Again fire; again deaths; and again the process of forgetting the firing of life. Fire and deaths, at least 52 laborers, in the Narayanganj-food-production factory is now news; and international news agencies have already disseminated the news of the murderous incident. So, there’s no scope to hide and deny; and no scope to claim that such reports tarnish image. The murderous fact tarnishes image, no doubt; and that’s the image of the factory owning group of persons, of the capital that is engaged with such trade with life and death. A legal process would, hopefully, help straighten facts – irresponsibility and callous indifferent handling of life can’t go scot-free. Already a number of concerned persons including the owner and managing director of the industrial group owning the fire-ravaged factory have been arrested and charged with murder. It’s a long legal journey whatever happens with the expected legal process – ascertain responsibility, negligence or not, etc. All citizens, as human being, expect fairness in this case as they expect in all cases. So, citizens will wait and look forward – let’s see what happens. So, the factory-fire incident – deaths of laborers – has actually put a system of delivering justice on trial of time in front of citizens. Whatever happens, even after a long and lengthy process of justice with the fire-death of workers, in the legal process will remain in people’s perception; and that’ll teach people, justice delivered or not, and in the long-run influence people’s decision and action. History of similar incidents in countries, and even in this land since establishment of factories in the colonized days, tells this – people perceive facts related to their life – be it capital, or owner, lender and exploiter, deprivation, indifference, brutality, biasness and partiality. Their perception defines their actions – organize, reject, rise and resist. Resistance can reach to the level that can hurt interests of perpetrators of deaths by fire. There’re instances of such resistance across lands. It’s now choice of the system – whether to deliver justice to the labor or not. It’s now level of maturity of the system – act to avoid animosity of the labor or not. The incident is an eye-opener – condition of the labor in this time. Describing the condition and time as brute, cruel, indifferent, inhuman, exploitative and murderous are not enough. These – brute, etc. – have turned cliché. The descriptions of the incident the Dhaka media, citing concerned authorities including the fire fighting service, have presented is impossible to bear with – charred human bodies, impossible to identify the burned laborers without DNA test, human bodies burned out to the level that the human bodies lost shape of human body, no fire extinguishing system, utterly inadequate fire-escape ladders, locked in doors while fire was razing and engulfing all around, compelling labor to stay within the burning building so that the workers can’t escape while flames were increasingly licking surrounding – from lower floor to upper floor, stored flammable materials without safety arrangement, only a few could reach roof of the building that enabled the fire service to rescue those fortunate, and a few of the workers jumped down from that roof – more than five stories high – to escape an active furnace only to meet their single “destiny” – death. It’s hellish. Scores, more than hundred human beings were pressed into this capital-made hellhole, actually a burning kiln. Was that a kiln that demands human beings as fuel to alight with crimson flames? The capital owning and operating the process is capable of providing the answer. Who the gentleman owning huge capital there can imagine of staying in this inferno? None. They will shiver with imagination of such a situation and die in fear before such an inferno encircles them. Their life-long all out effort is to avoid such a situation for themselves; as such a situation obstructs their indulgence with comfortable, luxurious life. But of laborers, the question of comfortable life “doesn’t” arise at all – is that the argument the capital puts forward? Haven’t the labor entered into contact with capital to produce profit till death subsumes labor – is that the argument put forward by the capital? Is that the reason the labor that were moving its muscles to produce food – juice, life energizing juice – turned into food of fire? Is that the reason the labor producing food for human beings turned lifeless, accepted an identity – void of identity, turned them into a subject of news- photograph? But, human beings were kept pressed into this fire pit. Capital, ultimately, can claim that there weren’t human beings, there were only labor – no life, no soul, no human feeling, no brain, no dignity, no human relation, only muscles sold to capital for a certain time. That much was that. This is the fact – capital hired labor for appropriating surplus value, and that labor was cheap, and there’s a huge reserve army of labor, and labor is so cheap that it’s easily expended, be it by pressing it into a fire pit and turning it into charcoal and ashes working as a crematorium, or by chaining it with inhuman working condition, or caving in of factory building, and turning workplace into graveyard. The unfortunate labor is in a hostile condition! The condition making labor unfortunate is a show of capital’s power. This power leads capital to arrogance as it, the owner asserts, according to Dhaka media reports, there’ll be labor if a factory is established, there’ll be work if labor is there, fire may ignite if there’s work, the ignition might be switched on by the labor, should I [the capital owner] be held responsible for the fire? How many capital owners made such claims publicly? How many times capital owners in this colonized sub-continent publicly made such audacious utterances? The utterances show capital’s confidence with its power. So, what’s the “problem” if there’s no fire fighting mechanism? So, what’s the “problem” if fire escape ladders are very narrow and inadequate? So, what’s the “problem” if the factory building was not constructed following the country’s Building Code? So, what’s the “problem” if a few laborers are licked by a hungry fire? Do capital’s arguments are constructed in the way told above? Class power will ascertain the argument – false or not. The lost labor’s kith and kin will search the labor – burned to death or “missing”; and weep and cry. But, that’s for a very short time. Has not Nazim Hikmet, the poet from Turkey voicing the toiling masses, written that the time-length of grief is very short today? All facts of the incident, and the incident itself will be forgotten by all other than a few labor activists and those who lost their earning members – be it a mother or an aged father or a teen age girl. Capital will profess: What’s to that with those the fallen and the aggrieved? Bygone is bygone; forget the dead. Isn’t capital “powerful” enough to ignore, to brush out those voices of anger and grief? Has not capital got that shrewdness that shrouds all inconvenient facts with forgetfulness? So, “forget” those dead bodies. Those have no use now – unproductive. Those now can’t produce any surplus value; so discard and dump. With those charcoals, the question of productivity – movement of wheels with increasing speed – shall no more be raised. Be happy, as those shall not consume anymore, relieving a group of economist that only calculates consumption by labor and make bosses happy with figure of increased consumption. Those the dead shall no more put profit into capital’s coffer; so, forget those charred bodies, which were once living labor and serving me – the capital. Don’t you see, my class brothers, the organizations I belong to don’t denounce such acts? That’s a fact, a fact of today: Forgetfulness. But, can this forgetfulness rein on perpetually? Dynamics of class struggle in exploitative system doesn’t allow that perpetual rein. Otherwise the Indigo British bosses whipping farmers in colonized Bengal wouldn’t have fled away; the British owners of mills on the Hoogly adjacent to Kolkata would have perpetually muzzled down voices of the labor, the labor in Bombay [now, Mumbai] wouldn’t have stood on the barricades along with the Royal British Navy sailors revolting against the colonial rule, there wouldn’t have been the Solapur Commune by labor – a tale of barricades and bravery. A few powerful ignore this dynamics while a few forget. But, many souls tied to machine of exploitation don’t forget. Rather they calculate – so many lives for so much profit, power of this class and power of that class – an equation of class power. That’ll also be news, not of deaths, but of resistance, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. So, with this calculation continuing and ultimately taking shape of a force, the death the factory fire has produced will also produce another fire, another inferno – of anger, organization, protest and resistance; and shall allow none to forget this death. It’s like Nazrul’s Taboo aamaare debo naa vooleete, Yet, I shall not allow burying me. Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka AuthorAuthorThis article was republish from Counter Currents. Archives July 2021
0 Comments
