5/12/2023 Beware those who try to discredit Leninism from a “decolonial” angle By: Rainer SheaRead NowCapitalism will co-opt anything, so long as it can be used to make profits or to aid its narrative campaigns. It doesn’t care about how “left” or “radical” an idea is, all it cares about is its potential utility within the class war. That’s where the phenomenon I’m going to talk about comes from: a project by the narrative managers of bourgeois class power to create a controlled opposition. To cultivate a leftism, or even a “communism,” that doesn’t fundamentally support class struggle, but in effect acts to obstruct class struggle. Parenti identified the 1990s precursor to this type of controlled opposition when he wrote about what he called the “anything but class” (ABC) left: To the extent that class is accorded any attention in academic social science, pop sociology, and media commentary, it is as a kind of demographic trait or occupational status. So sociologists refer to “upper-middle,” “lower-middle,” and the like. Reduced to a demographic trait, one’s class affiliation certainly can seem to have relatively low political salience. Society itself becomes little more than a pluralistic configuration of status groups. Class is not a taboo subject if divorced from capitalism’s exploitative accumulation process. Both mainstream social scientists and “left” ABC theorists fail to consider the dynamic interrelationship that gives classes their significance. In contrast, Marxists treat class as the key concept in an entire social order known as capitalism (or feudalism or slavery), centering around the ownership of the means of production (factories, mines, oil wells, agribusinesses, media conglomerates, and the like) and the need—if one lacks ownership—to sell one’s labor on terms that are highly favorable to the employer. In the post-2008 crisis world, where class has been shown to be extremely relevant, the ABC leftists have had to change their tactics. They still don’t recognize that class is the primary contradiction in the core, like how in their foreign policy analysis they still don’t recognize U.S. imperialism is the globe’s primary contradiction. But our conditions have made it essential for those claiming to want radical change to at least adopt the rhetoric of Marxism, as shown by how the social democrats are utilizing language which sounds “socialist” on a surface level. So the ABC leftists have largely come to claim to be “communists,” something that’s useful when building a brand or a community in left-wing spaces during the social media age. This is why it’s important for serious Marxists to understand that just because somebody online calls themselves a communist, doesn’t mean they’re worthy of your trust, or mean you should change your own stances in order to gain their favor. These pseudo-radical ideas are in the same category as those of the ABC theorist Herbert Marcuse, whose efforts to obscure the class reality have been described by the Marxist Eric Scheper as such: What can a bourgeois intellectual do to serve U.S. imperialism? He employs his “academic expertism” to manufacture theories which try to explain political and social features of class struggle between U.S. imperialism and the working and oppressed people in such a way as to argue that the basis of change and development in society is not class struggle, that man’s life is guided by the “demands of the life instincts.” That the productive machinery of U.S. imperialism promises to deliver everybody from the curse of work, and that “the higher historical truth would pertain to the system which offers the greater chance of pacification” (One-Dimensional Man). Marcuse touches upon every aspect of class struggle in order to “prove” that the problems of the decadent and parasitic U.S. imperialism do not originate from the contradictions inherent within the system. It is for this reason that periodicals like the Guardian, which serve U.S. imperialism, also praise and idolize paid agents of U.S. imperialism Marcuse’s reformist ideas, represented by the Democratic Party, are what these pseudo-Marxists ultimately work to advance. This is still true if unlike Marcuse, they understand that U.S. imperialism’s evils come from the system’s contradictions. Because even if they posture as revolutionary, they share his view that these evils don’t foremost originate from class contradictions. Instead, they tend to claim that the primary contradiction is settler-colonialism. Which of course is an evil that must be rectified, but as Parenti said, the issue with the ABC leftists is not that they talk about the injustices which particular groups are subjected to. It’s that they act like these injustices make class not the central factor. Part of the way these modern ABC leftists demonstrate this stance is simply through their practice. Instead of mainly directing their energy towards ends that actually advance the class struggle—anti-imperialist information warfare, aiding the working class movement, rigorous theoretical study—their focus is primarily on things that don’t on their own pose a serious threat towards the bourgeoisie. One can talk about social injustices all they like, but without a serious class analysis, their efforts won’t truly be offensive towards the ruling class. They’ll still be allowed a platform within bourgeois media, academic institutions, and left opportunist online spaces. A prerequisite for gaining this power is to present a type of “Marxism” which is off. Which includes accounts of history that are skewed to advance a certain narrative, or analysis of our present conditions that portray the working class as fundamentally reactionary. When confronted with these critiques, these ABC types may say they’re aware that class is relevant, and that the job of Marxists is to win the working class away from reaction. Yet even if they genuinely hold these correct beliefs, the fact that their wider practice and analysis work to the detriment of class struggle renders this knowledge of theirs ineffectual. If you’re not interested in what must realistically be done to win the people, and to narratively defeat the imperialist order which keeps the state strong, then you’re hurting your own cause as a communist. And that’s assuming all of these actors are even communists. They’re part of a larger ideological coalition that’s compatible with anti-communist anarchists and social democrats, since these types of liberals often also claim to be “decolonial.” It’s easy to call oneself “decolonial.” The CIA weaponizes “decolonial theory” to advance its global regime change goals, liberal academics talk plenty about this theory, and essentially every Democrat-aligned NGO employs rhetoric adjacent to it. It’s harder to come to a synthesis between anti-colonialism and class struggle, and go forward without letting one’s analysis be corrupted by the liberal ideas which our imperialist institutions have presented as “anti-colonialism.” True anti-colonialism recognizes class as the primary contradiction, as the systems of capitalist extraction that perpetuate colonialism can’t be defeated until the class struggle is won. And it will never be won as long as the faces of Marxism in the imperial center act like class is a secondary thing. When one acts like this, it doesn’t matter how passionately they claim to oppose the present social order. Their way of operating in effect does nothing besides aid the Democratic Party. It’s a cycle of ineffectualness that the left has been trapped in for generations, ever since the suppression of the communist movement allowed for the three letter agencies to cultivate a “New Left” that’s fundamentally disinterested in winning power. In our circumstances of intensified class and geopolitical conflict, this left is trying to appear as if it’s now a Marxist vanguard, but it’s ultimately on the side of the system. For example, the modern ABC leftists largely claim to be pro-China, but not for the same reason that serious Marxists are pro-China. Marxists support it because it’s a socialist state, ABC leftists say they support it because they view doing so as useful in advancing their (non-Marxist) aims. I phrase it as “they say they support it” because as soon as they learn their aims aren’t actually compatible with those of the PRC, they’ll come to oppose it, just like the rest of those who hold imperialism-compatible ideas. This last year’s geopolitical developments have shown that the PRC, due to its continued cooperation with Russia and its recognition that Russia was provoked, broadly has the goal of changing the balance of global power. More than that, it aims to continue building socialism in a future where U.S. imperialism can no longer threaten its revolution’s gains. Radlibs ultimately oppose China’s project to keep strengthening its workers state for the same reason they ultimately oppose its challenging U.S. hegemony: because both of these objectives are aided by Operation Z, and Z is something the radlibs will never support. Under no circumstances will they oppose Democrat foreign policy to the degree of backing an instrumental step towards defeating the U.S. empire’s strategic objectives. If they were to support Z, they would lose their support from the Democrat-aligned institutions and communities which give them their power. To fully break from these opportunistic actors, I’ve needed to realize that power on its own does not equate to effectiveness at changing society. Power, on an individual level, is like money: pleasurable to have in a superficial way, but not something that can necessarily make one an active agent in history. In fact, the cost of attaining power can be giving up one’s historical agency so that those who hold the power will let you in. Then you’ll still be an observer in history, only an observer with higher social status. I’m not here to get power or money, I’m here to change the direction history takes to the greatest extent possible. That’s the correct attitude for Marxists to have, as indicated by Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds in which he points out how communists don’t actually thirst for power. Our aim is to advance history’s development, by any means that will need to entail. Including being willing to alienate the Democratic Party, and its adjacent ideological fronts. They do nothing besides hold back the class struggle, they’re not worthy of our respect. AuthorThis article was republished from News with Theory. Archives May 2023
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5/12/2023 We must speak up before the propagandists get their war with China By: John PilgerRead NowWhere are the voices that speak up against fascism, war, and propaganda, asks renowned journalist John Pilger as he surveys the past decade of dirty tricks perpetrated by the United States and its allies The Congress of American Writers that was held in New York City took a firm stand against fascism and war. Photo: Daily Worker / People’s World Archives Speak up. Now. In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away. Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out. The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.” Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: “The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.” Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example: On March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They colored the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity. No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defense Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry. “Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. “Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean. There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful. The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering. “How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?” The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean? Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. US admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice.’ Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky. No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration. The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews. Today, Bandera is hero-worshiped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis. In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in a US-bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name. At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and US media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented. Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded. This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema. Journalists who traveled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered. In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic. Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous. The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice’ “wrote Eagleton. Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. The United States then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as ‘the movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century. On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’ At the time, I was a correspondent in the US and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialized his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was. Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said. As for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly Blacks they sent to jail. When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition. In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fueled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.’ ‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population. The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’. In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’ He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’ I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer , who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so. Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed. Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools? Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’ One of the persistent strands in US political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that US foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported. ‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favorite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War. According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of color: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan. Every Tuesday — reported the New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target’. A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’ In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. “We knew…,”he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state. Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misrata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and UNICEF reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’. When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomized with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’ On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.
Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or 70% of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing. It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.” In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his Defense Secretary. There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose.” At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War — having promised, in an emotional speech in the center of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’. Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has. I am writing this on April 30, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognize the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda. All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’. Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilization blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost. If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up. This article was produced by Globetrotter. John Pilger is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and author. Read his full biography on his website here, and follow him on Twitter: @JohnPilger. AuthorThis article was republished from Peoples Dispatch. Archives May 2023 Moscow Kremlin The West’s cryptic or mocking remarks doubting the Kremlin statement on the failed Ukrainian attempt to assassinate President Vladimir Putin do not detract from the fact that Moscow has no reason on earth to fabricate such a grave allegation that has prompted the scaling down of its Victory Day celebrations on May 9, which is a triumphal moment in all of Russian history, especially now when it is fighting off the recrudescence of Nazi ideology on Europe’s political landscape single-handedly all over again. The alacrity with which the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken debunked the Kremlin allegation, perhaps, gives the game away. It is in the neocon DNA to duck in such defining moments. That said, predictably, Blinken also distanced the Biden administration from the Kremlin attack. Earlier, the chairman of Joints Chiefs of Staff General Marks Milley also did a similar thing in an interview with the Foreign Affairs magazine disowning in advance any responsibility for the upcoming Ukrainian “counteroffensive”. This is the Biden Administration’s new refrain — hear no evil, speak no evil. No more talk, either, of backing Kiev all the way “no matter what it takes” — as Biden used to say ad nauseam. The heart of the matter is that Kiev’s much touted “counteroffensive” is struggling amidst widespread western prognosis that it is destined to be a damp squib. Actually, the salience of the Foreign Affairs podcast this week with Gen. Milley was also his diffidence about the outcome. Milley refused to be categorical that Kiev would even launch its “counteroffensive”! There is a huge dilemma today as the entire western narrative of a Russian defeat stands exposed as a pack of lies, and alongside, the myth of Kiev’s military prowess to take on the far superior military might of a superpower has evaporated. The Ukrainian military is being ground to the dust systematically. In reality, Ukraine has become an open wound that is fast turning gangrene, and little time is left to cauterise the wound. However, Kiev regime is ridden with factionalism. There are powerful cliques who are averse to peace talks with Russia short of capitulation by Moscow and instead want an escalation so that the Western powers remain committed. And even after Boris Johnson’s exit, they have supporters in the West. The militant clique ensconced in the power structure in Kiev could well have been the perpetrators of this dangerous act of provocation directed against the Kremlin with an ulterior agenda to trigger a Russian retaliation. From Blinken’s vacuous remark, it seems the neocons in the Biden Administration led by Victoria Nuland are in no mood to rein in the mavericks in Kiev, either. As for Europe, it has lost its voice too. This will probably show up in history books as a historic failure of European leadership and at its core lies the paradox that it is not France but the German government that has aligned itself closer with the US in the Ukraine war and risking an intra-European “epoch of confrontation.” Even otherwise, these are fateful times, with the political middle ground already shrinking in France and Italy and is much weakened in Germany itself in the wake of the pandemic, the war, and inflation. Importantly, this is only partly an economic story, as the decline of the centre and the de-industrialisation in Europe are closely related and the social fabric that supported the centre has come unstuck. Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, has been relatively lucky so far. It benefited from cheap labour from east Europe and cheap gas from Russia. But that is over now and the decline of German industry is foreseeable. When society fragments, the political system also fragments and it will take progressively greater effort to govern such countries. Germany and Italy have a three-party coalitions; the Netherlands has four parties; Belgium has a seven-party coalition. For the present, the hardliners in the Kiev regime have set the pace of events and Europeans will meekly follow. But there’s a ‘chill in the room’ — to borrow the words of Judie Foster in the horror film Silence of the Lambs when Anthony Hopkins transformed in a flash into Hannibal Lecter. Make no mistake, this is a tipping point; the clumsy attempt on Putin’s life jolts the kaleidoscope beyond recognition. The only comforting thought is that the Kremlin leadership is not going to be driven by emotion. The considered Kremlin reaction is available from the remarks by the Russian Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov: “How would Americans react if a drone hit the White House, the Capitol or the Pentagon? The answer is obvious for any politician as well as for an average citizen: the punishment will be harsh and inevitable.” The ambassador went on to draw the bottom line: “Russia will respond to this insolent and presumptuous terrorist attack. We will answer when we consider it necessary. We will answer in accordance with the assessments of the threat that Kiev posed to the leadership of our country.” No knee-jerk reactions are to be expected. Nonetheless, the scaling down of the Victory Day celebrations on the Red Square itself must have been a difficult decision. The Victory Day on May 9 is the most important holiday in Russia when the public and the state come together in a patriotic celebration during which people remember their family members who sacrificed their lives to defeat Nazism. Many of the day’s features—parades, songs and commemorative practices—date back to the Soviet era. Victory Day is the only major public holiday that made the transition to post-Soviet Russia. In a country that lost many of its idols and heroic achievements with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, triumph over Nazism remained a source of enormous collective and personal pride. But Putin’s hands are tied beyond a point when the country is in rage and demanding retribution, as evident from the comments by former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev: “After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left except for the physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique.” As for Zelensky, he simply left Kiev for Helsinki — and to the Hague thereafter, and arrive in Berlin by May 13 on a state visit — sensing danger, perhaps. Indeed, the fate of the Zelensky regime seems sealed. Zelensky reminds us of the mythical Wandering Jew, who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. Authorthis article was republished from Indian Punchline. Archives May 2023 5/10/2023 Countries worldwide are dropping the US dollar: De-dollarization in China, Russia, Brazil, ASEAN By: Ben NortonRead Now
The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar. China, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN nations, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are now using local currencies in trade.
