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
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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 By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. “Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. “Israel,” he noted, “must stop using water as a weapon of war.” Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair. In early October 2023, Israeli officials indicated that they would use their control over Gaza’s water systems as a means to perpetrate a genocide. As Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the head of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said on 10 October, “Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” On March 19, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick noted that Gaza needed “spare parts for water and sanitation systems” as well as “chemicals to treat water,” since the “lack of these critical items is one of the key drivers of the malnutrition crisis.” “Malnutrition crisis” is one way to talk about a famine. Faeq Hassan, Iraq, “The Water Carriers,” 1957. The assault on Gaza – whose entire population is “currently facing high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to Oxfam and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification – has sharpened the contradictions that strike the world’s people with force. A U.N. report released on World Water Day (March 22) shows that, as of 2022, 2.2 billion people have no access to safely managed drinking water, that 4 in 5 people in rural areas lack basic drinking water, and that 3.5 billion people do not have sanitation systems. As a consequence, every day, over a thousand children under the age of 5 die from diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. These children are among the 1.4 million people who die every year due to these deficiencies. The U.N. report notes that, since women and girls are the primary collectors of water, they spend more of their time finding water when water systems deteriorate due to inadequate or non-existent infrastructure or droughts exacerbated by climate change. This has resulted in higher dropout rates for girls in school. A 2023 study by U.N. Women describes the perils of the water crisis for women and girls: “Inequalities in access to safe drinking water and sanitation do not affect everyone equally. The greater need for privacy during menstruation, for example, means women and girls and other people who menstruate may access shared sanitation facilities less frequently than people who do not, which increases the likelihood of urinary and reproductive tract infections. Where safe and secure facilities are not available, choices to use facilities are often limited to dawn and dusk, which exposes at-risk groups to violence.” The lack of access to public toilets is by itself a serious danger to women in cities across the world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where there is one public toilet for every 200,000 people. Access to drinking water is being further constricted by the climate catastrophe. For instance, a warming ocean means glacier melt, which lifts the sea levels and allows salt water to contaminate underground aquifers more easily. Meanwhile, with less snowfall, there is less water in reservoirs, which means less water to drink and use for agriculture. Already, as the U.N. Water report shows, we are seeing increased droughts that now impact at least 1.4 billion people directly. According to the United Nations, half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, while one quarter faces “extremely high” levels of water stress. “Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of these phenomena, with acute risks for social stability,” the U.N. notes. The issue of social stability is key, since droughts have been forcing tens of millions of people into flight and starvation. Aboudia, Côte d’Ivoire, “Les trois amis II” or “The Three Friends II,” 2018. Climate change is certainly a major driver of the water crisis, but so is the rules-based international order. Capitalist governments must not be allowed to point to an ahistorical notion of climate change as an excuse to shirk their responsibility in creating the water crisis. For instance, over the past several decades, governments across the world have neglected to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities. Consequently, 42 percent of household wastewater is not treated properly, which damages ecosystems and aquifers. Even more damning is the fact that only 11 percent of domestic and industrial wastewater is being reused. Increased investment in wastewater treatment would reduce the amount of pollution that enters water sources and allow for better harnessing of the freshwater available to us on the planet. There are several sensible policies that could be adopted to immediately address the water crisis, such as those proposed by U.N. Water to protect coastal mangroves and wetlands; harvest rainwater; reuse wastewater; and protect groundwater. But these are precisely the kinds of policies that are opposed by capitalist firms, whose profit line is improved by the destruction of nature. Ibrahim Hussein, (Malaysia, “The Game,” 1964. In March 2018, we launched our second dossier, “Cities Without Water.” It is worthwhile to reflect on what we showed then, six years ago: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Technical Paper VI (IPCC, June 2008) is on climate change and water. The scientific consensus in this document is that the changes in weather patterns — induced by carbon-intensive capitalism — have a negative effect on the water cycle. In other words, watering golf courses is more important than providing piped water to the thousand of children under the age of five who die every day due to water deprivation. Those are the values of the capitalist system. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Consortium News. Archives April 2024 Sabah, Libya, is an oasis town at the northern edge of the Sahara Desert. To stand at the edge of the town and look southward into the desert toward Niger is forbidding. The sand stretches past infinity, and if there is a wind, it lifts the sand to cover the sky. Cars come down the road past the al-Baraka Mosque into the town. Some of these cars come from Algeria (although the border is often closed) or from Djebel al-Akakus, the mountains that run along the western edge of Libya. Occasionally, a white Toyota truck filled with men from the Sahel region of Africa and from western Africa makes its way into Sabah. Miraculously, these men have made it across the desert, which is why many of them clamber out of their truck and fall to the ground in desperate prayer. Sabah means “morning” or “promise” in Arabic, which is a fitting word for this town that grips the edge of the massive, growing, and dangerous Sahara. For the past decade, the United Nations International Organization of Migration (IOM) has collected data on the deaths of migrants. This Missing Migrants Project publishes its numbers each year, and so this April, it has released its latest figures. For the past ten years, the IOM says that 64,371 women, men, and children have died while on the move (half of them have died in the Mediterranean Sea). On average, each year since 2014, 4,000 people have died. However, in 2023, the number rose to 8,000. One in three migrants who flee a conflict zone die on the way to safety. These numbers, however, are grossly deflated, since the IOM simply cannot keep track of what they call “irregular migration.” For instance, the IOM admits, “[S]ome experts believe that more migrants die while crossing the Sahara Desert than in the Mediterranean Sea.” Sandstorms and Gunmen Abdel Salam, who runs a small business in the town, pointed out into the distance and said, “In that direction is Toummo,” the Libyan border town with Niger. He sweeps his hands across the landscape and says that in the region between Niger and Algeria is the Salvador Pass, and it is through that gap that drugs, migrants, and weapons move back and forth, a trade that enriches many of the small towns in the area, such as Ubari. With the erosion of the Libyan state since the NATO war in 2011, the border is largely porous and dangerous. It was from here that the al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar moved his troops from northern Mali into the Fezzan region of Libya in 2013 (he was said to have been killed in Libya in 2015). It is also the area dominated by the al-Qaeda cigarette smugglers, who cart millions of Albanian-made Cleopatra cigarettes across the Sahara into the Sahel (Belmokhtar, for instance, was known as the “Marlboro Man” for his role in this trade). An occasional Toyota truck makes its way toward the city. But many of them vanish into the desert, a victim of the terrifying sandstorms or of kidnappers and thieves. No one can keep track of these disappearances, since no one even knows that they have happened. Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated Io Capitano (2023) tells the story of two Senegalese boys—Seydou and Moussa—who go from Senegal to Italy through Mali, Niger, and then Libya, where they are incarcerated before they flee across the Mediterranean to Italy in an old boat. Garrone built the story around the accounts of several migrants, including Kouassi Pli Adama Mamadou (from Côte d’Ivoire, now an activist who lives in Caserta, Italy). The film does not shy away from the harsh beauty of the Sahara, which claims the lives of migrants who are not yet seen as migrants by Europe. The focus of the film is on the journey to Europe, although most Africans migrate within the continent (21 million Africans live in countries in which they were not born). Io Capitano ends with a helicopter flying above the ship as it nears the Italian coastline; it has already been pointed out that the film does not acknowledge racist policies that will greet Seydou and Moussa. What is not shown in the film is how European countries have tried to build a fortress in the Sahel region to prevent migration northwards. Open-Air Tomb More and more migrants have sought the Niger-Libya route after the fall of the Libyan state in 2011 and the crackdown on the Moroccan-Spanish border at Melilla and Ceuta. A decade ago, the European states turned their attention to this route, trying to build a European “wall” in the Sahara against the migrants. The point was to stop the migrants before they get to the Mediterranean Sea, where they become an embarrassment to Europe. France, leading the way, brought together five of the Sahel states (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) in 2014 to create the G5 Sahel. In 2015, under French pressure, the government of Niger passed Law 2015-36 that criminalized migration through the country. G5 Sahel and the law in Niger came alongside European Union funding to provide surveillance technologies—illegal in Europe—to be used in this band of countries against migrants. In 2016, the United States built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez, Niger, as part of this anti-migrant program. In May 2023, Border Forensics studied the paths of the migrants and found that due to the law in Niger and these other mechanisms the Sahara had become an “open-air tomb.” Over the past few years, however, all of this has begun to unravel. The coup d’états in Guinea (2021), Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) have resulted in the dismantling of G5 Sahel as well as the demand for the removal of French and U.S. troops. In November 2023, the government of Niger revoked Law 2015-36 and freed those who had been accused of being smugglers. Abdourahamane, a local grandee, stood beside the Grand Mosque in Agadez and talked about the migrants. “The people who come here are our brothers and sisters,” he said. “They come. They rest. They leave. They do not bring us problems.” The mosque, built of clay, bears within it the marks of the desert, but it is not transient. Abdourahamane told me that it goes back to the 16th century, long before modern Europe was born. Many of the migrants come here to get their blessings before they buy sunglasses and head across the desert, hoping that they make it through the sands and find their destiny somewhere across the horizon. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives April 2024 Today I visited the Lincoln memorial and felt a genuine sadness at the fact that our country has totally failed to live up to the ideals that it was founded upon. Consider the last words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address which are carved into the walls of the Lincoln memorial: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Far from creating a lasting peace among nations, the United States has become a world imperialist hegemon, which acts as the number one threat to world peace. Or consider the much simpler quote from George Washington plastered all over the Washington monument’s gift store. “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." Perhaps old George would have been more correct to say, Capital, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth, concentration, and accumulation. Because the U.S. is now a country which prioritizes the profits of capitalists and bankers far above the liberty of its citizens. The words that most affected me though were from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which like the second inaugural address, have been immortalized on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. “[T]his nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." How far we have strayed from a Government of by and for the people that these American leaders of the past dreamed of, and that hundreds of thousands of union soldiers fought to create. We now live in a so called Democracy where 92% of elections are determined by the candidate who raises the most money, where the Supreme Court has completely legalized political bribery through passing Citizens United, and where bills are literally written by corporate lobbying firms. Right across from the Lincoln Memorial is the Federal Reserve, which is one of many tools that the U.S. Government uses to control currency, and maintain unprecedented dominance over the global economy. Ironic that such a building is placed right across from a memorial dedicated to preserving a Government “of, by, and for the people.” So while my trip to the Lincoln memorial slightly disturbed me, it also inspired me. Visiting the memorial that day were busses of young schoolchildren on a field trip around Washington D.C. It got me thinking about what kind of country we are going to leave the youth? It is fully possible to create an economy and political system that works of, by, and for the people. It is called socialism. The only way to actually live up to the ideals that the country was founded upon is for working people to stand up and fight, to stand up and take this country back from the cretinous Wall Street parasites who have completely captured it. Just like our ancestors in the Union army stood up against slavery and tyranny not so long ago. Author Edward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a wrestling coach at Loras College. Archives April 2024 4/2/2024 On the General Discussion Document of the CPUSA's 2024 National Convention. Part 1. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowPREFACE This is the first in a series of opinion pieces on the upcoming CPUSA convention based on the main general discussion document (GDD). It is not my claim that the positions taken by the CP leadership are not consistent with their premises. My claim is that their premises are not Marxist and/or not sound. PART 1 GDD-1 Having postponed its mandated 2023 National Convention for a year in order to consolidate its control of the party, the current leadership has scheduled a National Convention for June 2024. Since the end of the Gus Hall era in 2000 the party leadership appears to have fallen into the hands of a right leaning Eurocommunist, Bernstein-inspired revisionist leadership cadre that under consecutive top leaders Sam Webb, John Bachtell and Joe Sims has followed a liquidationist policy [Webbism] which has seen the abolition of the print edition of the party newspaper and its replacement with a saccharine left liberal social-democratic internet version devoid of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary working terminology, the abolition of the existing YCL and the creation of a new youth organization more in the form of The Sims Youth than an independent YCL affiliated with the party, a turnover of the party archives to a bourgeois affiliated labor library associated with NYU, the abolition of the party’s theoretical journal and a decline in Marxist class consciousness as reflected in party literature. Webb has himself left the party to support the Democrats, Bachtell resigned as top leader and has said he no longer considers himself a Leninist but he remains in control of the party press. Joe Sims was put in his place as a top leader (or ‘’co-leader’’) and prefers the term ‘’scientific socialism’’ to ‘’Marxism’’— although now as the putative leader of the party he uses Marxist terminology pro forma that he had abandoned previously. Well, I need to provide some justification for the above remarks. I hope my analysis of the General Discussion