board movement not a socialist movement), and the same is true for the movements against racism, sexism and genocide. This is especially true considering the GDD admits ‘’nearly 100 million eligible voters, stand outside of electoral politics, disillusioned with the ballot, their hope for a better life scattered among countless broken promises.’’ It is all well and good that the document says this must be countered by the CPUSA running its own candidates under its name. I hope we do it as for the last 5 years it has only been talk. Coming up PART THREE [The Fascist Danger] AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives April 2024 Lecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico The United States tells the world and its citizens that it is the greatest country on the planet, where freedom and democracy reign, and where there is an American dream that gives everyone the opportunity to live flourishing "middle class" lives with white-fenced houses and two cars. For the American working masses, however, as the great critical comedian George Carlin noted, "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." When they are awake, what the American masses experience is the American nightmare; lives plagued by stagnant wages, inflation, and various forms of crippling debt. In the era of a decaying empire, the inhabitants of the belly of the beast find their conditions increasingly unbearable. What the U.S. working class is experiencing is an era of comprehensive crisis that has infiltrated all spheres of the capitalist way of life. Speech at UNAM (October 26, 2023) for the First Dialogues Congress Objective Conditions in the U.S. There are a host of factors that, when analyzed exhaustively, point to the existence of objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S. In no state in the country is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15, as social democrats and other progressives have called for, it still wouldn't be enough for a working-class family to survive anywhere in the country. With wages stagnating and inflation at a 40-year high, nearly 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600,000 homeless people roaming a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, go hungry while 30-40% of the country's food supply is wasted each year. As it becomes harder for working-class Americans to survive, more and more have been forced to resort to borrowing. Currently, the average American "has $53,000 in debt in home loans, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, credit card debt, student loan debt, and other debt." Moreover, because the U.S. is the only developed country in the world without universal health care, the commodification of medicine has left more than half of Americans with medical debt so crippling that many have been prevented from "buying a home or saving for retirement." Marx called this phenomenon of indebtedness of the poor secondary exploitation, which occurs beyond the moment of production. With a working class experiencing, in general, both types of exploitation (i.e., the one that occurs at the moment of production and the one that occurs later, taking the form of debt), for the first time in history the working class of the empire is being, in its entirety, super-exploited – a phenomenon that previously occurred only on the periphery and within the oppressed peoples of the empire (e.g., African-American and Indigenous communities). The decadence of the American empire can be seen on the horizon of its cities and towns, where what one finds is decrepit infrastructure rated 'D' (here it would be a 6), and cities frequently inhabited by the drug-addicted zombies that the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex has created. While more than half of federal spending goes to maintaining the world's most expensive military (spending more than the next 10 countries combined), many U.S. cities, inhabited by millions of Americans, lack access to clean drinking water. In addition, the U.S. has been experiencing a "historic decline" in life expectancy; So much so that today the average Cuban, despite six decades of illegal blockades and hybrid wars against their socialist project, lives about three years longer than the average American. The hardships faced by the American people are intensified by the experience of living in one of the most economically unequal societies in human history, where even by conservative figures, the "richest 0.1% have roughly the same share of [the] wealth as the poorest 90%." In the United States, the 59 richest Americans own more wealth than the poorest half of the population (165 million people). While most working-class Americans struggle to meet their daily needs, the country's wealthiest monopolists — those who control what we watch, buy, and eat — have become richer than ever. In the midst of this abundance of wealth in the elite, more than 60,000 Americans die annually from lack of health insurance. However, the crisis facing most Americans is not limited to their economic conditions. It is, instead, an integral crisis that has spread to all spheres of life, expressing itself through deep psychological and social ills. These can be seen in the millions affected by the opioid epidemic (which kills 70,000 Americans annually); rising rates of violent crime and school shootings; and in the mental health crisis in which nearly one-third of U.S. adults struggle with depression and anxiety. For more than a decade, studies of bourgeois institutions have confirmed what Marxists have known since the mid-nineteenth century – that "the modern state is nothing but a committee for administering the common affairs of the bourgeoisie." The United States, which spreads its blood-soaked hands around the world looting in the name of democracy, has proven to be a place where the dēmos (ordinary people) have anything but power (kratos). As the empirical study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page shows, In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not govern, at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When the majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or organized interests, they usually lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when a fairly large majority of Americans are in favor of policy change, they usually don't welcome it. Far from being the 'beacon of democracy' it purports to be, what the US has is a "democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich", which is the essence of bourgeois democracy. Or, in the words of López-Obrador, in the U.S. what dominates is the oligarchy with a façade of democracy. However, the American people, burdened by the conditions of moribund imperialism, have been catching up with the lies spread by pundits and ideologues to sustain bourgeois hegemony. The United States has some of the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world; about 40 per cent of the eligible population does not participate in presidential elections, and in local elections this number rises to around 73 per cent. More than 60% of Americans are dissatisfied with the two-party system and ready for third-party alternatives, and only about 20% approve of what Congress does. Naturally, it is difficult to participate in a political process in which one does not feel represented. However, both of our imperialist parties have reacted to this public discontent by cracking down on voting rights and the possibility of third parties being on the ballot. In addition, only 11% of Americans trust the media, 90% of which have been consolidated under the control of six companies. Considering the state of the American people, it is not surprising that despite the countless resources devoted to propagandizing the population against socialism, more than 40% of adults have a favorable view of socialism, and among millennials, polls show that 70% would vote for a socialist candidate. In his pamphlet, "The Collapse of the Second International," Lenin asks, "What, in general, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation?" And his answer is the following three symptoms: "(1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the "upper classes", a crisis in the politics of the ruling class, which leads to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes erupts. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient that "the lower classes do not want" to live in the old-fashioned way; it is also necessary that "the upper classes be incapable" of living in the old way; (2) when the suffering and misery of the oppressed classes have become more acute than usual; (3) when, in consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses..." Lenin concludes that "Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties, but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a rule, is impossible." These conditions constitute the objective factors that can generally be found in a social revolution. We have seen in the above assessment how the American masses are suffering more than usual, and, moreover, how poll after poll has shown that they are not willing to continue living as before (e.g., immense disapproval of Congress and the two-party system). These conditions are becoming what Gramsci called a "crisis of authority," that is, the moment of a crisis when the "ruling class has lost its consensus [and] is no longer 'leader' but only 'dominant.'" As he famously argued, "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born; In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." However, the discontent of the masses and their inability to live the old-fashioned way does not, as Lenin pointed out, exhaust all the conditions for an objectively revolutionary situation; firstly, the masses must not only be dissatisfied with the idea of continuing to live as before, but must also show a willingness to act, and, secondly, the ruling class itself must be shaken by the crisis and in a position where it too cannot continue to rule as before. The willingness of the dissatisfied masses to act can be seen in a variety of places: from the summer uprisings of 2020, where 25-35 million Americans protested the murder of George Floyd; to the 'Striketober' wave of 2021 where hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike; to the massive unionization efforts coming from workers at Starbucks, Amazon, and other industries. And, as we've seen in recent months, the willingness of leading unions like the Teamsters and United Automobil Workers to strike to meet their demands. While the Teamsters didn't have to strike against UPS to win a historic contract, the UAW is currently attacking capital's pressure points with what they call a stand-up strike, one of the most ingenious tactics of militant unionism. It is important to note that in all these struggles there is the working class's self-consciousness of itself as a class, one that finds itself in an antagonistic position to its bosses and its political puppets. While the old club of the labor aristocracy still exists and is wedded to the Democratic Party, a youth labor militancy is fighting like we haven't seen them fight since the 1930s, when communists led unions like the CIO. This movement represents the raw material with which a revolutionary organization can form a successful mass struggle for power. Have any of these conditions shaken the U.S. ruling class? Do they find themselves incapable of governing in the old-fashioned way? Our answer must be a resounding yes! The U.S. empire, with its 900 bases around the world, used to overthrow governments outside its imperial sphere of influence with relative ease. In the international community, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, it achieved an unparalleled global hegemony, only countered in the 1990s by Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. However, all things in this world are in a constant state of flux, and sooner or later, it was expected that 'the end of history' would end and that the imperialist unipolarity of the US and NATO would be challenged. It is our era of a bourgeoning multipolar world that marks the crumbling of the U.S. empire, and with it, the ability of its rulers to 'rule the old-fashioned way.' If the U.S. state, an instrument of U.S. monopoly capital and international finance, is incapable of governing internationally as it used to, that is, if it is incapable of continuing the expropriation and super-exploitation of the peoples of the world, this is not simply a crisis of foreign policy, but a crisis of the integral state. From the failed coup attempts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries; failed proxy wars against Russia and China; the development of BRICS+; it becomes an undeniable fact that the ruling class cannot continue to rule the old way, that the era of U.S. imperialist unipolarity is over. As the world continues to turn to China for mutually beneficial relationships in international trade; as the Patria Grande continues its shift to the left and its hemispheric unity against U.S. imperialism; as moves towards de-dollarization take place across the planet, where the dollar is expected to fall to 30% of world trade by 2030 (a brutal blow to a dollar hegemony that has been crucial to our era of imperialism dominated by sanctions and institutions of global finance capital); and as European citizens continue to protest the exacerbation of their material conditions by the U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia (which is destroying Germany, the heart of the EU economy and the euro, a power that is in a spiral of deindustrialization because much of its industry depended on cheap Russian oil that they no longer have access to after the U.S. blew up the Nordstream pipeline, in the worst case of environmental (and economic) terrorism in human history). As all these factors continue to accumulate, this crisis in the ruling class will become more pronounced. Moreover, what better description of this crisis of legitimacy than the fact that both parties, in the last two presidential election cycles, have pledged to challenge the election results? First, with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 — a victory, of course, that was won despite having lost the popular vote — Democrats spent the next four years pushing the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia, and even tried to impeach him for this. This, along with a long history of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda, laid the ideological groundwork – especially among previously "anti-war" liberals – for the anti-Russian hysteria and demonization of Putin that today fuels liberals' thirst for a Third World War. Then, in 2020, so did a significant portion of the Republican party and most of MAGA's base, who argued that the election was stolen by Democrats. As Marxists know, democracy in liberal bourgeois states is limited to the peaceful transfer of power from one faction of the ruling class to another through elections already conditioned by the influence of money and big capital. Today we can say that even this superficial appearance of democracy is crumbling. In doing so, we can see here another symptom that the ruling classes cannot rule in the old way. In essence, by all the standards that the Marxist tradition uses to assess objectively revolutionary conditions, we can say that the United States is currently in an objectively revolutionary situation that can only become more pronounced in the coming months and years. However, "the social revolution demands the unity of objective and subjective conditions." As Lenin pointed out, "revolution arises only from a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to undertake mass revolutionary action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, even in a period of crisis, "falls," if not knocked down." Subjective Conditions* However, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department's attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class "radical recuperators," as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a "controlled counter-hegemonic left," a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism. This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society. On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn't live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it's rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States: 1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or "backward" for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a "fascist threat." Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on. 2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them. 3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers' struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism. This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must socialist in content and national in form. Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism. etc. Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do. To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be – contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy – abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don't take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context. In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement. In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview – the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party. *This section has been slightly edited from the original lecture. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. This article was republished from the author's Substack, Philosophy in Crisis. Archives April 2024 4/12/2024 Islamic Socialism: A Globally Suppressed Islamic Resistance Movement By: Islamic Socialism (ML)Read NowFrom 1917 Russia to Today; The multiple movements, defining the ideology, and how the movement has been attacked by Wahhabism & the CIA First Mention of Islamic Socialism: Islamic Socialism started officially in the early 1900’s Russia during the time of increasing hostility towards the Tsar; and not for no reason either. Many Muslims of Russia and lands Russia imperialized was constantly being attacked by the Tsar and Church under the orders of the Tsar. The objective was to force the Muslims to pay taxes for their own oppression and convert to Christianity and loyalty to the Tsar. Many Muslims announced themselves as Islamic Socialists who support the Bolsheviks and refused to pay taxes or abide by the orders of the Tsar. This strengthened the fraternal ties the Muslims and Bolsheviks had and led to Muslims being directly involved in the Revolution. After which the Soviet Government announced republics specifically for the Muslim populations where they could live in accordance to their beliefs and values; such as the Azerbaijan People's Republic, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic. Many of the historical revisionists and reactionaries who have taken over much of the Muslim spaces today would try to argue the Soviets forced atheism on the Muslims, while there can be an argument to such, atheism was the established value of Soviet Government, not on the specific republics. Not to mention that the Soviet Union, like all states or unions of states, was not perfect nor could it be. It was more revolutionary and progressive for humanity and the Muslims than the violent and extremely anti-Islamic state of Tsarist Russia, but it was not without its faults. But to show the respect the Soviet government had for the Muslims, there is two quotes from the Soviet Government & Stalin: "We are told that among the Daghestan peoples the Sharia is of great importance. We have also been informed that the enemies of Soviet power are spreading rumours that it has banned the Sharia. I have been authorized by the Government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic to state here that these rumours are false. The Government of Russia gives every people the full right to govern itself on the basis of its laws and customs. The Soviet Government considers that the Sharia, as common law, is as fully authorized as that of any other of the peoples inhabiting Russia. If the Daghestan people desire to preserve their laws and customs, they should be preserved." -Address by Stalin at the Congress of the Peoples of Daghestan November 13, 1920; under section 1. Declaration on Soviet Autonomy for Daghestan “Muslims of Russia…all you whose mosques and prayer houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled upon by the tsars and oppressors of Russia: your beliefs and practices, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the revolution…” -To all the Muslim workers of Russia and the East’, issued by the Soviet government on 24 November 1917 It is important to mention however, the early Islamic Socialists of the USSR was differing and varying in positions and values across the region; with Daghestan Muslims being much more firm to Islamic values and beliefs in relation to their socialist values. It is these brothers and sisters that, in my opinion, lead by example in terms of early Islamic Socialism. However all forms of Islamic Socialism was often more economically and socially revolutionary than what the Muslim lands struggle with since the fall of the Ottomans, and especially since the end of the 1990’s. Islamic Socialist Movements, The Spread of the Beliefs, Defining an Ideology: The Muslim world has a complex history and, as of the last 200 years, has fallen into division and violence due to European colonialism and American imperialism. The violence that dominates the middle east, along with the rest of the Muslim states, especially in places like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on; they are results of nationalism (and its byproducts), capitalism, imperialism, and especially the centuries long effects of colonialism. This is the primary reason for the rise of Islamic Socialism as one of many forms of resistance movements. Along side it is others such as the Pan-Arab movement, the Shia resistance, and anti-Wahhabist movement. In some areas these other resistance movements often either intersect or fight on common grounds with the Islamic Socialist movements. It is because of this long history of resistance that Arab & Muslim resistance groups are often very dialectical, even arguably more so than their Marxist counter-parts; as they fully understand the interconnected and historical relations of their struggle against the oppressors and enemies of Allah. However unlike their Marxist counter-parts, many of which atheist, anti-imperialist and Muslim socialists are often deeply religious. It is stressed the term “movements” as the one issue of Islamic Socialism is it never had a defined specific ideology, it is an umbrella term that extends across multiple movements of similar but specific common positions. Such movements, groups & figures as Nasserism (Pan-Arab, Arab Socialism), Ba’athism, the Lebanese Liberation group known as Hezbollah, Gaza’s PFLP & DFLP, & Gaddafi of Libya. These movements come about because the study of the Quran and Sunnah make clear that Islam stresses a socially & financially revolutionary relation to society. A relation that is largely hated by capitalism, as capitalism itself hates religion unless religion can be commodified, thus undoing its religious values. Islam is specific in opposition to this, as Islam stresses collectivism, Zakat (charity), opposition to wealth hoarding, opposes credit (interest) in all forms, and opposes intoxications. Areas where capitalism is the most profitable and in many cases upheld by said areas. However while some movements, groups or figures may not compare with the rest on that interest specifically, what they all share in common is anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-zionism, and collectivism. The point of this article is to lightly cover the history and define a more specific analysis of Islamic Socialism. One that ties back to the original Islamic Socialists. This is to begin a process, with future pieces defining and detailing more in depth, defining a more Islam centered - socialist analysis of the modern world and its conditions and the correct path to a new Islamic society that regulates the new conditions accordingly without sacrificing our Islamic values and duties; or giving into backwards and hypocritical secularism that is incompatible with Muslim majority lands. There has been very few Islamic figures to talk about this topic, however Hafiz Rahman Sihwarwl is one who studied and came up with 5 specific elements in which Islam and Marxism share in common:
These points are absolutely true, but I would like to add to that as well. Something that should have been included in the above points was the fact Islam, socialism and Marxism stress an importance of opposing oppression. Islamic history is no stranger to oppression, since it dealt with it from the days of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) with the Kings of Mecca who opposed him and attacked the Muslims, all the way to today. And even worse so today for the last 200 years of Islamic history has shown some of the worse oppression against Muslims possible. Largely in part due to European/American imperialism and colonialism, but also due to the traitorous behavior of right-wing Islam. Right-wing Islam, known as Wahhabism and Salafism, promoted with the help of the CIA and Europeans. They played a part in colonizing the Muslim lands, aiding western imperialism, and attacking the resistance forces that rose against all of the western oppression. Why, for specifically Muslims, Islamic Socialism? While all resistance groups are substantially better for the Muslims, Islamic Socialism is stressed as the answer for our modern conditions because it stems from the first ever Islamic Socialists of the Russian Revolution of 1917, who believed, as Vijay Prashad put it: "The promise of equality and humanity was not going to be established merely spiritually" Prashad is right and in Islam there is multiple Hadith's and Ayats stating to not simply pray for the end of oppression, but act against oppression as well. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or he is an oppressed one.” People asked, "O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ)! It is all right to help him if he is oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?" The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "By preventing him from oppressing others." -Sahih al-Bukhari 2444 Islam is not simply peace, but peace and justice. We have lost this truth in today’s age of liberalization and hostility to political Islam. Islam DEMANDS peace and justice; and if not obtained and oppression is forced on us, we stand up as is the duty of every Muslim. Islam is a revolutionary religion through and through. "the believers have been sent for the betterment of mankind, that they will promote what is good, and prevent what is wrong" -Quran (3:110) The Muslims have a duty by Allah to forbid what is wrong, protect our community, and promote what is good. To not tolerate oppression upon our community or upon innocent people. This alone is a truth that can be found in our Quran and literature and immediately destroys the liberalization of Islam that many have been engaged in. This is our responsibility. So to fight for your ummah is nothing less than the task of a Muslim. And to fight against capitalism, with its core being oppression of workers for profit; and to promote haram commodities and actions, especially individualism at the cost of collective welfare. To fight against this is our duty as Islamic Socialists. If we was to be inspired by the early Islamic Socialists, and define our beliefs and values, let it be: We are Islamic Socialists because we are, as the name is organized, Muslims first and socialists second. Our main beliefs are that Allah is one and that Muhammad (PBUH) is his messenger. Second to that is opposition to capitalism, which has burdened humanity with oppression through the most wicked and haram (forbidden) means. To oppose capitalism is no less than to fight in the cause of Allah. There is no equal status that can be maintained between an economic oppressor and an economic oppressed, the only answer is an Islamic Socialist society following Sharia. A state for the Muslims that follows in accordance to Sharia and opposes a financial minority growing off the backs of the majority through social revolution and the regulation by a religious vanguard. Especially one that is tied to and follows the guidance of the Sheikhs (Muslim scholar, elder) with the collaborative input of the young adult Muslims who bring an understanding of new conditions to their attention. Without regulating these conditions, the power vacuum opens for men of extreme wealth and hard hearts to influence and dominate a society and undermine its religious values and/or duties. As members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has stated before; Those of the organization saw no contradiction in going to prayer before going to Lenin reading circles. It's because they understood "we have to look for the socialism in our own horizon." This same sentiment should be strong with us as well, as we must look for the socialism in our horizon, understanding our community's conditions and uniting them regardless of their sect. Especially uniting all the resistance movements into one powerful coalition for liberation of the Muslim lands. Of the many successful movements in the Muslim lands, be them Islamic Socialist, Pan-Arab, etc. There has been clear losses we have had that largely stem from our previous lack of unity that is now being fixed by multipolarity and the efforts of a united anti-western, anti-imperialist coalition. These losses also stemmed from Muslims being propagandized by the west or by brothers with good intentions but lack of analysis; in that losses like Gaddafi’s Libya and brutal attacks on Syria could have been greatly adverted or at least minimized if the resistance groups didn’t have the strong anti-Marx & anti-Lenin positions they did. Thankfully I feel that is changing to some extent. However this lack of analysis on capitalism & imperialism from these great minds is what led to Libya being diplomatic to the point of its own detriment by giving up its nuclear program. And Syria not securing economic power over the economy sooner and kicking out any western NGO’s or forces that later created the lunatic Wahhabist groups of the Free Syrian Army and others. Not to criticize Syria too harshly as I know it’s been struggling economically years before the civil war; but Muslims shouldn’t shy away from these great minds simply because we disagreed with their positions on faith; being wrong about a few topics doesn’t mean everything else you say is wrong. Much of Marx and Lenin’s analysis on capitalism and imperialism was and still is the most accurate break downs of the system we all fight, and its dialectical analysis can further help the Axis of Resistance push effectively against the imperialist coalition. So, for the Islamic Socialists, we should study Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and many of those they inspired without needing to agree with them on everything; only what is apparent and most logically accurate given our current conditions. As socialist/Marxist analysis is not a dogma, and it not there to be applied as such. Similarly, Socialism is also not an all encompassing system that deals with all issues across the board. It is an economic and political system; social issues and religious topics vary greatly across national conditions. Which is why socialism looks different in China, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, etc. Marxism-Leninism, which has the most advanced analysis of modern day capitalism, imperialism and fascism, is not a radically extreme or completely incompatible analysis to study from the Islamic point of view.
These are not extreme concepts and honestly would greatly improve the Muslim communities if applied in accordance to Islamic values.
These 3 components would not only secure Muslim countries from continued aggression of foreign, often western nations; it would return them back to a state of dignity as it would put the power back into the hands of the populace and especially the true religious members of the community who will finally return their nation back to Islamic justice. The Beginning of the Global Suppression: Islamic Socialism was taking Muslim intellectual circles by storm between the 1950’s and early 1970’s. It was around this time, specifically in 05/14/1952 a publication was documented by the CIA titled “Proposal to Unite Democratic Nations and Islamic World into an Anti-Communist Force.” What this piece detailed is how the CIA came to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and urged them to export their version of right-wing Islam (Today referred to as Wahhabism) funded by their oil funds and guided by CIA strategy. It is because of this why “Sheikhs” who are on Saudi payroll and fear death by the KSA have came out so firmly against Socialism and Communism and ironically parrot the same talking points against rivals of the US, Israel and NATO. It is also because of this why Wahhabist groups and violence involving them has dominated over much of Muslim communities. From Pakistan being a major hub for their radicalization, to the Chechen Wars, to the civil war in Syria, to the overthrow of Gaddafi; everywhere violence has poured out from within Muslim communities, most often time it involved the perversion of Islamic beliefs by the Wahhabist propaganda the KSA has peddled into the world. The CIA coming to the KSA about this goal is not random, in fact one of the most prominent Islamic Socialist movements of its time, Nasserism, was dominating in Egypt during this time. Shortly after the CIA came to the KSA, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution took place in July which put Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser in direct positions of power over a major country. Another prominent movement, Ba’athism, an Arab-Nationalist ideology which believes in a unified Arab state through the leadership of a vanguard party over a socialist revolutionary government, was created in 1947. There was also Gaddafi in Libya who came into power in 1969. Saddam (Iraqi Ba’athist party) in 1979 in Iraq. There is also the two resistance groups in Gaza, the Marxist-Leninist (also Pan-Arab and Maoist) DFLP created in 1968, and the Marxist-Leninist PFLP created in 1967. So this isn’t that small of an ideology for the CIA to be worried about, it was and still is a significant collection of movements in the resistance against western imperialism and capitalist colonization. Not only does many of these groups still exist, but new power players have joined the fight such as Assad of Syria (Syrian Ba’ath Party) and the Lebanese Liberation movement called Hezbollah. We can have our criticisms on some of these figures, but they are nonetheless still part of the umbrella of Islamic Socialist or Arab resistance movements. Why the need for this suppression? Because the west knows for a fact that a united front between the Muslims and socialists would be the end of their global imperialist and colonial domination over Muslim lands. Similarly, their lapdog traitors of the KSA and similar puppet governments would lose all political control and wealth extraction/hoarding if the masses of their nations and surrounding territories would rise against them demanding an Islamic government that represents them and protects their interests. What also did not help with this suppression was certain countries & figures, like the lunatic Hoxha railing against religious communities, and other socialist movements pushing anti-theism. A issue that the socialist, especially westerners, commonly do. Thankfully this practice for the most part has been abandoned in current Socialist states, however western propaganda and