(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar.
China and Russia are trading in their own currencies. Beijing and Brazil have also dropped the dollar in bilateral trade. The UAE is selling China its gas in yuan, through a French company. Southeast Asian nations in ASEAN are de-dollarizing their trade, promoting local payment systems. Kenya is buying Persian Gulf oil with its own currency. Even the Financial Times newspaper has acknowledged that a “multipolar currency world” is emerging.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow in March, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin revealed that two-thirds of the countries’ bilateral trade is already conducted in the ruble and renminbi.
“It is important that our national currencies are increasingly used in bilateral trade“, Putin said. “We should continue promoting settlements in national currencies, and expand the reciprocal presence of financial and banking structures in our countries’ markets”. The Russian leader added, “We support using Chinese yuan in transactions between the Russian Federation and its partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America”.
Just a week after Xi’s trip to Moscow, China announced that it had for the first time used yuan to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the UAE.
The deal was negotiated between the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company and the French company TotalEnergies, meaning European firms are now willing to conduct transactions in yuan. French media outlet RFI described the trade as a “major step in Beijing’s attempts to undermine the US dollar as universal ‘petrodollar’ for gas and oil trade”. The report quoted the chairman of the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, Guo Xu, who said the deal encouraged “multi-currency pricing, settlement and cross-border payment”.
On March 30, China and Brazil (the world’s most populous and sixth-most populous countries) announced they had come to an agreement to trade with each other in their local currencies, yuan and reais.
China’s media network CGTN reported, “The deal will enable China, the world’s second-largest economy, and Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly, exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa instead of going through the dollar”. It noted that China is Brazil’s biggest trading partner, and in 2022 the two countries did more than $150.5 billion worth of trade. Brazil’s leftist President Lula da Silva has called for Latin America to develop a new currency for regional trade, which he calls the Sur.
Just two days before China and Brazil revealed their deal to trade in local currencies, the South American giant’s former President Dilma Rousseff officially assumed her new role as chief of the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai.
The NDB, commonly known as the BRICS Bank, was created by the bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as an alternative to the US-dominated World Bank. Dilma, like her ally Lula, is a leftist from Brazil’s Workers’ Party. In a speech that Geopolitical Economy reported on in 2022, Dilma analyzed the US-China conflict as “a rivalry of two systems”, a struggle between neoliberalism and socialism. She condemned US sanctions and “dollar hegemony” and called for Latin America “to break with the Monroe Doctrine”.
Countries in Southeast Asia are also de-dollarizing.
The finance ministers and governors of the central banks of the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Indonesia on March 28. According to the news website ASEAN Briefing, at the top of their agenda were “discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies”. ASEAN is developing a cross-border digital payment system that would allow the use of local currencies in regional trade. ASEAN Briefing noted that Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand agreed on this in November 2022. The media outlet added that Indonesia’s central bank plans on creating a local payment system as well. ASEAN Briefing wrote: Indonesian President Joko Widodo has urged regional administrations to start using credit cards issued by local banks and gradually stop using foreign payment systems. He argued that Indonesia needed to shield itself from geopolitical disruptions, citing the sanctions targeting Russia’s financial sector from the US, EU, and their allies over the conflict in Ukraine.
Indonesia is the fourth-most populous country on Earth, after the United States.
Another Southeast Asian nation, Malaysia, is publicly advocating de-dollarization.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim met with Chinese President Xi in Beijing on March 31, where the two leaders discussed plans to weaken US dollar hegemony and even create an “Asian Monetary Fund”. This is a frontal challenge to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), which emerged from the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that established the dollar as the global reserve currency. Anwar proposed the Asian Monetary Fund at the Boao Forum in China’s Hainan province. “There is no reason for Malaysia to continue depending on the dollar”, Anwar said, in comments reported by Bloomberg. The media outlet added that Malaysia’s central bank is developing a payment mechanism so the Southeast Asian country can trade with China using its own currency, the ringgit.
Bloomberg noted:
The Malaysian leader’s comments come just months after former officials in Singapore discussed what economies in the region should be doing to mitigate the risks of a still-strong dollar that’s weakened local currencies and become a tool of economic statecraft.
“Economic statecraft” is a roundabout way of saying economic warfare. The unilateral sanctions the United States has imposed on countries all across the planet, in flagrant violation of international law, are backfiring. Many nations are now seeking financial alternatives, afraid that they could be the next target.
And with the US Federal Reserve constantly raising interest rates, the dollar has become so strong that it is hurting the currencies of other countries, making imports more expensive. Even US ally India is hedging its bets on de-dollarization. Reuters reported that Russia’s largest oil producer, the state-owned company Rosneft, made an deal with India’s top refiner Indian Oil Corp, which is also state owned, to use the Dubai price benchmark in oil sales, as opposed to the Brent benchmark. The decision “to abandon the Europe-dominated Brent benchmark is part of a shift of Russia’s oil sales towards Asia”, it wrote. Reuters cited “Rosneft’s chief executive Igor Sechin, [who] said in February that the price of Russian oil would be determined outside of Europe as Asia has emerged as largest buyer of Russian oil”.
Several countries on the African continent are advocating de-dollarization as well.
In March, Kenya signed an agreement with state-owned companies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to buy oil on credit, using the country’s local currency, the shilling. Kenya asked to do so because the African nation’s dollar reserves are running low, as it pays for more expensive imports.
One of the world’s leading newspapers, the Financial Times, acknowledged in an article in March that these historic developments are part of a transition to a “multipolar currency world“.
The chair of the Financial Times’ editorial board and US editor-at-large, Gillian Tett, wrote that “US banking turmoil, inflation and looming debt ceiling battle is making dollar-based assets less attractive”. She noted that the former Goldman Sachs economist who first popularized the term BRICS, Jim O’Neill, has stated that “the dollar plays far too dominant a role in global finance”.
AuthorBen Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst. He is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, and is based in Latin America. (Publicaciones en español aquí.)
This article was republished from Geopolitical Economy Report.
ArchivesMay 2023 United Parcel Service workers and the company are in negotiations over a new contract. The workers, who are vital to the country’s economy, often don’t have time to return home for a full night of sleep or are forced to rest in shelters because their pay is too low to afford a room In Canarsie, Brooklyn, UPS Teamsters from Local 804 rallied in front of a UPS Customer Center on April 21 United Parcel Service (UPS) workers are gearing up for a potential strike as they hold contract negotiations with the company. Talks between the company and the union representing UPS workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, opened on April 17. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien says that workers are ready to walk off the job if UPS fails to reach a deal on a strong contract before the current one expires on July 31. Workers are demanding better pay, more full-time work, better job security, and an end to the two-tier “22.4” job classification. The deeply unpopular “22.4” provision creates a lower-paid tier of workers who essentially perform the same work as senior drivers, but for lower pay. The workers are also demanding an end to excessive overtime, better protections against company harassment, the elimination of driver-facing cameras, and protection from hot weather. Drivers reported extreme temperatures inside their delivery trucks in posts that went viral last summer, and workers, like 24-year-old Esteban Chavez, have died due to extreme heat. “Part-Time America Won’t Work”A strike may have a formidable impact. UPS workers move 6% of the US GDP in their trucks every day. The last time UPS Teamsters went on strike was in 1997, when 185,000 workers walked off the job in one of the largest strikes in US history. The work stoppage cost the company USD 850 million despite only lasting for 15 days. The US has not seen a strike of this magnitude since. Today, after e-commerce has grown exponentially, UPS employs over 340,000 Teamsters, who deliver over six billion packages every year. UPS workers were declared “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic due to their critical role in distributing goods throughout the country. If these workers were to strike, the effects would be astronomical. A potential strike is leverage in the tough negotiations over the contract and workers are mobilizing in various parts of the country. In Canarsie, Brooklyn, UPS Teamsters from Local 804 rallied in front of a UPS Customer Center on April 21, to build momentum. A crowd of hundreds gathered while passing trucks honked in support. “[In] ‘97, I was a part timer on strike,” said Chris Williamson, Local 804 Vice President, addressing the rally. “The thing was, part time America does not work. It still doesn’t work.” “Part-Time America Won’t Work” was a key slogan during the 1997 strike. The slogan highlighted resistance to UPS’ push to split stable full-time jobs into far more precarious part-time positions. The strike was successful, winning raises for workers and around ten thousand full-time jobs. Teamsters reiterated the slogan “Part-Time America Won’t Work” several times at last week’s rally, because over two decades later, it remains relevant as unionized workers push for more full-time positions. Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ronald Jeffrey, a part-time worker from Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. Jeffrey works at a Wendy’s because UPS does not provide him with enough hours to be able to survive off of that job alone. UPS is meant to guarantee part-timers at least three and a half hours each day, but Jeffrey says this is not always the case. “They rather you get off the clock before that.” Jeffrey believes he is being treated unfairly, despite being declared an “essential worker” by the US government. “I definitely worked the whole two years. Without a day off. And got the medicine, and all these things, and food to people. [I] just got nothing for it,” he said. “Other companies gave their workers incentives and initiatives, and we got nothing. Absolutely nothing.” Local 804 workers also reported having full-time shifts split into two part-time shifts, severely disrupting sleeping schedules and ife outside of work. Fabrizio, a full-time driver who was made to work in split shifts, spoke to the gathered workers about being forced to come in to work from 4 am to 8 am, go home, then head back to work from 4:30 pm to 8:30 pm. “Guys are getting 4 hours, maybe 5 hours of sleep a day,” he said, “We’re coming in exhausted already and they’re giving us tons of work…We’ve got guys that have lived in [New] Jersey that are coming all the way [to Brooklyn]. They don’t even go home. They sleep in their cars. They can’t even go home, see their wife and their kids.” The union is fighting to end this practice, said Fabrizio. Dave Loobie, who worked part-time in the building for 22 years and is now a business agent for the local, addressed gathered workers. “Inside this building here, I worked alongside brothers and sisters who live in the shelter,” he said. “While UPS is making billions of dollars of profit, there are people living in the shelter working for them [who] can’t afford a room.” Pay is a major issue for UPS workers across the US. Some part-time workers are paid as low as USD 15.50 per hour. The Teamsters union is working to push starting wages above USD 20 per hour for part-timers. Meanwhile, UPS reported record profits last year, generating USD 100 billion in revenue for the first time. UPS CEO Carol Tomé was compensated USD 19 million last year—a far cry from workers sleeping in shelters. “We have to maintain this unity” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien took the helm of the union in 2022, after running for office with an endorsement from Teamsters progressive caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union. O’Brien beat Steve Vairma, the successor to the previous Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, whose popularity had plummeted after he undemocratically forced through a UPS contract that a majority of workers had voted against in 2018. This contract included a number of unpopular provisions, and many workers felt that Hoffa had cut a deal with the company, not with workers. One of the most unpopular parts of the contract was the “22.4” provision. Measures such as this serve to strengthen divisions between workers and undermine unity. O’Brien promises to break with Hoffa’s example and offer no compromises: he wants to do away with the 22.4 provision altogether. “[O’Brien] said forget that, he [wants 22.4s] gone,” Williamson said. “And we’re going to do it if we stand together.” “The company has created the 22.4 position and they are displacing full time helpers to divide us,” Brooklyn UPS driver Antoine Andrews told gathered workers. “But today, again, we demonstrate that we are united. We have to maintain this unity so that we can survive.” AuthorNatalia Marques This article was republished from Peoples Dispatch. Archives May 2023 We left Havana on May 3. Tired after days of seminars, meetings with locals, and cultural activities, I was able to begin unpacking and relax, unlike many others returning home to the United States who ended up being detained at the airports of Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Newark. They were granted special permission to visit Cuba under the US blockade that has been in place for more than sixty years (except for a short reprieve from 2014–2017). Yet, despite legal documents and US citizenship, the border agents harassed, threatened, and abused them like criminals. Freedom of movement does not apply to people in the land of the free. With the recent addition of Cuba to the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list under the Biden administration, the economic barrier erected by the most comprehensive blockade in history serves more than to asphyxiate Cuba into submission; its primary goal is to prevent the world from seeing and believing in an alternative to capitalism. Fredric Jameson once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. He must have not visited Cuba. Don’t get me wrong. Cuba is not a utopia. It is visibly struggling; infrastructure is crumbling; economic inequality exists; Cuban people are far from happy or content and some aspire to find new lives abroad. Nevertheless, what we learned in our ten-day trip in Cuba is that the left in the Global North cannot address the various issues facing us today without learning from the Cuban experience. To do this, and to concurrently strengthen anticapitalist struggles across the world, we must first and foremost break the US blockade on Cuba. Phenomena do not exist in isolation. The US blockade must be recognized as a manifestation of the same colonial project that existed long before the Cuban revolution of 1959 and the Cuban independence movement of 1902, as this year marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. One misconception about Cuba is the association with a singular figure of Fidel Castro. While many ordinary Cubans profess their love for their Comandante el Jefe, Fidel’s name or image is hardly seen in Havana—it was Castro’s own wish that public commemoration be discouraged. If there were to be a personification of Cuba’s national psyche, it is poet and anticolonial fighter José Martí. More than anything, Cubans pride themselves with the progress they made in anticolonial, anti-imperialist struggles since Martí. Seeing from the outside, the Cuban people today objectively retain degrees of sovereignty above neighboring states like Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico (which remains a US colony). In real terms, while Hurricane Maria left nearly three thousand people dead in Puerto Rico and devastated the island for years, Cuba suffered few casualties and quickly rebuilt—a fact undeniable even by the Washington Post. Thus, the question of whether Cuba is a socialist country matters less than whether Cuba is able to overcome centuries of colonialism. At the same time, the former is directly related to the latter: its socialist principles are in lockstep with its national liberation project. If you are an astute observer, you may pick out these principles traveling through Cuba. We did not need government officials, union representatives, or prominent intellectuals to tell us what they are. The lack of advertisement even at the busiest tourist corner of Havana reflects the social constraints exerted on market forces. The complete lack of police presence, even at 2 a.m. in an area with vibrant nightlife, the absence of homelessness, loitering youth, panhandling, and general wretchedness speak loud and clear about human welfare and security. Even when the buildings and sidewalks are in disrepair, music, art, and people in the community filled the public spaces. And of course, the hospitals—the successes of the Cuban healthcare system in taking care of its own people need no further elaboration. Lesser known is Cuba’s leading role in global health. We visited Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM) and met students from Congo, Chile, Palestine, and the United States (who came from underserved communities) on full scholarships; these students are trained with the socialist philosophy that sees health not as a mere biological problem but also a social issue, which prepares them to be able to serve their own community upon completion of training by gaining an understanding of their own geographical, political, and cultural contexts. This act of internationalism is but a small part of the renowned Cuban medical brigade that provides humanitarian aid to all corners of the world—to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Africa during the Ebola outbreak, Syria after the recent earthquake, to name only a few. Claudia, a young woman we met during the visit to Centro de Inmunología Molecular (CIM), was among the medical volunteers at the peak of COVID-19 infection. She was not a physician but a scientist working on the now-approved SOBERANA vaccine. As the US blockade deprived Cuba access to the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, they had to develop their own. After devoting hundreds of hours in the labs producing the basic research before vaccines can be mass manufactured, she spent months in Venezuela educating local communities on public health measures and helped distribute the million doses of SOBERANA donated from Cuba. We were deeply moved by such an embodiment of science in the service of humanity. It’s important to acknowledge that not every Cuban medical or science student is like Claudia—she told me as much; many trainees have left the country in pursuit of higher pays as physicians and scientists, and many are quitting their education to earn hard currency from the nascent tourist industry. The realization that we are the tourists still haunts the memory of this encounter. Meanwhile, Cuba’s pharmaceutical development is not entirely humanitarian, as SOBERANA under international patent rights allow for its sales and distributions in higher income countries to boost Cuba’s export. The market still dictates many facets of Cuban life. I am reminded of Huey Newton’s famous phrase: revolution is a process. If we simply take Cuba’s achievements in medical internationalism, scientific achievement, as well as the new 2022 Family Code that granted unprecedented rights to women, elderly, and LGBTQ+ communities—a demonstration of popular democracy through which millions of votes were casted and thousands of debates, consultations, and public events were held—as discrete victories of progress, we may find exemplary counterparts in Western Europe. But seeing the Cuban society as an agent in world history, we can draw a few unique lessons for our own struggle to overcome capitalism. First, we must study and understand how Cuba survived adversity, not just building a national and cultural identity on a resource-deprived island ninety miles off the coast of a settler-colonial empire, but actively resisting continued imperial aggression after centuries of slavery and extraction from the United States. In prioritizing human development as official policy, Cuba stands out among countries in the world for its education, medicine, science, sport, and arts. We may disagree on the verity of its socialism, but none can deny the contribution to humanity that the Cuban people have made since 1959 in healing and defending the world against colonists in Algeria, Angola, and Vietnam, etc. Second, in studying the contradictions, problems, and challenges of Cuban society, the effect of the US blockade cannot be underplayed. Any commodities that comprise 10 percent or more manufacturing in the United States are restricted to enter Cuba; third party countries or private firms that attempt to establish trade with Cuba will need to constantly tiptoe around sanctions and fines from unilateral US law, the content of which changes regularly to discourage capital influx to Cuba. As a result of economic suffocation, Cuba’s energy and food supply are in tight balance, always in conflict with social expenditure. We experienced several blackouts during our stay, and by the end of the trip became accustomed to sudden changes of itinerary due to logistical issues. While it is all the more impressive of what Cuba was able to achieve under the blockade, it should lead us to contemplate what more would Cuba have provided to the world if it is freed from the US stranglehold? Third, capitalism and imperialism are coevolutionary processes. We cannot win class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries at home without solidarity from the Global South—the majority of the world. This is where Cuba stands tall as a beacon of anti-imperialism since the beginning of the revolution, with its illustrious legacies of vanguarding the formations of Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina (OSPAAAL) and the Non-aligned Movement. As the blockade not only hinders social/socialist development of Cuba and the rest of the Third World, it is a detriment to our struggles within the belly of the beast. On a superficial level, we ask how many lives would be saved if the Cuban Heberprot-P treatment for diabetic foot ulcer or CIMAvax-EGF for lung cancer are allowed for the hundred million poor people in the United States? At a deeper level, if the US rulers can continue to disregard the will of the world’s people and commit to carry out this crime against humanity, what would it do to nascent revolutionary struggles in other parts of the world (e.g., Venezuela), or under its own belly (e.g., Black and Indigenous liberation)? The Cuban sovereign project, socialist or not, is at the forefront of a totality of world struggle against capitalism and empire. At the end of this write-up, our comrades detained at the US border are now released. They told us that their phones were immediately seized, broken into, while being denied legal consultation. We went on a trip to learn about Cuban society. Perhaps we learned just as much if not more about our own society. In order to free ourselves from repression in our own country, we must stand in solidarity with the Cuban people suffering from the same repression manifested abroad. The blockade against Cuba is a blockade against our own future, a shared vision by the people of the world fighting for peace, justice, and all that is good of humanity. AuthorCalvin Wu is a member of the May Day Brigade organized by the International People’s Assembly. He is the secretary of the organization Science for the People and a research scientist based in Cambridge, MA. Archives May 2023 Preface This article on Karl Marx, which now appears in a separate printing, was written in 1913 (as far as I can remember) for the Granat Encyclopaedia. A fairly detailed bibliography of literature on Marx, mostly foreign, was appended to the article. This has been omitted in the present edition. The editor of the Encyclopaedia, for their part, have, for censorship reasons, deleted the end of the article on Marx, namely, the section dealing with his revolutionary tactics. Unfortunately, I am unable to reproduce that end, because the draft has remained among my papers somewhere in Krakow or in Switzerland. I only remember that in the concluding part of the article I quoted, among other things, the passage from Marx’s letter to Engels of April 16, 1856, in which he wrote: “The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasant War. Then the affair will be splendid.” That is what our Mensheviks, who have now sunk to utter betrayal of socialism and to desertion to the bourgeoisie, have failed to understand since 1905. Biography Marx, Karl, was born on May 5, 1818 (New Style), in the city of Trier (Rhenish Prussia). His father was a lawyer, a Jew, who in 1824 adopted Protestantism. The family was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary. After graduating from a Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and later in Berlin, where he read law, majoring in history and philosophy. He concluded his university course in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Epicurus. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views. In Berlin, he belonged to the circle of “Left Hegelians” (Bruno Bauer and others) who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusion from Hegel’s philosophy. After graduating, Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to become a professor. However, the reactionary policy of the government, which deprived Ludwig Feuerbach of his chair in 1832, refused to allow him to return to the university in 1836, and in 1841 forbade young Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn, made Marx abandon the idea of an academic career. Left Hegelian views were making rapid headway in Germany at the time. Feuerbach began to criticize theology, particularly after 1836, and turn to materialism, which in 1841 gained ascendancy in his philosophy (The Essence of Christianity). The year 1843 saw the appearance of his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. “One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect” of these books, Engels subsequently wrote of these works of Feuerbach. “We [i.e., the Left Hegelians, including Marx] all became at once Feuerbachians.” At that time, some radical bourgeois in the Rhineland, who were in touch with the Left Hegelians, founded, in Cologne, an opposition paper called Rheinische Zeitung (The first issue appeared on January 1, 1842). Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne. The newspaper’s revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx’s editorship, and the government first imposed double and triple censorship on the paper, and then on January 1 1843 decided to suppress it. Marx had to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save the paper, which suspended publication in March 1843. Of the major articles Marx contributed to Rheinische Zeitung, Engels notes, in addition to those indicated below (see Bibliography), an article on the condition of peasant winegrowers in the Moselle Valley. Marx’s journalistic activities convinced him that he was insufficiently acquainted with political economy, and he zealously set out to study it. In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, a childhood friend he had become engaged to while still a student. His wife came of a reactionary family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia’s Minister of the Interior during a most reactionary period—1850-58. In the autumn of 1843, Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad, together with Arnold Ruge (1802-1880); Left Hegelian; in prison in 1825-30; a political exile following 1848, and a Bismarckian after 1866-70). Only one issue of this journal, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, appeared;[3] publication was discontinued owing to the difficulty of secretly distributing it in Germany, and to disagreement with Ruge. Marx’s articles in this journal showed that he was already a revolutionary who advocated “merciless criticism of everything existing”, and in particular the “criticism by weapon”, and appealed to the masses and to the proletariat. In September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time on became Marx’s closest friend. They both took a most active part in the then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris (of particular importance at the time was Proudhon’s doctrine), which Marx pulled to pieces in his Poverty of Philosophy, 1847); waging a vigorous struggle against the various doctrines of petty-bourgeois socialism, they worked out the theory and tactics of revolutionary proletarian socialism, or communism Marxism). See Marx’s works of this period, 1844-48 in the Bibliography. At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, as a dangerous revolutionary. He went to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League; they took a prominent part in the League’s Second Congress (London, November 1847), at whose request they drew up the celebrated Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines a new world-conception, consistent with materialism, which also embrace the realm of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat—the creator of a new, communist society. On the outbreak of the Revolution of February 1848, Marx was banished from Belgium. He returned to Paris, whence, after the March Revolution, he went to Cologne, Germany, where Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published from June 1, 1848, to May 19, 1849, with Marx as editor-in-chief. The new theory was splendidly confirmed by the course of the revolutionary events of 1848-49, just as it has been subsequently confirmed by all proletarian and democratic movements in all countries of the world. The victorious counter-revolution first instigated court proceedings against Marx (he was acquitted on February 9, 1849), and then banished him from Germany (May 16, 1849). First Marx went to Paris, was again banished after the demonstration of June 13, 1849, and then went to London, where he lived until his death. His life as a political exile was a very hard one, as the correspondence between Marx and Engels (published in 1913) clearly reveals. Poverty weighed heavily on Marx and his family; had it not been for Engels’ constant and selfless financial aid, Marx would not only have been unable to complete Capital but would have inevitably have been crushed by want. Moreover, the prevailing doctrines and trends of petty-bourgeois socialism, and of non-proletarian socialism in general, forced Marx to wage a continuous and merciless struggle and sometime to repel the most savage and monstrous personal attacks (Herr Vogt). Marx, who stood aloof from circles of political exiles, developed his materialist theory in a number of historical works (see Bibliography), devoting himself mainly to a study of political economy. Marx revolutionized science (see “The Marxist Doctrine”, below) in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (Vol. I, 1867). The revival of the democratic movements in the late fifties and in the sixties recalled Marx to practical activity. In 1864 (September 28) the International Working Men’s Association—the celebrated First International—was founded in London. Marx was the heart and soul of this organization, and author of its first Address and of a host of resolutions, declaration and manifestoes. In uniting the labor movement of various forms of non-proletarian, pre-Marxist socialism (Mazzini, Proudhon, Bakunin, liberal trade-unionism in Britain, Lassallean vacillations to the right in Germany, etc.), and in combating the theories of all these sects and schools, Marx hammered out a uniform tactic for the proletarian struggle of the working in the various countries. Following the downfall of the Paris Commune (1871)—of which gave such a profound, clear-cut, brilliant effective and revolutionary analysis (The Civil War In France, 1871)—and the Bakunin-caused cleavage in the International, the latter organization could no longer exist in Europe. After the Hague Congress of the International (1872), Marx had the General Council of the International had played its historical part, and now made way for a period of a far greater development of the labor movement in all countries in the world, a period in which the movement grew in scope, and mass socialist working-class parties in individual national states were formed. Marx’s health was undermined by his strenuous work in the International and his still more strenuous theoretical occupations. He continued work on the refashioning of political economy and on the completion of Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material and studied a number of languages (Russian, for instance). However, ill-health prevented him from completing Capital. His wife died on December 2, 1881, and on March 14, 1883, Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London. Of Marx’s children some died in childhood in London, when the family were living in destitute circumstances. Three daughters married English and French socialists; Eleanor Aveling, Laura