Document [GDD] the leadership has put out as the guide to the upcoming convention will do this. CPUSA conventions are usually well choreographed to end up exactly as the leadership wants and the GDD will give a good idea of what kind of program is in store for the membership [hint: it has something to do with making revisionism look orthodox and getting out the vote for Biden.] This, of course, is just my opinion of the post-Hall era, after 50+ years of seeing the party in action, and I could be wrong. The document opens with a general description of the effects today of the general crisis of capitalism, more or less similar to the effects that have characterized it for the last 50 or 60 years. The GDD also points out that ‘’fascism is increasingly promoted as an alternative by the most reactionary sections of the billionaire class.” It should be pointed out that Marxist theory doesn’t refer to a ‘’billionaire’ class.’’ The class in question is the monopoly capitalist (le gran bourgeoisie) class which owns and controls the financial and industrial means of production in the US— I.e., the ruling class which controls the Republican and Democratic parties as well. We are next told ‘’The crisis has its origins in the U.S.’ incomplete bourgeois democratic revolution that granted freedom to those with property, but subjected those without to bonded labor, slavery, and genocide, systems of exploitation that not only contributed to the country’s development but also laid the basis for a united struggle against such exploitation.’’ This is historically incorrect. The bourgeois democratic revolution was completed in the US in the 19th century after the Civil War. The bourgeois democratic revolution’s goal was to replace one ruling class with another— i.e., to make the capital class, the bourgeoisie, the ruling class and replace the feudal class which has no positive role to play in the new economic system of capitalism. At the end of the Civil War, with the downfall of the slave owning section of the capitalists (free independent workers not slaves or serfs are the theoretical exploited class under capitalism) the industrial bourgeoisie consolidated itself as the ruling class and completed the bourgeois democratic revolution in the US. The political struggle today is confined within the limits of this revolution. There is, however, a higher form of democracy that Marxists are fighting for— i.e., proletarian or working class democracy which will replace bourgeois democracy. How to conduct this fight will be determined by whether or not Marxists decide to build a revolutionary movement to bring about this higher form or confine themselves to trying to improve by reforms the already basically completed bourgeois revolution by which the capitalist class maintains its power. PART 2 coming up 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 4/2/2024 War on Gaza: We were lied into genocide. Al Jazeera has shown us how By: Jonathan CookRead NowFor weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza. Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia. Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported. Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation. These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group. The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities—from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes. The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included. What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings. Whitewashing genocide Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence. Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken. Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth. Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months. Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since. The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide. But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary. It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media. First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October—and those it did not—have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza. The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length. More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day. Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received U.S. approval. True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends. A colonial arrogance Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope. And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East. No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians—their slaves—were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow. The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could—and should—continue indefinitely. Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset. The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out. The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza. Suicide mission The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation. The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout—and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine—that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days. Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back. The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza. They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system--hostages labelled “prisoners”. As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned. Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map. For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off. The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position. It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia—the main Arab power broker in Washington—to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world. Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success. Loss of focus But for many long hours—with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised—Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected. Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose. With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities. That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel—by killing Israelis—for years of suffering in Gaza. And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza. It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media. Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down. Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders. One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior U.S. officials too. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims. Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened. Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed. Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally. When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so. Fabricating atrocities Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day. Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda. Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: A state has instrumentalized the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women. In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers. The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media—followed by the western media—“focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”. The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery? The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary. Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders. The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity. ‘Hannibal directive’ Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas—particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis—were actually Israel’s responsibility. Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas. In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities—still blamed on Hamas—suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”. These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive”—a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails. In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject. Woeful imbalance The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts. The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or U.S. media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October? In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza. But the problem runs deeper. This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years. Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target. That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism. A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation. There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness. Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps. And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide. Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests—such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East—the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm. Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide. Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds. AuthorThis article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives April 2024 (*) This text was presented at a symposium on the World System held at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, on September 22nd, 2023. Shortly before his death, in a series of writings, Samir Amin unfolded the two issues that mainly concerned him. The first was China’s refusal to succumb to financial globalization, that is, to the totalitarian power of global financial capital; the second was the need to build a “Fifth International.” We had been to China together, and I remember his immense anxiety on both subjects. One day he woke me up and asked me to urgently go to his room, where he was interviewed on a Chinese television, in order to talk, to describe to the Chinese public what I had experienced in Moscow, watching as a journalist the collapse of the Soviet regime and the restoration of capitalist relations of production and distribution. He feared that Beijing might, in some twist of its so sui generis evolution, make a decisive turn towards capitalism and wanted to ”inoculate ” somehow the Chinese in advance. Samir did not believe that the Chinese regime is a socialist one. “I will not say China is socialist, I will not say China is capitalist,” he said in a speech at a prestigious University of Peking. Sometimes he hoped, he thought, that there might be a way leading through state capitalism to state socialism and finally to socialism. If China were to completely embrace the financial globalization and its hierarchical structure, it would face enormous problems itself, but it would also decisively reinforce a rapid-forming Hyper-imperialist system, the one whose operational framework we all witness now in the war in Ukraine. Today, all the states of the collective West, with the exception perhaps of Turkey and in a very limited form, of Hungary, are acting in blatant opposition to their most elementary national interests. Turkey is an exception. It belongs half to the West and half to the periphery of the planet. It is not of course in any way an anti-imperialist force, still it disposes of a considerable degree of independence, using it in order to negotiate a privileged status in the ranks of western imperialism without identifying with all his policies. The rise of Hyper-imperialism tends to reduce Western nation-states to mere pawns, as big international finance capital gains control over all democratic