​Last week, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown told the NYT that US/NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine is 'inevitable'.
​
This is despite the fact that Biden has said doing so is ruled out because it would lead to WWIII, which would almost definitively lead to nuclear war and the deaths of millions.

The ruling capitalist class is willing to put the world on the precipice of nuclear devastation before admitting that their status as global hegemon is dwindling and that multipolarity is on the rise.

It is willing to loot $95 billion from American taxpayers under the auspices of furthering the war against Russia and China and the genocide against the Palestinians – when in reality most of that money goes back into the pockets of the military industrial complex who our politicians serve.

The world is changing, and those which benefited from the old order are digging their claws onto humanity trying to prevent it from advancing into a higher, more free, equitable, and democratic, mode of life.

The lives of the American people continue to deteriorate as generations of youth are the first in the country's history to have a worst living standard and prospect of life than their parents. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are drowning in debts accumulated for attempting to do something so ludicrous as survive or access basic education.

Today, we are not only wage slaves to the owners of big capital… but indebted to them for our own enslavement.

The country is collapsing. The infrastructure, like popular trust in the media and politicians, is dwindling. We are in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy and empire like we have never experienced before.

José Martí used to say that a lie can last a hundred years, but the truth catches up to it in a second. Well, those seconds have arrived for millions of Americans, for whom the truth has caught up to the lies they’ve been generationally fed. The power of the lies transmitted by the elite and their media has faded. It has wasted itself in repetition and given way to its opposite: the truth, the mortal enemy of our state’s hegemony.

Americans: things DO NOT have to be this way. They are not divinely ordained to be this way. This is a product of a social system – capitalism – that has developed historically and is currently collapsing before our very eyes.

The frail status of our octogenarian leaders encapsulates perfectly the status of the system.

American workers, the American people, DO NOT have sovereignty. We are an occupied people. Our state and the politicians that uphold it are beholden to only one interest – those of the capitalist elite.

Big corporations, banks, and investment firms are in command. Our rulers are servants of the accumulation of their capital. It is a dictatorship of capital that we live under. And it is high time that the yoke of big capital which oppresses us is thrown off.

The supposed representatives of the people are in reality the representatives of the oppressors and exploiters of the people. They represent those who send our brothers and sisters abroad to lose limbs, scar their souls, and sometimes return in caskets, all to murder people whom they had more in common with than the filthy parasites who sent them there, and who profited from their misfortune.

In 1776 we had a revolution because we recognized that our interests and those of the British empires could not co-exist under the same entity. This contradiction burst into a revolution - the first of many more anti-colonial revolutions in the hemisphere.

Then in 1865, through the general strike of the Black proletariat, we overthrew the Southern planter class and its cotton kingdom, whose very existence undermined the democratic ideals of 1776 and placed the nation in a contradictory predicament.

With the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, the advancements of our second revolution (1865) are rolled back, and a state of fascism and apartheid is installed in the U.S. South, with state sanctioned lynching being the order of the day.

But this counterrevolution did not break the democratic spirit of American workers, and specifically the superexploited and oppressed black proletariat. For decades the civil rights revolution fought to overthrow the apartheid system imposed in the aftermath of 1876.

Finally in 1964, with the guidance of the brilliant and revolutionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., legally sanctioned apartheid would be done away with. A new moment in the struggle would present itself, as the de jure lines which segregated our people and working class were lifted.

Now our people are more integrated than ever. They are ready to fight – together – as a united working class.

Dissent amongst their ranks is taking many forms, but they all are in motion against the system that keeps them poor, indebted, and desperate.

The task of communists today is to give this spontaneous and varied dissent some coherence and direction.

This is not imposed on workers from outside. It is much more immanent. It simply clarifies that which they already know implicitly. It makes explicit what is implicit in their consciousness.

This is why, whenever we talk about the Marxist worldview with our coworkers and community members, a frequent response is "wow, this simply puts words onto what I have been feeling for a long time."

The Marxist worldview is a yeast that allows the spontaneous consciousness that is already present in a dissenting working class to rise to the level of socialist class consciousness – to the understanding that they, working people, can change the world, and, that the movement of history tends towards that direction!

It is only this popular unity of working people, led by an American Communist Party, a genuine peoples party, that can Free America, and through this, Free Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and all other victims of U.S. imperialism!

​Author

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.

As a wrestling coach and athlete living in the Midwest I have plenty of interaction with MAGA supporters. My current wrestling coach, one of the greatest American Wrestlers of all-time, is a Trump supporting MAGA guy who regularly tells me that every single politician on both sides is corrupt, he doesn’t trust the Israeli and Ukrainian Governments, and that it's bullshit that people have to pay money to the banks for housing when banks don’t actually provide anything of substance. My coach wants a political and economic revolution, and because he feels that Donald Trump is the politician who best represents his anti-establishment political leanings, he supports Donald Trump.
      
One might think that as a Communist I would have nothing to talk about with a MAGA supporter, but me and my MAGA coaches and teammates discuss politics frequently, and I openly tell them about my views, oftentimes while rocking my Ivan Drago t-shirt that displays a large hammer and sickle, which one of these teammates told me I NEEDED to buy. When these types of friends ask me for political sources I send them to Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din of the Institute for a Free America, because I know that they will always preach pro-working class and anti imperialist politics without any of the leftist jargon that might be off putting to someone who hasn’t been through four years of liberal arts university courses about intersectionality and become accustomed to the near obsession with liberal identity politics that many leftists have.
      
When I first heard of the MAGA Communism strategy I thought it was a fantastic idea. But after hearing various people I respect say that the strategy was a distraction because tailing a bourgeois politician would get us nowhere, my views changed and I made a video speaking out against the strategy. And this brought me much validation from the liberal online left who was ecstatic to see that I was moving away from the basket of deplorables known as MAGA.

However, now I have watched the strategy in action and I believe in its usefulness, at least for a certain period of time. Two nights ago I spoke at an event coordinated by Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din and I don’t remember them mentioning Trump a single time. Al-Din gave a brilliant speech about the history of European and American political economy and how it has evolved to its current stage today where our entire political and economic system is dominated by a small number of shareholders and banks, and how this differs to Eastern nations like China where socialism and central economic planning has been used to control finance and divert resources towards social ends. Hinkle also gave what I felt was a fantastic and hilarious speech, establishing the connection between US imperialism and the Israeli genocide, calling the US’s undying support for Israel “a costly suicide mission” and saying “we are sending billions to diaper forces.” Hinkle also openly called himself a Communist, advocating for the US to open trade relations with the developing world instead of constantly interfering in their governments, and used a quote from Lenin to make his points, which received a positive reaction from the crowd.

It is clear to me that the purpose of MAGA communism was never to tail Donald Trump around uncritically as recent hit pieces about Hinkle have alleged.(1)The purpose was to reach the working class members of Trump’s base who are discontented with the current political establishment and are desperate for something new. And in doing that they’ve been quite successful. Hinkle has amassed 2.6 million followers on X after being banned from every other major social media platform for repeatedly and unapologetically going against mainstream media narratives. At the event this weekend I met an older lifelong Communist who told me how he brought 15 MAGA people into his Communist organization by focusing on class politics in his conversations with them. Additionally I met dozens of blue collar workers who told me how they’ve used the work of Haz and Hinkle, as well as my organization Midwestern Marx, to push their co-workers towards socialism.

The allegations against Hinkle are endless, he’s a grifter, he’s a fed, he’s a reactionary, he’s a Russian plant. And while I see how people could be suspicious of his meteoric growth, for those who have followed it closely it makes more sense. Hinkle acquired large audiences on multiple social media platforms by posting frequently and going on any large show that would have him. Upon getting banned from all of these social media platforms his fan base would migrate towards X and more attention would be drawn to his account because of the bannings.
      
And while I haven’t agreed with 100% of what Jackson Hinkle has said in the past three years, I do deeply agree with the core of his politics which is anti-imperialist and pro-worker. I can’t help but be excited by someone who accumulates over 2 million followers while openly wearing the title of Marxist Leninist and defending Stalin to the likes of Alex Jones. When I disagree with Hinkle I tell him openly and respectfully, and in the past it has always been a fruitful discussion that allows both of our audiences to learn and refine our rhetoric. And to be honest with you the Jackson Hinkle of today is not the Jackson Hinkle of three years ago, he’s become so much more confident in his positions and refined in his rhetoric when speaking sometimes it's hard to remember that he’s only 24. I would encourage people to avoid the tendency to quickly write others off without giving them the time to grow in their understanding of the world, or without giving them the courtesy of discussing whatever positions you might disagree with.
      
I do not think Communists should be afraid of Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din and I definitely do not think Communists should be afraid of working class MAGA people. It is our duty to advance the struggle of the proletariat regardless of its consciousness at the current moment. If we can speak to the anti-establishment leanings of MAGA workers in order to push them towards supporting socialism then that is an avenue which should be pursued!
      
It was Vladimir Lenin who would send party members to the meetings of the fascist and anti-semetic Black Hundreds peasant groups in order to disrupt them and win people away from their reactionary worldview by teaching them Marxism. If it was worth it for Lenin to reach out to fascistic peasants, surely it is worth it for us to reach out to proletarians who voted for Trump over the butcher of Libya Hillary Clinton and genocide Joe Biden.
      
In my view Hinkle and Al-Din have thoroughly overcome what my colleague Carlos Garrido calls the Purity Fetish (2), which has plagued the American left for decades. The Purity Fetish can be observed by western leftists who see people as static and unchanging entities who can’t change or be reached, which is a belief that is antithetical to Marxist Dialectical Materialism which teaches that the one constant thing in this world is that everything is constantly in flux and subject to change. Much of the Western Left is openly opposed to reaching the Trump’s MAGA base with socialist politics because they see them as too ideologically impure, while viewing themselves as the enlightened leftist who stands above the proletarian Trump supporter because they hold the correct political beliefs. The purity fetish left also falls into the trap of national historical nihilism, viewing America as a settler colonial nation which can never achieve socialism because it is uniquely evil as a country. These leftists fail to see the formation of the American nation which was advanced by the positive aspect of our history which should be celebrated and studied. The revolutionary war, civil war, and civil rights movement, were fought to advance our country forward and place black and white workers on an equal playing field, so that now they might struggle as one against the capitalist ruling class and their corrupt politicians.
      
Hinkle and Al-Din overcome all of these elements that exist within the purity fetish left. They reject national historical nihilism and reach out to working class Americans who are considered impure by much of the Western Left. In the past I have encouraged them to remember that it’s just as important to reach out to workers who vote for Biden (many of whom do so because they believe him to be more supportive of union organizing) as it is to recruit those who vote for Donald Trump. But this is actually one of the reasons why Midwestern Marx has decided to begin working with these two and their Institute for a Free America because their approach is slightly different to ours, but our goals are the same, to advance the class struggle in America and bring an end to US imperialism.

For those who have derided, smeared, and attacked those who want to reach out to working class MAGA folks, or who to those who have been deceived into thinking that Hinkle and Al-Din are reactionary fascists by out of context clips on X, or by straight up fake and doctored posts (which leftists have used to attack Hinkle many times including by the Communist Party USA itself in a now deleted piece) (3) the door will always be open. We will not cancel you like you have canceled so many of us. We will be here building when you decide to overcome the purity fetish and join us in this struggle to create a new and better social system that actually serves the working masses!

​References

1. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/24/2242596/--MAGA-Communism-A-new-flavor-of-crazy-for-the-anti-establishment-nihilist-incel-fringe 
2. Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the crisis of Western Marxism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).
3. Noah Khrachvik, "A Sad State of Affairs: The Decline of the Communist Party USA." Midwestern Marx Institute (May 10, 2024).

​If a colloquium on early entrepreneurs had been convened in the early 20th century, most participants would have viewed traders as operating on their own, bartering at prices that settled at a market equilibrium established spontaneously in response to fluctuating supply and demand. According to the Austrian economist Carl Menger, money emerged as individuals and merchants involved in barter came to prefer silver and copper as convenient means of payment, stores of value, and standards by which to measure other prices. History does not support this individualistic scenario for how commercial practices developed in the spheres of trade, money and credit, interest, and pricing. Rather than emerging spontaneously among individuals “trucking and bartering,” money, credit, pricing, and investment for the purpose of creating profits, charging interest, creating a property market and even a proto-bond market (for temple prebends) first emerged in the temples and palaces of Sumer and Babylonia.
​
The First Mints Were Temples

From third-millennium Mesopotamia through classical antiquity the minting of precious metal of specified purity was carried out by temples, not private suppliers. The word money derives from Rome’s temple of Juno Moneta, where the city’s coinage was minted in early times. Monetized silver was part of the Near Eastern pricing system developed by large institutions to establish stable ratios for their fiscal account-keeping and forward planning. Major price ratios (including the rate of interest) were administered in round numbers for ease of calculation1.

The Palace Forgave Excessive Debt

Instead of deterring enterprise, these administered prices provided a stable context for it to flourish. The palace estimated a normal return for the fields and other properties it leased out, and left managers to make a profit—or to suffer a loss when the weather was bad or other risks materialized. In such cases shortfalls became debts. However, when the losses became so great as to threaten this system, the palace let the agrarian arrears go, enabling entrepreneurial contractors with the palatial economy (including ale women) to start again with a clean slate. The aim was to keep them in business, not to destroy them.

Flexible Pricing Beyond the Palace

Rather than a conflict existing between the large public institutions administering prices and mercantile enterprise, there was a symbiotic relationship. Mario Liverani2 points out that administered pricing by the temples and palaces vis-à-vis tamkarum merchants engaged in foreign trade “was limited to the starting move and the closing move: trade agents got silver and/or processed materials (that is, mainly metals and textiles) from the central agency and had to bring back after six months or a year the equivalent in exotic products or raw materials. The economic balance between central agency and trade agents could not but be regulated by fixed exchange values. But the merchants’ activity once they left the palace was completely different: They could freely trade, playing on the different prices of the various items in various countries, even using their money in financial activities (such as loans) in the time at their disposal, and making the maximum possible personal profit.”

Mesopotamian Institutions Boosted the Commercial Takeoff

A century ago it was assumed that the state’s economic role could only have taken the form of oppressive taxation and overregulation of markets, and hence would have thwarted commercial enterprise. That is how Michael Rostovtzeff3 depicted the imperial Roman economy stifling the middle class. But A.H.M. Jones4 pointed out that this was how antiquity ended, not how it began. Merchants and entrepreneurs first emerged in conjunction with the temples and palaces of Mesopotamia. Rather than being despotic and economically oppressive, Mesopotamian institutions and religious values sanctioned the commercial takeoff that ended up being thwarted in Greece and Rome. Archaeology has confirmed that “modern” elements of enterprise were present and even dominant already in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, and that the institutional context was conducive to long-term growth. Commerce expanded and fortunes were made as populations grew and the material conditions of life rose. But what has surprised many observers is how much more successful, fluid, and more stable economic organization was as we move back in time.

Ex Oriente Lux

Growing awareness that the character of gain-seeking became economically predatory has prompted a more sociological view of exchange and property in Greece and Rome (e.g., the French structuralists, Leslie Kurke5 and Sitta von Reden6, and also a more “economic” post-Polanyian view of earlier Mesopotamia and its Near Eastern neighbors. Morris and Manning7 survey how the approach that long segregated Near Eastern from Mediterranean development has been replaced by a more integrated view8,9 in tandem with a pan-regional approach to myth,  religion,10,11 and art works.12 The motto ex oriente lux now is seen to apply to commercial practices as well as to art, culture, and religion.

Individualism Was a Symptom of Westward Decline

For a century, Near Eastern development was deemed to lie outside the Western continuum, which was defined as starting with classical Greece circa 750 BC. But the origins of commercial practices are now seen to date from Mesopotamia’s takeoff two thousand years before classical antiquity. However, what was indeed novel and “fresh” in the Mediterranean lands arose mainly from the fact that the Bronze Age world fell apart in the devastation that occurred circa 1200 BC. The commercial and debt practices that Syrian and Phoenician traders brought to the Aegean and southern Italy around the eighth century BC were adopted in smaller local contexts that lacked the public institutions found throughout the Near East. Trade and usury enriched chieftains much more than occurred in the Near East where temples or other public authority were set corporately apart to mediate the economic surplus, and especially to provide credit. Because the societies of classical antiquity emerged in this non-public and indeed oligarchic context, the idea of Western became synonymous with the private sector and individualism.