Lafargue and Jenny Longuet. The latters’ son is a member of the French Socialist Party. The Marxist Doctrine Marxism is the system of Marx’s views and teachings. Marx was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the 19th century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general. Acknowledged even by his opponents, the remarkable consistency and integrity of Marx’s views, whose totality constitutes modern materialism and modern scientific socialism, as the theory and programme of the working-class movement in all the civilized countries of the world, make it incumbent on us to present a brief outline of his world-conception in general, prior to giving an exposition of the principal content of Marxism, namely, Marx’s economic doctrine. Philosophical Materialism Beginning with the years 1844–45, when his views took shape, Marx was a materialist and especially a follower of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose weak point he subsequently saw only in his materialism being insufficiently consistent and comprehensive. To Marx, Feuerbach’s historic and “epoch-making” significance lay in his having resolutely broken with Hegel’s idealism and in his proclamation of materialism, which already “in the 18th century, particularly French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against... religion and theology, but also... against all metaphysics” (in the sense of “drunken speculation” as distinct from “sober philosophy”). (The Holy Family, in Literarischer Nachlass) “To Hegel... ,” wrote Marx, “the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (the creator, the maker) of the real world.... With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” (Capital, Vol. I, Afterward to the Second Edition.) In full conformity with this materialist philosophy of Marx’s, and expounding it, Frederick Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring (read by Marx in the manuscript): “The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved... by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science....” “Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there be.... Bit if the... question is raised: what thought and consciousness really are, and where they come from; it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of Nature, which has developed in and along with its environment; hence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of Nature, do not contradict the rest of Nature’s interconnections but are in correspondence with them.... “Hegel was an idealist, that is to say, the thoughts within his mind were to him not the more or less abstract images [Abbilder, reflections; Engels sometimes speaks of “imprints”] of real things and processes, but on the contrary, things and their development were to him only the images, made real, of the “Idea” existing somewhere or other before the world existed.” In his Ludwig Feuerbach—which expounded his own and Marx’s views on Feuerbach’s philosophy, and was sent to the printers after he had re-read an old manuscript Marx and himself had written in 1844-45 on Hegel, Feuerbach and the materialist conception of history—Engels wrote: “The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is the relation of thinking and being... spirit to Nature... which is primary, spirit or Nature.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primary of spirit to Nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded Nature as primary, belonged to the various schools of materialism.” Any other use of the concepts of (philosophical) idealism and materialism leads only to confusion. Marx decidedly rejected, not only idealism, which is always linked in one way or another with religion, but also the views—especially widespread in our day—of Hume and Kant, agnosticism, criticism, and positivism in their various forms; he considered that philosophy a “reactionary” concession to idealism, and at best a “shame-faced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.” On this question, see, besides the works by Engels and Marx mentioned above, a letter Marx wrote to Engels on December 12, 1868, in which, referring to an utterance by the naturalist Thomas Huxley, which was “more materialistic” than usual, and to his recognition that “as long as we actually observe and think, we cannot possibly get away from materialism”, Marx reproached Huxley for leaving a “loop hole” for agnosticism, for Humism. It is particularly important to note Marx’s view on the relation between freedom and necessity: “Freedom is the appreciation of necessity. ‘Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood.’” (Engels in Anti-Duhring) This means recognition of the rule of objective laws in Nature and of the dialectical transformation of necessity into freedom (in the same manner as the transformation of the uncognized but cognizable “thing-in-itself” into the “thing-for-us”, of the “essence of things” into “phenomena”). Marx and Engels considered that the “old” materialism, including that of Feuerbach (and still more the “vulgar” materialism of Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott), contained the following major shortcomings: (1) this materialism was “predominantly mechanical,” failing to take account of the latest developments in chemistry and biology (today it would be necessary to add: and in the electrical theory of matter); (2) the old materialism was non-historical and non-dialectical (metaphysical, in the meaning of anti-dialectical), and did not adhere consistently and comprehensively to the standpoint of development; (3) it regarded the “human essence” in the abstract, not as the “complex of all” (concretely and historically determined) “social relations”, and therefore merely “interpreted” the world, whereas it was a question of “changing” it, i.e., it did not understand the importance of “revolutionary practical activity”. Dialectics As the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, and the richest in content, Hegelian dialectics was considered by Marx and Engels the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy. They thought that any other formulation of the principle of development, of evolution, was one-sided and poor in content, and could only distort and mutilate the actual course of development (which often proceeds by leaps, and via catastrophes and revolutions) in Nature and in society. “Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics [from the destruction of idealism, including Hegelianism] and apply it in the materialist conception of Nature.... Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature’s process is dialectical and not metaphysical. “ The great basic thought,” Engels writes, “that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away... this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things.... For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.” Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is “the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought.” This revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s philosophy was adopted and developed by Marx. Dialectical materialism “does not need any philosophy standing above the other sciences.” From previous philosophy there remains “the science of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics.” Dialectics, as understood by Marx, and also in conformity with Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, or epistemology, studying and generalizing the original and development of knowledge, the transition from non-knowledge to knowledge. In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels’ philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“the negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; “breaks in continuity”; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws—these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one. (Cf. Marx’s letter to Engels of January 8, 1868, in which he ridicules Stein’s “wooden trichotomies,” which it would be absurd to confuse with materialist dialectics.) The Materialist Conception of History A realization of the inconsistency, incompleteness, and onesidedness of the old materialism convinced Marx of the necessity of “bringing the science of society... into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon.” Since materialism in general explains consciousness as the outcome of being, and not conversely, then materialism as applied to the social life of mankind has to explain social consciousness as the outcome of social being. “Technology,” Marx writes (Capital, Vol. I), “discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the immediate process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.” In the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as applied to human society and its history, in the following words: “In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. “Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.... In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.” [Cf. Marx’s brief formulation in a letter to Engels dated July 7, 1866: “Our theory that the organization of labor is determined by the means of production.”] The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or more correctly, the consistent continuation and extension of materialism into the domain of social phenomena, removed the two chief shortcomings in earlier historical theories. In the first place, the latter at best examined only the ideological motives in the historical activities of human beings, without investigating the origins of those motives, or ascertaining the objective laws governing the development of the system of social relations, or seeing the roots of these relations in the degree of development reached by material production; in the second place, the earlier theories did not embrace the activities of the masses of the population, whereas historical materialism made it possible for the first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses, and the changes in those conditions. At best, pre-Marxist “sociology” and historiography brought forth an accumulation of raw facts, collected at random, and a description of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the totality of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and production of the various classes of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the choice of a particular “dominant” idea or in its interpretation, and by revealing that, without exception, all ideas and all the various tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-economic systems. People make their own history but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people—i.e., what is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all man’s historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws. The Class Struggle It is common knowledge that, in any given society, the striving of some of its members conflict with the strivings of others, that social life is full of contradictions, and that history reveals a struggle between nations and societies, as well as within nations and societies, and, besides, an alternation of periods of revolution and reaction, peace and war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline. Marxism has provided the guidance —i.e., the theory of the class struggle—for the discovery of the laws governing this seeming maze and chaos. It is only a study of the sum of the strivings of all the members of a given society or group of societies that can lead to a scientific definition of the result of those strivings. Now the conflicting strivings stem from the difference in the position and mode of life of the classes into which each society is divided. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto (with the exception of the history of the primitive community, Engels added subsequently). “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” Ever since the Great French Revolution, European history has, in a number of countries, tellingly revealed what actually lies at the bottom of events—the struggle of classes. The Restoration period in France already produced a number of historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers) who, in summing up what was taking place, were obliged to admit that the class struggle was taking place, were obliged to admit that the class struggle was the key to all French history. The modern period—that of complete victory of the bourgeoisie, representative institutions, extensive (if not universal) suffrage, a cheap daily press that is widely circulated among the masses, etc., a period of powerful and ever-expanding unions of workers and unions of employers, etc.—has shown even more strikingly (though sometimes in a very one-sided, “peaceful”, and “constitutional” form) the class struggle as the mainspring of events. The following passage from Marx’s Communist Manifesto will show us what Marx demanded of social science as regards an objective analysis of the position of each class in modern society, with reference to an analysis of each class’s conditions of development: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.” In a number of historical works (see Bibliography), Marx gave brilliant and profound examples of materialist historiography, of an analysis of the position of each individual class, and sometimes of various groups or strata within a class, showing plainly why and how “every class struggle is a political struggle.” The above-quoted passage is an illustration of what a complex network of social relations and transitional stages from one class to another, from the past to the future, was analyzed by Marx so as to determine the resultant of historical development. Marx’s economic doctrine is the most profound, comprehensive and detailed confirmation and application of his theory. Read full pamphlet HERE. AuthorV. I. Lenin Archives May 2023 5/4/2023 A Worldwide Anti-Imperialist Left: Why it is Needed, and What it Must Do (Paper). By: Alan Freeman and Radhika DesaiRead NowCapital organises globally yet workers do not. As the US-led NATO powers escalate the Ukraine conflict into a new world war, this imbalance is becoming intolerable. This paper presents the case for a worldwide anti-imperialist Left, representing ordinary people committed to a just and peaceful multipolar world order. This will serve both the national interest of every country, and the general interest of humanity. We base our case on an historical assessment of the last such organization, the Communist International or Comintern for short, founded in 1919 and dissolved in 1943, and its two predecessors, the International Working Men’s Association or ‘First International’, founded in 1864 and dissolved in 1872, and the Second or “Socialist” International, founded in 1889 and dissolved in 1914. The Comintern, the third attempt at a single world organisation of the working class, was as much a child of the world-historic 1917 revolution as the Soviet Union. Many Russians, including President Vladimir Putin, are reconsidering the wisdom of dissolving the USSR; it is time to also reassess the decision to abandon the project of an international organisation of propertyless people. Our case is controversial because in the West, those parties that identify as “Left,” headed by the allegedly left-leaning US Democratic Party, almost unanimously endorse the US-led proxy war on Russia. Further confusion arises because many governments of the Right, such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, actively oppose sanctions, promote alternative trading relations to those hitherto imposed by the USA, and insist that Russia’s legitimate security concerns be given due consideration. This has led many in the nationalist wing of Russian politics to conclude that the interests of their country require alliances with the parties of the Western Right–notably the Trumpist Republican Party. Conversely the Western “Left” parties justify their support for NATO’s war aims as necessary to defeat Right wing forces, with whom they lump the current Russian government. The entire paper may be read and downloaded here. Authors Dr. Radhika Desai is a Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She has proposed a new historical materialist approach to understanding world affairs and geopolitical economy based on the materiality of nations. Some of her recent books include Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Karl Polanyi and Twenty First Century Capitalism (2020) Revolutions (2020) and Japan’s Secular Stagnation (2022). Her articles and book chapters appear in international scholarly journals and edited volumes. With Alan Freeman, she co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press. Her latest book is Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy, which will appear in November and will be open access. Dr. Alan Freeman is a former principal economist with the Greater London Authority and is now a research affiliate of the University of Manitoba. With Radhika Desai, he is co-director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group. He is also co-editor of the Future of World Capitalism book series with Pluto Books, and the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press He is a committee member of the Association for Heterodox Economics (www.hetecon.net) and a vice-chair of the World Association for Political Economy. He is a board member of Video Pool Winnipeg and the Christopher Freeman Trust, and a former board member of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Archives May 2023 5/4/2023 Odessa after the massacre: nine years later the wounds are still fresh. By: Steve SweeneyRead NowThe west continues to ignore, downplay and misrepresent the trade unionists who were burned alive in Odessa’s trade union building by Nato’s fascist stormtroopers The burning alive of antifascist protestors in Odessa’s trade union building on 2 May 2014 sent shock waves round the world. But the perpetrators of this heinous crime, far from being brought to book, have been rewarded with promotions and immunity. These are the ‘democrats’ our rulers are funding in their obsessive quest to destroy Russia. his exclusive interview with an Odessa massacre survivor was carried out for Proletarian by Steve Sweeney in Russia. ***** Sasha gently rolls back the sleeve of her jumper to reveal scarred and damaged skin. “It still hurts me sometimes even now,” she tells me as we sip coffee in a Moscow cafe. “Doctors said it would be like this for some time. But it has been nearly ten years.” Sasha [not her real name] was one of the hundreds injured in the Odessa Trade Union House massacre on 2 May 2014. “I was lucky, I managed to escape. They tried to burn us all alive. The police stood and watched as they shot at us and beat us. “Many jumped from the windows and were attacked as they hit the ground. It was like hell,” she says. At least 48 people were killed as far-right Ukrainians set the building alight after pro-Russians took shelter there from a baying mob. Fighting for the truth Nine years later, the survivors and the victims’ families are still seeking truth and justice for their loved ones amid a cover-up by the state and the connivance of western institutions including the Council of Europe, the European Union and others. In fact, the only criminal cases that have been opened by the Kiev administration are against those who were attacked, as Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov explained earlier this year. “We know the truth,” Sasha says. “We know who did this and they are being protected. But we will not give up. Those who died deserve justice. We need to heal the pain.” She was on the streets of Odessa just months after the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a US-backed coup after he refused to sign a deal integrating Ukraine more closely into the European Union. “We objected to this meddling, this was not what we wanted. Fascists were taking over the country because of the west. They were helping them to control Ukraine and to kill us,” she says. “I will never forget that day for as long as I am alive. The Banderists and fascists were killing people and the whole world looked away,” Sasha continues. “All we wanted was to be treated like humans, but they treated us like animals, cockroaches. This was terrorism.” Fascist pogrom organised by Nato’s puppets The pogrom was coordinated by the Right Sector, a coalition of ultranationalist forces founded by Dmytro Yarosh, a virulent antisemite and supporter of Ukrainian wartime Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera. They took advantage of a football match held between Odessa and Metallist Kharkiv on the day of the massacre, rallying the support of right-wing ultras from both teams’ supporters. “We knew there was going to be trouble on the day of the match. These teams had a reputation for violence, but police did nothing to stop them. It started when they marched in the city,” she explains. There had been an agreement reached to peacefully clear the Kulikov field, the site of a pro-Russian encampment that had been set up in the months after the Maidan coup. This was reportedly to make way for Victory Day celebrations on 9 May, the date which marks the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. But as the violence started, the camp was set ablaze, causing people to flee to the nearby trade union building for shelter. “It is ironic we agreed to move out of the camp but then it was attacked by the Ukrainian nazis, the same people defeated [in 1945]. But here [in Ukraine] they did not go away,” Sasha says Hundreds gathered there, and soon after it too came under attack. “I was in a room that was filled with smoke very quickly. We could hardly breathe. As I left there were bodies on the floor. I could not help them. “Some people started jumping out of the windows. I heard the sound of their bodies hitting the floor and they were beaten to death. “On the ground [outside] people stopped us from leaving. I could hear the football fans chanting, singing Ukraine’s anthem … “Nobody was coming to help. The fire was spreading and there was shooting too. I thought I was going to die,” she recalls. The Ukrainian police were not passive bystanders – although they did nothing to help, they were filmed firing their guns into the trade union building. Crowds below chanted “Burn, Colorado, burn”, a reference to the pro-Russian colours of ribbons worn by some of the protesters. As the fire tore through the building, the Ukrainian national anthem was sung by those gathered outside, taunting those trapped inside as they burned to death. The Nazi-era slogan – Slava Ukraini, now frequently to be heard on the lips of Kiev’s western sponsors – was shouted as people were dying inside the building, whose walls were daubed with swastikas and the name “Galician SS”. “We escaped, but nobody helped us,” Sasha says, adding: “It was terrifying. After the attacks people were afraid to leave their homes. We didn’t want to go outside for weeks.” No retribution for the perpetrators Despite the admissions and footage clearly identifying many of those responsible, the perpetrators remained free. In the aftermath of the fire, the Right Sector celebrated the deaths, describing the massacre as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history”. Yarosh, whose organisation claimed responsibility for “coordinating” the attack, even became a candidate for the Ukrainian presidency and later an MP. He was never investigated by Ukrainian authorities – and he was not alone. Svoboda party MP Irina Farion declared: “Bravo Odessa … Let the devils burn in hell’ – yet she also was not charged. Fatherland party lawmaker Lesya Orobets published a statement on her Facebook page on 2 May celebrating the “liquidation” of the oppositionist kolorady – a derogatory term for those who hold pro-Russian views. She accompanied her post with several photographs of headless corpses. Aleksey Goncharenko, who took part in the Odessa protests, was later elected to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. These are the so-called democrats backed by the west. Sasha made her way to the roof as the blaze spread. Exactly what happened inside the building is unclear. Many died there, some of them outside, their bodies found riddled with bullets. “They [Ukrainian authorities] did nothing while these people celebrated the burning. They hate us and do not have respect for life. We know who our killers are. They are the government.” The United Nations has criticised Kiev for its unwillingness to carry out proper investigations into the massacre. But, unsurprisingly, there has been a concerted effort to cover up the truth by western powers, which have tried to shift the blame onto Russia. Petro Poroshenko, who was later to be installed as Ukrainian president, led the charge accusing ‘Russian provocateurs’ and supporters ‘shipped in from Transnistria’ of coming to Odessa to foment violence. He even accused Moscow of placing gas canisters in the trade union building to deliberately increase the number of casualties. But this has been widely dismissed, including by those not allied with Moscow. An eyewitness report for the CIA-backed Radio Liberty said: “On 2 May, 48 people died. None of them were ‘Russian saboteurs’ or ‘Transnistrian fighters’ or ‘bussed-in Bandera anarchists’. All were residents of Odessa and the surrounding suburbs.” Sasha confirmed this and said the only outsiders were the hundreds that had been bussed in the night before the provocations started, along with the football supporters who had been urged to join in with the attacks. Western media and politicians continue to look the other way On today’s anniversary, commemoration events have been banned in Odessa once again, as pro-Kiev forces seek to erase the event from memory. Ukraine’s western backers have also colluded in order to downplay the role of far-right Ukrainian forces in the attack. The Council of Europe’s international advisory panel described the events of May 2014 as “clashes”, as if both groups were equally responsible for the massacre. But the IAP drew its conclusions from the May 2 Group – made up of journalists and others – many of whom justify the actions of the Ukrainian government while denouncing criticism of Kiev as “pro-Russian propaganda”. Solidarity for the victims of this heinous massacre has also been in short supply from ‘Ukrainiacs’. Last year passed without a mention from most of those displaying the yellow and blue flag in their social media profile pictures. The British-based so-called ‘Ukraine Solidarity Campaign’ – in reality a front for the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty – has gone so far as shamefully to recycle claims that describing the attack as a massacre is “Russian propaganda”, blaming the victims for their own deaths. It was, of course, these opportunists that organised the poorly attended demonstration last year which saw a handful of trade unionists chanting “Arm, arm, arm Ukraine!” as they marched through the streets of London – just as then prime minister Boris Johnson was in Kiev promising to do exactly that. We now also know that he was there to strongarm puppet actor-president Volodymyr Zelensky and prevent him from signing a peace deal or entering negotiations with Russia to bring an end to the conflict. Of course, these supporters of the Kiev regime cannot draw attention to the massacre, or admit who was responsible – to do so would blow a major hole in the narrative that there are no fascists or neo-nazis in Ukraine, which they hail instead as a beacon of freedom and democracy. Nine years on from the attack, the victims of the Odessa massacre have largely been forgotten by the west, sacrificed as pawns in its proxy war against Russia and abandoned by those who claim to stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. The events in Odessa were just one part of an orgy of far-right violence unleashed in the wake of the western-backed Maidan coup. The Ukrainian neo-nazis – emboldened after the Odessa massacre – carried out another attack in the city just seven days later on Victory Day, shooting dead an unknown number of unarmed demonstrators in an incident that was not even reported in the west. The rest is history. Today the conflict continues, having escalated into a Nato proxy war and the battle being waged in the areas now incorporated into the Russian Federation. But for those who lost loved ones in the Odessa Trade Union House massacre, and for those who survived, the struggle for justice continues. “Please raise our voices. Tell the world not to forget the people of Odessa and our struggle for justice,” Sasha says. “Only then can we put out the flames that continue to burn.” Author Steve Sweeney writes for the Morning Star, the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain. He is also a People's Assembly National Committee member, patron of the Peace in Kurdistan campaign, and a proud trade unionist. First published by The Communists Archives May 2023 5/4/2023 Nationwide outrage after Black homeless man murdered by white vigilante in NYC subway. By: Natalia MarquesRead NowJordan Neely, the famous Michael Jackson “impersonator” who went around the NYC subway system dancing and entertaining passengers, was murdered by a white transit rider Monday On May 1 in New York City, a white subway rider murdered Jordan Neely, a Black homeless man who was expressing his misery at going without food or water. In a train entering the Broadway-Lafayette station in lower Manhattan, Neely cried out to passengers, “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” according to a witness, continuing: “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” The New York Police Department claims that Neely then proceeded to throw garbage at commuters, which prompted an argument and then a brawl with a 24-year-old white transit rider. The brawl ended in the rider, a US Marine veteran, putting Jordan Neely in a chokehold that lasted 15 minutes, ending in his death. The police took the veteran in for questioning, only to release him shortly afterwards. The NYPD has thus far refused to release the killer’s name. Freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez witnessed the killing and took a four minute video of Neely’s final moments. While the unidentified white man has Neely in a chokehold, multiple passengers hold him down. Neely’s death has been ruled a homicide by a medical examiner. The murder prompted outrage throughout New York City which quickly spread across the country. On Wednesday, 50 demonstrators packed onto the Uptown-bound F train platform at the Broadway-Lafayette to demand justice for Neely. New Yorkers who watched Vazquez’s video were quick to recognize Neely was the famous Michael Jackson “impersonator” who went around the subway system dancing and entertaining passengers. “I use to see [Jordan Neely] everyday on my commute to JFK8 Amazon pre-Covid,” tweeted Chris Smalls, leader of the Amazon Labor Union. “I’ll never forget enjoying seeing him dance and sing MJ for the people.” Meanwhile, right-wing pundits are smearing Neely’s character and arguing that the killer was justified based on the frequency of subway violence perpetrated by homeless people. This is despite the fact that according to the NYPD’s own metrics, so-called “transit crimes” are down 8% from last year. The right-wing media has also repeatedly pointed to Neely’s 44 prior arrests as justification for his murder. However, homelessness itself is heavily policed and criminalized. Homeless people are detained repeatedly for crimes of poverty such as fare evasion and “disorderly conduct,” (both crimes which Neely was arrested for) an inevitable product of a life lived entirely in the public sphere. Homelessness can be a product of a criminal record, as former prisoners are repeatedly denied employment and housing in the US. At the same time, homelessness can be a cause of a criminal record. Being unhoused is in itself illegal in many ways: loitering, camping out, or using the bathroom in public are all crimes a person can be arrested for. Homeless people are 11 times more likely to be arrested than those who are not homeless. Still, violence perpetrated by homeless people in subways is not unheard of, and many New Yorkers have experienced this firsthand. Some of Neely’s arrests included four for assault. However, this reality must be combined with a sincere analysis of the ways that homelessness and poverty drive people towards violent outbursts. Mental illness is far more prevalent in the homeless versus the non-homeless. Homelessness itself has been shown to increase the likelihood of violent behavior. When Neely was fourteen, his mother was murdered by her boyfriend while Neely slept only feet away. Christine Neely was 36 when she was killed, her body later discovered in a suitcase on the side of a highway in the Bronx in 2007. Neely testified at the murder trial. “His moms died—she got killed too. And now him?! She got killed [by] her boyfriend. And now him? By somebody else?” Andre Zachery, Neely’s father, told New York Daily News. “I don’t know what to say.” Neely died six years younger than his mother, at age 30. It is unclear if Neely was suffering from a mental health episode, and Vazquez claims he did not assault anyone. Either way, shouting at people does not carry the death penalty in the United States. Neither does being hungry and thirsty. And yet, by releasing Neely’s killer and protecting his identity, it seems as if the NYPD has condoned the deployment of lethal vigilante violence. One of Neely’s father’s neighbors claimed that he used the Michael Jackson impression as a way to cope with his mental health troubles. “He wasn’t violent. He was more a don’t-look-at-me-type of person. Anxiety,” she told the New York Daily News. “I felt like that’s why he did the Michael Jackson thing—he had better confidence. It just became like that’s all he wanted to do. Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson.” Demonstrators on the F train platform demanded to know the identity of Neely’s murderer. On the wall someone had scrawled “Who killed Jordan Neely?” On the ground of the platform, someone had spray-painted “Jordan Neely was murdered here.” Demonstrators say that the system failed Neely. Adolfo Abreu of grassroots organization Vocal New York told Peoples Dispatch about what he believes led to Jordan Neely’s desperate cry for help. “It’s a lack of New York State and New York City government prioritizing housing first solutions and funding programs to make sure that people can get help,” he said. “Instead, we’re cutting budgets for vital social services.” Demonstrators expressed vocal opposition to Eric Adams’ cuts to social services and deployment of the NYPD and others to sweep homeless encampments around the city. “Eric Adams cuts funding for public spaces, for spaces that are used by New Yorkers, all races, of all classes,” Isabelle Sturgis, a Brooklyn resident, told Peoples Dispatch. “They want this city to be a playground for the rich. They don’t want to have to see the homeless, they don’t want to have to deal with the homeless… [Homeless people] are New Yorkers. But they’re not seen as that. They’re not seen as New Yorkers.” First published by Peoples Dispatch Archives May 2023 In just a few months, the United States may experience a labor struggle the scale of which has not been seen in over 25 years. The contract between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and United Parcel Service will expire this year, and a strike is possible. Much has been written about the labor upsurge of recent years. From Starbucks organizing across the country, to the wave of unionization among academic workers, to the significant public sector strikes in K-12 and higher education, it is clear that there is real potential for the revitalization of the labor movement in the United States. What we have not yet seen in recent years is organized labor taking action in a way that affects the ability of the economy to function at the national level. That may be about to change. A mammoth player in the economy The contract between the Teamsters and UPS is the largest private sector collective bargaining agreement in the United States. It is a national agreement, covering some 350,000 workers across the company’s vast shipping network. Because this is a national bargaining unit, there are UPS Teamsters working in every part of the country. Unlike most other labor conflicts, this is one that will touch every geographic area in the United States. The national agreement and the large number of workers alone do not give a clear picture of the scale of this potential conflict. We must look to the powerful role that UPS plays in the economy. Every day, the equivalent of 6% of the entire economy of the United States is being transported within the UPS system. The equivalent of over 2% of the world economy is within the system on a daily basis. The company’s massive Chicago Area Consolidated Hub is the largest ground package facility in the world and the largest intermodal container handler in the western hemisphere, moving containers between rail cars, trucks and warehouses. This facility alone employs 8,000 workers who move 2.1 million packages daily. The center of UPS’s air package operations lies further south in Louisville, Kentucky. Here, the truly massive Worldport global air hub spans some 5.2 million square feet with 300 cargo-bearing flights arriving and departing daily. Between the 12,000 workers employed at this superhub and the advanced automation throughout the facility, some 2 million packages are processed daily. In the pre-holiday peak season, this number doubles. Looking back: the 1997 strike While it is easy to imagine how powerful a national strike at a company this central to the economy could be, we don’t need to speculate. We can look to history. In 1997, the Teamsters engaged in a 15-day strike that resulted in UPS losing over $600 million. Retail and other industries dependent on UPS services were also significantly impacted by the strike. The strike also enjoyed enormous public support. Some of this can be explained by the highly visible role of the UPS package car driver and the friendly relationship that many working people develop with the driver who has their route. These relationships personalized the strike for many. The union was also very successful at projecting the primary strike issue in a way that would broadly resonate across the working class. Many of the workers in UPS warehouses are employed part-time and have to wait years to secure full-time work. The principal issue of the 1997 strike was creating more full-time jobs and accelerating this path to full-time work. The union recognized that this issue was not limited to a single employer and fought under the slogan, “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” Many workers who pieced together multiple part-time jobs or feared the part-timing of their own jobs identified with the UPS workers whose fight became a symbol of a more general struggle against corporate America’s elimination of secure full-time work. UPS workers demand dignity and respect There are echoes of 1997 in the demands being raised by the Teamsters in this year’s contract fight. A route to sustainable full-time work remains a core contract issue — one that is more broadly felt following a controversial provision of the 2018 agreement. This provision created a new category of package car driver, known as a 22.4 in reference to the contract article creating the classification. The current Teamsters leadership regards the creation of the 22.4 position as the launch of a two-tier system within the full-time UPS workforce. This issue is broadly felt by the membership and opposition to the 22.4 position was one of the key factors driving the “no” vote on the 2018 contract. Overwork and other health and safety issues have also been highlighted by the union in the buildup to negotiations. Forced overtime for drivers, particularly during peak season, has been a major source of conflict and underscores the need for more full-time drivers. Protection from extreme weather has also been raised as a major issue, both in warehouses and for drivers on the road. Teamsters Local 804 president Vinnie Perrone has described the trucks and warehouses that Teamsters are working in as “infernos” that have sent workers to the emergency room. Finally, the issue of wage increases will surely be a major subject in these negotiations. Part-time pay has long been an issue and contributes to the heavy turnover of the part-time workforce. Full-time workers have secured significantly higher hourly pay through decades of contract fights, but continuing to be the wage leader in the industry will require substantive increases, given the impact of record inflation. Looking forward: collision course It is impossible to know with certainty how the negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS will unfold, but several factors on both sides indicate that an intense conflict is likely. Unrest has been brewing among the ranks of UPS workers for some time. In fact, the last contract in 2018 was voted down by the membership. Then-president James Hoffa, Jr. used an archaic provision in the union’s contract to overrule the vote and impose the contract. Current Teamsters President Sean O’Brien publicly broke with Hoffa Jr. early in the 2018 negotiations, setting up a years-long campaign for the presidency of the union. O’Brien, the head of Boston’s Teamsters Local 25, assembled a diverse coalition of former rivals united around a vision for a union that is more willing to confront the bosses. O’Brien and his Teamsters United slate won by a landslide. Much of this vote came from UPS workers hoping to avoid a repeat of the disappointing 2018 contract. O’Brien has staked his new presidency and his image as a national figure on a successful campaign at UPS. He has been publicly talking about the need to take strike action at the company since the debacle of 2018. He needs to deliver and seems to genuinely want this fight. The thousands of UPS workers who feel that they have been falling behind for years are unlikely to accept anything less than a major contract victory. UPS is not likely to simply roll over. The company brought in record profits of $11.3 billion in 2022, but they are forecasting a slower year in 2023. This has already been reflected in some newsworthy layoffs in the first quarter of the year. The shipping and logistics industry has been transformed by Amazon. What was once a UPS client is now also a competitor. The company must find a way to maintain its market share in a more difficult environment and a large increase in labor costs over its non-union competition — Amazon, FedEx, etc. — will not be something that the company’s decision makers will be likely to accept. Negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS are underway. President O’Brien is chairing the negotiations himself — a break from past practice under Hoffa Jr.’s leadership and another signal of the importance of these negotiations for the new leadership. The last day of the current contract is July 31. If no new agreement is reached by August 1, a strike is very likely. Every worker has a stake in the outcome of this crucial fight. Public support, including participation in solidarity actions coordinated with the union and support at the picket lines if a strike breaks out, will be a highly important factor in the struggle. As the expiration of the UPS contract approaches we need to spread the word far and wide about the huge importance of this impending battle between the working class and corporate America. First published in Liberation News Archives May 2023 5/4/2023 Degrowth: An environmental ideology with good intentions, bad politics. By: Collin Chambers and Liberation SchoolRead NowIntroduction The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself. Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle. Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected. The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself. The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population). Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect. Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints. The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.” False equivalences between different social systems But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts. The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world. Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism? Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class. Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:” “Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12]. Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits. Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.? Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world. Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste! In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism. Degrowth and building the class struggle In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should. From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action? Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better. Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class. Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:” “Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine… “Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17]. References [1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976). Capital Vol 1 (New York: Penguin Books), 742. [2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.” Viewpoint Magazine, April 14. Available here. [3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,” Real-World Economics Review 87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system. [4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007). An essay on the principle of population (New York: Dover). [5]Marx, Capital, 784. [6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018). In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos (UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21. [7] Ibid., 24. [8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 30, no. 2: 189. [9] Ibid., 194. [10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015). Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff (Washington: Zero Books). [11] See Karl, Marx. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98. [12] Marx, Karl. (1991.) Capital Vol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180. [13] Kallis, In defense of degrowth, 21. [14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Available here. [15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” In Materialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517. [16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’” Monthly Review, June 17. Available here. [17] Ibid. First published in Liberation News Archives May 2023 The US dollar is essential to US global power projection. But in 2022, the dollar share of reserve currencies slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades. It is now established that the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency is eroding. When corporate western media begins to attack the multipolar world’s de-dollarization narrative in earnest, you know the panic in Washington has fully set in. The numbers: the dollar share of global reserves was 73 percent in 2001, 55 percent in 2021, and 47 percent in 2022. The key takeaway is that last year, the dollar share slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades. Now it is no longer far-fetched to project a global dollar share of only 30 percent by the end of 2024, coinciding with the next US presidential election. The defining moment – the actual trigger leading to the Fall of the Hegemon – was in February 2022, when over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves were “frozen” by the collective west, and every other country on the planet began fearing for their own dollar stores abroad. There was some comic relief in this absurd move, though: the EU “can’t find” most of it. Now cue to some current essential developments on the trading front. Over 70 percent of trade deals between Russia and China now use either the ruble or the yuan, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. Russia and India are trading oil in rupees. Less than four weeks ago, Banco Bocom BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which is the Chinese alternative to the western-led financial messaging system, SWIFT. China’s CNOOC and France’s Total signed their first LNG trade in yuan via the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange. The deal between Russia and Bangladesh for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear plant will also bypass the US dollar. The first $300 million payment will be in yuan, but Russia will try to switch the next ones to rubles. Russia and Bolivia’s bilateral trade now accepts settlements in Boliviano. That’s extremely pertinent, considering Rosatom’s drive to be a crucial part of the development of lithium deposits in Bolivia. Notably, many of those trades involve BRICS countries – and beyond. At least 19 nations have already requested to join BRICS+, the extended version of the 21st century’s major multipolar institution, whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, then South Africa. The foreign ministers of the original five will start discussing the modalities of accession for new members in an upcoming June summit in Capetown. BRICS, as it stands, is already more relevant to the global economy than the G7. The latest IMF figures reveal that the existing five BRICS nations will contribute 32.1 percent to global growth, compared to the G7’s 29.9 percent. With Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico as possible new members, it is clear that key Global South players are starting to focus on the quintessential multilateral institution capable of smashing Western hegemony. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) are working in total sync as Moscow’s partnership with Riyadh in OPEC+ metastasizes into BRICS+, in parallel to the deepening Russia-Iran strategic partnership. MbS has willfully steered Saudi Arabia toward Eurasia’s new power trio Russia-Iran-China (RIC), away from the US. The new game in West Asia is the incoming BRIICSS – featuring, remarkably, both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose historic reconciliation was brokered by yet another BRICS heavyweight, China. Importantly, the evolving Iran-Saudi rapprochement also implies a much closer relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole and the Russia-China strategic partnership. This will translate into complementary roles – in terms of trade connectivity and payment systems – for the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia-Iran-India, and the China-Central-Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, a key plank of Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Today, only Brazil, with its President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva caged by the Americans and an erratic foreign policy, runs the risk of being relegated by the BRICS to the status of a secondary player. Beyond BRIICSS The de-dollarization train has been propelled to high-speed status by the accumulated effects of Covid-linked supply chain chaos and collective western sanctions on Russia. The essential point is this: The BRICS have the commodities, and the G7 controls finance. The latter can’t grow commodities, but the former can create currencies – especially when their value is linked to tangibles like gold, oil, minerals, and other natural resources.' Arguably the key swing factor is that pricing for oil and gold is already shifting to Russia, China, and West Asia. In consequence, demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing. Trillions of US dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate. The fall of a weaponized currency will end up smashing the whole logic behind the US’ global network of 800+ military bases and their operating budgets. Since mid-March, in Moscow, during the Economic Forum of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI) – one of the key inter-government organizations in Eurasia formed after the fall of the USSR – further integration is being actively discussed between the CSI, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS. Eurasian organizations coordinating the counterpunch to the current western-led system, which tramples on international law, was not by accident one of the key themes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at the UN earlier this week. It is also no accident that four member-states of the CIS – Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – founded the SCO along with China in June 2001. The Davos/Great Reset globalist combo, for all practical purposes, declared war on oil immediately after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. They threatened OPEC+ to isolate Russia – or else, but failed humiliatingly. OPEC+, effectively run by Moscow-Riyadh, now rules the global oil market. Western elites are in a panic. Especially after Lula’s bombshell on Chinese soil during his visit with Xi Jinping, when he called on the whole Global South to replace the US dollar with their own currencies in international trade. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently told the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – the heart of the US establishment matrix – that “geopolitical tensions between the US and China could raise inflation by 5 percent and threaten the dominance of the dollar and euro.” The monolithic spin across western mainstream media is that BRICS economies trading normally with Russia “creates new problems for the rest of the world.” That’s utter nonsense: it only creates problems for the dollar and the euro. The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025. The petroyuan cometh And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the GCC represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner. The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018. Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan. The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves. This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU. Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan. That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar. US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers. The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself. AuthorPepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist. He writes a column – The Roving Eye – for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for RT, Sputnik News, and Press TV. In addition, he previously worked for Al Jazeera. This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune. Archives May 2023 CPRF rebuts ahistorical assertion that Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine war is as an aggressive imperialist power. The following article was written in reply to remarks by the Communist Party of Greece’s international department: ‘On the imperialist war in Ukraine and the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’ by the international department of the CPRF in May 2022. The video above shows communist fighters in the Donbass in 2015 raising the Soviet flag over the liberated city of Debaltsevo in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Many Russian communists have died helping to defend the antifascist regions in the Donbass since 2014. ***** On 23 April 2022, the newspaper Risospastis, the press organ of the Communist Party of Greece, published an article by the international department of the central committee of the KKE: ‘On the imperialist war in Ukraine and the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’. The article assesses the actions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in connection with the special operation carried out by Russia in Ukraine, and openly accuses the party of a pro-government, ie, pro-imperialist, position. We categorically disagree with such a mechanical assessment. The quintessence of the article lies in the fact that, from the point of view of the Greek comrades, an imperialist war is going on in Ukraine in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie and, by supporting a special operation, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is thus “pursuing a line of solidarity with the ruling United Russia party and President Putin”. Insisting on the ‘imperialist’ nature of this war, the Greek comrades rely on the well-known statement of VI Lenin that “A struggle for markets and for freedom to loot foreign countries, a striving to suppress the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and democracy in the individual countries, a desire to deceive, disunite, and slaughter the proletarians of all countries by setting the wage-slaves of one nation against those of another so as to benefit the bourgeoisie – these are the only real content and significance of the war.” (August 1914) However, the comrades did not mention that this statement is contained in the article of VI Lenin ‘The tasks of revolutionary social democracy in the European war’. And in it he was talking quite specifically about the first world war – really a purely imperialist, predatory one. But if we do not take a stand on the ground of dogmatism, then we must admit that any war has its own specific features. The task of a Marxist in determining his position in relation to war is, first of all, to determine precisely its specific character. Indeed, in addition to imperialist wars, there are also national-liberation and antifascist wars, which gained a particularly wide scope in the middle of the 20th century, when fascism and Nazism arose as political phenomena, and the national-liberation struggle intensified under the influence of the October Revolution. How did the Communist party come to its position?Developing its political position on the issue of the special operation, the party analysed the specific historical conditions that objectively caused the crisis in Ukraine. Before the October Revolution in Russia, Ukraine, which was part of the Russian empire, was a purely agrarian country. In order to strengthen its industry, at the suggestion of VI Lenin, six industrial regions from the Russian Soviet Republic in the east and south, which had never been part of Ukraine, were transferred to Ukraine, including Donetsk and Lugansk. In 1939, Galicia (western Ukraine) was annexed to Ukraine, previously part of Poland. So, the current territory of Ukraine is the result of its entry into the USSR. And it is ‘sewn together’ out of very disparate pieces, from Galicia (Lviv) with a strong influence of Poland, Austria and Hungary, to eastern Ukraine, strongly gravitating towards Russia. Socialist Ukraine developed very powerfully. Aviation and rocket-building, petrochemistry, the electric power industry (four nuclear power plants) and defence industries were added to the extraction of metal and coal. It was as part of the USSR that Ukraine received not only the bulk of its current territory, but also its economic potential, and became one of the ten largest economies in Europe. The destruction of the Soviet Union in December 1991 caused, at the same time, the destruction of the centuries-old economic integration of Ukraine with Russia, the rupture of all economic, political and cultural ties. Now it is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Its manufacturing industry, with the exception of metallurgy, is practically destroyed. The economy of Ukraine now rests on loans from the west and income from people who left for Europe and Russia in search of a job. The people’s living standards fell catastrophically, and emigration increased sharply. About 10 million people (out of 45 million) left the country, the most qualified specialists. The level of corruption and social differentiation has reached one of the highest levels in the world. The country is on the brink of a national catastrophe. Coup in Kiev as a basis for inciting the conflictIn February 2014, a coup d’état was carried out in Ukraine with the direct assistance of the United States and other Nato countries. Legitimate power in the country was overthrown. Neo-nazis came to power. Subsequently, the United States publicly announced that it had invested about $5bn in preparing for the change of power in the country and the “development of democracy”. It is quite obvious that, just like that, no one will spend such a gigantic amount of money. As a result of the coup d’état, people from western Ukraine, from Galicia, where extremely nationalist, antisemitic, anti-Polish, russophobic and anticommunist sentiments are historically strong, seized power. The forced assimilation of the Russian-speaking population began. The ban on the Russian language and the decision to transfer school education from Russian to Ukrainian gave rise to strong resistance in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. People took up arms. On 11 May 2014, in a popular referendum, 87 percent of citizens voted for independence. So, not at the direction of the Kremlin, but at the initiative of the masses, the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics arose. After several unsuccessful attempts to seize the LNR-DNR, the nazis from Kiev switched to terror. During eight years of incessant shelling from large-calibre guns, almost 14,000 civilians were killed and tens of thousands maimed. Serious damage has been done to the infrastructure there. At the same time, European countries and the United States were extremely indifferent to the eight-year-long genocide of the Russian people in Donbass, in fact, justifying the actions of the Kiev regime. Today, the European Union and the USA, showing unprecedented hypocrisy, talk about the suffering of people during the fighting, but they remain silent about the fact that using civilians as human shields has become a common tactic of those whom they call “freedom fighters”. Development of neo-nazism in UkraineOur comrades, considering the situation in Ukraine, only grudgingly mention the danger of the country’s fascisization. But one of the main goals of Russia’s military operation in this country is its denazification. After all, even according to US congressmen and US intelligence agencies, Ukraine has become a centre of international neo-nazism. Here are some facts. After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, in western Ukraine, where, as we have already noted, extremely nationalist, antisemitic, russophobic and anticommunist sentiments were initially strong, SS divisions were formed to fight against the Red Army. Local nationalists, led by Hitler’s admirer Stepan Bandera, began to exterminate the jewish population. In Ukraine, about 1.5 million jews were killed at the hands of Bandera. This is one-quarter of all victims of the holocaust. During the Volyn massacre in 1944 in western Ukraine, about 100,000 Poles were brutally killed. Bandera massacred partisans and burned alive the population of hundreds of villages in Belarus. Already after the war, anticommunist and anti-Soviet rebels and western Ukraine, with the support of the United States and Great Britain, launched terror against the civilian population from 1945-53. During these years, Bandera killed about 50,000 people in Ukraine. The descendants and followers of these killers came to power after the 2014 coup. The traditions of anti-Polish, antisemitic and anti-Russian terror are very strong among the neo-nazis who now really control Ukraine. Nazi ideology is being implanted in Ukraine. Ukrainian fascists – the organisers and participants in the atrocities of the war – are officially recognised as national heroes. Their symbolism became that of the state. Every year, solemn marches are held in honour of fascist criminals. Streets and squares are named after them. The Communist Party of Ukraine has been driven underground. Intimidation and political assassinations of politicians and journalists have become a regular occurrence. Monuments to Lenin and everything related to the memory of life in the USSR are being destroyed. At present, the Bandera-ites, like the SS stormtroopers of Nazi Germany, serve as a shock detachment of big business. They tightly control every movement of state power, constantly blackmailing it with the threat of a coup. The nature of the current Ukrainian state is an alliance of big capital and the highest state bureaucracy, supported by fascist elements, under the full political and financial control of the United States. Causes and nature of the special military operationBased on Marxist theory, the military conflict in Ukraine cannot be regarded as an imperialist war, as our comrades are trying to prove. By its nature, this is a national-liberation war of the people of Donbass. And from the point of view of Russia, this is a fight against an external threat to national security and fascism. It is no secret that the people’s militia of Donbass was not able independently to resist the many thousands-strong Ukrainian army, armed with foreign weapons. The defeat of the militias would inevitably have led to the total annihilation of the Russian-speaking population, many of whom were Russian citizens. In accordance with the constitution of the Russian Federation, in order to protect its citizens and ensure national security, Russia took the actions provided for by the law, since it was impossible to do this in any other way. The negotiation process within the framework of the Minsk agreements was deliberately sabotaged by Kiev with the support of the United States and the European Union. By this time, Ukraine had concentrated 150,000 troops and nazi battalions in the Donbass. Kiev, with the support of the United States, was preparing to regain control of the Donbass by military means. With the blessing of its American directors, Ukraine was preparing in early March of this year to launch a military operation to seize Donbass, and then Crimea. Today, there is plenty of data to support this assertion. The Bandera regime has been preparing for war for eight years. The ideological indoctrination of military personnel has been systematically carried out in the spirit of outright russophobia, the most powerful fortified areas have been created, and the army has been saturated with the latest weaponry. Following its imperialist geopolitical goals, the United States systematically included Ukraine in the sphere of its military interests and turned the country into a Nato spearhead, intending to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian soldier”. Back in December 2021, Russia turned to the United States with a proposal to hold talks on the non-expansion of Nato eastwards. The Americans evaded a direct answer. In light of this, in January 2022, Russia warned that in such a situation it would be forced to take additional measures to protect its national security. At the same time, things were moving towards the deployment of US tactical weapons in Ukraine. Ukraine, which has four nuclear power plants and great scientific and technical potential, has begun the preparations for building its own nuclear weapons. Under the patronage of the Pentagon, more than 30 laboratories for the development of bacteriological weapons were created in Ukraine. There are documents confirming the work in these laboratories with especially dangerous bacteria of deadly diseases, as well as the study of methods for their distribution, taking into account a person’s race. All this poses a threat not only to Russia, but to all mankind. It is argued that this is exclusively a question of interimperialist contradictions; the struggle for markets and raw materials. The inability to see the national component of class questions and the class component of national questions leads one into the realm of dogmatism. Interest of the Russian oligarchy in Ukraine or lack thereof?In an effort to prove that the war is being waged in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie, in the interests of seizing the natural resources and taking over the industrial potential of Ukraine, our Greek comrades use VI Lenin’s statements about the nature of wars outside of the historical context in which he made them. However, the assertion that the Russian leadership was preparing a military takeover of Ukraine in advance contradicts the facts. From the very beginning, the leadership of the Russian Federation did not support the idea of a referendum on the formation of the people’s republics of Donbass. Following the agreements under the Minsk 2 process, Russia a priori assumed that the Donbass would remain part of Ukraine, although with a certain degree of autonomy. And the Russian leadership, until the very beginning of the military operation, insisted on the implementation of Minsk 2 – that is, on the integration of Donbass with Ukraine. So where is the preparation for an imperialist takeover? In reality, Ukraine, its industry and resources, has since 1991 been the object of superexploitation by the US and European monopolies. The Russian oligarchy did not participate in ‘dividing the pie’, which was in the sphere of western interests. Moreover, the Russian oligarchy was against the military operation in Ukraine. It was striving with all its might to integrate into the world oligarchy and was already under strong pressure from the west, which demanded more energetic influence on the government in order to maintain Russia’s pro-western orientation. In addition, Russian oligarchs have suffered greatly from the Russian military operation in Ukraine. They are included on the sanctions lists, their palaces and yachts have been confiscated, their bank accounts are frozen. We do not feel the slightest sympathy for those who plundered Russia for three decades, and who are now losing their loot. We only want to emphasise that the Russian oligarchy was not only not interested in the military operation, but also suffered from it. By refusing to support this operation, big business lost not only property and money, but also much of its influence on the Russian ruling elite. Pay