NGO’s established to do what the CIA use to more covertly (like the National Endowment for Democracy) still pushes narratives that this isn’t the case. This is why the Islamic Socialist movement can not be too trusting with all socialist groups, as even socialists aren’t with different tendencies. The Islamic Socialists need to only work with and trust fellow socialists who will allow them a equal say and a authority over their communities. Sovereignty on all matters, united by the primary goals of anti-imperialism and national liberation. The Chinese do this well as is shown by recent fraternal ties with the Houthis and Gaza resistance forces. This goes for the rest of the resistance movements as well; we can only advance as a movement for liberation with unity of other liberation movements. That means any forces who share the common positions of anti-imperialism, anti-zionism, anti-fascism, collectivism & national liberation should be built alongside as long as we respect each others role in the fight. Similarly, and they are great role models for us in this regard, as the Gaza resistance and how they operate through the Joint Operations; I say role models because you have multiple resistance forces in Gaza who are Communist, Arab-Nationalist, Palestinian Nationalist, Islamic, and so on, fighting side by side as one agency. If they can fight in unity, we should be able to as well. The Future: Until we can reconcile our past and not repeat the same mistakes, we will always struggle in our objective for a free Muslim world. The movements that are successful today in fighting against the west and its puppet governments have similar values to or are Islamic Socialist (even if they differ greatly). Not only does the Islamic Socialist movements need intellectuals and theoreticians; it needs a more defined set of economic values, structural framework, deep Islamic religious values, and strategic path to victory over the puppet governments and western imperialist forces. The future is bright, but it will take everyone in this fight to make it obtainable. AuthorThis article was produced by Islamic Socialist (ML). Archives April 2024 On what basis do we call the Civil Rights Movement a revolution? And will there be one to follow? The year is 2024. America is today engulfed in its greatest political crisis perhaps since the Civil War. The blatant hypocrisy and contempt shown by our elites, decades of deindustrialization, neglect, and downward economic mobility, cities and towns overrun by deaths of despair, and America’s most recent proxy wars in Gaza and Ukraine have, in unprecedented fashion, driven Americans away from the current political establishment and toward the memory of that last great movement led by Martin Luther King and a sea of people who called themselves freedom fighters. This was the Third American Revolution, and we are its children. It rests in our hands to determine whether there will be a Fourth. To speak, then, of this history is not to regress into some dead past—it is to enter into battle for our present and future. Now is the time to face our inheritance. Prologue: The Revolutionary Diane Nash was 21 years old when she, along with a small number of other students from various Black colleges in Nashville, began attending James Lawson’s workshops on nonviolence in 1959. Raised in Chicago, Nash had not encountered the full harshness and humiliating irrationality of segregation until she came to the South; Lawson’s workshops, inspired by his studies in India, were the “only game in town” where anyone talked about ending segregation. Over the course of many months, the group met, discussed, and debated—oftentimes for hours—over a series of formidable questions: was nonviolence a viable philosophy and method? Could nonviolent change ever take place in the hyper-violent American South? What would it take to desegregate Nashville? Who and what were the social forces, individuals, and institutions that mattered in the city, and how did they think and behave? Where should the effort to desegregate Nashville begin, and why? And finally: could each student accept the possibility of his or her death at the hands of an enraged white mob? Aimed at desegregating lunch counters and other public facilities, the Nashville Sit-Ins of 1960 were the product of these months of exhaustive investigation, deliberation, and planning. It was one of the nation’s earliest, most audacious nonviolent direct action campaigns, and a microcosm for how the Civil Rights Movement created new human beings and new human relations: a condition for the rebirth of America as a nation and as a civilization in potentiality. Initially shy and timid, Nash grew to become the unquestioned leader among this cadre of students and a respected, battle-tested revolutionary in the Civil Rights Movement. What produced a Diane Nash? To answer this question, we must rewrite our entire understanding of American history and of the very question of revolution. An American Canon For the current generation of activists, leftists, and young people, it does not normally occur to us to think of the Civil Rights Movement as a revolution, nor of America having a revolutionary tradition beyond perhaps 1776. Our chronology of modern revolutionary history usually begins in 1917; our ideological references are Marx and Lenin. There is a great irony in this: Martin Luther King and the Black Freedom Movement are more foreign to us than the Russian Revolution. We cannot comprehend a revolution that used Nonviolence and Love as its theoretical framework, just as seriously as the Bolsheviks used Marxism. So we dismiss the Civil Rights Movement as a bourgeois reform effort or quaint morality play; we cast figures like King as naive, or “problematic,” or insufficiently radical because they do not fit some imagined criteria of what it means to be a revolutionary. It is this assumption, this blind spot, which is our worst enemy; by it, we cripple our revolutionary potential, place ourselves in opposition to our own people, and give aid and comfort to the ruling class. We assemble fantasies of revolution and miss the glaring truth: revolutions are made by human beings. Any attempt at constructing a revolutionary vision in the United States must ultimately be anchored by the human qualities—and devoted to awakening the human capacity—of the people who make up this nation. Defining the Third American Revolution as such requires a rethinking of revolutionary chronology and science. This does not mean discarding the experience of the Russian Revolution. But recognizing a Third American Revolution means locating a different point of origin for ourselves within the revolutionary history of the United States. More concretely, it means starting with the Second American Revolution: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the epic battle to bring down the slave system. Given far less credence than the First, it addressed the central contradiction emanating from 1776—slavery—thereby bringing new life to the American democratic experiment and yielding far greater impact in the grand scheme of history. From the furnace of this Second American Revolution, three prophets were born whose words and deeds serve as the North Star of this nation’s revolutionary tradition: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin. Put together, their work forms an organic whole, a basic paradigm for American revolutionary thought. Du Bois, the greatest scholar of the 20th century, furnished the Black Freedom Movement with a method for understanding and intervening in the course of human action; King, the principal leader of the Third American Revolution, and Baldwin, who bore prophetic witness for this Revolution, both operated within the framework of Du Boisian science. It was no coincidence that King turned to Du Bois’s writing at the height of the Movement to make sense of the present revolution that was unfolding in America. Du Bois’s monumental Black Reconstruction in America identified the enslaved Africans in America as workers—a figure of modernity. He then argued that the central category of the American revolutionary process was the Black Worker. This was, first, a recognition of the central fact that the rise of capitalism in the U.S. and Western world depended on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery—an oppression of an ancient form that yet produced a new world system never before seen in human history. Thus the freeing of four million slaves, the toppling of the planter class, and the reconstruction of a new state in the American South all constituted a “revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide reverberation”—one which helped make possible the October Revolution of 1917. Du Bois further saw that the condition of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and segregation produced, in the United States, a distinct social group with a highly unusual consciousness. Locked out of the pale of humanity by a white civilization, the enslaved were forced to