institutions, stripping them of their national and democratic essence. In the principal capitalist countries there is still a remnant of the type of bourgeois democracy, but it is becoming increasingly hollow. How a road to socialism can be reopened, after the distortions and defeats of the 20th century, is certainly an open question. In order for this path to be unlocked, it is crucial to simultaneously shut down the path towards the further empowerment of the fast-evolving totalitarian Western capitalism, with the collusive possibilities offered to it by modern technological forces. And this has become possible today thanks to the resistance of the peoples of Yugoslavia and the Middle East, thanks to the social struggles in Europe and Latin America, thanks to the return of Russia to world politics, thanks to the fantastic economic rise of China. That is why every revolutionary Marxist, wherever he comes from, from the South, the East or the west of our continent, must be resolutely against Western imperialist interventions and not be led astray by the humanitarian and “democratic” pretexts used by western imperialism. None of their interventions brought democracy, all of them led to social and national disasters in the countries where they took place. The first duty of every conscious militant of the Left today is the opposition to imperialist wars and sanctions. This certainly does not mean unconditional support for the regimes that are attacked every time by imperialism, be it Serbia or Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran, Russia or China. It means an understanding of what the total domination of the West on the planet would mean for human civilization and for the very survival of the human species. Today, the emergence of the BRICS, the moves towards a multipolar world, the weakening of the role of the dollar are paving the way for a new, democratic world order. These are huge, historic steps. But it is only the necessary, not the sufficient, condition for a new world order. Our problem should not be a question of defeating the Western world in order to just replace it, but of moving all of humanity towards a new civilization that can face the enormous threats that have appeared for the first time in human history, due to the productive forces and technologies we have developed and which, if not controlled, will very soon put the very survival of humankind at risk. The West does not have the means to defeat the emerging majority of humanity. But in its effort not to lose its global dominance, it can proceed with policies that can blow up humanity with the means of mass destruction, a danger inherent in its adventurist policies towards Russia and China. Even if this scenario does not come to pass, the climate crisis is rapidly evolving and neither the West nor emerging global powers are taking action to address the most severe threat to humanity in the history of our existence, one that surpasses even the danger of nuclear conflict. Because nuclear war may or may not happen. But the Climate Change is coming with certainty, not with probability and humans will not survive it. They have to stop it but in order to stop it another social system and another civilization is what is needed. That is, even if we avoid the catastrophe of a World War, we risk finding ourselves in an environment of destruction due to a prolonged stalemate and conflict between North and South, East and West. If Rosa Luxemburg declared a century ago we had to choose “socialism or barbarism,” the dilemma today is: socialism or extinction. In our fight against climate change we fight for socialism. And in our fight for socialism we fight to save the planet. No one of the big problems humanity is facing can be addressed now on a national or regional level. This is one of the reasons we badly need a new International. The problems I mentioned above and other such issues cannot be solved solely by the action of states which are opposed to the dominant Western powers, These States are, by the way, mostly conservative, and just aim at the West leaving them alone and not interfering in their affairs, which is impossible because Imperialism is the nature of Capitalism. In any case, merely relying on states is not enough to tackle the challenges that humanity is up against, we need the conscious mobilization of vast popular masses in both the North and the South of the planet. We need also an alliance between western popular classes and the oppressed nations of the South and a mobilization of peoples all over the world. Such an alliance means addressing simultaneously socio-economic, geopolitical and ecological problems in the direction of a nationally, regionally and globally planned and democratically controlled economy. This should be our strategic goal. You cannot nowadays address the ecological but not the social, the social but not the geopolitical, the geopolitical but not the social. We need a 5th International for a variety of reasons, in order to unite the regions of the world on the basis of a new socialist project—because without such unity war will become unavoidable. We need also unite and coordinate the fights against capitalism, against imperialism, against totalitarianism, against climate change and degradation of nature. We cannot for example phase out the use of fossil fuels without taking into account the different position of different countries, etc. etc. Progress and planning become synonymous. In the light of the experience of the 20th century we cannot contain ourselves to the state ownership of the productive forces; we need to seek social ownership and control through the extensive use of methods of self-management. Socialism does not mean state ownership, it means the exercise of power by the people at all levels. It also means that we