attention to which class forces opposed Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in the first place. That is, first of all: large monopoly capital. Their political representatives are in the liberal environment, and they have many ‘creative’ servants among the so-called intelligentsia. Of course, we recognise the existence of interimperialist contradictions, of the desire of imperialist predators to seize the natural and energy resources of other countries. Russia is a victim of the west’s plans to turn our country into a source of cheap raw materials. And we have been fighting against such plans for many decades. But we by no means believe that Russia, for all the depravity of its current political system based on the power of big capital, has suddenly turned into the same predator. The struggle in Ukraine has a fundamentally different character that does not fit into these dogmas. The position of the Communist partyIt was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that was the first to define the essence of the regime that seized power in Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan. Thus, all the subsequent activity of the party was built precisely on the basis of the class essence of the ongoing political processes. We have been very critical of the foreign policy of the Russian leadership. We have always condemned the disregard for the interests of the peoples who until recently were part of the unified Soviet state. If anyone closely follows our actions (and it seemed to us that the Greek comrades were well acquainted with our documents), they will inevitably see that it was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that, since 2014, has been persistently putting forward a demand for the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics by Russia. No other political party in Russia has done so much to support the population of Donbass. We supported the return of Donbass to Russia from the beginning. It is not that the CPRF “shows solidarity with United Russia and President Putin”, but that they, as a result of historical imperatives, are now being forced to take the path that the CPRF has stubbornly insisted on for three decades. In such a situation, is it fair to say that we blindly support Putin’s policy in Ukraine? The Communists of Russia take an active part in the defence of the LNR-DNR. Hundreds of communists are fighting the nazis as part of the troops of the people’s republics. Dozens of communists have died in this struggle. Over those eight years of fighting, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation sent 93 convoys of humanitarian aid to the republics, with a total weight of 13,000 tons, and brought thousands of children for rest and treatment in Russia. Throughout these years, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation demanded that the Russian leadership recognise the independence of Donbass. It is frankly unpleasant for us to hear how our Greek comrades speak with an element of contempt about the “so-called” people’s republics of Donbass, since these are precisely the people’s republics that emerged as a result of the real will of the masses. Citizens of the LPR-DPR defended them at the cost of the lives of thousands of civilians and soldiers of their armies during the hardest eight years of resistance to the creeping aggression of neo-nazi Bandera-ites. Of fundamental importance is the fact that not only the Russian army, but also volunteer units of the Donbass itself, in which there is a very large stratum of communists and miners, are fighting against the Bandera-ites. Where in all this is the “protection of the interests of the oligarchy”? Are our comrades, who put their lives in mortal danger every day, also defending the interests of the Russian oligarchy? Or are they protecting ordinary people who have fallen victim to the neo-nazis who seized power in Ukraine? One must have a strong unwillingness to see the real state of affairs in order to assert that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is merely showing solidarity with the ruling elite. The intensity of the class political struggle in Russia has not abated at all. The persecution of communists and party supporters, even after the start of the military operations in Ukraine, show that there is no class harmony between the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the current ruling group. One can list very many cases when our comrades are subjected to repressions. And we react harshly to the persecution of our comrades. At the same time, we continue to subject the socioeconomic course of the current government to harsh criticism. No party in Russia can claim to have been more vocal in its criticism of the government. In the 30+ years since the 1991 anticommunist coup, we have provided countless evidence of our determined struggle against the ruling faction. That is why our party enjoys broad support from the masses. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation received almost 19 percent of the vote in the elections to the state duma in September 2021. And this is in the conditions of a well-established and long-established machine of electoral fraud. We are sure that the real level of support for us among the people is much higher. And this is because we are guided, in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, by the desire to carefully study the interests and moods of the people. By the way, by supporting Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, the Communist party has expressed the will of the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens. As for the allegations of “flirting with nationalist sentiments and nationalist forces”, we are proud to say that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is the leading left-wing patriotic force in Russia. And we consider the protection of the interests of the Russian people and other peoples for centuries living together with the Russians, primarily Ukrainians and Belarusians, as our international duty. And to deny the historical significance of the ‘Russian world’ or Russian civilization, in our opinion, is just as absurd as to deny the great significance of the ancient Greek civilization. When Manolis Glezos tore down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis, he was guided not only by class interests, but also by the national pride of the Greeks, who resolutely joined the fight against the German occupation. Attitude of the world community to the events in UkraineAlthough western politicians and their media, arrogantly pretending to be ‘world public opinion’, openly participate in the war on the side of the neo-nazis, the largest countries in Asia and Africa, the middle east and Latin America, who know first-hand what European and American neocolonialism is, quite rightly view what is happening in Ukraine as Russia’s struggle against the unipolar world led by the United States. Countries whose population make up 60 percent of the world’s population either support the Russian operation or take a neutral position. An aggressive position is taken only by those who in 1941 came to us with a war as part of the Nazi coalition. These are the countries of Europe, as well as the USA and Great Britain, which did a lot to revive the German military machine after its defeat in the first world war. Today, Russia is again fighting against fascism and against those who support it in Europe and the United States. AuthorCPRF postcript: Mindful of the heroic merits of the Communist Party of Greece in the struggle against Nazism and against the military dictatorship, we categorically reject the idea that our comrades could knowingly end up in the camp of those who are now trying to crush Russia through the hands of Ukraine. We once again emphasise our deep respect for the KKE as a party that has made a huge contribution to the revival of the international communist and workers’ movement after the destruction of the USSR in 1991. This article was republished from The Communists. Archives May 2023 Tehran Times conducts an interview with Ramiro Sebastian Funez, an anti-imperialist content creator in Los Angeles, to gain further insight on the diminishing U.S. imperialism and hegemony in the globe. Photo: Tehran Times. “U.S. imperialism is declining because the parasitic system of capitalism upon which U.S. imperialism is built on, is running out of resources and nations to consume,” Funez says.He also says “the de-dollarization” is happening because nations see the effects of U.S. imperialism on their nation. Here is the text of interview with Ramiro Funez: Q: Why is U.S. imperialism declining? U.S. imperialism is declining because the satanic system of neoliberalism, capitalism, usery, debt and the global religion of money is declining because it is a parasitic system that constantly needs a new host in order to continue to grow. Imperialism and capitalism as economic systems constantly need to expand. They are parasitic that constantly need new flesh, new hosts, bodies to consume and thrive. Just like any other parasite in the natural world. Once there are no longer any healthy thriving host to bite into, suck the energy, money and resources out of it, then it begins to die. U.S. imperialism is declining because the parasitic system of capitalism upon which U.S. imperialism is built on, is running out of recourses, nations to consume. It is losing power as no people around the world want to do business with the U.S. anymore, the de-dollarization is happening because they see the effects of U.S. imperialism on their nation. So, it is running out of hosts, thus the system, it is rotting from the inside out. This is the reason why U.S. imperialism and hegemony are declining. It is economic but it is also spiritual as well. Q: What has the U.S. committed to lose it clout across regions in the world? Nations across the world have recognized what happens when the U.S. invades a country. We’ve seen throughout history, that whenever the U.S. enters a region, with its vague promises, vague slogans of liberal democracy, freedom and human rights, whatever that means! Those nations end up becoming worse. “This is a major threat to Western Atlanticism, which is concerned and worried about any unity between Russia, China and Iran.” After the U.S. enters a region with the promise of freeing the people, bringing them prosperity and democracy, we see that things actually get worse. Look after the 2011 murder of Muammer Ghaddafi and the subsequent invasion of Libya. Look at Iraq after 2003, look at Afghanistan and so many nations around the world. Latin American and Caribbean nations, African nations, Asian nations. Same thing happened in the former Soviet Union by the way with Russia. When the U.S. had its Western backed candidate Yeltsin who ushered in neo-liberal economics into Russia, things got horrible for the Russian people. It wasn’t until Vladimir Putin took power and was able to bring order, stability and growth back to Russia and things got better. So the U.S. is losing clout across regions across the world because the people of the world are waking up and seeing that it is a horrible empire that actually brings the opposite of what it says it does. The U.S. says it brings democracy it actually brings dictatorship. The U.S. says it brings economic freedom, it actually brings economic stagnation and slavery. The U.S. says it brings human rights, it actually brings human rights violations. Q: Is new world order moving to the East? There is currently a shift in a new world order moving to the East, led by the nations of Russia, China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is very important because this represents a new world order in which we have nations benefiting the masses of people around the world at the helm of leadership. What we’re seeing is resemblance of the 5th century. You’ll recall that in the 5th century AD, you had the fall of the Roman empire. As the Roman empire was collapsing, it was also in a decadent period. You had people who were gorging themselves with food and vomiting in order for them to have more food. You had the spreading of illicit material, really disgusting sexual images and practices that were being promulgated in the Roman empire. Decadence, vice and an aspect of ‘do as that will’ satanic ideology was prevalent in ancient Rome at this time. “The official religion of the United States empire is not Christianity, it is capitalism and imperialism. And its God is the dollar.” Horrible practices, so it was not only an economic collapse of the Roman empire, it was a spiritual and moral collapse. The Roman people were having less kids. They were becoming more decadent. They were becoming more unpure in their practices. At the same time, with the rotting and decay of the Roman empire, you had the rise of the East and Islam. In the 600s, you had the rise of the eastern civilizations of China, the original Silk Road. There is a saying that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but history rhythms’. And in a way, what we’re seeing now is rhythms of the 400’s and 500’s. We are seeing a cycle being a new cycle, just like in that time period, but on a newer and higher level. In this case, the Roman empire is the U.S. empire and European powers, and now the rise of Islamic civilization again led by all the heroic Muslims resisting empire in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq. Then you have China and Russia and this is important because all three nations (Iran, Russia, China) are under Eurasian land mass. This is a major threat to Western Atlanticism, which is concerned and worried about any unity between Russia, China and Iran. There is also a shift in a new world order moving to the East, because Russia, China and Iran have amazing, tremendous relationships with Africa, Latin America and South Asia which are historically the more underdeveloped regions of the world. Russia, China and Iran have never invaded Africa or Latin America. Their cooperation is based on a win-win cooperation, it is based on friendship, trade as equals and not forcing values, religion or money onto the people. It is brotherly growth and development. This is why the shift is happening to the East. Q: Have countries in West Asia realized that their security cannot be guaranteed by Washington? Most definitely. Not only because the U.S. and the West fall back on their promises, or they fail to do so, but because they do the exact opposite. Whenever West Asian countries trust the U.S., it actually betrays them and brings violence and chaos. Instead, they’re choosing to normalize ties with Iran, Syria and Yemen. Iran is at the forefront of bringing peace and stability in the region. In Syria, the government has resisted so many coup attempts, color revolutions, attacks and wars. It is still standing strong and defending its people who are people of all religions. The Yemeni people are now stronger than ever. Even in occupied Palestine, heroic people resisting Zionist occupation for decades, since 1948 have gotten much closer to the resistance axis because they have realized the liberation of Palestine will not happen through the U.S. Q: How much has the U.S.-led NATO military support for Ukraine backfired? It has tremendously backfired. Just here in the United States, people are not wanting to fund a government tens of thousands of miles away in Ukraine, when there are so many problems at home. How can you have trillions of dollars going to the other side of the planet, when there is mass homelessness, unemployment, poverty, infrastructure that is decaying. There are so many reports out explaining that so much of the infrastructure, bridges tunnels, railroads are collapsing in the United States because they haven’t been updated in almost 100 years. Yet you have trillions of dollars going to fight “Russia”, so it’s a horrible contradiction. All the U.S. brings and promotes is chaos and nonsense wherever they go. The people want order, the people want traditional values, civilization and peace. This is why more and more people are beginning to support Russia. What we are seeing now within Europe and the U.S. is rising inflation, strikes, protests. There is growing disdain for funding Ukraine because there are so many problems that already exist within these empires. Q: How has Washington weaponized the U.S. dollar? The official religion of the United States empire is not Christianity, it is capitalism and imperialism. And its God is the dollar. It has the world under a spell. The people who create the U.S. dollar and who run the financial institutions are able to convince the masses that these pieces of paper, these magic money squares, have some sort of value. Intrinsic value. And they do not. They have no value. It has manipulated the system with these little pieces of papers that they can print at will, however they like, to convince the masses to buy up all the resources and build a huge military to control its system. The U.S. dollar has been used and weaponized to control all international monetary institutions because countries around the world have been subjected to the dollar. As long as countries are forced to adopt the dollar, then they become slaves to U.S. imperialism. But now thankfully with de-dollarization, you have people who are beginning to see this for what it is, which is a magic trick of spell and they are no longer falling for this and this actually very good news. AuthorAli Karbalaei This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune. Archives April 2023 |
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