grapple with and construct their own sense of humanity. Locked out of economic opportunities afforded to most immigrants, many slaves upon achieving freedom aspired to become not autonomous, self-made individuals but rather freedom fighters for their people still in bondage. They wanted freedom; they wanted education; they wanted an end to the plantation system; they wanted land to till; they wanted to work, but to be free workers; they wanted dignity. The proletariat, as formulated by Marx and Engels, refers not merely to an economic relation; the proletariat is a category of consciousness and social organization. Black folk were compelled, by necessity, to develop tightly knit social institutions to ensure group survival. Foremost among them was the Black church: a sanctuary for communion with the divine, a gathering place for social life, a vessel for historical memory, a training ground for organic leadership, a site of ideological struggle, and a vehicle for freedom and protest. It was here that a new kind of proletariat emerged through the dialectic of history. The Black proletariat defied the ideology of a white supremacist Christianity and inscribed their own struggle for freedom onto the Biblical narrative. Where the European working class saw itself in the propertyless proletariat of antiquity, Black folk saw themselves in the Exodus story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or in the early Christians, forced underground by the Roman Empire. It was the Black proletariat’s unique consciousness of social reality that decided the fate of the Civil War. The arrival of the Union army to the South meant, for the slaves, the fulfillment of divine prophecy. “To four million black folk emancipated by civil war,” Du Bois wrote, “God was real”—and His visage was Freedom. This sense of prophecy, this ability to see themselves as central actors in the dramatic unfolding of history, gave tens of thousands of slaves the courage to abandon the plantation, risking death, and join the Union forces. The withdrawal of their labor crippled the Confederacy and swung the war toward the Union, setting the stage for Reconstruction, the greatest experiment in a radical worker’s democracy the world had yet seen, as the masses of Black folk threw themselves into the difficult task of rebuilding a land ravaged by war. The subsequent counter-revolution against this experiment, enacted by a new alliance between rising industrial capital and white labor, decimated Black folk and set them to wander for a generation in the wilderness of America. For his study of this period, Du Bois used Marx but was not bound to classical Marxist standards. He did not ask the dogmatic question, Was Reconstruction a revolution or not? Instead he asked, What kind of revolution was this? What was the logic of its development? What does it reveal about America’s historical trajectory and revolutionary, democratic possibility? Above all, what did it mean to those four million Black slaves who, on a fateful night, made the leap toward freedom and thrust themselves onto the stage of world history? Here is where our understanding of the Third American Revolution must begin. It was part and parcel of world revolutionary processes in the 20th century; King, Lenin, Mao, and Gandhi alike ventured to resolve the same questions of democratic rule that had been raised by the modern epoch. And yet, the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s-70s was a revolution of a different type—one whose full magnitude, quality, and depth have yet to be fully realized. It was distinct from other revolutions that were guided by Marx and Lenin; it laid a blueprint for future democratic revolutions seeking to address the contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. It is a vast goldmine beneath the feet of the American citizenry, waiting to be unearthed and used in the fire of a new struggle. The Black Freedom Movement: Making Time Real To the outside observer, it seems strange that a new revolutionary movement should have begun in the U.S. in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Conventional thought would tend to see greater revolutionary possibility in a period of intense economic crisis such as the 1930s, compared to a period of relative domestic economic prosperity like the 1950s. Flushed with victory and unscathed by the Second World War, America faced the latter half of the 20th century as an industrial superpower on the ascendancy. Internal dissent seemed to have been solved by McCarthyism. To the extent that America’s elites thought about the “Negro problem,” they assumed they could allow the worst excesses of segregation to gradually dissipate over time, without fundamentally changing the economic, political, or social structure of the country. The U.S. ruling class, seeing itself in nearly godlike terms as America subdued its mother Europe and much of the world to preserve the remnants of Western imperialism, believed it held the reins of history. It could not imagine a movement rising from the lowliest, most forsaken backwaters of the South to directly challenge its own authority. To the children and grandchildren of the former slaves, however, the outpouring of the nonviolent movement in Montgomery and soon a hundred other cities made all the sense in the world. What Black folk saw in the immediate postwar period was a world freedom movement flooding across humanity, as the system of colonial imperialism came under crisis. From Alabama to New York, from Tennessee to Florida, from Mississippi to Pennsylvania, over kitchen tables, among church pews, and in shaded street corners, news of the anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia spilled into the vision, hearing, speech, thoughts, and hearts of Black people. The remarkable victories of poorer, darker peoples over once-invincible Western empires forced Black folk in America to reflect on their own lack of freedom—in a nation that proclaimed its own “freedom” as a model for the world, no less. It was doubly fateful that the Black proletariat saw the 100th anniversary of Emancipation approaching; for it was the defeat of Reconstruction which had, as Du Bois explained, laid the foundation for the ascendance of U.S. and European imperialism at the sunset of the 19th century. From the nation’s halls of power, the Black proletariat heard the constant refrain: “Wait.” Yet from the turning of a world far vaster, the Black proletariat felt the thunderous cry: “Move.” So they moved. And through their movement, hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of ordinary working people commandeered the pace and direction of social-historical time in the United States. Martin Luther King wrote of this phenomenon in Why We Can’t Wait: “Sarah Turner closed the kitchen cupboard and went into the streets; John Wilkins shut down the elevator and enlisted in the nonviolent army; Bill Griggs slammed the brakes of his truck and slid to the sidewalk; the Reverend Arthur Jones led his flock into the streets and held church in jail. The words and actions of parliaments and statesmen, of kings and prime ministers, movie stars and athletes, were shifted from the front pages to make room for the history-making deeds of the servants, the drivers, the elevator operators and the ministers.” For King, it was not only the bitter reality of oppression, but Black folk’s consciousness of their place in history that gave them the faith, urgency, and audacity to take time into their own hands. “The milestone of the centennial of emancipation,” he wrote, “gave the Negro a reason to act—a reason so simple and obvious that he almost had to step back to see it.” Nowhere was that consciousness reflected more clearly than in the Southern student movement helmed by a new generation of Black youth, for whom James Baldwin bore witness in 1960: “Americans keep wondering what has ‘got into’ the students. What has ‘got into’ them is their history in this country. They are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them.… The question with which they present the nation is whether or not we really want to be free. It is because these students remain so closely related to their past that they are able to face with such authority a population ignorant of its history and enslaved by a myth.