References

1. “Das Palastgeschäft in der altbabylonischen Zeit.” In Interdependency of Institutions and Private Entrepreneurs: Proceedings of the Second MOS Symposium (Leiden 1998), ed. A.C.V.M. Bongenaar, 1998, pp.153–83; “Royal Edicts of the Babylonian Period—Structural Background.” In Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, ed. Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop, 2002, pp. 139–62.
2. “The Near East: The Bronze Age,” The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, ed. J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, 2005, pp. 53-54.
3. The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 1926.
4. The Later Roman Empire, 284–610: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, 1964.
5. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, 1999.
6. Exchange in Ancient Greece, 1995.
7. The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, ed. J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, 2005.
8. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel (author) Sian Reynolds (translator), 1972.
9. “Did the Phoenicians Introduce the Idea of Interest to Greece and Italy—and If So, When?”, Greece between East and West, ed. Gunter Kopcke and I. Tokumaru, pp. 128–143.
10. Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur by Walter Burkert, 1984.
11. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth by M.L. West, 1997.
12. Greece between East and West: 10th-8th centuries BC by (G.) Kopcke and (I.) Tokumaru, ed., 1992.

​In the apartment of my friends in Baghdad (Iraq), they tell me about how each of them had been impacted by the ugliness of the 2003 U.S.-imposed illegal war on their country. Yusuf and Anisa are both members of the Federation of Journalists of Iraq and both have experience as “stringers” for Western media companies that came to Baghdad amid the war. When I first went to their apartment for dinner in the well-positioned Waziriyah neighborhood, I was struck by the fact that Anisa—whom I had known as a secular person—wore a veil on her face. “I wear this scarf,” Anisa said to me later in the evening, “to hide the scar on my jaw and neck, the scar made by a bullet wound from a U.S. soldier who panicked after an IED [improvised explosive device] went off beside his patrol.”
​
Earlier in the day, Yusuf had taken me around New Baghdad City, where in 2007 an Apache helicopter had killed almost twenty civilians and injured two children. Among the dead were two journalists who worked for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. “This is where they were killed,” Yusuf tells me as he points to the square. “And this is where Saleh [Matasher Tomal] parked his minivan to rescue Saeed, who had not yet died. And this is where the Apache shot at the minivan, grievously injuring Saleh’s children, Sajad and Duah.” I was interested in this place because the entire incident was captured on film by the U.S. military and released by Wikileaks as “Collateral Murder.” Julian Assange is in prison largely because he led the team that released this video (he has now received the right to challenge in a UK court his extradition to the United States). The video presented direct evidence of a horrific war crime.

“No one in our neighborhood has been untouched by the violence. We are a society that has been traumatized,” Anisa said to me in the evening. “Take my neighbor for instance. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind because of another bombing.” The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has experienced the kind of warfare faced by the Iraqis, and now by the Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is hard to recover from such violence.

My Poisoned Land

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point to the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations. The U.S. dropped at least 74 million liters of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land.

A Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma terre empoisonnée (My poisoned land) in 2016 as a way to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the U.S. lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how as a journalist in 1966 she was sprayed by a U.S. Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy from the impact of Agent Orange on Trân Tô Nga. “The people from that village over there,” my guides tell me, naming the village, “birth children with severe defects generation after generation.”

Gaza

These memories come back in the context of Gaza. The focus is often on the dead and of the destruction of the landscape. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and of cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now, 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly.

Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organization recognized a phenomenon called “sick building syndrome,” which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighborhoods. There is now over 37 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

Every war zone remains dangerous years after ceasefires. In the case of this war on Gaza, even a cessation of hostilities will not end the violence. In early November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that the Israelis had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (although, as they pointed out, Hiroshima sits on 900 square meters of land, whereas Gaza’s total square meters are 360). By the end of April 2024, Israel had dropped over 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which would be the equivalent of six nuclear bombs. The United Nations estimates that it would take 14 years to clear the unexploded ordnance in Gaza. That means until 2038 people will be dying due to this Israeli bombardment.

On the mantle of the modest living room in the apartment of Anisa and Yusuf, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a small piece of shrapnel that struck and destroyed Yusuf’s left eye. There is nothing else on the mantle.

THE media has been full of claims by the World Bank and by governments that millions of people in the global South have been lifted out of poverty during the last three decades that saw neo-liberal economic policies. The Niti Aayog in a press release earlier this year claimed near zero poverty for India by 2022-23, affecting only 5 per cent of the population. The hard data on nutritional intake show however that hunger has risen greatly over the last three decades, with more than two-thirds of its rural and urban population unable to spend enough to satisfy minimum needs of calorific and protein intake; India’s very low ranking (111 out of 125 countries in 2023) on the global hunger index continues, and while some health indicators have improved, others have worsened.
​
Those who believe the official claims say, ‘how can hunger have increased when poverty has declined?’ The question should be the opposite, namely ‘how can poverty have declined when hunger has increased?’ The information on rise in hunger is direct, based on readily available and verifiable statistics, compared to official poverty estimates that are based on illogical and non-transparent calculation methods, rendering quite spurious the claim of massive poverty decline. The illogical method has the blessings of the World Bank which repeats the spurious claim of poverty decline.

Why is the official method illogical, and the conclusion of poverty decline spurious? Because its method has meant repeatedly under-estimating poverty lines over time, leading to a lowering of the nutritional intake that can be accessed at these poverty lines.The poor have been counted below a standard that itself has been allowed to decline; but for any valid comparison over time, the standard must be held constant. If a school claims great success in lowering over a period of 30 years the proportion of failures among students taking examinations, from say initially 55 per cent of all students failing to only 5 per cent failing, we are hardly likely to believe the claim when we find out that over the same period the pass mark has been quietly lowered from 50 out of 100 in the initial year, to 15 out of 100 by the terminal year. Applying a constant 50 out of 100 pass mark, we find the failure percentage has risen.

Similarly official claims of poverty decline carry no conviction when we see that compared to the official nutrition norms of 2,200 calories rural and 2,100 calories urban actually used to obtain poverty lines in the initial year 1973-4, in a large number of states over the next four decades the energy intake accessible at official poverty lines had declined to 1700 calories or less and protein intake which is highly associated with energy intake has also declined. According to the Tendulkar committee poverty lines (being followed at present by the Niti Aayog) in rural Gujarat in 2011-12 the poverty ratio was 21.9 per cent at its per head monthly poverty line of Rs 932. But we find that energy intake at this level was only 1,670 calories, while obtaining 2,200 calories required spending Rs 2,000 or over double the official poverty line, and 87 per cent of persons fell below this level. Official poverty at 21.9 per cent and real poverty at 87 per cent is no mean order of difference. In rural Punjab, the low 7.71 per cent official poverty ratio was at a sum that gave 1,800 calories daily while the true poverty line at which 2,200 calories could be reached was much higher with 38 per cent of persons falling below it. In 2009 in rural Puducherry the official poverty ratio was near-zero at 0.2 per cent solely because the very low poverty line allowed only 1,040 calories per day—a starvation level, whereas the actually poor unable to reach the 2200 calorie norm, comprised 58 per cent. Here the official poverty line was pitched so low that below it there were no observations, since people were dead. Urban poverty similarly shows high and rising poverty compared to decline in official estimates.

The Niti Aayog’s claim of only 5 per cent in poverty in 2023-24, relies on the 2011 Tendulkar poverty lines price-indexed to 2023-24. Taking the highest consumption spending under the Modified Mixed Recall Period, and using the price index data in the official Fact Sheet, the poverty lines when brought forward to 2023-24, are Rs 57/69 daily per head for rural/urban areas. The food part accounts for Rs 26.6/27 and the non-food part for Rs 30.4/42 rural/urban respectively taking the average shares spent on food and non-food. The food part would have bought 1.3 litres of the cheapest bottled water, with nothing left over for food (the poor do not actually buy bottled water, the example is to illustrate how paltry the food sum is).

To think that minimum non-food daily needs of a person however poor on account of rent, transport, utilities, healthcare, and manufactured goods (leave alone education and recreation) could be met by Rs 30.4 rural to Rs.42 urban per day, requires a degree of disconnect from objective reality that no rational individual can display, only the official estimators seem to be capable of it. Their so-called poverty lines are destitution-cum-starvation lines, with 6.6 per cent of rural and 1.6 per cent of the urban population still somehow surviving at sub-human existence levels, producing the 5 per cent overall average claimed to be in poverty. The true poverty lines at which minimum nutrition could be obtained were at least 2.5 to 3 times higher. In another three years at most, officially ‘zero poverty’ is likely to be claimed, because the official poverty lines would have been further lowered to a level where there will be no survivors. If an examination pass mark reaches zero, there are zero failures.

Far from declining, the share of the actually poor in both rural and urban population has risen noticeably over the last three decades. In 1993-4, the poor comprised 58.5/57 per cent in rural/urban areas since they could not reach nutrition norms of 2200/2100 calories per day, while by 2004-5 the respective rural/urban poverty ratios had risen to 69.5/65 per cent. After a large spike in the drought year 2009-10, there was a decline by 2011-12 to 67/62 per cent.
The 2017-18 nutrition intake data were not released but the intakes can be conservatively approximated (by deflating food spending in the later year to 2011-12 and applying the food cost per unit of nutrients) and this shows a sharp rise in rural poverty to over 80 per cent of the population, while urban poverty remained at about the same level as in 2011-12. The full data for 2023-24 are still to be released but in view of the pandemic-induced economic slowdown and rising unemployment, the true poverty levels are likely to have remained high.

The conceptual muddle that governments and the World Bank have created for themselves, and their resulting false claims of declining poverty, is the outcome of a simple logical mistake. They first correctly defined the poverty lines on the basis of nutrition norms in the initial year, and then for every succeeding year improperly changed the definition, de-linking it from nutrition norms; and they have done this for every country. In 1973-4 in India, the monthly spending per head required to access daily 2200 calories in rural and 2100 calories in urban areas, were Rs 49 and Rs 56.6, giving the respective official poverty ratios of 56.4 per cent rural and 49.2 per cent urban. This definition of the poverty line directly using nutrition norms was never again applied even though the needed current data on nutritional intake, has been available every five years.

Instead these particular 1973 poverty lines were simply updated to later years using price indices as has been explained, without ever asking whether nutrition norms continued to be reached or not. To start thus with one definition of poverty line and quietly switch to another completely different definition means committing a logical fallacy, the fallacy of equivocation. This fallacious method meant that the particular basket of goods and services available and consumed in 1973-4 was held fixed—by now it is 50 years in the past—with only its cost being price-indexed to the present.

In reality however the actually available basket of goods and services has been changing especially rapidly over the last three decades of neo-liberal market-oriented reforms (much more rapidly than the weights assigned to different items in price indices can be changed) because of increased privatisation and market pricing of goods and services. A basket being fixed for 50 years assumes away real trends in poverty, for whether people remain at the same level of poverty, get worse off or get better off, depends crucially on whether and in what ways the initial basket of goods and services is changed. Historically, poverty was reduced greatly or eliminated entirely by State policies in those countries where healthcare, education, and to a large extent housing and utilities were removed from the sphere of market pricing and were instead treated as public goods, using the budget to provide entirely free health care and compulsory free education for children, or only nominal charges were imposed. State-financed construction of affordable low-cost housing with low rents, and nominal charges for public transport and for utilities (water, energy for lighting and cooking), freed up a larger share of the family budget for buying food, manufactured necessities and spending on recreation. Such provision of public goods was not only typical in the socialist countries in Asia and Europe; it was also undertaken in the post-WWII period in almost all the West European capitalist countries.

The converse happened, the available basket of goods and services changed drastically to the detriment of consumers, with the introduction of market-oriented economic reforms in the countries of the global South  because these measures substantially or entirely removed healthcare, education and utilities from the category of public goods and into that of market pricing.  The resulting spike in these charges impacted adversely the income available to the majority of the population for spending on food and manufactured necessities, pushing more people into nutritional stress. Unwise specific policy measures like the 2016 currency de-monetisation, or the impact of the 2021-22 pandemic-induced recession, have aggravated the poverty problem no doubt but are not the basic causes of rising poverty, which long predates these events.

It is not a difficult proposition to substantially reduce poverty through redistributive measures. About one tenth of India’s GDP would need to be devoted to providing adequate food for the population, basic and comprehensive healthcare, compulsory free education, employment guarantee and old age pension; for which additional taxation of 7 per cent of GDP that the rich and super-rich can easily bear, would be needed. Combined with vigorous implementation of the existing National Food Security Act 2013 and the MG National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, genuine large-scale reduction of poverty would result. But an essential precondition for this lies in the realm of concepts that guide empirical work and the inferences based on them: the incorrect measurement of poverty that has been prevalent not only nationally but internationally has to be abjured, and the false claims of poverty reduction replaced by factually and logically correct estimates.

Note: The author’s book ‘Exploring the Poverty Question’ is in press. ​

​Author

Utsa Patnaik 

Originally published: Peoples Democracy

Victory Day In Chicago

On May 12th, a special Victory Day concert was organized in Chicago to celebrate 79 years of victory of fascism in the Second World War. The opening ceremony gave recognition to the historic contributions made by every single constituent republic of the Soviet Union, which stood shoulder-to-shoulder in common struggle; Russian SFSR, Belarusian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Armenian SSR, Georgian SSR, Uzbek SSR, Turkmen SSR, Tajik SSR, Kazakh SSR, Kirghiz SSR, Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Moldavian SSR, & Ukrainian SSR. ​

​The concert’s musical program featured a myriad of classic Soviet songs, both from the WWII period and later productions intended on immortalizing the memory of Soviet victory. These include A Hilltop With No Name (На безымянной высоте), From the Heroes of Yore (От героев былых времен), and, of course, Day of Victory (День победы) among others. 

You can watch the full concert here:

​Therefore, it comes as little surprise that the local Ukrainian nationalist community showed up to protest an event memorializing the Soviet victory over fascism, once they had discovered it on social media. Neither the fact that these Ukrainians were free to participate in what was supposed to be a non-politicized event, nor the historical truth that Ukraine had overwhelmingly fought alongside Russians in WWII, were enough to keep these pawns of US imperialism from making fools of themselves on that day. 

At any rate, the majority of people around the world remember the Soviet Union’s sacrifice in The Great Patriotic War. Every year since 1945, people have paid their respects to victory, they have done so this year, and they will continue to do for as long as the history books stay true to the actual events that make up the Second World War.

Author 

Donald Courter

Republished from the Revolution Report

Historical narratives are constituted by our capacity to suffuse them with an imaginary, un-real supplement: this was one of the great insights of modern historiography. It is never enough to recount the facts as they are – the brutal soberness of ‘facts’ are often in themselves coloured by inevitable distortions of a form of ideological appraisal. Neutral facts are, in other words, mostly impossible to present ‘by themselves’. To understand a historical period, one must necessarily understand its phantasmatic and imaginary aspects – one must engage with how a historically materialistic set of facts is retrospectively ‘filled in’ by a subjective construction of meaning. Ultimately, understanding any great juncture in history implies a recognition that the account of this juncture is often immediately formulated in retrospect by a certain supplementary, speculative historicization. The most radical of historical events are all too often forced to ‘make sense’ by being applied to a dogmatic set of presuppositions.
​
As with any radical thinker in the history of ideas, Marx’s intervention is from its conception coloured by the type of narrative which is only retrospectively positioned. The radical novelty of Marx’s thought inversely meant that he was inevitably placed in a conceptual relation to various preceding philosophical traditions. Ultimately, the capacity to understand ‘Marx for himself’ was almost immediately abandoned.

This question of a retrospective integration of Marx (both of dialectical materialism and of historical materialism) into a theoretical legacy was, for justifiable reasons, narrowed into a question of Marx’s fidelity to and heritage in Hegelian philosophy. Marx frequently presented his texts as revisions of or reactions to Hegel’s system. His references to Hegel were extensive and his origin in the Young Hegelian tradition of the mid-19th century is well documented. This Marx-Hegel conjunction would therefore inevitably continue after Marx’s death.

During the early 20th century, the intellectual trend of Hegelian Marxism rose to prominence. Lenin himself rigorously engaged with Hegel’s Science of Logic in 1914-1915 (although his interest in Hegel undoubtedly continued aften this period) in order to substantiate his reading of Marx. Lukács’ seminal work (History and Class Consciousness, 1923) was partially characterised by a theoretical engagement with the origin of the legacy of dialectical materialism in Hegelian thought. The reciprocal positioning of Marxism and Hegelianism, whilst sceptical, was distinctively kept alive by Lukács’ return to the necessity, as Marx put it, of not treating Hegel as a ‘dead dog’.