7/11/2021 ‘Science, Not Speculation’: Scientists Blast Obsession with ‘Unsubstantiated’ COVID Lab Leak Theory. By: Morgan ArtyukhinaRead NowWhen rumors began that the newly discovered novel coronavirus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in February 2020, an international group of scientists penned a letter in defense of their Chinese colleagues, who had sequenced the virus’ genome, concluded it was of natural origin, and denied claims the virus had been stored at the lab. Two dozen prominent scientists from around the globe, including physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, virologists, biologists, ecologists, and public health experts, penned a letter published in the British medical journal The Lancet on Monday, urging that “science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans.” Many of them had also signed the February 2020 letter, which The Lancet also published. World leaders and public figures must “turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry” about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, if humanity hopes to defeat the present pandemic, to say nothing of preventing the next one, the scientists warned. “We believe the strongest clue from new, credible, and peer-reviewed evidence in the scientific literature is that the virus evolved in nature, while suggestions of a laboratory-leak source of the pandemic remain without scientifically validated evidence that directly supports it in peer-reviewed scientific journals,” the scientists wrote. “Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential to understand how the virus has spread and to develop strategies to mitigate the ongoing impact of COVID-19, whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics,” they said. “Allegations and conjecture are of no help, as they do not facilitate access to information and objective assessment of the pathway from a bat virus to a human pathogen that might help to prevent a future pandemic.” Lab Leak Theory Gains CurrencyClaims that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan virology lab have spread since early 2020, when the virus caused a major outbreak in the surrounding Hubei Province of China. However, as Sputnik has reported, the claims have derived from and been amplified by far-right anti-Chinese figures, including then-US President Donald Trump, members of his administration, including Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s senior advisers. Recent polls have shown that 83% of Americans would support US actions to punish China if the lab leak theory is found to be true, including trade penalties, travel sanctions, a boycott of the 2022 Summer Olympics, and even payment of reparations to families whose loved ones died of COVID-19. Moreover, 46% of Americans surveyed in mid-June believed in the lab leak theory, including 70% of Republicans, 41% of Independents, and 32% of Democrats. This file photo taken on April 17, 2020 shows an aerial view of the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province © AP PHOTO / HECTOR RETAMAL Nonetheless, the World Health Organization (WHO) investigated the possibility as one of several during an information-sharing visit with Chinese colleagues in Wuhan in early 2021. Their report eliminated no possibilities, but rated a lab leak as among the least likely of five possibilities. The others included two types of zoonotic transfer, introduction through the cold chain, and the international military games held in Wuhan two months before the first COVID-19 cases were identified. Before the WHO’s report was even complete, Western media, politicians, and conspiracy theorists were already claiming it was inadequate and faulting the Chinese for supposedly withholding evidence, even though members of the WHO team publicly dispelled those claims. In the aftermath, the lab leak theory continued to spread in the media and became increasingly mainstream, with the Biden administration bowing to popular pressure in May and ordering US intelligence to produce a report in 90 days on the virus’ origins. Scientists Denounce Tit-for-TatHowever, the Monday letter’s authors didn’t just criticize this swelling of what they called “unsubstantiated allegations”: they also criticized the Chinese government for returning fire. “Recrimination has not, and will not, encourage international cooperation and collaboration. New viruses can emerge anywhere, so maintaining transparency and cooperation between scientists everywhere provides an essential early warning system. Cutting professional links and reducing data sharing will not make us safer,” they wrote. They pointed to the WHO’s March report as “the beginning rather than the end of an inquiry” and backed the Group of Seven’s June call for “a timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened phase 2 COVID-19 origins study.” However, they cautioned that the results could take years to be arrived at, and that an origin might never be uncovered. The origins of another closely related coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), were only partially triangulated in 2017, 15 years after the outbreak it caused. The scientists found bats in a remote cave in China’s Yunnan Province that had inside them coronaviruses with all the building blocks of SARS, but couldn’t actually prove SARS had come from them. Others, like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold, have never had their origins found. The logo of the World Health Organization is seen at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, June 11, 2009 © AP PHOTO / ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS Leo Poon Lit-man, a professor in the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health who signed both the Monday letter and the February 2020 letter, told the South China Morning Post that “a lack of dialogue and communication” was slowing the science down. “We just don’t have a healthy dialogue and, in terms of public health, we have to build on trust,” he told the Hong Kong-based paper. “I just don’t see there is trust between governments and within scientific communities, and we need to find a way to reconcile this issue.” Asked about the Lancet letter at a Wednesday morning press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said that “attempts to politicize study of origins to scapegoat other countries will only end… in failure.” Wang said it was clear the US was engaged in “more and more overt political manipulation” by “hyping up the China ‘lab leak’ theory” and “vilifying” the WHO report to “alter the fact that it is the US politicians who dismiss science and politicize epidemic response that should be held accountable for the loss of more than 600,000 American lives.” Featured image: © CC BY-SA 4.0 / Ureem2805 / Wuhan Institute of Virology AuthorMorgan Artyukhina This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune. Archives July 2021 7/11/2021 Haiti: No to U.S. intervention in wake of Jovenel Moïse assassination. By: Rachel DomondRead NowIn the early hours of July 7, Haitian president-turned-dictator Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his home in Port-au-Prince. While many details of the assassination remain unclear, the political vacuum in Haiti will likely result in a fierce struggle over the direction of the nation in the coming weeks. The Biden administration’s initial reactions to the assassination disturbingly indicate that the U.S. government is considering deepening their intervention in Haiti, which could possibly involve a military intervention. Biden’s official statement pledges that the United States “stand[s] ready to assist”. The spokesman for the State Department ominously said that the United States is “prepared to receive additional requests from Haitian authorities”. A new U.S. occupation of Haiti, or any type of meddling in the country’s sovereign affairs, would be a disaster. For over a century the U.S. military has helped corporations plunder Haiti, carrying out invasions, supporting coups and menacing anyone who fights for the freedom and independence of the country. Even if they use humanitarian language, the goal of any U.S. intervention remains the same. The assassination comes at a time of incredible political, social and economic turmoil within Haiti. Increasingly poor living conditions and a grossly inadequate government response to COVID-19 have left the masses of Haitians completely devoid of economic and social support. Already, nearly 60% of the nation lives in extreme poverty, and the failure of the Moïse administration to rectify the root causes of such poverty has exacerbated kidnappings for ransom by people struggling to survive. Repression from the Haitian National Police has only served to make the situation increasingly unsafe and unstable for Haitians. This, along with a wanton power grab to extend his tenure in office, has prompted mass protests against Moïse. In recent months, the resistance of the Haitian people has led to a historic wave of demonstrations that threatened to unseat his government and opened the possibility that a new force could come to power that is outside the control of U.S. imperialism. It is unclear what effect Moïse’s assassination will have on the popular movement, whose grievances extend far beyond the individual crimes of Moïse. The assassination also comes just one day after Moïse nominated neurosurgeon Ariel Henry as the new Prime Minister, who, according to the Haitian Constitution, would assume power in Moïse’s place if ever necessary. Henry, a supporter of the 2004 U.S.-backed coup in Haiti which pushed anti-imperialist president Jean Bertrand-Aristide out of Haiti, would be the 6th Prime Minister in the four years of Moïse’s term. Despite lacking popular support amongst poor and working Haitians, Moïse has ruled by decree since dismissing the Haitian parliament in January 2020, and has refused to step down from the presidency after his term expired on February 7, as stipulated by the Haitian Constitution. Financial and political support for his regime by the U.S. government has been instrumental in maintaining his rule up until this point. In response to the political vacuum now within Haiti, the threat of U.S. intervention to “stabilize” through occupation looms large. However, it is crucial to understand that the actions of the United States are not done out of concern for the Haitian masses, but for maintaining U.S. power over Haiti. As the first free Black republic, throughout history Haiti has been subject to assault after assault by the United States and other imperialist governments seeking to curb its potential to achieve a democratic and sovereign nation that prioritizes the needs and well-being of poor and working Haitians. During this critical time for the future of Haiti, it is more important than ever that people in the United States support the demand of the popular Haitian resistance that calls for the end of U.S. and all foreign intervention in the country. AuthorThis article was republished from Liberation. Archives July 2021 7/10/2021 Nicaragua's Political Opposition as Organized Crime. By: Stephen Sefton & Tortilla con SalRead NowDora Maria Tellez (left) and Hugo Torres(right) campaigning in 2008 for US government supported right