… These students prove unmistakably what most people in this country have yet to discover: that time is real.” Nonviolence and the Revolutionary Imperative The advent of nonviolence was the spark that made this breakthrough possible. Nonviolence has been so distorted in the pages of our history that it is necessary to completely abandon our prevailing notions of it and return to the source for a more useful interpretation of its meaning. First formulated by Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle against British imperialism and further developed by the Civil Rights Movement in America, nonviolence was not only a method of protest against injustice: nonviolence was a social process. We must remember that the Color Line constituted a basic condition of American social life. If capitalism socializes various functions and contradictions of human relations, then the Color Line embodied the most explicitly social problem for the American working class to face. In other words, racism presented a clear contradiction that the people themselves had to resolve. America’s white supremacist social system was designed to beat Black people down, to rob them of their dignity, to destroy their families and social ties, to keep them anxious in terror of the white mob, to undermine their consciousness of themselves, and to trap them perpetually within the lowest, most exploitative level of labor. For generations, the scourge of this system had worked day and night to break Black people’s will to struggle for a better future. On the other hand, it took thinkers like Du Bois and Baldwin to show just how much white supremacy also degraded and debased the ordinary white American. It rendered him utterly dependent upon a ruling class to give him his aspirations and sense of reality. It robbed him of his democratic instinct—of his ability to think for himself. It trapped him, helplessly, within a false identity: an identity held captive by a lie about the inferior humanity of another. The innovation of nonviolence for the American situation did two things from the start: it transformed the Black proletariat once more into a fighting people, and it shattered the false system of reality that imprisoned the white American. On this basis, the Third American Revolution set about forging a new social contract and democratic consciousness among the American people—in essence, began a process for the birth of a new American people. Nonviolence drew from the example set by the slaves during their exodus from the plantations in the heat of the Civil War—what Du Bois called the General Strike. Further synthesizing this Black tradition of mass noncooperation with Gandhi’s satyagraha, King and the Civil Rights Movement developed nonviolence into a powerful, highly disciplined method of political activity and social change. Seldom recognized for his philosophical and political genius, King became the leader of the Movement because he knew his people and he knew America. He sensed the precise moment when Black people were “ready for mass action, ready for its risks, and ready for its responsibilities.” He was an earthquake in the landscape of American religious and political orthodoxy, harnessing the Black church and prophetic tradition to their fullest power. He broke the McCarthyite consensus that had frozen the nation into ideological sterility. Through his words and by his willingness to suffer, he challenged Black and white people alike in a way that no figure ever had or has since. Like water in the desert, or light roaring down from heaven, nonviolence forged a path to democratizing America that has not yet been fully realized. This was the dialectic of the Movement: it forced American bourgeois democracy to fulfill its long-forsaken promise of legal equality and enfranchisement to Black folk, while at the same time conceiving a new type of democracy directly in the battles and campaigns waged across the South and North. The Civil Rights Movement comprised manifold phenomena at once. It was an odyssey of human discovery, sending waves of pioneers out among the most destitute, fearsome territories of the Jim Crow South to win over the people to a new vision of the future. It enlisted young and old, poor and professional, industrial and domestic worker, man and woman, southerner and northerner, believer and non-believer, Black and white into an army of equals—and instilled in them the confidence that they could decide the future of the country. It yielded a vast labor movement that in the end organized tens of thousands of unorganized Black workers in the South. It created a channel for Black and white people to relate to one another with unflinching openness and uncommon honesty—seeking to fulfill Du Bois’s vision of a “creative relationship” between white and Black workers. It produced a generation of leaders, artists, and intellectuals who were tested on the threshing floor of mass struggle. It compelled millions of white Americans to grapple, for the first time, with their own passivity and political immaturity, their own mediocre aspirations and moral standards. And drawing the beast of segregation out into the open for all humanity to see, it directly confronted the U.S. state at the local, state, federal, and international level, paralyzed the state’s normal functions, and bent it to the point of breaking. On the eve of the October Revolution, Lenin looked to the Soviet councils created by Russian workers and saw the seeds of a new democratic state that could supplant the crumbling Tsarist regime. In the whirlwind of the Third American Revolution, King saw the new human beings and social relations being created through nonviolent action and understood that therein lay the possibilities for a new people’s democracy in the United States. His name for it was the Beloved Community. Baldwin translated this vision into a task: “achieving our country.” The Human Heart: Where Civilization Begins Before embarking on their Sit-In campaign, the Nashville students trained relentlessly with each other to endure physical and verbal abuse—to kill the natural instinct within themselves to flee or fight back, and reach a new plane of human ability that stood unmoved by the gales of hatred, fear, indifference, intimidation, violence, and death. Their eventual collision with these forces took place, simultaneously, in dramatic confrontations in the public square and in the private reaches of the human soul. It was in this same vein that Baldwin wrote of King’s presence in Montgomery: “Martin Luther King, Jr., by the power of his personality and the force of his beliefs, has injected a new dimension into our ferocious struggle. He has succeeded, in a way no Negro before him has managed to do, to carry the battle into the individual heart and make its resolution the province of the individual will.” This battle of the human heart erupted in every single encounter between the apostles for freedom and their countrymen. Here, in so little as a brief moment of eye contact, the former could level a challenge to the latter: I am not who you think I am. Who, then, are you going to be? The Civil Rights Movement was the first true mass phenomenon to be experienced by the whole nation through the new technology of television. Raw footage of children being battered by fire hoses, mauled by police dogs, paraded to jail, and beaten by mobs filled the living rooms of tens of millions of American households. The country’s white majority was forced to recognize, first, that the Negro was not happy in his designated place as Southern authorities had proclaimed; and second, that all Americans were implicated in the moral storm that the Movement had brought to the surface of the nation’s conscience. The question of morality has long been distorted by liberals and dismissed by radicals. Yet in the eyes of King, Lawson, Nash, Baldwin, and many others in the Movement, morality was conceived as an essential task of democracy and civilization. The “moral choice,” as Baldwin framed it, meant that all Americans must confront themselves as products and agents of a complex, still-unfolding history; and, on those terms, face the question of whether they could take responsibility for their own lives and the life of their country—or, surrender their sovereignty to the hands of the butchers, liars, and fools who ruled the nation. When King called for a “revolution of values” at the height of the war in Vietnam, he was therefore calling upon the American people to assert that the basic tenets of civilization belonged to them, and not the ruling elite. Du Bois, King, and Baldwin all envisioned an America that could break free from the confines of a dying Western civilization—to become, simultaneously, truly American and a synthesis of the world’s civilizations, especially the rising Afro-Asiatic axis of world humanity. If civilization in America was to be reborn, then that future took root in the heart of one like Diane Nash, who was prepared to die for freedom. She and all the Movement’s young people, Black and white, who rushed toward the crucible of danger to wage the Sit-Ins, the Freedom Rides, the Children’s Crusade, and the Freedom Summer Project, forged a fierce bond among each other—and achieved a personal, moral authority through their sacrifice—that set a new standard for the rest of the nation to emulate. From Montgomery to Nashville to Birmingham, the soldiers of the nonviolent army unleashed a new human possibility in the estranged landscape of modern American society. They called it love—“the sword that heals.” The War That Came It is commonly said that King became “more radical” in his later years. This is a fundamental misreading: the Civil Rights Movement and its strongest adherents were revolutionary from the