This frequent attempt at understanding Marx alongside the spectres of Hegelianism was however progressively abandoned. A definitive shift emerged towards the radical separation of Marx and Hegel. The novelty of Marx was framed according to the irreducibility of his theoretical invention to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Lenin had famously stated that we need Hegel’s Science of Logic in order to understand Marx’s Capital (Lenin, 1929). However this dependency of Marx upon Hegel was either negated, or progressively inverted into the dependency of Hegel upon Marx. Althusser is perhaps the most recognisable figure of this inversion. Lenin’s statement that Hegel’s Logic is the key to Marx’s Capital was reformulated. For Althusser, if anything ‘we need Marx in order to understand Hegel’ (Althusser, 1969). Hegel remains fallible until you translate his Logic into dialectical materialist terms.

Althusser is in part most famous in this tradition for eventually decisively asserting that Marx’s dialectical materialism owes nothing to Hegel. As a standalone philosophy, it breaks with Hegelianism to the point of being unrecognisable at its very core from the latter. Both For Marx (1965/2005) and the early texts of On Ideology (2020) would lay the ground for precisely this de-coupling of Marx and Hegel. The Ideological State Apparatus as furnishing the everyday coordinates of reproducing the fundamental conditions of capitalist-economic modes of production; an analysis reformatted to be deployed on the ideological level of our subjective-discursive methods of interpellation into a decentralised, diffused State apparatus; a non-idealised, un-centralised understanding of consciousness as posited within a pre-existing set of material conditions – these were aspects of Marxism which Hegel had failed to ever articulate.

At the same time, Althusser’s grand treatise on the independence of Marx and his undeniable break from previous methods of philosophical questioning was Reading Capital (1965), in which the vision of a Hegel-independent Marx is most clearly argued for. Althusser’s purism towards Marx is clear: the very ‘object of enquiry’ posited in Capital is itself furnished by the new method of questioning which Marx installs; new disjunctive temporalities of independent historical and economical ensembles/regimes are opened up; a scientific analysis grounded in the recognition of a constitutively ‘blundered view’ of ideological enquiry is stressed. Marx’s epistemological rupture is at its roots understood as anti-humanist and anti-historicist (and hence irreconcilable with the historicism of Spirit for Hegel). Fundamentally Althusser deploys a profound criticism of any attempt to think Marx inside the confines of Hegelian philosophy. In the same work, Ranciere, Balibar, Macherey, and Establet similarly provide a vision of Marx constitutively detached from Hegel: the analysis of commodity fetishism, and an analysis of the concept of ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ (to be returned to below) are only some of the examples of this.

In the following decade, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari as avatars of this vision of ‘Marx without Hegel’. The two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 & 1980), sees in its eccentric overturning of French structuralism an abandonment of Hegel’s idealising thinking according to absolute categories: ‘negation’ and ‘the absolute’ are replaced by rhizomatic fluidities and a philosophy of ‘pure difference’. Yet despite this aggressive tradition subsumed under a vision of ‘Marx for himself’ which characterised 60s and 70s French philosophy, a return to Hegel emerged as a necessary treatment of Marx’s (at this point) confused intervention.

Interestingly, Žižek would reproduce Althusser’s inversion of the Marx-Hegel relation: Marx’s Capital is indeed necessary in order to retrospectively fully understand Hegel’s Logic. Žižek indeed agrees that Hegel most directly makes sense in the light of (and in his difference from) post-German-Idealist philosophy – however Žižek would draw the opposite conclusion to Althusser: that Hegel is clarified by Marx, makes Hegel the more radical of the two thinkers. This is one of the principal theses of his self-described magnum opus, Less Than Nothing (2013): by understanding Hegel in the confines of Marx, we see that Hegel is clearer in conceptualising the political agency of the rabble. In other words, for Žižek, the potential for revolutionary political action is more present in Hegel than in Marx.

A similar homogenisation of Marxism and Hegelianism emerges with the work of Badiou, who defends the communist hypothesis from the perspective of what he calls an ‘event’. An event is an ontologically-grounded disparity in a structured political, artistic, or scientific order, which conditions an aggressive and targeted reformulation of the logical forms of our discursive and historical forms of understanding – the event is an unstructured multiplicity irreducible to the situation in which it appears. Importantly, the logic of the event is not possible without Hegel. What Badiou calls his ‘mathematical ontology’ is, according to his own words, an appropriation of Hegel’s ‘greater logic’ (Badiou, 2006). Thus his Marxist framework for the intervention of popular political movements is explained by a Hegelian logic. Once again, Marx has to be thought within the confines of Hegel.

The question of the Marx-Hegel relation returns today with the same tensions. Some of the perceived failures of 20th century Marxist-Leninist projects has prompted Western “Marxists” to ‘return to Hegel’ as a method of reflecting upon political and historical events in order to discern a logical mode of articulating new forms of politically grounded social justice. Others insist that the attempt to discern the Hegelian workings of Marx is an inexcusable attempt to institutionalise (and neutralise) his radical political potential: Marx is kept ‘safe’ by being framed according to an intellectual game or hermeneutics of the Hegelian forms latent in Marx’s texts. In order for Marx’s works to mean something, in order for them to carry any political weight, they must exist as a separate entity from any (inherently sterilising) Hegelian speculation.

Žižek’s argument that Hegel is more radical than Marx himself would be the ultimate suffocation of any form of spontaneous and collective political agency. By implication, workers must get acquainted with the Science of Logic and learn to decipher a radical, practical potential within the dialectic of the concept, through a rigorous approach to Hegel’s 150-year long conceptual engagement with Marx. To claim that any political collective must be grounded in an expert reading of Hegel is in this sense an impossible and bourgeois proposition. Others may argue, as Žižek himself does, that, politically speaking, it is not enough to ‘just do things’: we have a duty to reflect upon why an instinctual fixation upon direct, unquestioning action – a dedication to mindlessly and endlessly producing ‘formal’ political acts (protests, union strikes etc.) – is an inevitably impotent endeavour. The antidote to this impotence would be Hegel, who allows us to ‘think through’ Marx in a politically productive way.

It is barely worth mentioning that major moments in the history of Marxism (Luxemburg, Gramsci, Korsch, Bloch, nuances in the writings of the Hegelian Marxists, the unique position of the Frankfurt School, and a multiplicity of reversals in classical and contemporary Marxism, just to name a few) are missing in the above exposition. However this exposition is far from an intended history of Marxism, and rather serves to briefly illustrate the distinctive lack of univocity in the development of thought on the relation between Marx and Hegel.

‘Marx’ or ‘Marx and…’: these are the opposed poles of a political-philosophical thought that have come to partially define the continental tradition. These two positions are understood as profoundly irreconcilable, and entail radically different implications for the coordinates of political agency and for the recurrent Leninist question, even more pressing now, of what is to be done. But are these positions truly as mutually antagonistic as assumed? It would seem that the alternative between ‘Marx’ and ‘Marx and…’ reproduces Lacan’s paradox of a robber who gives the (false) alternative between ‘your wallet or your life’. In this forced decision, the wallet is always and unquestionably up for taking. The context in which an apparent choice is presented is conditioned by the appearance of a free choice. This ‘free choice’ is however nothing but the freedom to choose a forced alternative. The question of ‘your wallet or your life’ implies the same inevitable consequence – the asymmetry is clear: I cannot somehow choose to ‘give my life and keep my wallet’ as the alternative of ‘giving my wallet and keeping my life’ – the question implies a non-existent freedom. The asymmetry inherent in the choice derives from the fundamental identity of each position. In either case, the wallet is taken.

The latent form of the Marx-Hegel debate is a similarly unavoidable asymmetry, a fundamentally false sense of choice. Hegel is a fictive implication, a retrospective addendum to the category of Marx. The addition of Hegel, if Marx is to be properly understood, will in itself mean nothing to any formulation of ‘Marxism for itself’. The Marx-event (the unsettling introduction of Marxism in the history of ideas) must be understood as radical enough to be independent of any Hegelian tone that may be attributed to it, as much as this tone may nevertheless necessarily be attributed to it. What is of fundamental concern is, in fact, the Marx-event as an initially inarticulable disjunction. When considered from the perspective of his distinctive originality, it will be inevitable that Marx will be thought from the retrospective formulation of ‘Marx and…’ – there is no ‘Marx for himself’ if the ‘and what?’ is not inscribed in the basic logic of his emergence in the philosophical tradition. The most unique inventions are unavoidably framed according to what preceded them, however irreconcilable they are to their original context.

Hegel became the privileged reference-point for this speculative, conceptual and reflective counterpart to the category of ‘Marx and…’: for each Marxist innovation, its formal avatar can be, however forcefully, seemingly discerned in the Hegelian system. One of the more contested instances is perhaps what (via Engels and Althusser) would be called ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ – a category contested even within Marxist literature. With the structures of surplus-value production and forms of commodity circulation (and the ‘socially determining’ aspect of their investment-processes and inherent commercial tendencies) detailed in Capital (1867, 1885, & 1894), ‘determination in the last instance’ is generally understood to denote the conceptual, indirect agency of economic modes of production in positing the presuppositions for the social structures in which these same modes of production are exercised. The furnishing of the ground of a system’s own intervention – this retrogressive logic is generally attributed to Marx’s dialectical materialism. However is this dialectical method of furnishing the ground for one’s own articulation not even more fundamentally inscribed in the very core of the Hegelian ‘concept’ (Begriff), in the Science of Logic (1812/2014)? The concept is the dynamic actualisation of the logical becoming of essence out of the constitutive antagonism of existence (a transient indeterminacy between being and nothing). The concept must exist towards, as constituted by, that which is radically other, or constitutively irreducible, to itself – it must therefore posit the coordinates of its own un-representable negation as internal to its own substantial expression, and in so doing it posits its own presuppositions in an interminable contradiction of which it is itself the product.

Ultimately, as can be seen in these many examples, there appears to be little value in desperately searching for the ‘missing aspect’ of dialectical materialism which will either reconcile it with, or make it irreducible to, other philosophical systems. Even with more recent trends insisting that Hegel is himself a materialist, any history of the Marx-Hegel relation is itself more of a logical problematic, as Fraser and Burns (2000) had suggested. However, this problematic indeterminacy of Marx can be framed as being far from a weakness. In fact, it is the paradoxical, conceptual strength of reflection that it can reformulate the new according to its roots in the old. This is not to be taken as a detriment to Marx, but as a testament to his originality. His intervention is so retrospectively malleable precisely because of the radical indeterminacy of his historical and dialectical materialism. If we return to Badiou, we can propose that the ontologically inassimilable discontinuity conditioned by an ‘event’ is so radical precisely because it lends itself to an infinite series of possible retrospective reformulations. It is a testament to Marx’s conceptual ingenuity, as a philosophical and as an economical thinker, that he is indefinitely and retrospective forced into various philosophical systems in order to ‘make sense’ of him.

The question should not therefore be, ‘what does Marx owe to Hegel?’ Marx can be made to owe a lot of things to a lot of philosophers. In order to maintain a fidelity to the originality of Marx’s thought, the initial question should be, ‘what about Marx made him retrospectively assimilable to a variety of philosophical traditions? What about Marx’s thought lent him a malleability allowing him to be constructed according to his meaning for any of a series of preceding philosophical systems? The question of Marx’s fidelity to Hegel might be an interminable question, however this question does not herald an immanent articulation of the relation or reproduction of absolute idealism within dialectical materialism, but rather signifies a constitutive inarticulability central to the Marxist intervention, which renders his work constitutively and retrospectively constructed by his temporary ‘fit’ within a historical tradition. Marx’s break from philosophy is radical enough to be both indeterminate and incomplete. Recognising that the debate on Marx’s relation to Hegel is a consequence of this historical inconsistency of Marxism itself, and thus of its undisputable originality, is becoming an increasingly important task for the 21st century avatars of Marxist thought.

 
References
 
Althusser, L. (1965/2005). For Marx. London: Verso Books.
Althusser, L. (1965/2014). Lire Le Capital. PUF.
Althusser, L. (1969). Lenin before Hegel. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm.
Althusser, L. (2020). On Ideology. Verso Books.
Badiou, A. (2006). Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1972/2013, 1980/2013). Capitalism and Schizophrenia [Anti-Oedipus & A Thousand Plateaus]. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Fraser, I. & Burns, T. (2000). Introduction: An Historical Survey of the Hegel-Marx Connection. In: Burns, T., Fraser, I. (eds) The Hegel-Marx Connection. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1812/2014). The Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press.
Lenin, V. I. (1929). Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/.
Lukács, G. (1923). History and Class Consciousness. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/.
Marx, K. (1867, 1885, & 1894). Capital [vols. 1-3]. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/.
Žižek, S. (2013). Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso Books.

While neoliberalism is the economic and political ideology that dominates most of the Western world today, it is an ideology that is unknown to most American citizens. The purveyors of neoliberal ideology present themselves as objective and as being above ideology, which serves as a method of concealing the real underlying principles of neoliberalism, which are actually wildly unpopular with regular people. In this book journalist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison attempt to reveal these hidden principles of neoliberalism so that the ideology can be better understood and combatted. And while they do a good job revealing what makes neoliberal capitalism such a predatory, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, and ecologically disastrous system, they also fall into the left-anticommunism that plagues so much of the Western left, which was critiqued brilliantly by Michael Parenti in his 1997 classic Blackshirts and Reds.
         
The most valuable contribution of this book is that it traces the ideological history of neoliberalism through different thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and Milton Friedman, up until today where neoliberals themselves now reject the word neoliberalism because of how unpopular it has become. Instead, neoliberals prefer to posture as being above ideology, and to portray the principles of neoliberalism as being natural and eternal.

The authors show how the rise of politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Agusto Pinochet represent a transition away from Keynsianism and toward neoliberalism, or an unregulated, monopolistic, financialized, version of capitalism, justified by the idea that if we allow the rich to concentrate as much wealth and power into their hands as possible, then somehow this wealth will eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us at the bottom. Since the rise of Reagan and Thatcher inequality has skyrocketed, ecological degradation has accelerated, countless wars have been fought on behalf of corporate plunder, rents and debts are through the roof, and wealth has been concentrated at the top at unprecedented rates.
         
The book also makes a pertinent and valuable analysis of the rise of right wing populist demagogues like the business tycoon Donald Trump in the US, the Musolini praising Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and the far right Hindutva associated leader of India Narenda Modi. Monbiot and Hutchison avoid falling into what some have called “Trump derangement syndrome” by making a sober and realistic analysis of Trump’s rise to power, arguing convincingly that deteriorating economic conditions make people more susceptible to right wing demagogues who claim to be fighting the establishment while doing its bidding in reality. They point out that it was Bill Clinton, the husband of Hillary Clinton who Trump ran against in 2016, that allowed many good manufacturing jobs in middle America to be outsourced to the Global South with the passing of the free trade agreement NAFTA. Free trade is a core principle of neoliberal ideology, and thus the authors show how it is neoliberalism that set the stage for the populist right wing movement, masterminded by the likes of Steve Bannon, and brought to fruition by his preferred candidate Donald Trump.
         
I also found the author’s analysis of mental health under neoliberalism to be pertinent, as too often we overlook the atomization of humanity and the lack of social connection that permeates throughout the neoliberal system. Obviously these factors play a role in the unprecedented rates of depression, opioid addiction, and mass shootings that now exist across the US. Too often the issue of social isolation in society is overlooked as politicians push half-baked cure-all solutions to these problems that won’t upset their corporate donors. For example the Democrats pushing for gun control, and gun control alone, everytime a new shooting takes place, while generally having very little to say about social isolation and the deterioration of community. It is important to understand that these social issues are complex and are rooted in the social system, and therefore, require systemic and complex solutions. The authors do a fantastic job of making this case in their systematic critique of neoliberalism.
         
Neoliberals tell us that the current state of society is the way things have to be, that this is the natural order of life which must be maintained forever because there are simply no alternatives. And it is this assumption that Monbiot and Hutchison look to challenge in their book. However, by also claiming that communism is a “failed ideology” {1}full stop, with absolutely no explanation or analysis of why it has “failed”, they too are unwittingly propagating the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism. In the words of Michael Parenti, “to claim that Communism can never work is to ignore that fact that it has for millions of people around the world.” Today China is leading the charge against neoliberalism and in doing so have accomplished the incredible feat of bringing 800 million people out of poverty. {2} A fact that the authors of this book don’t even attempt to grapple with, instead falling back on the lame cold war talking point that communism has simply failed.

I would encourage these two authors to read economist Michael Hudson’s fantastic article “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs.China’s Industrial Socialism”{3} which lays out in great detail the systemic differences between American neoliberalism and Chinese socialism. Although, if a positive word was spoken about Chinese socialism in this book it might not have gotten published by Penguin publishing house. Thus, the decision to badmouth socialism while completely ignoring all of its successes may have been more of a financial decision than a scholarly one.
         