wing banker Eduardo Montealegre, candidate of ex-President Arnoldo Aleman's right wing PLC party | Photo: Tortilla con Sal Despite numerous reports in international media to the contrary, none of the people arrested had been selected by any of Nicaragua's political alliances or parties as possible candidates for the upcoming general election on November 7th this year. Ever since they lost badly in the 2011 elections to the Frente Sandinista, Nicaragua's political opposition has divided into conventional political parties working in the country's legislature and an extra-parliamentary opposition based in local NGOs. The US government, in particular, gave up supporting Nicaragua's opposition political parties financially so as to focus on consolidating an opposition bloc exploiting the figure of “civil society” but excluding the country's main labor and rural workers’ organizations and the cooperative movement. The member organizations of this exclusive, bogus civil society were all financed either directly by the US and allied governments or indirectly via foreign corporate and state-funded foundations. After a period of accumulation of resources from 2011 onward, this extra-parliamentary opposition mounted the violent, US designed coup attempt which lasted from April to July in 2018. But the main opposition political parties for the most part respected the country's institutions and refrained from taking part either in the widespread extreme violence or in the national dialogue between the coup promoters and the government. For that reason, no leading figure from Nicaragua's opposition political parties has been affected by the recent series of arrests of people from organizations that supported the 2018 coup attempt. All those arrested face well-supported indictments for illegal activities that would incur criminal prosecution in the United States, any country of the European Union and practically every country in Latin America and the Caribbean. The main formal indictment against all the individuals under investigation is that of acting in violation of Nicaragua's Law 1055, “Law for the Defense of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination for Peace”. Under the law, it is a crime to seek foreign interference in the country's internal affairs, request military intervention, organize acts of terrorism and destabilization, promote coercive economic, commercial and financial measures against the country and its institutions, or request and welcome sanctions against the State of Nicaragua and its citizens. In addition, Cristiana Chamorro of the Violeta Chamorro Foundation, Juan Sebastian Chamorro of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES), Felix Maradiaga of the Institute for Strategic and Public Policy Studies (IEEPP) and Violeta Granera of the Centre for Communications Research (CINCO) may also face charges for money laundering and breaking the “Foreign Agents” law which requires all organizations receiving finance from overseas to register with the authorities, report the amount of money received and how it is used. The law strengthens the already existing Law 147 regulating non-profit organizations under the supervision of the Ministry of Governance (MIGOB) which obliges non profits to report annually on their sources of income and how the money was spent. Despite numerous reports in international media to the contrary, none of the people arrested had been selected by any of Nicaragua's political alliances or parties as possible candidates for the upcoming general election on November 7th this year. Cristiana Chamorro, Juan Sebastan Chamorro, Arturo Cruz and Felix Maradiaga had earlier stated they aspired to the candidacy of one of the political parties, most likely the Citizens for Liberty political alliance. But none of them was formally under consideration. In any case, as many observers have noted, the figure of their possible candidacy in the elections has served as a smokescreen to distract from the criminal charges against them, for which they would face prosecution in practically any country in the world. The other main group of Nicaragua's extra-parliamentary opposition facing indictment under Law 1055 are the leaders of the Unamos political movement, formerly the Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS). These are former leading Sandinistas Dora Maria Tellez, Victor Hugo Tinoco and Hugo Torres and their younger colleagues Ana Margarita Vigil, Suyen Barahona, and Tamara Davila. With the cosmetic political makeover from MRS to Unamos, the MRS old guard have tried to play down their Sandinista past and links to their network of ex-combatant supporters. A relatively small but experienced and committed group of these ex-combatant MRS supporters played a key role organizing, directing and leading the violence of 2018 that resulted in over 260 deaths. Former guerrilla hero Hugo Torres is reported by the UK Guardian noting in relation to the recent arrests of well-known opposition figures in Nicaragua “...that’s how life goes: those who once held their principles high have now betrayed them.” Torres should know. He has collaborated with US government intervention in Nicaragua since at least 2005. Ever since then, until very recently, Tellez, Torres, Tinoco and other ex-sandinistas like Monica Baltodano and Henry Ruiz successfully fooled their foreign supporters by claiming they were loyal to some kind of authentic Sandinismo which they could never quite define. Monica Baltodano posed as a super-revolutionary, fooling leftists in Europe especially, while all the time collaborating closely with Nicaragua's right wing and accepting substantial funding for her Popol Nah NGO from the European Union and USAID. From 2007 to 2011, she served as a legislative deputy for the center-right social democrat MRS party of Tellez and Torres at the very time that party was allied with Nicaragua's right wing. For example in the 2008 municipal elections they openly campaigned for oligarch banker Eduardo Montealegre, PLC political party candidate for mayor of Managua, when the PLC was still controlled by corrupt ex-president Arnoldo Alemán. For her part Baltodano has so far not figured in the current series of indictments. Baltodano’s ex-sandinista allies in the Unamos leadership are accused of breaking the law against collusion with foreign powers, but that may well turn out to be less serious than their possible role in planning new attacks, similar to those of 2018. Between April and July that year, 22 police officers were killed and 400 suffered gunshot wounds at the hands of well-armed opposition activists. The MRS ex-sandinistas and their accomplices, like Medardo Mairena and Francisca Ramirez of the extremely violent Anti-Canal Movement and right wing Catholic Church bishops and priests, including Silvio Baez, Rolando Alvarez and Abelardo Mata, organized and supported widespread mass extortion and violence including murder, torture, arson, rape and other serious assaults affecting many hundreds of victims and their families. After the 2018 coup attempt failed, the authorities refrained from arresting its organizers, instead focusing on people who had directly committed criminal offenses. Subsequently, the 2019 government amnesty meant that the MRS leadership, as well as Felix Maradiaga, Cristiana and Juan Sebastian Chamorro, Violeta Granera and their accomplices escaped prosecution and sentencing for their role in the coup attempt. In fact, the extremely violent events of 2018 were a massive exercise in organized crime and terrorism, during which the various components of Nicaragua's opposition involved in it operated according to a very clear program. For example, the MRS leadership coordinated experienced ex-combatants among their movement's activists to help organize the violence more effectively, for example in Masaya. Felix Maradiaga coordinated with his contacts in local and regional organized crime networks to attack public buildings and run extortion operations out of Managua's UPOLI and UNAN universities and at dozens of roadblocks. Medardo Mairena and Francisca Ramirez activated their Anti-Canal Movement thugs to do the same along the main highways leading to Nicaragua's southern Caribbean Coast. Renegade local politicians of traditional political parties followed suit on the highway leading to the northern Caribbean Coast, for example at Rio Blanco and Mulukuku. Right wing Catholic Church bishops and priests guaranteed logistics ensuring that churches in dioceses across the country served as headquarters for the violent opposition gangs. The private business organization COSEP also played an important role in logistics, as did opposition aligned NGO's like the human rights organization CENIDH, and Baltodano's Popol Nah, among others. In addition, human rights organizations like CENIDH, the Permanent Commission for Human Rights (CPDH) and the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANPDH), all funded by foreign governments, systematically misrepresented human rights abuses, inventing abuses by the authorities and concealing innumerable abuses by violent opposition activists. Like all those organizations, the Chamorro NGOs - Cristiana's Violeta Chamorro Foundation, Juan Sebastian's FUNIDES and Carlos Fernando Chamorro's CINCO – also facilitated the coup attempt by distributing money they received from foreign governments and foundations. Felix Maradiaga, Juan Sebastian Chamorro and others traveled internationally projecting a false “freedom and democracy” narrative, appearing in influential European media like the BBC, among others. The Chamorro media outlets La Prensa and Confidencial and the plethora of online proxies they set up with USAID funding coordinated the massive online disinformation campaign to mislead national and foreign opinion. This massive and complex operation had been planned by the US authorities in coordination with their agents in Nicaragua over many years following the collapse of the traditional opposition political parties in 2011. Among other things, the current investigation is likely to determine whether or not the Chamorros, the Unamos ex-Sandinistas and their opposition allies, in addition to their illegal collusion with US and allied government intervention, were planning