must rethink the pursuit of the constant perpetual development of the productive forces. For some ideas as to what this alternative transitional program of a fifth international should be, I refer you to a text of mine which asks some first questions. www.defenddemocracy.press AuthorDimitris Konstantakopoulos This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives April 2024 Ben Ughetti discusses the factors behind the left's repellent image. Picture The Activist Loser– a person who dedicates their entire personality to ‘the cause’. The political stripe of said person is usually meaningless albeit almost entirely predictable. They all look a certain way with unkempt or alternative haircuts, clothes that might not look or fit right and of course hundreds of badges on their lapels– proclaiming to the world everything from their trade union membership, vegan leanings, and the minority identity they’ve adopted. Try to have any form of conversation with these people and you quickly find they have none of the same interests and ambitions that most other people have. They live in a microcosm of their own sense of moral superiority. This person is a walking cliché from a Citizen Smith episode. It would be tempting to just point and laugh at The Activist Loser, however their association with our movement has resulted in reputational damage beyond belief. We know that on the Labour Party left there seems to be an endemic problem of ‘losers’, for want of a better term. The regular spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn being attacked, denounced and mocked in many critical interactions during his election campaigns was cringeworthy. Ultimately, you had a situation where a man who looked like an aged Activist Loser– some lefty allotment owner who couldn’t wear a tie properly– was being humiliated in the national media week after week. The optical issues that the Corbyn campaign faced are issues almost every section of the left has to deal with today. Left wing people in this country are not seen as normal people but almost a subculture of society, and as a result, are routinely rejected by the ordinary people that they portend to speak for. The obvious question here is why? Why does the left attract such a high proportion of these Activist Losers who exist on the fringes of society? The socialist cause is undeniably a noble one. To stand up against oppression, fight for equality and to build a better world. With this the left has always traditionally attracted a ‘softer’ type of person. In his post-capitalist desire lectures, Mark Fisher makes the observation that the left in many ways holds a position that they are the “wounded” and therefore cannot imagine themselves in a form of power against their enemies. This wounded mentality becomes an easier position to hold. It takes a certain type of person to make being wounded a status signifier, never mind a political position. We must imagine our Activist Loser as a wounded person. The best example of what is meant by this is when the left is directly attacked. Assessing the response of them for example in debate with a conservative on culture, the response is often to retreat into decrying bigotry. Or when facing state repression, to hysterically bemoan how badly the capitalist government is treating them. To the outside observer, this becomes very demoralising to watch, and any potential for sympathy from the masses is outweighed by the repulsion such plaintive trilling generates. We should be able to look at these responses and disagree. We know the nature of the capitalist class and need to be able to match and defeat them. The constant insistence amongst the left that we need to be fighting a cause of one-hundred different fronts in the never-ending identity wars, is emblematic of wounded victim mentality. For vast sections of the left the possibility of taking power is unimaginable. For these people however, this is actually preferable. They see politics as an extended personality trait or hobby, not as something transformative for our class. In the 1960’s with the rise of postmodernism, the left began to redirect the struggle not in the purpose for fighting class war, but for control of a moral authority afforded by fighting an identity war. Philosophers like Michel Foucault made the case that any and all societal norms had to be challenged on all fronts whether it be norms around prisons, hospitals or sexuality. As a result we saw a rise of new individualistic leftists who now didn’t see the cause of the left as the cause of class struggle but the cause of thousands of fractured ‘struggles’. Where political movements historically found success in getting as many disparate groups to unite on a single issue, the socialist movement now seems determined to produce more division among those who already support them. This is succinctly illustrated by the complete false assertion that ‘you can’t be a socialist if you don’t support feminism, open borders, trans rights, environmentalism etc’. Where Activist Losers use politics as a badge collection to show off how many correct stances they personally take. In a self-capitulating sense, this variety of individualistic leftist becomes a capitalist’s anti-capitalist: they have been able to digest the anti-capitalist theory and education to a degree where they are able to use its linguistics to redefine revolutionary ideas to be about the self. Using the tools provided to us by materialism we know that even the concept of societal norms is no concrete thing but rather for the usage of communists. A way to engage contemporary political discourse. Rejection of any and all norms for contrarian’s sake is clearly a fool’s errand that if popularised any further in the left will result in becoming divorced from the very idea of popular movement