Existing socialist countries are only mentioned a few times in this book and always disparagingly. In Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti says “For decades, many left leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anti communist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist Leninist Left.” {4} The authors of Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism repeatedly engage in this time honored tradition of bashing socialist countries in order to distance themselves from the communist left, and to fit their message within what is allowed by the established political orthodoxy. It’s amazing how the authors can be aware of the fact that our society is dominated by corporations, bankers, and shareholders, who spend billions of dollars trying to manipulate the public’s understanding of political economy, yet they seem to believe everything that these entities are telling us about communism. As a result the author's analyses of communism sound no different than what you would see in old school cold war propaganda, or a corporate owned news outlet like Fox.
         
Parenti’s text goes on to say that “sorely lacking within the US (or in this case the British) Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union.” {5} Likewise, sorely lacking from the Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of Neoliberalism, is any kind of rational evaluation of China, Cuba, Vietnam, or even non-socialist nations like Iran, who are attempting to construct an alternative economic system to Western neoliberalism. Which you’d think would be important in a text about neoliberalism. The authors choose to totally ignore the emerging multipolar world which is challenging the existing Western power structure and trying to bring about a world where the neoliberal US is no longer the unipolar global hegemon. Even the notedly anti-communist academic Noam Chomsky made a better analysis of China and the multipolar world in his recent book The Withdrawal which was a joint effort with Communist academic Vijay Prashad. {6}

Instead of socialist nations like China, these authors choose to champion the region of Rojava as an existing example of a possible alternative to neoliberalism. Rojava is a semi-autonomous region in Syria which is governed by a self described socialist party with many different branches known as the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers Party. During the Syrian Civil War the PKK sided with the US and CIA backed Free Syrian Army which allied itself with Jihadist extremist groups like ISIS and Al-Nusra in their effort to overthrow the sovereign Government of Bashar Al-Assad. It was in the chaos of this horrific civil war that the Syrian Kurds were able to establish a semi-autonomous zone in so-called Rojava for the first time. Rojava and the PKK have been criticized, especially by the Marxist Leninist left, for acting as proxies of Western imperialism, and for enforcing ethno-nationalist policies that have reportedly led many Syrian Christians to flee Rojava. [7]

The authors champion Rojava because of its efforts to implement Democratic reforms, socially progressive policies distinct from the rest of Syria, and to establish worker cooperatives. But there are many reasons to question whether Rojava should be upheld as a viable alternative to Western neoliberalism, especially when Rojava and the Kurds were recently used as pawns in a regime change effort led by Western neoliberals, intended to overthrow a sovereign state by putting arms in the hands of some of the worst extremist groups in the region. The US currently maintains seven military bases in so-called Rojava which further brings into question whether or not this region is truly a new kind of popular democracy distinct from Western neoliberalism. It is highly possible that Rojava is being allowed by Western neoliberals to experiment with some new forms of Governance so long as they continue to act as a proxy of Western power in the Middle East. {8}

Similarly to Rojava, the state of Israel has adopted a progressive veneer in the past, claiming to be champions for women's rights and for the labor movement, or even claiming to have a socialist economic system due to the prevalence of worker co-ops. However, nobody in their right mind would argue that Israel is a country that anyone should attempt to emulate. As they have of course been charged with maintaining a system of apartheid that systematically discriminates against Palestinian Arabs, who have been ethnically cleansed by the US and British backed State of Israel for over 70 years. Palestinian living standards have reached disastrously low levels, and over 70% of Palestinian people are now living in refugee status, proving that it is impossible to build an equitable and democratic state so long as you allow yourself to be a pawn of western imperialism.  We should be wary of any US backed countries that claim to be heroes for women's rights and Democracy.

Comically, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds singles out two left anti-communist intellectuals for specific criticism, those being the anarchist environmentalist Murray Bookchin, and the self described socialist novelist George Orwell. Murray Bookchin once mocked Parenti for trying to make a balanced analysis of the Soviet Union by derriding him for caring so much about “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words). Ironically, it is Bookchin’s vision of a future society that Monbiot and Hutchison champion as the most viable alternative to neoliberalism. Despite the fact that no such society has ever been created and sustained in practice, unless you accept their fallacious argument about Rojava. This is not the case with Marxist-Leninist socialism, which has seen a great deal of success in practice, and has already elevated living standards for billions of people.
The other ideologue who Parenti criticizes, George Orwell, used his voice to vehemently denounce and criticize the Soviet Union at a time when they were locked in a mortal struggle with Hitler and the Nazis. Ironically, George Monbiot won the Orwell award for journalism in 2022 and has since given lectures for the George Orwell Foundation {9} carrying on Orwell’s legacy of criticizing capitalism, while bashing and deriding those around the world who are doing the most to construct an alternative to it.

While this book grasps the evils and contradictions of neoliberalism quite well, it fails to understand the geopolitical situation today in which a new multi-polar order is arising against US dominated neoliberal hegemony. The US is desperate for regime change in countries like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. because they continue to build stronger economic ties with one another, while preventing western neoliberals from plundering their resources and manipulating their Government policy.

Confusingly, the authors at one point lump Russian President Vladimir Putin together with neoliberal demagogues around the world such as Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Donald Trump in the US, and Narenda Modi in India. And while Russia did fall in line with the Neoliberal world order during the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent plundering of the Russian economy by Western capital, under Putin they have largely reversed course, building stronger trade ties with China, nationalizing sections of the energy industry, cracking down on certain oligarchs and Russian firms, and investing more resources in infrastructure development. It is for these reasons that the US desperately seeks regime change in Russia today, dumping billions of dollars into a Ukrainian Proxy war against Russia, and terroristically blowing up the Nord stream Pipeline to sever Russian economic relations with Europe. The Russia of today, with Putin at the helm, is far from fitting in with neoliberal puppets of the West like Netanyahu in Israel or Zelensky in Ukraine. This is why Putin receives only vitriol from the US Government, while the other two receive a seemingly endless supply of money and guns.

The authors also make the claim in this book that China’s production quotas under Mao Zedong had no social utility whatsoever, which simply shows a complete lack of understanding of Chinese history and socialist economic planning. Prior to the era of Mao, China was a feudal agrarian country with very little industry to speak of. The country was dominated by feudal landlords who ruled over vast swaths of land worked by impoverished peasants. In order for China to become a modern society Mao needed to industrialize the nation and teach these peasants to engage in modern economic practices such as steel working. This is why the now infamous backyard furnaces came about, as Chinese peasants had to be given tools by the state in order to teach themselves how to do modern industrial production. And while these policies were far from perfect, the first years of Mao’s rule in China were the fastest increase in human life expectancy that has ever been seen in human history. China transformed in a matter of decades from a backwards feudal agrarian dictatorship, into a modern economy where social metrics like literacy, housing, and access to healthcare, have been massively expanded. To say that the production quotas under Mao had no social utility, and to compare them to production as it now exists in the neoliberal United States, is a statement that can only be described as absurd and ignorant.

The authors do choose to acknowledge the power of central economic planning and how it can be used to direct production towards social ends. However, instead of analyzing how the USSR and China used economic planning to transform themselves from being semi-feudal agrarian countries into industrialized global superpowers in a matter of decades, the authors instead choose to praise Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the way that he was able to direct all production towards military equipment during the Second World War. And to be fair, this is not a bad example. It does show that the US can, and has historically, used central economic planning to direct production toward social ends. However, to use this as an example while dismissing China’s use of central economic planning as a failure is completely ludicrous.

An area of agreement I have with the authors is that the left of today needs to offer people a new narrative as to how our system can be radically changed. We at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis have been attempting to do just that, by fleshing out a theory of American Marxism, or what we call the American Trajectory. We believe that America has already gone through three periods of revolutionary change, those being the 1776 revolution against british colonialism, the Civil War of the 1860s which abolished slavery and made capitalism the dominant mode of production in the American South, and the civil rights movement which did away with apartheid putting black and white workers on a more equal playing field, and allowing them to organize together against the ruling class as one. As Americans we need to understand that our history is one of colonial plunder and corporate power, but it is also a history of resistance to that power. Heroes like WEB Dubois and Martin Luther King helped to fight for historic advances that brought us to the situation we are in today free of slavery and apartheid. The struggles of the past have moved our society forward and set the stage for what must come next… American Socialism. The abolition of the neoliberal capitalist system and the transition into a truly democratic system where production is directed towards social ends, rather than the production of surplus value alone. This is the American Trajectory and this is the “New Story” that I believe we need to start selling the American Public on.

Marxism is not a failed ideology. It is a science that must be applied uniquely to each country so that we might understand our current situation and how to change it through class struggle. Once we learn to apply Marxism to our own conditions and use it to understand our country’s history, we can start to understand how we got to the current situation, and how we can best move forward with changing it. There are many analyses in this book that are passed off as unique, but were already made by Karl Marx more than a century ago. Such as the idea that the ruling economic class of society will try to portray its own narrow interests as being in the interest of the whole of society, including the workers they exploit. This was something that Marx and Engels realized as early as 1840 in his text The German Ideology. The authors reformulate Marx and Engels’s analysis in different words without crediting or citing them, before turning around and claiming that Marxist ideology has failed. Such instances are common among Western Leftists who tend to throw endless shade at the work of Marx while copying some of his most important analyses of capitalism without credit.

Despite falling into left-anticommunism throughout, the authors of Invisible Doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, provide a solid and pertinent critique of capitalism and the current neoliberal social system. Because of this book, many people will come to understand how the social problems we face today are rooted in capitalism, and the neoliberal political ideology that stems from it, and serves to justify its continued existence. The book proves without a shadow of a doubt that for the vast majority of people living under neoliberalism the system has failed.

However, by arguing that capitalism's antithesis, socialism, has also failed, the authors further confuse the masses and push them to seek solutions in the anarchist school of thought which has yet to produce a successful revolution, or build a social system separate from western capitalism and imperialism. By arguing that keynesianism, neoliberalism, and socialism have all failed the authors extinguish some of the hope that the masses might place in the rise of socialism and the multipolar world. This might be acceptable if the authors made a sober analysis of rising socialist powers like China and Cuba, or their non-socialist allies like Russia and Iran, in order to argue that their rise will not be enough to destroy neoliberalism, and there is still much work to be done by workers here in the imperial core. Which is an argument that I would agree with. However, the authors instead fall back on cold war style state department talking points to dismiss these rising socialist and socialist adjacent powers without offering a shred of real analysis. And thus the book gives a solid analysis of neoliberalism, but confuses the current state of geopolitics by neglecting to analyze the massive and growing resistance to neoliberalism that is taking place in the East and the Global South.
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Read this book if you want to gain a better grasp on modern neoliberalism, and especially its ideological roots which can be traced back to the beginning of the last century. However, also make sure to pick up Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky’s The Withdrawal for a more all encompassing and accurate analysis of the current geopolitical situation. Also don’t be afraid to pick up some Marx and Lenin. I promise there is more to learn from them than what much of the Western left would lead you to believe.

Citations

1. Monbiot, George, and Peter Hutchison. The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Penguin Books Ltd, 2024.
2. “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience.” Worldbank.Org, The World Bank, 1 Apr. 2022, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience. Accessed 2024.
3. Hudson, Michael. “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism.” Michael-Hudson.Com, 14 Apr. 2021, https://michael-hudson.com/2021/04/americas-neoliberal-financialization-policy-vs-chinas-industrial-socialism/.  Accessed 2024.
4. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 43.
5. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 45.
6. Prashad, Vijay, et al. The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. The New Press, 2022.
7. Hamou, Ammar, and Will Christou. “Syrian Christians: Exploited or Protected Minority?” Syria Direct, 22 Dec. 2019, syriadirect.org/syrian-christians-exploited-or-protected-minority/.
8. Line Struggle Collective. “On Rojava and the Western Left.” Linestruggle.Medium.Com, Medium, 22 Apr. 2022, https://linestruggle.medium.com/on-rojava-and-the-western-left-bac1b858173e. Accessed 2024.
9. “George Monbiot.” The Orwell Foundation, The Orwell Foundation, 13 July 2022, www.orwellfoundation.com/journalist/george-monbiot/.

​The principal question for any socialist movement today, be it in the U.S. or outside, is where it stands on issues of war and peace – what will be its position regarding American imperialism. As the great W. E. B. Dubois had long ago noted, “the government of the United States and the forces in control of government regard peace as dangerous.” The foundation of American society, as it exists under the tyranny of capital, is war. They have built up a grand machinery of lies, pumping out through all mediums the twisted facts and invented realities needed to support their topsy-turvy narrative of world events – and thereby, obtain consent for their crimes. They have slaughtered people and allowed whole populations to face the meat grinder of war to defend the right of accumulation for the owners of big capital – the monopoly-finance capitalist class. To defend the ‘rights’ of those who have pillaged the world for centuries. Those who make a killing out of killing. Who trade in the annihilation of life for profit.
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As everyone knows, wherever there is oppression and immiseration there will be, sooner or later, resistance. This is a universal law of all human societies fractured by class antagonisms. It is this dialectic of class struggles which pushes humanity forward, often producing the births of whole new social systems from the ashes of a previous one. But these moments of societal renewal, where a new class comes into a position of power and creates a world in its own image, are not guaranteed – even if the conditions for producing it are. There is always the possibility, as Marx and Engels had long ago noted, of a general societal dissolution. To put it in terms fitting with the contradictions of the capitalist mode of life, it isn’t only socialism which stands as a possibility within the embryo of capitalism, equally capable of actualizing itself is, as Rosa Luxemburg long ago noted, barbarism.

The human element, what in traditional communist literature is called the subjective factor or the subjective conditions, are indispensable. It does not matter how bad things get, how clearly revolutionary the objective conditions are, without the subjective factor all is nil. It is the organized masses, led by the most conscious within their ranks, that make, out of the objectively revolutionary conditions, the revolutions.

For Lenin and the communist tradition, objectively revolutionary conditions require the presence of a few key factors: 1- the worsening of the masses’ living conditions, 2- their inability to go on in the old way, 3- their willingness to act (and not just passively accept dissatisfaction), and 4- a crisis in the ruling class itself, where even they cannot continue on in the old way. These objective conditions are present, and intensifying daily, in American society. I chronicle them in detail in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

We are faced with the first generations in American history to live lives worst than their parents. Precarity has become a general reality for working people, the majority of whom are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people. Debt slavery has also become, in our highly financialized capitalism, a generalized reality drowning most working-class Americans. Hundreds of thousands die yearly for lacking the financial means to access medical services or overdosing on opioid drugs pushed by the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with the government, the universities, and NGOs. Social decay is evident as former industrial powerhouse cities are plagued by zombified humans and rusted remains of the industries that once were the basis of decent working-class communities. The American dream has become a joke for working-class people who have more and more come to realize what the comedic-critic George Carlin once said: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

But these conditions, although functioning as the prime matter for building a revolutionary movement, are not enough. Why is that? I turn to Lenin, who says that “it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Like Sisyphus, the left of the last two decades seems condemned to roll the rock up simply to see it fall… rinsing and repeating continuously every few years. Since the protest movement against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Bernie Movement, to the Black Lives Matter Protests, to the current protests against the Zionist Genocide, the left has seen itself condemned to pull hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions, into the streets to express anger with whatever injustice is latched onto, only to then, after a few weeks or months, have everything return to square one.

I genuinely hope that the protest for a permanent ceasefire breaks this trend.

But if we are honest with ourselves, what fruit has borne out of the last two decades of protests? Did the Iraq protests stop the invasion and further destruction of the middle east? Did the occupy wall street protests stop financial speculation and overthrow the 1 percent? Did the Bernie movement win political power and bring with it the much-promised political revolution? Did the BLM protests actually challenge policing, the prison industrial complex, and the system which has made them necessary? The answer is not only No. The answer is, besides not achieving their desired ends, they have often accomplished quite the contrary. Movements such as Bernie’s and BLM, whatever still remains of it, were clearly just absorbed into the liberal, frankly most dominant, wing of the ruling class. They became what I’ve called a controlled form of counter hegemony, presenting a veneer of radicality on what is essentially a bourgeois politics that serves to reinforce the status quo with radical sounding language.
Giving up is, of course, not an option. The necessity for struggle is in the air. What do we do then?