another coup attempt in the context of this year's elections. In any case, should those currently accused end up being prosecuted and sentenced for their crimes, few people in Nicaragua will have much sympathy for them. AuthorStephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal This article was republished from teleSur. Archives July 2021 7/10/2021 Book Review: Richard Westerman- Lukacs's Phenomenology of Capitalism. Reviewed By: Paul Leduc BrowneRead NowMuch has been written about History and Class Consciousness (henceforth HCC); it is hard to imagine that anyone could come up with a substantially original interpretation. Richard Westerman has done so in his daring and surprising book, Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism. Reification Revalued. Lucien Goldmann said that Lukács was a Kantian, who became a Hegelian, and then a Marxist. According to Westerman, Lukács in HCC was in fact a Husserlian. Rejecting a century of interpretations of HCC, Westerman views Hegel as an influence on Lukács – but only the Hegel of the Science of Logic, not that of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Lukács proposed a phenomenology of creative and receptive attitudes toward the work of art in his Heidelberg manuscripts (1912-1918), which he wrote with a view to obtaining his ‘habilitation’ in German universities. In them, Lukács wrote: ‘In the interest of terminological clarity, and unless the contrary is explicitly stated, it must be said here once and for all that the expression ‘phenomenology’ refers to Hegel’s and not Husserl’s use of the term’ (Lukács 1974: 37, n. 10). Indeed, the unfolding of proletarian class consciousness in HCC has mostly been read as structured along the lines of Hegel’s phenomenology. Westerman, however, claims that phenomenology in the manuscripts and in HCC is in fact strictly Husserlian, not Hegelian, and that the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Emil Lask (as well as the writings of art historians Alois Riegl and Konrad Fiedler), offer the key to understanding both the Heidelberg manuscripts and HCC – Westerman does not cite Lukács’s own statement in this regard, but mentions (55) that Agnes Heller refers to such a passage, but that she also ‘concedes’ that Lukács’s interpretation of Hegel was very ‘idiosyncratic.’ Ultimately, Westerman concludes not only that Lukács rejects the notion of identity in Hegel, but that ‘Lukács’s solution, in contrast, eschews both identity and essence’ (168). Yet, Lukács’s whole argument aims to demonstrate that the proletariat will become ‘the identical subject-object of history’ (Lukács 1971: 197). Most readers of HCC believe that it is a work of Marxist philosophy. That is not the impression one gets from Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism, which claims that Lukács ‘transfers Husserl’s account of the intentional structure of the mental acts and the phenomena of consciousness to the practical acts and phenomena of social being’ (127). The rehearsal of the Marxist sources of HCC is a well-trodden path; one can understand that Westerman should have chosen not to repeat common interpretations, but to outline a fresh one. However, he seems to be at pains to ignore the influences of Hegel and Marx on Lukács’s book (something he attempts to justify in his book’s conclusion). For example, in order to account for the relational character of Lukács’s approach, he invokes Georg Simmel. He does not see relationality here as stemming from the writings of Marx, who famously defined the human essence as the ‘ensemble of the social relations’ (Marx 1976: 3). In general, Westerman does not display great knowledge of Marx’s theory. He seems to believe that Marx had an economistic and class-reductionist approach, a rather debatable proposition. He claims that alienation ‘is the result of a dichotomy produced by the commodity structure’ (278) between form and content. But Marx did not aim to be a theorist of commodity exchange as such; his purpose was to theorize a very specific relationship, the sale of labour power in the relationship of capitalist and wage labourer. The issue was not commodity exchange, which has existed in many modes of production, but capital. Westerman regards as a sign of art historian Riegl’s influence the idea that ‘each type of society has a different “structure of objectivity”’ (102). One is tempted to reply: they are called modes of production (a notion that encompasses much more than economic relations). Westerman questions whether Lukács was an orthodox Marxist, arguing that Lukács’s theory of capitalism is based on reification, but does not deal with surplus value or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – as if these were the touchstone of Marxist orthodoxy. The publication of the 1844 Manuscripts, but also of the Grundrisse and of the full version of German Ideology, revealed the extent to which HCC paralleled Marx’s thought in so many ways. Indeed, Westerman himself notes that Lukács in 1967 stressed the salience of the concept of alienation in twentieth-century thought and how HCC was centered on this problem. Westerman constructs a straw man he repeatedly knocks down throughout his book. He accuses a variety of interpreters of Lukács of believing that the latter ‘treat[s] the relation of subject to objectivity as the interaction of two mutually external entities’ (4). No such interpretation of Lukács should be taken seriously, because it completely misunderstands his concept of reification. For Westerman, ‘subject and object are treated [by Lukács] as structurally defined parts of a meaningful totality of consciousness’ (16). The key word here is ‘meaningful’: ‘Consciousness’ in HCC coincides with social being, writes Westerman. He writes that Lukács ‘interprets social being through a formal semantics of practices and the meaning of objects […] it is the logic of these meanings that drives social practice’ (277-278). On that view, it would seem that Lukács was an idealist after all, as critics of HCC in the Communist movement claimed! Westerman suggests that the young Lukács oscillated between two positions: a mystical, messianic one, expressed in Soul and Form, The Theory of the Novel, and Lukács’s political writings between 1919 and 1921; and a rigorous philosophical one stated in the Heidelberg manuscripts (1912-1914, 1916-1918) and the chapters of HCC written or rewritten in 1922. Westerman attributes this to Lukács’s return in 1922 to ideas inspired by Lask, Husserl, Riegl and Fiedler. This begs the question of why his early revolutionary writings were not inspired by them. Why, in 1919, 1920 and 1921, would he ‘forget’ about the views developed in the Heidelberg manuscripts, only to rediscover them in 1922? Is there not a simpler explanation? Ultimately, Westerman is not able to establish the unity of HCC. He proposes in his account to discard the two chapters on Rosa Luxemburg, as well as those on class consciousness, on legality and illegality, and on the changing function of historical materialism, and to focus only on the chapters ‘What Is Orthodox Marxism’, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, and ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’. Westerman cites approvingly Lukács’s notorious comment that the sole criterion of Marxist orthodoxy is the adherence to the method of Marxism, rather than to this or that theory or concept, or even to all or any of Marx’s individual discoveries. It is easy to point out that Marx’s ‘method’ could surely not so easily be abstracted from his discoveries, and that any rejection of the latter would surely imply a real indictment of the former. Yet when Lukács speaks of ‘method’, he means the practice of grasping events and processes as aspects of totality, in other words in the light of the actuality of the moment of proletarian revolution. Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism is a very academic volume; it treats HCC as one might a work by Aquinas or La Mettrie, not as an eminently militant, communist book. Seeing it as principally influenced by Husserl, Lask or Riegl is also a way of making it a safe object of academic research in conservative universities. The publisher’s web site says that Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism ‘offers a radical new interpretation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, showing for the first time [emphasis added] how the philosophical framework for his analysis of society was laid in the drafts of [his] “Heidelberg Aesthetics”’ and ‘reveals for the first time a range of unsuspected influences on his thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, and Alois Riegl’. This is simply untrue (and Westerman himself is much more careful in his utterances on this subject). Ernst Bloch (1923), Rosshof (1975), Rochlitz (1981, 1983) and Kavoulakos (2018) all noted or explored Lask’s influence on HCC. Agnes Heller wrote: ‘[The Heidelberg Aesthetics] constitutes the bridge between Soul and Form and History and Class Consciousness. One could even indulge in the dangerously unhermeneutical idea that there is no possible understanding of Lukács without the Heidelberg Aesthetics.’ (Heller 1989: 206) Miguelez wrote a doctoral thesis (published in 1973) supervised by Lucien Goldman, comparing Husserl and Lukács; Vajda (1978-79) compared them in a similar way. There is no doubt that Westerman goes much further than they did in reading Lukács’s work in the light of Husserl’s phenomenology. Lukács learned much from Kierkegaard, Husserl, Lask, Riegl and Fiedler; it is also evident that he was very deeply influenced by Marx, Luxemburg, Lenin, Hegel, Kant and many others. The aim of HCC was not to propose a phenomenology of capitalism, as in the title of Westerman’s book, but to shed light on the development of proletarian class consciousness, and, on this basis, to give an account of the proletarian revolution within the context of a theory of history. Why did Lukács call his book History and Class Consciousness? Westerman’s account provides no sense of this. Because he does not believe in the relevance today of class struggle or proletarian revolution, Westerman has, often ingeniously, tried to provide a new meaning for HCC, by reinterpreting it completely as a work of Husserlian phenomenology, rather than of historical materialism. The result no longer resembles History and Class Consciousness. References