beginning. Revolutions do not happen overnight, but rather proceed in stages; even a sudden lightning strike of revolutionary action is the result of deeper processes of change, tension, and protracted struggle. With each victory and mark of progress, the Third American Revolution faced new questions, challenges, and contradictions. The success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was marred by the escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Even as the government tried desperately to offset the cost of the war, King saw the Vietnam War as a sign of a hardening contradiction between the U.S. state’s ability to fulfill its social contract to the American people, versus its need to sustain world imperialism through perpetual wars and military expansion abroad. The next stage of the Movement naturally reached for a broader, deeper coalition—a Poor People’s Campaign—to attack the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and war. Where the Movement had earlier sought to negotiate with the state to gain equal rights, the question of war placed the Movement into more direct opposition to the state and monopoly power. America’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam spoke to the success of the Vietnamese liberation forces as much as it did to the demoralization and opposition of soldiers, young whites, and Black folk who listened to King and Muhammad Ali more than they did Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. By 1967, when King named the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” he understood that he was marked for death. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the beginning of a concerted, merciless campaign to overturn the Third American Revolution as it was reaching a higher stage of development. This counter-revolution wrought more chaos and destruction than we know: it left in its wake not only the smoldering cities that erupted in anger and pain immediately after King’s death, but also the ruins of the deindustrialized, impoverished, war-like heartlands and urban metropolises that we live in today, as the nation continued to gorge itself on new wars that paved the way for the hollowing out of domestic industry as cheaper labor was secured abroad. With King’s death, the ruling class decapitated the Movement and sowed confusion in its ranks. The Black Power generation that followed, though not lacking in revolutionary zeal, largely accepted the false narrative that King had been a moderate and that nonviolence had failed. They tried to reinvent revolution by turning their backs on the revolutionary era that had produced them. Meanwhile, many of the Movement’s original freedom fighters who resumed their lives in “normal society” suffered from long standing psychological wounds akin to veterans returning home from war. Only a few—among them, Coretta Scott King, James Lawson, Diane Nash, and James Baldwin—carried the torch for peace and King’s unfinished legacy. And the nation’s white “silent majority,” having already grown cold to King at the exact moment he issued a call to break silence on America’s path of destruction, did not realize what they, too, had lost in losing King. The ruling elite again tried to reassert control over time by making King’s memory and martyrdom obsolete. In later decades, they found it safe enough to appropriate nonviolence itself: removing its revolutionary, democratic, emancipatory essence, and turning nonviolence into an empty form of protest that could be made to serve whatever agenda the state wanted. Drunk on its apparent victories, America at the close of the 20th century found itself secure as the so-called leader of the free world. Yet for the people, it was another long night of desolation and wandering. To Awaken the People We have been born into this period of counter-revolution. The political confusion and susceptibility of today’s younger and middle-aged generations are a reflection of that fact. We are scarcely aware of whence we came. It is not our fault that we have become so lost—but it is our responsibility to find our way forward. America is a contradiction: it is a globe-spanning empire that is dragging humankind to the brink of annihilation; yet it is this same nation that produced King, Baldwin, and Du Bois, and which still contains the seed of the Beloved Community. It is a society still blinded by delusions about its own freedom and apparent diversity, yet it is also an indescribably more vast, complex, and beautiful place because of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The Third American Revolution was forestalled and undermined—but it was not a failure. Americans are less racist than they were in 1955. They are more broadly suspicious of the ruling class than ever before. They have grown exhausted and disgusted with unending wars. These are the marks of the Third American Revolution upon the body politic of the country. Untold effort has been expended to reverse these advancements of the people’s consciousness. What is going to be our relationship to this history? What is going to be our role in this nation’s future? Such questions hang in the air all over America and are perceived, however dimly at first, by a generation that is just now having to grapple with real, inescapable political and moral questions as we face the horror of a genocide in Gaza being committed in our name, and the collapse of America’s paper-thin prestige on the world stage. The crisis of American society is a crisis of legitimacy: the people do not trust the nation’s governing institutions, making it impossible for the ruling elite to rule in their accustomed ways. A crisis is an opening. When everything is in flux, new coalitions and new ways of doing politics become possible, and the actions of ordinary people take on greater weight in deciding how the crisis will be resolved and in which direction history will move. Such a time calls for a re-examination of the Third American Revolution and a revival of nonviolence in its fullest, most creative sense. Such a time calls for a Fourth American Revolution. The broad mass of Americans are daily pushed toward anti-social impulses, toward isolation and distrust of one another. We are told that it is not our place to question the reality presented to us, but we question it anyway—making every person feel that he or she is slowly going insane as the world burns. The science of nonviolence can be developed in a multitude of new forms to help the American people find each other again; to openly confront the obscenities of our senile, inhuman elites; to create new spaces where the people can come together—unbothered by official institutions—to work out their common problems and grapple with their common future. Peace and war, poverty, violence, moral values, education: all these and more are questions that must be made democratic, that must be returned to the province of the people’s will. We are only at the tip of the iceberg of what can be conceived in this peculiar drama called the American experiment. Can it be done? Can our people find it within themselves to achieve King’s vision, or are we all doomed to go down with our war-crazed ruling elite? We do not know—the shape of the future is sharp and uncertain. But what will happen if we do nothing? What do we reveal about ourselves when we say that hundreds of millions of people in this country—and all the children to be born—are beyond saving? What does humanity demand of us, if not the complete transformation of America from an empire to a new nation that “studies war no more”? Our Common InheritanceThe Third American Revolution is the birthright of every single American, whether we came here 20 years ago or have lived here for 200 years. Diane Nash put it plainly: “My contemporaries had you in mind when we acted. We were in dangerous situations, and sometimes people would freak out. A number of times I saw the person standing next to them put their arm around that person’s shoulder and say, ‘Remember that what we’re doing is important. We’re doing this for generations yet unborn.’ So although we had not met you, you should know that we loved you.” It is worth repeating: the young formed the beating heart of the Third American Revolution. Martin Luther King was only 25 when he was called to serve as pastor of Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery. And James Baldwin knew better than anyone that the young are uniquely capable of battling for a revolutionary vision and purpose because they feel, instinctively, that in doing so they are also fighting for their very lives. They were the children of sharecroppers, ministers, maids, doctors, and dock workers. They were prepared to pay their dues to the generations who came before them, who fought—in darkness, and against all odds—to bring them to where they stood: facing the future. We must prepare to do the same. AuthorJeremiah Kim This article was produced by Avant-Garde. Archives April 2024 |
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