I think we must start with being open to self-critique. Far too often even the attempt at doing so will receive backlash from those who are more comfortable with continuing the failures. Marxism is to dogma as water is to oil. If one is present the other cannot be, or at least not for long. If the tactics of the past have not worked, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask: why have the working masses not been won over to our side? Why have all the movements we’ve led this century ended in disappointment? It is okay to fail, but what is insane is to continue to fail in the same way while expecting a different outcome.

When questions such as these are tackled by the dominant left, the blame is almost always placed upon working people. Working people are not enlightened enough, too brute to realize how bourgeois ideology manipulates them, etc. While components of the narrative are true, the question is, so what? What is the point of communists if not precisely to piers through that, to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people – to rearticulate the rational kernels of the spontaneous common sense they’ve developed within the bourgeois order towards socialism, either producing active militants in the process or the sympathetic mass which it leads. In my view, the chunk of the blame for our failures lies on the left itself. On its middle-class composition and the purity fetish outlook it operates with.

Therefore, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department's attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class "radical recuperators," as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a "controlled counter-hegemonic left," a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism.

This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society.

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn't live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it's rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States:

1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or "backward" for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a "fascist threat." Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on.

2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them.

3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers' struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism.

This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must socialist in content and national in form. Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism.  etc.  Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do.

Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride, it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.

To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be – contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy – abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don't take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context.

In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement.

In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview – the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling class, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party. 

​Hundreds of college student encampments across the country against the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza have now spread to Europe, South America and the world. The acts of mass solidarity have seized the frontpages of mainstream tabloids for almost a month now. It all started on Wednesday March 17th at my alma mater, Columbia University, thanks to the leadership and solidarity of hundreds of student and faculty leaders. Mayor Eric Adam’s impressive squandering of our taxpayer money to harass and repress peaceful student protests will not soon be forgotten by voters.
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I was one of the alumni and professors arrested for opposing this disgraceful holocaust of human life in Gaza that even the corporate media describes as a threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families. The two-week encampment was a magical time of love, movement building and collectivity. While the NYPD arrested hundreds of us on the night of Tuesday April 30th, there were constant threats throughout the duration of the two-week encampment. As NYPD helicopters and drones circled overhead and hundreds of riot police prepared to invade Columbia for a second time in two weeks, here is a view from the inside of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 

A Second Sweep?

On the night of Tuesday, April 23rd tensions reached their highest point. An NYPD helicopter hovered above, low enough to make sure no one slept on the sixth night of occupation. A drone moved 10 feet every 5 seconds above hundreds of camped-out students who cried out for warmth and a Palestine free of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

After midnight, there were movements and adjustments by the hundreds of student protestors in expectation of the second sweep by the riot police. Or would it be the National Guard , as the administration was threatening? The heavy specter of the Kent State , Jackson State and Orangeburg student massacres towered over us. On the second day of the camp the previous week, Columbia’s president, the Baroness Manouche Shafik , had sent the NYPD in to arrest students and destroy the first Butler lawn encampment. After the one hundred plus arrests, a second team swooped in and occupied the adjacent East Lawn.

In the swirl of rumors, there was the temptation to run around in confusion, like chickens with our heads cut off. The Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish student leadership’s calm confidence checkmated the untested fears. This is the unity Zionism most fears.

On East Lawn, the protests of past epochs hung heavily over the hallowed grounds in front of the beams and columns of the towering neoclassical-structured Butler library. The names Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle and others were written above in bold letters on the imposing imperial structure. Before the pending showdown below, these names meant nothing more than a Literature Humanities or Art Humanities paper deadline for the multitude below determined to halt the gears of genocide. Timidity and academia have never inscribed themselves into the pages of history. Emboldened by the examples of Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, Muna El Kurd, Ahed Tamimi, Shireen Abu Akleh and so many other anti-colonial Palestinian fighters and martyrs, this was their moment. To even utter the names of Palestinian people’s soldiers was an act of rebellion. The corporate media was in overdrive to dilute and pervert the anti-genocidal message of the student occupations across the U.S. The students repeatedly say Palestine has a right to live and prosper; the mainstream media repeatedly misreports , in subtle and forthright ways, that "the movement is anti-Semitic."

On the other end of every one of our anxious breaths, Palestine remained the compass and heartbeat of the encampment.

The Importance of Leadership and Centralism

In the inflection points of this struggle, there was a higher probability of deeper police infiltration. The student leadership broke us into smaller units to minimize the impact of snitches. Our camp security used tactics of restraint and patience with Zionist provocateurs. Student leaders reminded us that under-covers most often arrive under the amorphous cover of anarchy. Any new face at this eleventh hour was deeply suspicious.

Before the asymmetrical show of force , there was no vacillating. There was no doubt. One student posed the million-dollar question to her brigade: “Why are they treating us like this? We are a bunch of geeks with books and disgust for Zionist genocide.”

Best friends, new friends and veteran comrades squeezed each other’s hands in the brisk spring air. Those April days from 56 years earlier hung frozen in the balance.

Every instruction from our trusted leadership emerged from a high degree of collaborative reflection and centralism. The highly democratic, representative student body came together through 7 months and 76 years of organizing against Israeli apartheid. We organized ourselves into brigades. A student team evacuated dozens of tents in a lightning-quick logistical move. Brigade Red tossed them over a fence, along with any cautions that persisted. We packed up all of our food and collectivity. Was this the end of the Gaza encampment, the end of our commune of stubborn tears and raised fists? The concerns from hours ago over sunscreen and tent flies to stay dry dissipated into the observant night. The moon was our only front-line witness, as the Baroness had closed the citadel’s gates. Alumni complained about not being able to enter campus. A crowd had assembled outside the ivy gates reminding this prison house of nations, that private property is theft. We could hear the chants and drums outside of the protest in solidarity with us on the other side of the police barricades. The support just seventy-five yards away and across the world was the background of our resolve. We were not alone. This encampment symbolized the frustrations of billions of forgotten and voiceless human beings. The Columbia students had started a prairie fire with their fearless spark.

Some three hundred of us sat at assembly in touch with the pulse of the beating earth. A row of rustic lanterns illuminated 76 years of anti-colonial dreams, its sharp light piercing the walls of our humble tents. A frigid, visible breath short of its one-week anniversary, Columbia’s Gaza commune was under threat.

For the Global Palestinian Family, sleep was again the privilege of the colonial enemy and their pets. For in Occupied Palestine, the colonizers’ Doberman Pinschers are considered superior to the Native. And this is what united us all. The revolutionary, in their essence, is the one who no matter the odds, stands up to the bully .

We carry the genocide in our throats and consciences. What would Refaat have written? How did Motaz stand strong? Wael had birthed a new family…the family of humanity.

Hundreds of students were in collective anti-state motion, divided according to the commitments they could make. “The 10’s” prepared for arrest. “The 8’s” assumed their supportive positions. “The 6’s” played their role. “The 2’s” and “the 4’s” were international students or immigrants who could not get arrested. We were subdivided into rank-and-file cells of civil disobedience. Bodies scattered in one thousand directions. Endless beams of celestial light bounced around the football-field sized grass encampment.

                                   The cold, irate ground shook below
                                            the hopeful grass
                                                    the unwashed gravity
                                                                 braced the selflessness
                                                                               the internationalism…

Building on the legacy of the protests against the colonial slaughter in Vietnam in 1968, the ant-apartheid struggle of 1985 and the ethnic studies fight of 1996, Columbia’s offspring of past struggles demonstrated that the order of student revolt is anything but chaos.

Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism

The New York Times, CNN and Fox, The New York Post and their ideological cousins prepared their “anti-semitic” headlines divorced from material reality.

In the sea of keffiyehs, hundreds of “journalists” came and went, hunting for anything that could be twisted into an anti-semitic trope. Undercover informants and provocateurs infiltrated the outside rally engaging in an anti-semitic skit in front of the drooling cameras. In a scene totally alien to the essence of the Palestinian movement, two pretend students demanded money from a “Jewish student” in return for not further destroying a tattered, burnt Israeli flag. It was a disgusting scene meant to further demonize the burgeoning mass movement. The Atlantic took cheap shots at the liberated zones. Proud of their liberal arrogance, they surely knew better than anyone else how to stop seven and a half decades of colonial dispossession, humiliation and massacres. Entitled Zionists insisted on making it all about them and their colonial narcissism. Anything to distract from Gaza. The historic Jewish soul is trapped between two holocausts.

Two journalists tried to keep up with the lightning-quick, unified crowd but tripped over their self-seeking motives, sliding headfirst into the second base of sensationalism. The restive scene knocked the microphone out of their hands. This wasn’t about them. It was about the ancient Palestinian people whose only desire was to live as all nations aspire to live, free of foreign fetters.

“Stay Focused on Gaza!”

The censorship, the fascism and the holocaust of human life steeled the collective resolve. All thoughts were with Gaza. “Stay focused” was the silent prayer shared by all. “Staying Focused! We do not engage with instigators! (with a Why? And an explanation below).” was[1]  a poster that sat as the third eye of the people’s occupation.

Imagine trying to engage in dialogue with Nazis who had been so thoroughly indoctrinated in hatred of all things socialist, Jewish and Slavic. The Zionist is a sociological reality who despises all things true, native and self-determining. The Zionist fashions himself superior to his neighbors. The camp insisted on not relinquishing control of the narrative to the genocidaires. Not engaging with Zionist provocateurs was tactic number one for the encampment populated by hundreds of tents.

Everyone had a task that was completed. Composed of some 300 ants, the ant colony acted as one body. Half-stepping was not an option. Was the National Guard about to enter? The negotiating team texted encrypted updates. Had the administration compromised? The Baroness and her minions wanted to talk about repealing suspensions if the students gave up; we were focused on the genocide.

The sea of keffiyehs had parted. The symbol of the most despised has united us like no other. To wear the keffiyeh in New York City is to remind ourselves every second that we are human and Zionism will not vanquish us. The flag that flew so high that April 17th is not just the flag of the Palestinian people, it is the flag of humanity.

Before the site of the SWAT teams, a sophomore majoring in English thought of calling her parents on Long Island to tell them she loved them. That thought quickly moved to the outer recesses of her mind. This was an inside moment among comrades who no one in the outside world could ever quite understand. Camaraderie was the watchword. A generation removed from the protagonists, I looked around at the beautiful leaders. Their passion compelled them forward. Who would one day write memoirs and make documentaries about this moment?

The roar of the helicopter and the silence of the drone above mocked us and our principles. The riot police, phalanxes of armed men and women, awaited orders to crack “the geeks’” heads open. The NYPD had all of the identity politics boxes checked. Black, Bengali, Dominican, women, LGBTQ+, young Asian cops etc. It mattered little. They formed a blue wall of repression armed with ignorance, self-interest and guns. All of mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams’ diversity trainings boiled down to plain fascism.

The Passive U.S. Masses vs. A Restive Humanity

Hundreds of other students gathered on all sides of us to watch the unraveling of history.

A would-be stirrer of the masses yelled to the crowd of hundreds of journalists and onlookers who stood behind our occupied East Lawn: “Are you all with us?” No one dared to respond. The crowd looked around dazed and confused, unaware of the import of this moment. Had they even paid their admission? They refused to make eye contact with anyone, least of all their own soul. The mass agitator egged them on: “Will you stand against a genocide?” He chanted the cry of our epoch: “Free Free Palestine!” There was no reply. Expectations in the blind, colonial Western world are a resentment in construction, but he insisted. “Free Free Palestine!” There was silence. In the ideological void, a student yelled back: “Dude, we’re just spectators.” The neutral mass was again a wet hen before the anti-genocidal momentum of history.

To be a part of this night and these two weeks of unity, resistance and love for Palestine at the Columbia encampment has been an honor. It felt like I was back in the mid 1990’s when we waged struggles for Ethnic Studies and labor rights.

To the anti-colonial fighters who are the age of our children across the world: Keep going! Keep fighting! It is right to rebel! Columbia Administrators can go to hell! Seize the time! Keep leading the way! Gaza sees you! “Palestine is our moral compass!”

​One day after his inauguration, Bassirou Diomaye Faye–Senegal’s new self-proclaimed “left Pan-Africanist” president–announced that the new government will conduct an audit of the country’s oil, gas and mining sectors. Faye said, “The exploitation of our natural resources, which according to the constitution belong to the people, will receive particular attention from my government,” and stated that Senegal’s existing contracts with energy corporations like BP will be renegotiated if needed.
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Faye’s campaign victory is another contribution to a recent trend in West Africa, in which several new governments have formed on the basis of political and economic sovereignty, rejecting the neo-colonial domination that has reigned on the continent since the mid-20th century. One of these countries, Niger, recently ordered all U.S. troops to leave its territory.

These developments have caused much consternation for U.S. imperialism. U.S. government and military officials have openly discussed the strategic importance of Africa to the United States, and they are debating how to retain maximum control over the continent. We can look to the case of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and prime minister, to understand some of the ways U.S. imperialism may potentially respond to the current developments in West Africa–and how those of us in the United States can better equip ourselves to challenge it.

Kwame Nkrumah: An architect of Pan-Africanism

Ghana was colonized by Britain in 1874 and was called the “Gold Coast Colony” during this period. Its national liberation movement picked up steam in the late 1940s, and Kwame Nkrumah rose as a leader in two of the colony’s most significant political parties: first the United Gold Coast Convention and later the Convention People’s Party. Recognizing that independence was inevitable, Britain attempted to tightly control the process of independence. The colonial governor organized elections after imprisoning the most militant leaders of the national liberation movement, Nkrumah and many other CPP cadres, in 1950.

Despite these obstacles, the CPP dominated the elections and landed a decisive blow against British colonialism. In 1957, Ghana became one of the first countries in Africa to win its independence, and Nkrumah was elected first as prime minister, then later as president.

Nkrumah was a Pan-Africanist and a socialist who initiated projects to advance the political and economic independence of Africa at a time when most of the continent was still colonized. In 1958, Nkrumah convened a meeting between leaders of the eight independent African states at the time. That meeting was soon followed by the first All-African Peoples’ Conference held in Accra, Ghana that same year. The main goal of the conference was to build unity among the 300 delegates about the path forward for the struggle against colonialism and imperialism on the continent.

Five years later in 1963, Nkrumah played a central role in establishing the Organization of African Unity. The OAU initially consisted of 32 countries and had five stated purposes:

1. To promote the unity and solidarity of the African States;
2. To coordinate and intensify their cooperation and efforts to achieve a better life for the peoples of Africa;
3. To defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity and Independence;
4. To eradicate all forms of colonialism from Africa; and
5. To promote international cooperation, having due regard to the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Nkrumah also made immense contributions to the struggle against imperialism by identifying and defining “neo-colonialism.” In 1965 his book, “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,” Nkrumah writes:

Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism.

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from the outside.

Nkrumah identified that as the era of formal colonialism was coming to an end, the imperialists were using financial domination as a means to retain political control over much of the Global South. This later came to fruition in Nkrumah’s own country.

Because of his commitment to socialism and Pan-Africanism, openness to collaboration with the Soviet Union and China, and contributions to anti-imperialist consciousness throughout Africa and the world, Nkrumah was increasingly viewed as a threat by the U.S. government, who set into motion a plan to remove him from office.

CIA-backed coup ends socialist experiment in GhanaIn December 1957, just nine months after Nkrumah was elected to lead an independent Ghana, the CIA distributed a now declassified report titled “The Outlook for Ghana” to the White House, National Security Council, and several other federal agencies. The report identified that Nkrumah’s priorities of rapidly modernizing Ghana’s economy and advancing Pan-Africanism on the continent would be hampered by a lack of financial resources in the newly independent country. The conclusion of the report set a general framework that informed U.S. policy towards Nkrumah and Ghana:

Attitudes and policies toward the U.S. will probably be shaped largely by economic interests. A growing number of Ghanaians have visited the U.S., where they have been particularly impressed by technical achievements, but repelled by the racial discrimination which they encountered. Both on the latter count and because of the extremes in which anticolonialism is expressed, Ghana does not find moderate U.S. policies very appealing. Ghana nevertheless is favorably disposed toward the U.S.. at present, especially since it is regarded as the logical source of the foreign capital and technical assistance essential for the Volta Project, and Ghana is likely to make large requests for aid in the near future…

We believe that Ghana’s desire to avoid close alignment with any great power and to act independently in African affairs will limit both Soviet and Western influence in at least the short run. However, the practice of the [socialist] Block taking positions on ‘colonial’ and racial matters similar to those of the former colonies will often result in Ghana’s lining up with the Bloc on certain issues before the UN. These relationships are likely to develop regardless of any countering Western actions.