AuthorPaul Leduc Browne is professeur honoraire at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, Québec, Canada. This article was republished from Marx and Philosophy. Archives July 2021 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claims Florida schools have become 'socialism factories,' and he wants to force teachers to reveal their political opinions. | AP The Red Scare is back in Florida. As was reported by People’s World last month, the Republican-led government of the state has been ramping up its attacks on democracy with a special focus on using the state education system to spread anti-communist ideology. Anti-communism almost always goes hand in hand with the promotion of racism (covert or overt) and other repressive or fascist-like ideologies. Right on cue, the government of Florida is showing the accuracy of that assessment. The law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis will require Florida state schools to survey the political affiliations of all their teaching staff. The governor says Florida schools have become “socialism factories” and that this bill will put an end to this imaginary problem. Such laws are a callback to the infamous “blacklists” of the McCarthyite 1950s, during which professionals were banned from work in many fields and persecuted because they were communists or suspected of being communists. At its height, thousands of Americans were banned or shunned from their places of work, and even more were intimidated into keeping their thoughts secret to avoid such a fate. People were intimidated or blackmailed into falling in line with anti-communism. A few years ago, it was generally accepted that the McCarthyite era was a stain on the democratic history of the U.S., but apparently, the Florida Republican Party has reconsidered. The Florida governor insists that these surveys, which will not be anonymous, will not be used for purposes of hiring, firing, and promotions—which, if true, begs the question of how it will address the DeSantis’s issue with left-wing teachers “indoctrinating students.” So is the goal simply to instill fear among educators? This law has another provision that allows students to film their teachers so that they can sue them. Republicans claim this is meant to protect students from “indoctrination,” but it can easily be used to intimidate teachers that may have beliefs with which some students disagree. This is an all-out assault on teachers’ freedom and ability to teach their students as they have been trained to do. This latest law is part of a general overall Republican-led assault on education and democracy across the United States. Just two weeks ago, Florida forbade schools from teaching critical race theory. A number of other Republican-governed states look to follow in line. Equally transparently, many Republican-ruled states have been passing laws in order to suppress their citizens’ ability to vote. These laws are specifically aimed at minorities and working-class people because they are more likely to vote against Republicans. Now, Florida is leading the way in the next phase and trying to prevent children from learning any ideas that the Republican Party considers “stale,” as the governor choose to label them. Some more progressive members of Congress have been trying to fight back against this Republican assault on democracy. The “For the People Act” was proposed with the hope of defending the voting rights of Americans. The bill passed the House, but got stuck in the Senate due to a lack of support from corporate Democrats and the threat of a Republican filibuster. The Republican Party is doing all it can to make sure they do not lose any power. The easiest way to attain that goal is to make it harder for people to vote, and to ban the teaching of any ideas that the Republican Party disagrees with or which could threaten their rule. These are the bricks that are used to lay the road to fascism. AuthorAmiad Horowitz studied history with a specific focus on Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. He lives in Hanoi, Vietnam. This article was republished from People's World. Archives July 2021 7/10/2021 Spain Passes Transgender Equality Law; Protests Engulf Country After Homophobic Murder. By: Maicol David LynchRead NowMembers of the Unidas Podemos coalition march in Madrid's Pride parade, celebrating the passage of the new Transgender Equality Law, behind a banner reading: 'They are rights, not wishes. It's the law!' | via Unidas Podemos “They are rights, not wishes. It’s the law!” read the pink, blue, and white banner of the Communist Party of Spain as its members marched with the wider Unidas Podemos (United We Can) coalition for Madrid’s Pride Parade this past Saturday. Early last week, Spain’s Minister of Equality Irene Montero, elected on the Unidas Podemos list and a prominent member of the Union of Young Communists of Spain, announced the passage of the “Trans Law,” which expands the rights of LGBTQ citizens in terms of their gender identification from the age of 16, allowing them to legally change their name and gender. The law came into effect at the end of Pride Month and was implemented by the ruling Socialist Worker’s Party of Spain (PSOE), a center-left social democratic party, in coalition with Unidas Podemos. The new rights guarantee is being celebrated by the LGBTQ movement in Spain and internationally, but it has been somewhat overshadowed by the murder of Samuel Luiz outside a gay nightclub in A Coruña, Galicia. 24-year-old Samuel Luiz was murdered in a homophobic attack in Galicia. Luiz, a 24-year-old nurse who worked in a senior citizens home, was beaten to death by a group of people. Spanish police described the incident as a “human pack kicking a youngster for than 150 meters down a street.” Authorities believe between six and ten attackers were involved. A friend of Luiz reportedly told police that the assailants called Luiz “a f*cking faggot” while punching and kicking him. Three people—two men and a woman—have been taken into custody so far, but the investigation continues, and police have not ruled out further arrests. Massive ongoing protests in response to the killing have made it appear that Pride Month has been extended a few weeks due to the sea of rainbow and transgender rights flags filling the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga, Bilbao, and other Spanish cities. That the two events—an advance in transgender rights and an apparent homophobic murder—occurred in the same week is emblematic of the complex history of LGBTQ rights in Spain. The well-known homosexual Communist poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was killed by Gen. Francisco Franco’s fascist forces for his political affiliation and sexuality during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Decades after his murder, he became an icon for dissidents and the LGBTQ community. Homosexuality was decriminalized in Spain in 1979 with the restoration of bourgeois democracy after the death of Franco. Remnants of the dictator’s homophobia and transphobia still litter Spanish politics today, felt not only on the right but also in some sectors of the so-called radical left. For example, in early 2020, the Communist-led United Left expelled the Feminist Party of Spain (PFE) from the coalition due to its anti-transgender stances on the question of women’s liberation. Then, following the implementation of the “trans law” last week, the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain (PCTE) has attacked what it calls an “opportunistic” reform stating, “Confusing sex with gender, to end up dictating the self-determination of sex, denies the material basis of the oppression suffered by working women.” The PCTE claims that if gender oppression is supposedly “no longer due to the destructive consequences of the system, but is simply an individual choice, capitalism is exonerated from any responsibility.” Despite the regressive stances of the sectarian left, however, the overwhelming majority of working-class organizations are celebrating the new law as a sign of historic social progress. They hail the Transgender Equality Law as the action of a government which they democratically elected to represent them shortly before one of the most devastating pandemics in world history. The party which sits at the head of the governing alliance, PSOE, can be characterized by its mostly progressive domestic policy and aggressive imperialist foreign policy, for instance, its defense of NATO. Historically, the PSOE fought hardest for the legalization of same-sex marriage and the right for LGBTQ couples to adopt under the leadership of openly gay congressman Pedro Zerolo, who passed away from cancer in 2015. A Communist Party of Spain poster: ‘Always with the LGBTI struggle. Always with pride.’ | via PCE PSOE’s supporter in government, Unidas Podemos, is an alliance of a more radical leftist orientation. It includes Izquierda Unida, or United Left, which is led by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). Equality Minister Irene Montero’s partner, Pablo Iglesias, was the leader of the UP alliance until losing his bid for governor of Madrid earlier this summer after facing numerous death threats from supporters of the neo-fascist, anti-immigrant, and homophobic/transphobic VOX party. PSOE and UP struck a deal to enter into an alliance in late 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the Trans Law, the left-wing coalition government has also been praised for other progressive moves, including raising the minimum wage by 5.5%. Minister of Equality Irene Montero and Minister of Consumer Affairs Alberto Garzón announce passage of the Trans Law. | via PCE Spain has also managed to ditch its status as of one of the most plagued epicenters of the pandemic in Europe, and unemployment rates have dropped at historic rates under the guidance of Vice President Yolanda Díaz, a member of the Communist Party and now leader of the UP alliance since Iglesias withdrew from politics in early May, and Alberto Garzón, leader of the Communist-led United Left coalition and current Minister of Consumer Affairs. Hopes have been raised that the government may even make moves toward ending the Spanish monarchy thanks to the royal family’s ongoing corruption. Despite making yet another historical advance toward full equality for LGBTQ workers in Spain, the PSOE-UP coalition government will continue to fight an uphill battle against violent attacks on members of the LGBTQ community motivated by the hate speech of far-right VOX politicians. Congresswoman Gádor Joya Verde of VOX, for instance, recently stated that if her “…son was gay, (she) would prefer not to have grandchildren.” Another VOX spokesperson, Juan Ernesto Pflüger, asked, “Why do homosexuals celebrate Valentine’s Day if what they have is not love, but rather abnormal behavior?” This is one point that the PSOE and the UP agree on despite their many disagreements regarding the future of the Kingdom of Spain and a restoration of a (Third) Republic: Homophobia and transphobia are not welcome in a progressive and socialist Spain. AuthorMaicol David Lynch is a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA and an activist and organizer in Working America and Indivisible. He writes from New York City and is most passionate about the struggles against imperialism in Latin America and the fight against xenophobia in immigrant communities in the USA. This article was republished from People's World. Archives July 2021 7/9/2021 Book Review: BreadTube Serves Imperialism - Caleb Maupin. Reviewed By: Edward Liger SmithRead NowFor at least a year now a bitter online feud has played out between Marxist-Leninist activist Caleb Maupin, and the group of online content creators known as BreadTube. Breadtube creators such as Ian “Vaush” Kochinski have grown large online followings for giving political and cultural commentary from the left. Ideologically Vaush claims to be both a socialist and a dialectical materialist, while the name “BreadTube” is derived from famous anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s text Conquest of Bread. Caleb Maupin has repeatedly criticized BreadTube as an entity since doing an online debate with Vaush over a year ago. Caleb’s new book BreadTube Serves Imperialism attempts to systematize his argument that BreadTube creators are overall harmful to the movement for socialism. Maupin suspects that there may be direct ties between the US State Department and BreadTube. Since there is no incriminating evidence of this the book sets out to prove that regardless of whether Vaush and other creators are tied to US intelligence or not, they serve the same purpose of propping up the American ruling class and American Imperialism by extension. While BreadTubers have mocked Caleb for even taking the time to write a book about them, a systematized formulation of these arguments is welcomed by those of us who have watched this conflict play out exclusively online. The online culture around politics is notoriously toxic and ideas are usually debated publicly through 280-character tweets or live-streamed online debates. The idea that anyone would write a book engaging with the ideas and tactics of their intellectual rivals is foreign to this online political climate, despite the fact that for years political theorists engaged with each other through publishing written material. Bad Empanada (a BreadTube figure not mentioned in the book) proudly declared in his original video response that he would not be reading the full book. Perhaps when Marx responded to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty with a book titled Poverty of Philosophy, Proudhon should have simply refused to read the book, and challenged Marx to a Twitch debate instead. To make the argument that BreadTube is ultimately harmful to left politics Maupin draws comparisons between the online creators and the cold war counter gangs funded by the US State Department. These gangs masqueraded as advocates for socialism whilst purposefully acting in a way that is harmful to the movement and distorting the meaning of socialism. For example, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was propped up by the United States from the beginning. Pol Pot claimed to be a Marxist who could raise the Cambodian peasantry from poverty. In reality, the Khmer leadership knew nothing of Marx. Philip Short’s Pol Pot Anatomy of a Nightmare says for Pot and the Cambodian leadership “Marxism signified an ideal, not a comprehensive system to be mastered and applied.” Pot’s Government committed horrific genocides in the name of Marx and seemed committed to building a form of socialism that left everyone in Cambodia equally impoverished. Pot was not someone who sought to construct a socialist mode of production, but rather a tool of Western imperialists who had no understanding of Marxist economics. With the CIA’s help Pot capitalized on the popularity of Marxism to bring himself into a position of power. It’s hyperbolic to imply Vaush and other BreadTubeers are the modern-day equivalents of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. It seems that Maupin’s personal dislike for the BreadTube personalities may have influenced his choice to compare them in the book to some of history’s most despicable enemies of socialism. Gangs funded by the American empire purposely fill people’s heads with wrong ideas about Marxist economics. Caleb’s accusations of State Department connections is almost surely a retaliation against some BreadTubers habit of publicly smearing him as a Fascist. BreadTuber Thought Slime introduced Caleb in one video as “a crypto-fascist posing as a leftist, because it allows him to condescend to people more often.” A completely disingenuous description of someone who has been an active communist for almost 20 years after getting involved with politics through Iraq war protests. Understandably, Maupin is upset that after years of organizing with the belief that he was fighting against fascism, someone with very few organizing credentials can smear him as a fascist to an audience of nearly 200,000 people who consider themselves leftists. He even claims to have recently been kicked out of an organizing event for supposedly being a fascist. The allegations from both sides are unprovable and non-materialist. Caleb Maupin is not a fascist, and we can’t know if BreadTube is a psyop similar to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. However, it’s worth noting that Maupin’s accusations here seem to be in retaliation to having his reputation smeared for over a year by people who call themselves socialists. So the origins of BreadTube and CIA counter gangs can’t be materially compared, but do they have similar practical effects on the overall struggle for socialism? The bulk of BreadTube Serves Imperialism is dedicated to making this argument. Of course, BreadTube is not a homogenous way of thinking, but rather a collective of various online personalities with many young and intellectually curious viewers who tune in to watch their content. So, while the BreadTube left is not a hive mind, the sheer amount of anti-Marxist and pro-imperialist rhetoric from some of BreadTube’s major figures should be concerning to anyone who is serious about seeing socialism in the United States or bringing about an end to capitalist imperialism. The root of BreadTube’s most imperialistic rhetoric is their misunderstanding or refusal to understand production. That which Marx called ‘the anatomy of civil society” in Capital Vol 1. When a Libertarian tells you to “study economics” they actually want you to accept the dogmatic belief that market forces are inherently rational. When a Marxist says “study economics” they mean to understand that production, and the relations by which it is carried out, are at the root of the evils and triumphs of society. Because socialists understand this, we see changing the relations of production as the key to changing the form of society. Maupin’s book goes into great depth explaining the relation between production and imperialism, explaining that capitalist imperialism is not defined by war and military action, but is an economic system allowing capitalists to expand their profits through setting up capital to steal resources from poorer nations. Only once this all-important process of production is threatened or interrupted do the western capitalists begin asking their buddies in Washington to destabilize another nation. BreadTubers are often missing this key concept at the core of their analysis. I’ll give an example separate from the many which are described in the book. In a response to one of my own videos critiquing him for labeling anyone who supports existing socialist countries as a “tankie,” Vaush appeared shocked that in my video I had accused the United States of keeping the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in a state of constant warfare and economic hardship. In an exasperated tone, he asked “Wait! Hold on! Are you suggesting America is responsible like currently… for North Korea’s Political isolation? They (The DPRK) maintain it deliberately.” He then goes on to say the DPRK purposefully isolates themselves so that they may be propped up by China. This is a misunderstanding that is rooted in idealist thinking. Vaush’s analysis begins with the cultural, political, and legal superstructures of the US and DPRK. By rooting his analysis in politics rather than production, Vaush made the common mistake of pinning the socio-political problems of Korea on the country’s political structure itself. While the political structure of the DPRK is certainly not beyond critique, someone like Vaush who claims to be a dialectical materialist should see the political arena as a reflection of the productive one. The DPRK was formed in the context of a bloody anti-imperialist struggle against the Japanese who’s ruling class enriched themselves using the raw materials and productive forces of Korea. Once the Japanese had been expelled, capitalists in the United States immediately realized that profits could be made if they were able to make Korea a colony of their own. Less than a year after gaining their independence in a bloody struggle the DPRK was at war once again. This time against the United States and their far-right Korean ally Syngham Rhee, who would