itself. What separates left and right individualists? The right individualists see themselves in a way of personal improvement to gain more capital, maintain certain moral structures and to reduce the capacity of the state. By contrast, the left individualists see themselves in a fight for the boundaries which they wish to keep pushing. These people frequently appear as downtrodden, but in reality are very focused on achieving dominion of moral authority with which they can pressure and influence the rest of the left and to an extent, wider society. With the rise of these individualists the traditional left’s fight for our class was pushed aside in favour of more identity politics based issues. Ultimately these people are the ones who see themselves as righteous victims of the most ugly parts of contemporary society instead of the class exploited by our economic system. These people will identify themselves in a variety of shades whether it be postmodernist, anarchist, intersectionalist or anything else. In their rejection of not only the norms of society but working-class culture they become increasingly abstracted from normality. All of this of course is not a rejection of subculture entirely, or to say that subculture is inherently a bad thing. In some ways, we could harness subculture to our advantage in support of class struggle. However, that is for a competent communist movement to decide, and until then, we should be able to have rational and meaningful conversations with the public without putting them off. The current optics of the left are not sustainable and will never earn the respect of the working people of Britain. The current stereotype of the left being easily offended, privately educated, Guardian-reading moralists who seek to sit in front of traffic or pontificating to people about fad nonsense such as ‘fatphobia’ or ‘cultural appropriation’ cannot continue. “It is very significant that it is not the embittered failures, not the careerists and reckless political adventurers, but the flower of the youth who turn to communism and who make the best communists.” – Harry Pollitt So, how do we respond to this? The Soviet Union explored what the ideal Soviet citizen would look like. A lot of this was firstly about being a functioning member of society and contributing to the growth of the Soviet Union. The intent and basis for this should be instructive for us. Not only in our political lives should we seek to be the best communists that we can be in order to sculpt the societal view of who we actually are. While I might not currently be able to answer what the perfect communist looks like it is very easy to deduct what doesn’t make a good communist and answering this question is a worthwhile endeavour. One of the most useful things we could do is cast-off this baggage of being part of ‘the left’. We are communists and our demand is Marxism-Leninism. We don’t fit ourselves in boxes to join people who we fundamentally disagree with. Our image also is our own, to set apart from the Activist Losers. The second and most immediate thing for us to do is to consider how we as individuals fit ourselves in society. This is something that needs a high degree of self-criticism. When thinking about your political work ask yourself: am I just sitting on Discord servers debating who I would have sided with in the Sino-Soviet split? Is this actually a good use of my time or am I throwing myself deeper into the echo chamber? You should have friends and relationships beyond your cadres, from work or from school, with other interests outside of politics, whether it be films, music, books, art or sports: the basic ingredients for both a healthy life and a tolerable personality. As Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 the less you do these things the further alienated you become from life itself. Communists are not some sort of caricature where we are all too serious to celebrate Christmas or go out with our friends. Life is meant to be enjoyed and communists in their fight should know this more than anyone else. We should be able to look at ourselves in the mirror aspirationally and ask: am I as physically fit as I could be? Could the way I dress and my haircut potentially put people off talking to me in public? Of course, we shouldn’t be prescribing universal looks and mandated haircuts but we shouldn’t look like a fringe group either. It’s a fine and tricky line but one we should be striving to get right. As extreme as our beliefs may be perceived by some in our communities, we can at least attempt to act and look as relatable as possible. The struggle for communism is ultimately a struggle for a popular movement. The sight of Activist Losers is disheartening and a sign of loss to the movement. However, when we use such slogans as “the only war is class war” or “smash capitalism” we should be self-reflective to how we can better ourselves to fulfil the essential tasks. If we are to build our movements of popular struggle and mass unity it requires us to be able to use the framework of dialectical materialism to dissect what will actually speak to working people on a level they can relate to. It’s for these reasons that it would be more beneficial for us to not think of ourselves as being “on the broad left” or apart of some sort of left wing super alliance but as the communist movement. We are serious people and as a result should treat our optics as such. So next time before you leave the house, perhaps reconsider the spiked leather jacket or the Che Guevara beret. It might just be worth leaving at home. Or better still, the dustbin. AuthorBen Ughetti is a member of the Young Communist League’s South Yorkshire Branch This article was produced by YCL Challenge. Archives March 2024 |
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