The Volta Project was the cornerstone of Nkrumah’s vision to modernize Ghana’s economy. It was a hydroelectric dam that would generate enough electricity to scale up industrial production in Ghana, particularly of aluminum which is an abundant natural  resource in Ghana. As alluded to in the CIA’s report, the U.S. government decided to fund the Volta Project in an attempt to prevent Ghana from fully aligning with the socialist camp, and to provide imperialism with some leverage over the country.

However, as the CIA predicted, even U.S. support for the Volta Project could not prevent the relationship with Ghana from fraying due to Nkrumah’s fundamental opposition to colonialism and imperialism. As the relationship deteriorated, the U.S. government began taking steps to have Nkrumah overthrown. In 1964, the U.S. State Department’s Director of the Office of West African Affairs, Mahoney Trimble, proposed an “action program” for U.S. policy in Ghana. In it, he openly stated, “U.S. pressure, if appropriately applied, could induce a chain reaction eventually leading to Nkrumah’s downfall.” Key components of the action program were a slow-down or withdrawal of payments for the Volta Project, “psychological warfare” to diminish support for Nkrumah within Ghana, and turning leaders of other African countries against Nkrumah.

The United States also began building ties with the forces within Ghana who eventually successfully led a coup against Nkrumah in February 1966. In a 1965 internal memorandum, Robert Komer of the National Security Council wrote,

FYI, we may have a pro-Western coup in Ghana soon. Certain key military and police figures have been planning one for some time, and Ghana’s deteriorating economic condition may provide the spark.

“The plotters are keeping us briefed, and State thinks we’re more on the inside than the British,” the memo continued.

While we’re not directly involved (I’m told), we and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah’s pleas for economic aid.

There is also compelling evidence that the CIA was directly involved in the coup. In 1978, “first-hand intelligence sources” told the New York Times that the CIA advised and supported the coup plotters. The New York Times article also acknowledges that this claim is supported by “In Search of Enemies,” a book written by John Stockwell, who worked for the CIA for 12 years.

After the coup, the U.S. government rushed to provide financial and diplomatic support for the coup government to ensure that Nkrumah and the CPP could not regain power. This included the delivery of 500 tons of milk to alleviate the hardships that the U.S. had been helping foment only months before.

The struggle against neo-colonialism continues

It is not difficult to see some parallels between Nkrumah’s vision for Africa and those expressed by today’s new crop of African leaders who reject neo-colonialism. Those of us in the United States must study the history of U.S. intervention in Ghana–and all of Africa–so that we can better oppose the attacks that are likely to come in the future.

This history illustrates that U.S. imperialism will use a hybrid strategy of economic, information, political, and–if needed–military warfare to prevent the rise of sovereign African countries. However, as the position of U.S. imperialism slips in the world, anti-imperialist consciousness continues to develop within the United States, and more countries join the ranks of those who refuse to submit to colonial domination any longer, these tried and true tactics of neo-colonialism are set to face their toughest tests yet.

It is impossible to be against the disappearance of walls that segregate people, and it is therefore impossible not to applaud the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or, for that matter, not to look forward to the fall of other walls that today, thirty years later, still stand or are being built.

But it is legitimate to inquire if the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been a triumph for democracy.

In doing so, it should be kept in mind that democracy has not only a political but also a social face: it is a system in which the demos, the great mass of ordinary people, not only may provide some input, e.g. via elections, but also receives some benefits, typically in the shape of social services. Let’s ask the crucial question, cui bono?, “who profited from this?” The answer may surprise you.

Beneficiaries of the so-called revolutions in Eastern Europe were certainly the landowning nobility, the former ruling class, and its close ally, the Church, Catholic in most of Eastern Europe but Orthodox in Russia, formerly also a major landowner. On account of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and revolutionary changes introduced by the Soviets in Eastern Europe in 1944/45, the nobility and the church had lost their vast landed properties (and castles, palaces, etc.) together with their previously preponderant political power.
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In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, not only the noble families of the former German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but also, and especially, the Catholic Church, were able to recuperate in Eastern Europe their landed property that had been socialized in 1945. The result is that the Catholic Church is once again the biggest landowner in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, etc. To this landlord, the Eastern European plebeians — e.g., Polish tenant farmers and Slovenian stall-keepers on the little market square behind the Cathedral of Ljubljana — now have to pay much higher rents than in the supposedly “bad old days” before 1990. Many former aristocratic landowners, such as the dynasty of the Schwarzenbergs, are back in possession of chateaux and large domains in Eastern Europe and enjoy once again great influence and political power, just like in the supposedly “good old days” before 1914 and/or 1945.

​Not a word was ever said or written about these things in our mainstream media, however; to the contrary, we were persuaded to believe that Karol Józef Wojtyla, Pope John-Paul II, collaborated with the archconservative American President Ronald Reagan and the CIA against the Soviets only in order to restore democracy in Eastern Europe. That the head of the Catholic Church, an eminently undemocratic institution in which the Pope has everything to say, and millions of ordinary priests and believers nothing at all, might be an apostle of the democratic gospel, is an absurd notion.
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If the Pope really wanted to go to bat for democracy, he could have started with the Catholic Church itself. That John-Paul II really wanted nothing to do with genuine democracy appears all too clearly from the fact that he condemned “liberation theology” and fought tooth and nail against the courageous champions of this theology — generally ordinary priests and nuns — who promoted democratic change in Latin America, democratic change that was much more needed there than in Eastern Europe. Indeed, in most of Latin America the population has never benefited from inexpensive housing, free education, medical care, or the many other social services that were taken for granted in communist Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Of course, in Latin America the Catholic Church had always been a large landowner, whose privileges and wealth — fruits of the bloody conquest of the land by the Spanish conquistadors — might have been erased by a genuine democratization to the advantage of peasants and other proletarians. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the Pope worked hard for change in Eastern Europe but opposed it in Latin America.

In any event, in the predominantly Catholic countries of Eastern Europe, and especially in Poland, the Catholic Church was able to recuperate much of its former wealth and influence. But does this amount to a triumph for democracy? Consider this: democracy means equal rights for all citizens, but in Poland the separation of Church and state, one of the great achievements of the French Revolution, providing equal rights to all citizens regardless of their faith, which was a reality under communism, now exists only on paper, but not in practice; Poles who do not happen to be Catholic, as well as homosexuals and feminists, cannot feel at home there. Poland has in some ways returned to the very undemocratic era before the French Revolution when, in just about every country, a specific ‘state religion’ was imposed on all citizens and there was no question of religious freedom or tolerance.

​In Russia, the Orthodox Church had lost virtually all of its former wealth and influence as a result of the 1917 revolution. Conversely, it managed to recuperate a great deal of riches and influence after the likes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin dismantled the communist system, fruit of an October Revolution that had also separated church and state. In the Russian heartland of the former Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church has made a comeback almost as spectacular as the one achieved by the Catholic Church in Poland. It has repossessed virtually the entire gigantic portfolio of land and buildings it owned before 1917, and the state has generously financed the restoration of old (and the construction of new) churches at the expense of all taxpayers, Christian or not.
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The Orthodox Church is once again big, rich, and powerful, and closely associated with the state, exactly as in the pre-revolutionary, quasi-medieval czarist era. With respect to religion, Russia, like Poland, has made a great leap backward to the Ancien Régime.

As for ordinary people, the situation is not nearly as bright. In Russia, the revolutionary changes inaugurated in 1917 had brought enormous improvements in the lives of the bulk of a formerly extremely poor and backward population — not immediately, but certainly in the long run.

By the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall,, the Soviet population had achieved a rather decent level of general prosperity, and the majority of Soviet citizens did not long for the demise of the Soviet Union.

To the contrary: in a 1991 referendum, no less than three quarters of them voted to preserve the Soviet state, and they did so for the simple reason that this was to their advantage. Conversely, the demise of the Soviet Union, prepared by Gorbachev and achieved by Yeltsin, turned out to be a catastrophe for the majority of the Soviet population.

The kind of widespread, desperate poverty that was so typical of Russia before the October Revolution was able to make a comeback there in the 1990s, that is, at the time when capitalism was restored under Yeltsin’s auspices. The latter orchestrated what may well have been the biggest swindle in world history: the privatization of the enormous collective wealth, built up between 1917 and 1990, via superhuman efforts and untold sacrifices, by the labor of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, by what used to be called the “proletariat.” That crime benefited a “profitariat,” that is, small group of profiteers, who became super-wealthy, a kind of mafia whose bosses are known as “oligarchs.” Balzac once wrote that “a crime hides behind every great fortune”; the great crime that hides behind the fortunes of the Russian (and other Eastern European) oligarchs was the privatization of the wealth of the Soviet Union under the auspices of Yeltsin, and ordinary Soviet citizens were the victims of that crime.

It is thus not surprising that even now, a majority of Russians regrets the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and that in former East Bloc countries such as Romania and East Germany, many if not most people are nostalgic about the not-so-bad times before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as is consistently demonstrated by opinion polls. A major determinant of this sentiment is the fact that vital social services such as medical care and education, including higher education, are no longer free of charge or very inexpensive, as they used to be. Women also lost many of the considerable gains they had achieved under communism, for example, with respect to employment opportunities, economic independence, and affordable childcare.

A majority of the denizens of former Eastern-European “satellites” of the Soviet Union likewise experienced hard times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These countries were de-industrialized as privatization caused western corporations and banks to move in and apply “shock therapy,” which involved massive layoffs of workers in the name of efficiency and competitiveness. A previously unknown curse, unemployment, appeared on the scene precisely when social services, previously taken for granted, were discarded because they do not fit into the neoliberal mould. Today, there is no future in Eastern Europe for young people, so they leave their homeland to try their luck in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere in the west. These Eastern Europeans vote against the new system “with their feet,” as the western media used to crow triumphantly whenever dissidents defected from communist countries at the time of the Cold War.

While the communist countries offered their citizens elaborate social services and full employment, in other words, a fairly high level of social democracy, there was certainly no political democracy, at least not in the conventional western sense of the term, that is, with free elections, free media, etc. In Russia and Eastern Europe, there is now admittedly much more freedom but, as a denizen of Germany’s eastern reaches has sarcastically quipped, this freedom amounts mostly to “a being free of employment, of safe streets, of free health care, of social security.”

In other words, political democracy has arrived at the cost of the liquidation of social democracy; and as this comment implies, to many if not most people, benefits such as full employment, free education, health care, etc., are more precious than the freedom, enjoyed by Americans, for example, to choose a president between the candidates of two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, that have not without reason been described as  “two right wings of one single party.” (Not surprisingly, a great percentage of Americans does not bother to vote.)
Eastern Europeans may now be freer than before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but do they now live in truly democratic political systems? Far from it. Russia never experienced the dawn of genuine political democracy; not under Yeltsin, and not under Putin. As for the former Soviet “satellites,” increasing numbers of people there are traumatized by the loss of social benefits and other services that they took for granted under communism and had not expected to lose upon the arrival of capitalism.

Persuaded by politicians and media pundits to blame their troubles on scapegoats such as refugees, they have increasingly supported extreme-right parties that advocate authoritarian, jingoist, xenophobic, racist, and sometimes openly neo-fascist or even neo-Nazi policies. All too many of the leaders of parties and even governments in the post-communist states are no champions of democracy at all, but glorify the undemocratic and sometimes openly fascist elements that ruled their countries in the 1930s and/or collaborated with the Nazis during the war and committed monstrous crimes in the process. In Ukraine, for example, the neo-Nazis now proudly trek through the streets with torch parades, swastika flags, and SS symbols. In much of Eastern Europe, democracy is not flourishing at all; it is obviously under threat.

We have seen that the nobility and above all the clergy, the former ruling classes, have done very well in Eastern Europe and, at least as far as the church is concerned, in Russia as well, thanks to the fall of communism. But the greatest beneficiaries of the changes inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin Wall have been the international elites of business, the big banks and corporations. These are generally American, West-European, or Japanese multinationals, and being a multinational means doing business in all countries and paying taxes in none. (Except in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, where the tax rate is minimal).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the multinationals triumphantly entered Eastern Europe in order to sell their hamburgers, cola, weapons, and other merchandise; to take over state enterprises for a song; to grab raw materials; to hire highly qualified workers and staff, educated at state expense, at low wages; etc. (In Russia this looked possible under Yeltsin, darling of the West, but Putin subsequently blocked the West’s planned economic conquest of Russia in favour of homegrown capitalists, and for this he has never been forgiven.)

The financial and industrial elite of Western Europe and much of western world in general has managed to profit in yet another way from the fall of communism. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, even in Western Europe the Soviet Union was still rightly regarded as the vanquisher of Nazi Germany, and its social-economic model enjoyed an immense prestige. In this context, the Western elite hurriedly introduced political and social reforms – collectively known as the “welfare state” – to avoid more radical, even revolutionary changes for which a potential certainly existed, most obviously in countries such as France and Italy.

And during the Cold War it was deemed necessary to maintain a system of ‘welfarism’ and high employment to retain the loyalty of workers in the face of competition from the communist countries with their policies of full employment and elaborate systems of social services. But the welfare state restricted, not drastically but certainly to some extent, the possibilities for profit maximization, and “neoliberal” intellectuals and politicians condemned the scheme from the very start as a nefarious state intervention in the presumably spontaneous and beneficial operation of the “free market.” The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, then, offered the elite a golden opportunity to dismantle the welfare state and social security schemes in general. As there was no longer a Soviet Union to compete with, the elite was free to roll back the social services associated with the welfare state all over Western Europe with impunity. In the years after 1945, writes the Belgian historian Jan Dumolyn,

the elite had made major concessions to the working population out of fear of communism, . . . in order to keep people quiet, and to counter the appeal of socialism behind the Iron Curtain. It is therefore not a coincidence that the social services began to be rolled back after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The threat was gone. It was no longer necessary to appease the working population.

In Western Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the elite is still very much focused on this task, clearly in the hope that soon nothing at all will be left of the welfare state. The fall of the Berlin Wall made it possible that we are now witnessing a return to the unbridled, ruthless capitalism of the nineteenth century – a catastrophe for ordinary people, for the demos, and therefore a major setback for the cause of democracy.

The losers in the drama of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe thus also include workers and employees in Western countries, that is, the majority of the population, which erroneously considers itself to be “middle-class”: their relatively high wages, favourable working conditions, and social services, introduced after 1945, were proclaimed to be “unaffordable.” The wage-earners were told to settle for less, but even when they do agree to have their wages lowered and their benefits “clawed back” in the framework of “austerity” measures, they often see their jobs disappear in the direction of the low-wage countries of Eastern Europe and the even lower-wage Third World. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the big West German corporations, which had collaborated very profitably with the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, were allowed to plunder East Germany economically.

On the other hand, the West German workers have seen their wages — lowered by the Nazis but increased immediately after 1945 — decline rapidly, as job opportunities migrated to areas further east and keen competition for the remaining jobs has been arriving in the form of migrants from Eastern Europe as well as refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, etc. These newcomers are blamed by many journalists and politicians for all the problems; this serves to divert attention from the real causes of the problems and simultaneously provides grist for the mill of all sorts of neo-fascist and other extreme-right political movements.

The fall of communism turned out to be very advantageous for a minority but highly disadvantageous for the majority of the population on both sides of the former Berlin Wall. It also had extremely nasty consequences for millions of people in the Third World. In the years after 1945, the cause of democracy achieved significant progress there, because the denizens of countless colonies could realize their dream of independence.

That was possible thanks to the support of the anti-imperialist Soviet Union and despite stubborn resistance put up by the western powers that happened to be the colonial masters. The latter inflicted murderous wars on the freedom fighters. France and the US, for example, tried (in vain) to smash revolutionary movements in Algeria and Vietnam, massacring millions of people in the process. In many colonies that gained their independence, the western powers made use of assassination (e.g. Lumumba), bribery, embargoes, destabilization, coups d’état, etc. They also engineered fake revolutions (“colour revolutions”) to ensure that socialist experiments were avoided or caused to fail and that regimes came to power that served the interests of the former colonial masters.

But it was not easy to pursue neo-colonialist projects as long as the Soviet Union existed, because Moscow provided considerable support, first to revolutionary forces that fought for independence in the colonies and afterwards to independent former colonies, especially —  but not exclusively —  when they opted for a Soviet model of development. After the fall of the wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, however, the western powers, and above all their leader, the US, found it much easier to impose their will on the ex-colonies.

This not only meant that the former colonies were no longer permitted to imitate the Soviet example and follow the socialist path to development, which quite a few of them had originally intended to do: henceforth it was also verbotento steer an independent economic course, for example by closing their doors to western export products and investment capital and/or use their own raw materials such as petroleum for the benefit of their own people instead of the profit of American and other foreign investors. The latter was/is the great sin committed by the likes of Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and, just recently, Evo Morales. Neo-colonial objectives could now be achieved via bombings, invasion, and other brutal forms of open warfare, as happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, or economic warfare, for instance against Cuba and Venezuela.

These wars have had an extremely undemocratic character, as they have cost the lives of millions, mostly poor people, including countless women and children.  And the regimes installed by the victors have all turned out to be hopelessly undemocratic, unpopular, corrupt, and sometimes incapable of governing a country.

While these wars have been a catastrophe for millions, they have been wonderful for the (mostly American) western producers of sophisticated and super-expensive weaponry. The high costs of these wars are socialized, they are the responsibility of the state and therefore of the ordinary citizens who are saddled with an increasingly important share of the taxes, while the profits are privatized, that is, end up in the wallets of shareholders of (mostly multinational) corporations and banks whose taxation rate has consistently dwindled to ridiculously low levels. The neocolonial wars, made possible, or at least facilitated, by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, thus not only ruin the lives of millions of denizens of poor Third World countries, but also contribute to make the few rich even richer, and the poor, even poorer, in the western heartland.

These wars consolidate not only the riches, but also the power, of the rich and powerful: they constitute a pretext for limiting the freedom of ordinary people in the name of national security and patriotism. President George W. Bush achieved that with his repressive Patriot Act; and the internet and especially the social media are used increasingly spy on (and thus intimidate) the oi polloi. Thanks to the fall of the Berlin wall, then, the “one percent” is now richer and more powerful than ever before, and the “99 percent” are poorer and more powerless than ever before.

If you belong to the “one percent”, go ahead and celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, thirty years ago. But please do not ask the rest of us to celebrate with you.

Author

​Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Great Class War: 1914-1918. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

​Republished from Global Research

​A discussion of the origins of urbanization may provide some insight into the character of modern social problems by highlighting the long historical dynamic at work. It may not be out of place here to point out that anti‑states are well known in the modern world, above all in what the U.S. Federal Reserve Board classifies as eleven offshore banking centers. Five such enclaves are in the Caribbean: Panama, the Netherlands Antilles (Curacao), Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British West Indies (Cayman Islands). Three enclaves—Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore—were founded to conduct the China trade. The remaining three are Liberia, Lebanon, and Bahrain at the mouth of the Persian Gulf—the island which Bronze Age Sumerians called Dilmun when they used it to trade with the Indus valley and the Iranian shore.
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Nothing would seem more modern than these offshore banking and tax-avoidance centers. They are the brainchildren of lawyers and accountants in the 1960s seeking to weave loopholes into the social fabric—to provide curtains of secrecy (“privacy”) to avoid or evade taxes, and to serve as havens for ill‑gotten earnings as well as to facilitate legitimate commerce.

Whereas modern nation‑states enact laws and impose taxes, these enclaves help individuals evade such regulations. And whereas nation‑states have armies, these centers are the furthest thing from being military powers. They are antibodies to nationhood, yet more may be learned about Ice Age, Neolithic, and even Bronze Age gathering and meeting sites by looking at these modern enclaves than by examining classical city‑states such as Athens and Rome.

Timeless Features of Entrepots

1. They Lack Political Autonomy

Instead of being politically independent, the modern offshore banking centers and free trade zones are small former colonies, e.g., the Caribbean islands as well as the Chinese entrepots. The Grand Cayman Island was a Jamaican dependency until 1959, when it chose to revert to its former status as a British crown colony so as to benefit from what remained of imperial commercial preferences. Liberia and Panama are U.S. dependencies lacking even their own currency system (both use the U.S. dollar). Hong Kong did not gain title to its own land until Britain’s leases expired in 1997. Panama did not gain control of its canal until 1999.

In sum, whereas political theorists define the first characteristic of modern states (and implicitly their capital cities) as being their ability to enact and enforce laws, offshore banking centers are of no political significance. In the sense of being sanctuaries from national taxes and law authorities, such enclaves are in some ways akin to the biblical cities of refuge. If they are not sanctuaries for lawbreakers in person, they at least provide havens for their bank accounts and corporate shells.

2. They Occupy Convenient Points of Commercial Interface Between Regions

Typically, entrepots are on islands or key transport navels such as the Panamanian isthmus. They are separated as free ports politically, if not physically, from their surrounding political entities. They often are centers of travel and tourism (“business meetings”) and for gambling. In antiquity they typically were centers for sacred festivals or games such as were held at Delphi, Nemia, the Corinthian Isthmus, or Olympia (whence our modern Olympic games originated in a sacred context).

3. They Enjoy Sacred (or Legal) Protection Against Attack

Although Delphi and Olympus were landlocked (as was Çatal Hüyük), they were centrally located for their local regions. They served as religious and cultural centers, whose festivals and games could be conveniently attended by the Hellenic population at large. Even visitors who were citizens of mutually belligerent city‑states enjoyed sanctuary. Of course, today’s enclaves no longer claim sacred status, except for the Vatican and its Institute for Religious Works promoting money-laundering functions1. Their commercial focus has become divorced from the religious setting associated with international commerce down through medieval Europe with its great fairs. And indeed, their attraction is especially to wealthy individuals avoiding the tax laws and criminal codes of their own homeland.

4. They Are Militarily Safe

Although today’s enclaves rarely have armies of their own, they are militarily safe. Thanks to their unique apolitical status, and indeed to their ultimate dependence on larger powers, their neighbors have little motive to attack them and every reason to use them as business channels and even for government transactions such as arms dealing, money laundering, and related activities not deemed proper behavior at home. The resulting commerce thrives free of regulations and taxes, conducted in militarily safe environments without the cost of having to support standing armies, and hence less need to levy taxes for this purpose, or to monetize national war debts.

5. They Are Politically Neutral Sites

To create such enclaves has been an objective of mercantile capital through the ages. It patronizes the world’s politically weakest areas as long as they do not do what real governments do: regulate their economies. The search for “neutral territory” expressed itself already in the chalcolithic epoch, many millennia before private enterprise developed as we know it. The result of this impetus is that neolithic towns such as Çatal Hüyük, Mesopotamian temple cities such as Nippur, island entrepots such as Dilmun, the Egyptian Delta area, Ischia/Pithekoussai, and the biblical cities of refuge share the following important common denominator with today’s offshore banking centers: Instead of being centers of local governing, legal, and military power, they were politically neutral sites established outside the jurisdictions of local governments.

6. They Create Forums for Rituals of Social Cohesion

Whether the status of these urban sites was that of sanctified commercial entrepots or amphictyonic centers, they provided a forum for rituals of social cohesion to bolster their commerce. These rituals included the exchange of goods and women (intermarriage)—commerce and intercourse in their archaic sexual meaning as well as in the more modern sense of commodity exchange.

I have cited above the archaic practice of conducting trade via island entrepots. The sacred island of Dilmun/Bahrain in the Persian Gulf represents history’s longest lasting example of such an enclave. It served as an entrepôt linking Sumer and Babylonia (whose records refer prominently to the “merchants of Dilmun”) to the Indus civilization and the intervening Iranian shore. Its status as a sacred as well as commercial center may have been promoted by the fact that its waters were a source of pearls, prized as sacred symbols of the moon (being round, pale, and associated with deep water). It also seems to have served as a high‑status burial ground for prosperous individuals, or at least for parts of their bodies. Lamberg‑Karlovsky2 reports that there are more fingers and other limbs than full skeletons, as the Sumerians partook piecemeal in the island’s sanctity (although some commentators believe that this may be simply the result of grave robberies through the centuries3). In any event, these social and commercial virtues helped make Dilmun one of the most expensive pieces of Bronze Age real estate, not unlike modern Bahrain.

7. They Facilitate Commercial Development

The sacred status of such entrepots facilitated commercial development in ways that did not abuse Bronze Age sensibilities, much like the sacred status of temples did when they became the major economic and textile production centers. While creating the economic conditions and organization of large‑scale enterprise within traditional social values and order, Bronze Age institutions provided leeway so as not to stifle commercial development with overcentralized control. This may be part of the reason why trade was conducted outside the city gates. The philosophy was to create “mixed economies” in which institutional and private sectors each had their proper role.

1. David A. Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, 1984, pp. 92-94.
2. C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky “Dilmun: Gateway to Immortality,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Jan 1982, 41(1), pp. 45-50.
3. P.R.S. Moorey, “Where did they bury the Kings of the IIIrd Dynasty of Ur?” Iraq, 46, 1984, pp. 1‑18.

​In early April 2024, the navies of four countries—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States—held a maritime exercise in the South China Sea. Australia’s Warramunga, Japan’s Akebono, the Philippines’ Antonio Luna, and the United States’ Mobile worked together in these waters to strengthen their joint abilities and—as they said in a joint statement—to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight and respect for maritime rights under international law.” A few weeks later, between April 22 and May 8, ships from the Philippines and the United States operated alongside Australian and French naval troops for Exercise Balikatan 2024.
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For this Balikatan (“shoulder-to-shoulder”), over 16,000 troops participated in an area of the South China Sea that is outside the territorial waters of the Philippines. Alongside the navies of these nations, the Coast Guard of the Philippines took part in Exercise Balikatan. This is significant because it is the boats of the Coast Guard that most often encounter Chinese ships in these international waters, part of which are disputed between China and the Philippines. Although the official documents of these exercises do not mention China by name, they are certainly designed as part of the increasing military activity driven by the United States along China’s maritime border. 

During the Balikatan exercise, the navy vessels from the Philippines and the United States jointly attacked and sank the decommissioned Philippine Navy BRP Lake Caliraya. The ship—which was made in China—had been donated to the navy by the Philippine National Oil Company in 2014. The fact that it was the only ship in the Philippines’ navy that was made in China did not go unnoticed within China. Colonel Francel Margareth Padilla-Taborlupa, a spokesperson of the armed forces of the Philippines, said that this was “purely coincidental.”

During Balikatan, the defense ministers of the four main nations met in Honolulu, Hawaii to discuss the political implications of these military exercises off the coast of China. Australia’s Richard Marles, Japan’s Kihara Minoru, the Philippines’ Gilberto Teodoro, and the United States’ Lloyd Austin met for their second meeting to discuss their collaboration in the region that they call the Indo-Pacific. It was at the edges of this meeting that the public relations teams of these ministers began to float the term “Squad” to refer to these four countries. While they did not formally announce the creation of a new bloc in East Asia, this new nickname intends to provide a de facto announcement of its existence.

From the Quad to the Squad

In 2007, the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States met in Manila (Philippines) to establish the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad) while their militaries conducted Exercise Malabar in the Philippines Sea. The Quad did not initially include the Philippines, whose President at the time—Gloria Arroyo—was trying to improve relations between her country and China. The Quad did not develop because Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was unhappy with Washington’s growing belligerence towards Beijing. The Quad revived in 2017, once more in Manila, with a more forthright agenda to work against China’s Belt and Road ambitions in the region (which U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called “predatory economics”).

Over the course of the past two years, the United States has been frustrated with India’s discomfort with the kind of pressure campaign that the U.S. has been mounting against China and Russia. India refused to stop buying discounted Russian energy, which was a pragmatic decision during an election period (although India’s purchase of Russian energy has declined over time). When asked if India will consider being a NATO+ member, India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar said that India does not share the “NATO mentality.” India’s reluctance to join in the full-throated New Cold War against China annoyed the U.S. government, which therefore decided to set aside the Quad and assemble the Squad with the more pliant and eager government of Philippines president Bongbong Marcos. It is important to note, however, that in April India delivered a batch of supersonic BrahMos cruise missiles to the Philippines (sold for $375 million and produced by a joint venture between arms manufacturers in India and Russia). That these missiles might be part of the new pressure campaign against China is not something buried in the fine print of the deal.

Provocations

Since its “pivot to Asia,” the United States has sought to provoke China. The U.S. trade war that began in 2018 largely fizzled out due to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its attempt to build the advanced production lines to circumvent U.S. trade restrictions (for instance, when the U.S. tried to prevent China from importing semiconductor chips, the Chinese developed their own manufacturing capacity). The U.S. attempt to make Taiwan into the frontline of its pressure campaign has not borne fruit either. The inauguration of Taiwan’s new president Lai Ching-te on May 20 brings to the helm a man who is not interested in pushing for Taiwan’s independence; only 6 percent of Taiwan’s population favors unification with China or independence, with the rest of the population satisfied with the status quo. Unable to create the necessary provocation over Taiwan, the United States has moved its gunsights to the Philippines.

While the Philippines and China dispute the status of several islands in the waters between them, these disagreements are not sufficient to drive either country to war. In April 2024, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte recalled that when he was president (2016-2022), “there was no quarrel. We can return to normalcy. I hope that we can stop the ruckus over there because the Americans are the ones pushing the Philippine government to go out there and find a quarrel and eventually maybe start a war.” In March, President Marcos said that he is “not poking the bear” and does not want to “provoke” China. However, the formation of the Squad two months later does indicate that the Philippines has now replaced Taiwan as the frontline state for U.S. provocations against China.

China’s vice chair of its Central Military Commission, Zhang Youxia, warned against “gunboat muscles.” “Reality has shown,” he said, “that those who make deliberate provocations, stoke tensions, or support one side against another for selfish gains will ultimately only hurt themselves.”

​GDD 3 Part Three— Lessons for today [part one here, part 2 here, part 3 here]

This section consists of four paragraphs:

1. The way to fight the fascist danger and secure Biden’s election as President is to mobilize masses of people to support these goals. There follows a brief history of progressive struggles waged in the past for peace and civil rights in which mass actions were responsible for pressuring the ruling class to make concessions which they did to prevent mass consciousness moving in the direction of system change.

2.  A list of the concessions granted by the ruling class as a result of mass mobilization. An incorrect explanation is offered to explain why the right-wing was able to take over the government in the wake of these concessions. ‘’The center and left were divided over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. Those divisions resulted in over a decade of right-wing rule, first with Richard Nixon and then (after Carter) Ronald Reagan.’’ It was not that the center and the left were divided, it was because the center and the right were united. The historical tendency of the center is to move to the right whenever the left begins to mobilize. Center-left or Left-center unity is a losing strategy thought up by the revisionists who reject revolutionary tactical maneuvering in principle [no more Bastilles]. The Left waters down its demands to accommodate the center and at the crucial moment of the struggle the center defects to the right. All those centrist Democrats in the Solid South who supported the New Deal defected to the ultra-right Republican Party when the Civil Rights Act was passed.

3.  ‘’The demand for complete equality called for the completion of unfinished bourgeois-democratic business, not only from the founding of the Republic, but also by the betrayal of Reconstruction and segregation.’’ The founding of the Republic included the recognition of slavery and the right to own slaves was recognized in the constitution until after the Civil War— as far as bourgeois democratic business was concerned there was no problem at the time with ending Reconstruction and imposing segregation. The job of the bourgeois democratic revolution is NOT the demand for complete equality, nonsense from the bourgeois viewpoint, but to enshrine the bourgeoisie as the ruling class and the working class as the subject class— this has been accomplished. The Road to Socialism leads to the overthrow of bourgeois democracy by working class democracy and the greatest roadblock to that is the myth of center-left unity. [Actual praxis is a little more complicated but this is the theoretical essence of Marxism-Leninism.]

4.  The CPUSA played an honorable role in the civil rights and peace movements but the major leadership roles came from the forces of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and other civil rights groups, such, CORE, SNCC and the Urban League. There were some overlaps between the civil rights and anti-war and peace movements featured by the rise of the Black Panthers and the most important youth movement SDS. This section ends as follows--

‘’just as in the ’60s, the country is confronted by a triple threat: this time from Trump and fascism on the right, bipartisan support for war, and a many-sided class war on democracy and labor at home and abroad.’’ But it should be noted that the threat from fascism is not just from Trump and the right, but also from Biden and the ‘mainstream’ Democrats. Recently Biden signed the  renewal of the FISA foreign surveillance act which allows the government to, without a warrant, spy on every American that has any electronic device, phone, TV set, radio, etc., and force anyone with such a device to spy on others and report the findings to the government.  Senator Ron Wyden [ Dem. Oregon]  said the bill was “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” This is just the type of fascist control bill the left would have expected from Trump but it is from Biden. This fascist part of the bill was originally added under Bush in 2008 and has been reauthorized by Biden. American fascism is a bipartisan enterprise— spying at home, genocide abroad. This is the real ‘’serious jeopardy.’’

The struggle for democracy

This section consists of two paragraphs of mumbo jumbo about democracy and the working class in which class issues and bourgeois liberal issues are jumbled together to comprise something called the Communist ‘plus’, which turns out to be the revisionist interpretation of The Road to Socialism plus confusion twice confounded. Let’s see if we can clear up this mess of mixed up faux Marxism.

The first paragraph opens by informing us we have to struggle to obtain victory (duh!) and the struggle   ‘’includes the GOP assault on voting rights, abortion, trans, and immigrant rights, as well as support for genocidal wars abroad. The challenge is to link these struggles together, and connect them with the fight for a ceasefire.’’

Well, there are at least two ceasefires we need, Gaza and Ukraine. But we also need to get rid of the Cuba blockade, the Venezuela sanctions, the military buildup against China, etc., etc. All these struggles have their own dynamics and involve different sets of interests. Trying to connect abortion rights with voting rights and trans rights with say a Gaza ceasefire is really comparing apples and oranges. Anyway the Democrats are just as bad as the GOP with genocide and ceasefires. The common link here is the capitalist system— it is the class struggle led by the working class that must be the focus for a CP. All these struggles cross class lines, our job is not to  ‘’connect them with the fight for a cease fire(sic)’’ but all of them, including the ceasefires, have to be connected to the class struggle. Class reductionist? Absolutely, that is what Marxists do.

The paragraph discusses the party’s program and does point out it is working class power that is the key to getting concessions from the ruling class but the whole capitalism versus socialism issue is ignored. Marxists understand the importance of the unions and working class power but without raising the workers class consciousness to socialist consciousness  working class power remains mired in the capitalist system and cannot transcend bourgeois democracy— and it’s the limits of bourgeois democracy that is the problem — it’s already given us Genocide Joe and is getting ready to serve up Trump. It is fantasy to think the people can free themselves from oppression by using the system of the ruling class.

Let’s look at paragraph two where the issue of Socialism does make its appearance. ‘’Even if at the end of the day, efforts prove unsuccessful, all is not lost. It’s in these battles that deeper lessons are learned about the nature of capitalism. In fact, that’s where working-class experience intersects with revolutionary ideology; that’s where theory is developed. It’s where the Communist Party provides its “plus.” The party helps draw out and theorize experience by highlighting the capitalist causes of the crisis and the need for socialist solutions. Thus, the process of struggle is what leads workers to become conscious of themselves as a class force.’’

There is nothing generally objectionable with this passage. The problem is it does not reflect the actual praxis of the leadership. That praxis, in the press and the website, rarely puts forth a Marxist-Leninist analysis of current events  and leans to a praxis oriented towards reformist support for the Democratic Party, at times even viewing the DP as part of its make believe all people’s front or center-left coalition. The Communist ‘plus’ is actually a ‘minus’ in practice. The emphasis on ‘democracy’ is  minus as it constantly stresses the term ‘democracy’ indiscriminately and even links it with ‘’Bill of Rights” socialism giving the false impression that workers will not  restrict the rights of the class enemy to organize and try to regain power if proletarian democracy comes to power.

Class hegemony and a ‘’Bill of Rights’’ in any sense recognizable to Americans, is a contradictio in terminis. The bourgeois ruling class violates its own Bill of Rights  at will as student protesters and union organizers find out on a daily basis.

What’s New

This is an optimistic GDD  paragraph putting a spin on the last few years making it appear the progressive movement is riding high. The fact is the Democrats lost the Congress when the Republicans took over the House and the Democrats have spent billions on concocting a proxy war with Russia by aggressively advancing NATO to its borders and have supported a genocidal war in GAZA by financing the Zionist aggression, back tracked on climate change, immigration reform, student debt, and medicare for all.  Unionization has seen some major advances,  the peace movement has been revitalized, and finance capitalism has pretty much recovered from the losses due to covid. Neo-fascism has made electoral and social advances and Biden has managed to become more unpopular than Trump. The CP is a small party and while it has basically supported most all the right causes and condemned the bad ones it has been mostly an observer of events vicariously participating in victories and defeats organized by others. This will continue to be the case until a new non-revisionist leadership  comes to the fore which rejects Webbism, not just verbally but in practice, and puts forth a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist platform that rejects reformist pussy footing with the Democrats and begins to field candidates (not just talk about it)  either in its own name or as independents or in real, rather then imaginary, coalitions in which its participation is public knowledge. This will be a difficult challenge as long as top down bureaucratic centralism rather than Leninist democratic centralism (not its Stalinist variant which proved unsuccessful) remains the modus operandi of a self perpetuating Webbite leadership.
 
A Class Struggle Moment

This section has two paragraphs. 1.  The first notes an uptick of militancy in the labor movement and makes generalized statements about how the workers are for  the progressive things we support and against the things we don’t. The GDD doesn’t seem to  realize that the working class is not of one mind on the issues discussed. Some 40% of unionized workers support MAGA and 90% of the working class isn’t even unionized. What the GDD calls ‘’a new class struggle’’ is actually just a return to normalcy after the covid lockdown and the fact that many union contracts are expiring and negotiations are getting underway. It is important to support all progressive union struggles and demands, as well all organizing efforts but these struggles are not qualitatively different from normal union activity under capitalism.

2. This paragraph notes some interesting statistics that can make us hopeful for the future of the labor movement but they only show modest beginnings. The percentage of pro union Americans has reached the level it had in 1965 when union membership was over 30% of the workforce. Popularity is one thing but actual political and economic clout is another. Recently THE ATLANTIC pointed out ‘’Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of meaningful negotiations to get one.’’—4/18/2024 While it’s good that 500,000 workers were involved in strikes and walkouts in 2021, we should remember in the 1970s almost every year saw 2,000,000 such labor actions. All this just means we can’t be complacent — we have a long way to go to really radicalize the consciousness of the workers and when that happens you won’t find any Genocide Joe presidents posing as ‘friends’ of labor.

ANTI-MONOPOLY CONSCIOUSNESS

In discussing this section in a Marxist context, not a revisionist one, we must distinguish anti-MONOPOLY from anti-monopoly CAPITALISM. Many groups are opposed to monopoly but have no interest in replacing capitalism with socialism. The article opens by pointing out that a majority of the public have ‘a dim view’ of big business. This is based on a Gallup poll which also mentions that this doesn’t apply to youth between the ages of 18-29 and that the greatest drop in big business support comes from conservative Republicans (no doubt due to big business becoming so-called ‘woke.’) We are also informed the masses ‘’are opposed to a single business dominating any given market and antitrust laws are popular’’. This has been the case, by the way,  since at least the Teddy Roosevelt era. This is supposed to be a ‘’new moment in the class struggle’’ but these sentiments are as old as the hills and fluctuate back and forth all the time.

The next fairly long paragraph lets us know the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and capitalism isn’t working out for millions of people. This is pretty much a description of ‘capitalism through the ages.’ It would be nice if it did, work out for all and sundry but what’s important for the system is the rich are getting richer part. The system is working very well when the capitalists are rolling in clover and the devil takes the hindmost. That’s pretty much the system today and when we have the choice to pick one of two genocidal maniacs to be the president you have been living in an alternate reality to be seeing either a ‘’socialist moment’’ or a Great Leap Forward in the class struggle.

Here is the evidence for the alternative reality. 1. Only 40% of  Afro-Americans view capitalism favorably. This is cited from an article entitled ‘’Black Americans view capitalism more negatively than positively but express hope in Black businesses.’’ But also 52% had a positive view of socialism. As far as a socialist moment is concerned, 62% didn’t expect any real change in the system during their lifetime. 2. The GDD also cites that only 48% of women are favorable to capitalism. This is from the article ‘’Modest Declines in Positive Views of ‘Socialism’ and ‘Capitalism’ in U.S.’’ This article concludes, ‘’The American public continues to express more positive opinions of “capitalism” than “socialism,” although the shares viewing each of the terms positively have declined modestly since 2019.’’ No moment here.

Finally, once  again an incorrect Marxist view must be corrected. With respect to the problems of discrimination and lack of justice for the working class and especially minorities, including wage differentials, the GDD points out,’’Institutionalized racism and misogyny are clearly hard at work. They remain capitalism’s Achilles’ heel.’’ The first sentence is totally correct, but not the second. As pointed out earlier, racism and misogyny are features of the superstructure conditioned by historical context and cannot be the Achilles heel of capitalism.  That would be its inability to appropriate surplus value from labor power due to the irreparable loss of markets.

We can conclude from this section of the GDD there is enough discontent to give the left an opening to increase its influence in the country. Left grouplets backing Biden based on imaginary coalitions will probably not be in a position to benefit from this opening.

Crisis of governance

This section points out that there is a widespread dissatisfaction with the way the government is functioning. It maintains this is largely due to GOP intransigence but the Pew Research Center report behind this section found ‘’no single focal point for the public’s dissatisfaction.’’ Rather it was across the board ‘’widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office.’’ However, this didn’t prevent people from going out to vote and the last three general elections had record turnouts. It seems that faith in the system is still working.

The section concludes with a portrait of the Republican Party which is accurate and grim. The majority of Republicans have become ultra-right proponents of conspiracy theories, believe the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ by Biden,  their support of the neofascist Trump does not bode well for the future of bourgeois democracy. While it is true that ‘’white supremacy, along with extreme nationalism, are driving this brand of politics’’ it fails to mention the real cause which is fueling these traditional right-wing features of American democracy— the worsening economic conditions created by the capitalist system supported by both major parties. The Stock Market is booming but Main Street is debt ridden, inadequately insured, faced with inflation, eroding living standards and despondent regarding the future. Neither of the two major political parties has viable solutions to these problems. This is affording a neofascist such as Trump a shot at returning to the White House. Supporting Biden is hardly a sign of a ‘’socialist moment,’’

Democratic, anti-racist majorities

The very first paragraph is very problematic. It begins by saying ‘’ the threads of equality and democracy run deep in the fabric of the United States’ body politic and culture.’’ It seems to be just the opposite. The society was based on slavery and after the Civil War by cut throat industrial capitalism which even today leaves 90% of working people without union protections, minority rights are restricted and have only recently seen some relief with civil rights legislation enacted in the LBJ era. Women’s rights are a joke with inability to get the ERA passed, wage parity, and the Supreme Court, in addition to negating minority voter registration protections, has abolished the constitutional right of abortion. We are now engaged in a great culture war over sexual rights, voter rights, immigration rights, and the threat of a Neo-fascist being elected president.

The evidence given by the GDD of this fabricated deep thread is 1. The Black Lives Matter uprising, 2.protests for LGBTQ and immigrant rights, 3. 2020 election of Biden and 2022 election (in which the Republicans actually took over the House— it was a close defeat so a ‘victory.’ The fact that elemental human rights, elemental equality, are NOT provided by our society and  have to be constantly fought for and some need an uprising to get heard (this uprising resulted in increased funding for the police) indicates the authors have no understanding of the nature of the society they live in.

The basic deep threads in this society are woven on the loom of monopoly capitalism and they are anti real democracy and equality for the masses and for strengthening the rule of law enacted for the benefits of capitalist domination and imperialist expansion. These real threads periodically call forth protests but when the dust settles and a few reforms are in place the fabric of capitalist domination remains firmly in place. Thus, after around 50 years of preaching left-center unity, bill of rights socialism and lesser evil voting, fascism is poised to take power.

The second paragraph of this section gives some justification for a progressive majoritarian reading of current public opinion on the following issues— 1. Majority support for affirmative action. This is based on an article from the Cato Institute which actually maintains ‘’Polls do not produce a clear picture of where Americans stand on the issue.’’ So, it’s unclear where the majority stands according to this source. It’s good to remember that pollsters word polls to get the results they want. 2.The majority supports specifically equal affirmative action for women. The Gallup Poll behind this found 72% of women and 61% of men agreed. 3. A supermajority of non LGBTQ Americans support equal rights for the LGBTQ community according to a study released by GLAAD – ‘’the world’s largest Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization.’’ The polls show these progressive trends but on the other hand, politically, they also show Trump leading Biden which indicates cognitive dissonance among the electorate, or the voters think Biden is a fake progressive. It is hard to think someone who backs, in fact enables, genocide and the cold blooded murder of over 14,000 children, is progressive or even fit to be president.

The GDD is correct in maintaining these majoritarian progressive views are a good basis to build on to win over mass support. The rest of this paragraph just repeats what leftists have been saying over and over forever— victory depends on unity, we must support all the rightful demands of all oppressed groups, fight for peace,  etc.,etc. It is certainly correct. It was correct in Deb's day and it still is.

The GDD says this fight must be directed against the MAGA right and fascism. It says nothing in this section about socialism. Despite the fact that the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the GAZA genocide, starving our socialist comrades in Cuba, attacking every progressive anti-imperialist movement around the world, prolonging the proxy war against Russia, building up for a confrontation with China, and is the ruling party of the number one imperialist power in the world and the greatest enemy to the world’s oppressed masses, the GDD  wants us to work with this child murdering genocidal party in what it calls ‘’the people’s front.’’ This to defeat the Republicans in 2024 and in the indefinite future. This is not Marxism-Leninism, siding with one group of imperialists to defeat another in a series of short term struggles marked by the bourgeois election cycle. Fighting fire with fire often results in bigger fires.

 Finally, the GDD asserts, ‘’Participation in it and helping activate the anti-fascist, anti-MAGA majority remains a top priority for the Communist Party in the coming period.’’ There may be other more important priorities.  It is the Convention that is supposed to decide the top priorities but it has already been decided by the leadership what they will be. Our conventions have often been just show pieces for the leadership since by the use of slates and delegate selection their supporters always control the vast majority of votes and they remain in power regardless of the sentiments of the membership whose views, if too critical, are either censored or ignored. This is the way conventions were held in the Soviet Union and the former east European Socialist Countries, and one of the reasons they no longer exist. As long as the Webbite faction that controls the party continues this model for self perpetuation I fear our party will fail to gain a significant portion  of influence on the left due a genuine Marxist-Leninist political formation. Well, who knows the future. I hope I am wrong and overly pessimistic and the party actually has a successful openly democratic convention and I wish the comrades the best in their deliberations. Sapere Aude!

Toward a socialist moment 2.0
 
This is the last section of the GDD and it is not very clear as to what is meant by ‘socialism.’ What is the ‘’Bill of Rights socialist vision’’ that a working-class-led state will exemplify? The capitalist state already has a Bill of Rights. If we have a peaceful transfer of power it’s because the Bill of Rights of the capitalists helped us along. Are we going to change it or make a new one? Now it’s just a slogan we thought up to gain some  attention and to assure people socialists won’t take away their rights. The KKK and the NAZI groups can still have rallies and marches ( or can they)? What does a working-class-led state imply— a transition to socialism and the abolition of the bourgeoisie as a class? That is what  socialism means to Marxist-Leninists and if you are going to be honest about it the Bill of Rights won’t apply to the bourgeoisie. Sorry guys, it’s Bill of Rights SOCIALISM and one way or another you won’t be around.

We are told how popular socialism is becoming ‘’close to a third of the U.S. people are open to the socialist idea.” What kind of socialism is that?  It is ‘’Socialism as it’s understood in the popular imagination.” That’s Bernie Sanders socialism, e.g Denmark! The socialist tradition we historically represented is closer to East Germany. I doubt if one third of Americans are thinking of East Germany  plus the Bill of Rights.

This is where the 2.0 comes in. East Germany , the former Soviet bloc, Cuba, China and other socialist countries are 1.0 socialists.’’The socialist moment that emerged around the broad left in 2016 and 2020 must be built upon.’’ That is the tradition of the old Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, DSA and the eco-socialists of the Green Party and the movements coming out of the Bernie Sanders campaign. 1.0 is history and 2.0 is coming. The red caterpillar will become a multicolored butterfly (or perhaps a grey moth).

The GDD says in effect, we have to build on the Bernie roots by applying Marxism-Leninism (this is a nod to party stalwarts who haven’t got with the program) creatively applied to U.S. conditions. This will become socialism 2.0. What we see is a program based on the ideas of Euro-communism and the evolutionary social democratic philosophy of the Second International as developed by Bernstein and, after 1914, Kautsky. This is the new dawn we are asked to embrace. I’m not saying it’s wrong or incorrect, it’s just not Marxism-Leninism and a party with this type of program may be the only way to press left for reforms in the U.S., but it should seriously consider changing its name as this is a program traditionally associated with the anti-communist left.

​Author

Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Tom is the Counseling Director for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022), Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism (2022), The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: Friedrich Engels on G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach (2023), On Lenin's Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (2023), and Early Christianity and Marxism (2024) all of which can be purchased in the Midwestern Marx Institute book store HERE.