go on to become the first President of South Korea, ruling as a brutal dictator. Rhee’s forces would commit massacres in the war, filling the city of Pyongyang with the dead bodies of communists. The US indiscriminately launched bombing campaigns decimating civilian areas. When all was said and done 20% of the DPRK’s population had been killed in the war. One person for every family of five. While the US claims to this day that the war was an effort to prevent the North Korean political structure from committing human rights abuses, any socialist should know the real goal is always to maximize profits through controlling production in as many places as possible. Now consider the state of Korean Production after the war. The country’s production had been dominated by the Japanese for years, and as happens in all colonized nations, this prevented the Korean productive forces from developing in a diversified way. Then, after finally gaining their independence, the United States leveled their countries infrastructure with bombs, and a United Nations manufactured voting plan split the country in half. At that point, it became the task of the DPRK’s Political structure to effectively manage the nation’s production and rebuild their country after it had been leveled by three years of continued bombing. It was at this point that the US surrounded each of the DPRK’s borders with troops, besides the border that touches China. They then put the country under a brutal sanction regime, hoping to prevent the productive forces of the DPRK from increasing and starve their people into submission. The sanctions have only intensified as capitalism shifts to the domination of Western-backed financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Marxist academic Vijay Prashad identifies this as the longest hybrid war carried out by the US in its history as they have now kept the DPRK relatively economically isolated for almost 70 years since slaughtering 20% of the population. Despite these sustained attacks, the DPRK has been able to maintain its independence (with the help of nuclear deterrents), and create a sustainable living situation for its people. Vaush’s claim that the country purposefully isolates itself in order to trade with China is an absurd lie, made even more absurd when you know that the country Vaush is sitting in has banned the DPRK from trading at every border except the one they share with China. Even former US President Jimmy Carter said, “the North Koreans have suffered because the United States has done everything we possibly could to destroy the economy of North Korea.” (Loyal Citizens of Pyonyang). Vaush’s analysis is simply based on a surface-level overview of the North Korean political system, which Vaush labels as “authoritarian” and therefore not worthy of defense from Imperialism. Despite claiming to be a dialectical materialist, his analysis is neither dialectical nor materialist. He does not view the Korean Political structure as something which arose from the relations of production. If he did he would see that in 1910, when the independence struggle was starting, the political structure was forming itself in relation to the conditions of production, that is, in opposition to the Japanese and American capitalists who sought to dominate Korean land and people in order to enrich themselves. Of course, there are human rights abuses in Korea committed by the State. However, it is truly harmful for a prominent socialist living in the United States to lie to his audience about the DPRK in a fashion which encourages them to believe the US State Department’s narrative. Imperialists do not care about defending people from the human rights abuses of foreign governments. They care about controlling production and selling what they produce. This is the nature of capitalist imperialism which stems from the productive relations at the root of capitalism itself. While socialists have historically understood the true character of imperialism and organized against it, BreadTube’s Vaush lends credence to the simplified narratives the US empire gives about the countries they seek to colonize. While writing a book about rival internet personalities may seem like a silly endeavor, BreadTube Serves Imperialism at least helps to identify trends on the left that are worth fighting back against. While I am unconvinced that BreadTube is funded by the CIA, it does appear to be middle-class radicalism masquerading as socialism. Political and Cultural analysis is often divorced from any analysis of class, and fighting imperialism becomes secondary to fighting reactionary anti-SJW trolls on the internet. Achieving political power for the working class no longer seems to be the goal. In a video detailing how he plans to build socialism, Vaush claims that a President implementing socialist policy via executive order would be questionable to him as it sets an authoritarian precedent. This kind of thinking is entirely at odds with Marxism, which encourages the working class to smash the capitalist state apparatus and use the State's power to seize the means of production from the capitalist class, eventually changing the relations of production, and therefore subsequently the whole of society. It seems to me it’s less likely that BreadTube is CIA funded than it is that they are middle class people who have figured out a financially lucrative way to play video games while giving surface level political and cultural analysis. Similar to Pol Pot, many of them seem to believe in socialism as an ideal, or worse, a popular online trend to be exploited for profit. Vaush’s socialism abandons the working class because he is not a worker and cares more about protecting his own class position than moving society towards a more humane mode of production or combatting capitalist imperialism. Vaush says that the first step in his plan to construct socialism is to change the cultural values of society. He says his job as a socialist commentator is to change the culture of society so that people will become more accepting of socialist values and eventually socialism can be implemented through the ballot box. This is undeniably a distortion of what socialism has meant even before Marx. In the BreadTube conception of socialism the principal contradiction is not between the class who works and the class who owns, but between those who agree with the cultural values of BreadTube and those who do not. In this explanation Vaush reveals that he does not share Marx’s view of the working class as the revolutionary agent of society, who’s position in the economy allows them to wrest societies productive capacities from the hands of capital. In Vaush’s conception of socialism the revolutionary agent is no longer the working class, but Vaush himself. His goal is not to organize the working class so that they can fight for better conditions, but to procure a large audience who can be convinced into sharing his cultural values. The focus is no longer on the relations of production which are the anatomy of society, but the culture and politics which spring from it. This conception strips socialism of its core principles, and replaces it with a toothless version of itself, which is incapable of even recognizing the core contradictions in capitalist society. In a beautiful contrast to the synthetic socialism of BreadTube Maupin ends the book with a "four point plan to rescue the country" from his socialist think tank, the Center for Political Innovation. 1. A mass mobilization to rebuild the country 2.Public Ownership of Natural Resources 3. Public Control of Banking 4. an economic bill of rights Included in these plans are specific proposals such as building a rail between the Midwest and more prosperous regions of the country, or creating a mass mobilization of workers to create jobs and rebuild our crumbling public infrastructure. As someone who has spent their entire life around Midwestern Workers, I can tell you that this is the kind of political plan that will appeal to the American working class. Midwestern workers want jobs, stability, and peace. They will only struggle for a socialism that will make their lives better, not one which seeks to deprogram them and their children from ideas that online twitch streamers deem to be incorrect. The working class is not stupid as they're often made out to be. They simply understand their own interests. And the plan put forth by CPI is exactly the kind of socialist agenda which is needed to convince workers that socialism is the path forward if they want to improve their conditions. While I think Caleb Maupin is early to jump to conclusions of CIA backing, BreadTube Serves Imperialism does thoroughly expose the anti-Marxist- and pro imperialist leanings of many prominent BreadTube creators. These are trends on the left which need to be criticized and struggled against. The purpose of Marxism is to give socialism a scientific base upon which it can be built. BreadTube’s distortion of socialism’s meaning and the history of existing socialist states is incredibly harmful to the overall struggle for socialism. I commend Caleb Maupin for his continued activism in the face of relentless smear campaigns and harassment, and for attempting to present systematic arguments against what he believes to be a harmful trend within left wing politics. Hopefully the Bread Tube creators will give it a read in the spirit of being self-critical, however, I won’t be holding my breath. AuthorEdward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a co-founder and editor of Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. He is currently a graduate student, assistant, and wrestling coach at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Archives July 2021 As recent events make clear, our world has been irreversibly changed. Adequately responding to the changes already baked into the climate --- and learning how to thrive in this new world while avoiding the worst case scenarios still on the horizon --- will require nothing less than the revolutionary overthrow of the very system that created these problems. Photo: Aliraza Khatr/Getty In 2017, journalist and science writer David Wallace-Wells published a widely-read and hotly-debated article in New York Magazine titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” The article, which laid out in morbid detail the near-future effects of global climate change on human habitation, drew both criticism and praise from climate activists. For many, Wallace-Wells’ depiction of a worst case scenario — which included section heads with such titles as “Heat Death,” “The End of Food,” and “Perpetual Collapse” — was so relentlessly apocalyptic as to crush any hope that the most terrible effects of the climate crisis could somehow be avoided. This, some claimed, would discourage the kind of mass organizing necessary to confront the problem. Others, however, praised the article for exactly these reasons, arguing that the only way to move people to take action is to make clear the mortal threat of climate change. While the question of the psychological effects of such apocalyptic visions of environmental collapse remains unanswered, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: we are already living in the time of climate catastrophe, and capitalism is to blame. Thanks to a total lack of action by corporations and bourgeois governments across the planet, several of the scenarios depicted by Wallace-Wells are already unfolding, with terrifying consequences. Take, for example, the previously unimaginable prospect of heat death. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), 2020 was not only the hottest year on record, but the six previous hottest years all took place since 2014. And while this steady rise in temperature may be hardly noticeable on a global scale, it can lead to catastrophic local events. In June, for the first time ever, wet bulb temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius — that is, the temperature and humidity at which humans can no longer naturally cool themselves — were recorded in the Persian Gulf and parts of Pakistan. Such temperatures, if sustained, would mean almost certain death for anyone unlucky enough to be caught outside for more than a few hours, even sitting in the shade with plenty of water. That such previously unheard of temperatures are already being recorded, even as corporations and states continue to emit tens of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, means that many of these areas could become all but uninhabitable within a matter of decades, or even years. Meanwhile, just last week, freak weather patterns brought scorching, record-breaking heat to the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures in the Canadian province of British Columbia topped 121 degrees Fahrenheit, melting roads, destroying electrical infrastructure, and killing hundreds. As many as 700 people in British Columbia, and at least 130 more from Washington and Oregon, died as a result of complications from the extreme heat. While this particular heat wave is being described as a once in a millennium event, research shows definitively that such incidents are becoming increasingly common. Extreme heat events like these have increased threefold since the middle of the 20th century, reaching average temperatures 3-5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than previous heatwaves. Further, heat dome effects like the one that scorched British Columbia have also become more common since the 1990s as a result of changing jet stream patterns. Scientists are still debating whether or not these changes in the jet stream are the product of climate change. Other potentially catastrophic phenomena, such as the shrinking of Arctic sea ice, are already happening, and at an accelerated pace. Last year, researchers at the University of Leeds, reported that Arctic sea ice melt was happening at a rate six times faster than in the 1990s. Since the 1980s, the Arctic — which is warming much faster than the rest of the planet — has seen a massive decrease in the amount of summer ice. This June, temperatures there reached an astounding 118 degrees Fahrenheit, and NASA has reported that the 2020 summer ice minimum was the second lowest on record, only slightly more than the record-breaking 2012 minimum, which scientists estimate was the highest melt rate in the last 4,000 years. Because ice and snow reflect a far greater portion of sunlight than open water, this melting has created a feedback loop, in which dark open waters absorb more heat, creating even more open water, which in turn absorbs more heat and melts more ice. At this rate, scientists estimate that we could see ice-free summers in the Arctic as soon as 2035, far sooner than previous predictions. This melting has been so severe that it has already opened new shipping routes and access to natural resources, which are leading to increased tensions between the United States, China, and Russia over control of the region. Such tensions point to the potential for a period of expanding climate-driven military conflict, as rising temperatures continue to reshape the geography of the planet. Unfortunately, these kinds of feedback loops are not only threatening the Arctic. A leaked draft report from the normally sanguine United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that there is little time left to avoid further catastrophic tipping points. These include the melting of the polar ice caps and wholesale transformation of the Amazon forest into open savanna. The most important aspect of this report, however, is its blunt assessment that many scenarios and impacts can no longer be avoided and that world governments are currently ill-prepared to deal with the inevitable changes already taking place. From infrastructure collapse to famine, mass migration, and flooding of coastal cities and island nations, the looming effects of climate change that are already baked into the system are going to be an enormous challenge, one that will require planned cooperation on a global level that capitalism, built on competition, has proven incapable of achieving. As the heatwave in the Northwest and the recent electrical grid failure in Texas demonstrate, even wealthy countries such as Canada and the United States are ill-equipped to deal with the infrastructure challenges posed by climate change. Images coming out of Oregon and Washington of buckling asphalt and melting electrical wires show the vulnerability of aging infrastructures and the way that such climate events can potentially lead to a cascading series of catastrophes, as heat waves and hurricanes give way to blackouts, forest fires, and flooded cities and subway systems. At the same time, historically dry regions, such as large portions of Australia, and the American Southwest, are already seeing unprecedented historic droughts and wildfires that have overwhelmed emergency services. In Australia alone, more than 46 million acres of land were burned during the 2019-2020 fire season, wiping out entire ecosystems. And things are even worse in the developing world, where increased heat and changing rainfall patterns are causing, among other disasters, longer droughts and more famines. In Madagascar alone, over 400,000 people are facing starvation thanks to a climate-induced drought that has turned many former farmlands into dust bowls. While such events are bad enough in themselves, the long-term consequences, if left unaddressed, will be even more devastating, as catastrophe piles upon catastrophe. Increased military conflict, pandemics, mass emigration, and economic collapse are already happening but are sure to get worse if nothing is done to both stop the causes and mitigate the effects of climate change. And capitalism has shown that it is profoundly incapable of doing either. Indeed, fossil capitalism, founded as it was on the presumption of an endless availability of cheap energy, and grounded in the necessity of limitless growth and near-sighted profit-seeking, has only made these problems worse and it is the height of insanity to think that the same system responsible for creating climate change can somehow stop it. The recent infrastructure debate and the Biden administration’s lack of any meaningful climate plan, the failure of the Paris Summit, and the increasing levels of global carbon emissions all show that bourgeois governments are not only often unwilling, but actually incapable of taking the kinds of drastic actions needed now to stop further climate change. At the same time, the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration, and economic crisis also shows that global capitalism is woefully unprepared to deal with the consequences of the climate catastrophes already happening everywhere. Stopping further global warming, ending runaway climate change, and adapting to the new normal of a world that will almost certainly soon be at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer than before the industrial revolution will require the kinds of cooperative economic planning and mobilizations only possible in a society run by and for the interests of working people instead of profit. This means a global socialist society that prioritizes need over growth and cooperation over competition. Building a revolutionary struggle to win such a world must be our priority if we hope to salvage what is left of our environment. But any such struggle must also necessarily involve organizing around a series of demands to protect the lives and wellness of working people and to stop climate change now before it gets worse. These must include the immediate nationalization of all transportation manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction, and energy production under the control of workers and communities of working people, a commitment to the cessation of the use of all fossil fuels within the next decade, and mass public investment in carbon capture technologies. It must also include demands for open borders to accommodate climate refugees, debt cancellation for all dependent and semi-colonial countries, and mass public investment in new energy infrastructure, public transportation, and forest, ocean, and wetland conservation. This is the only way we can rationally transition away from an economy built on growth, consumerism, destructive methods of production, and the use of heat-trapping fossil fuels. AuthorJames Dennis Hoff is a writer, educator, labor activist, and member of the Left Voice editorial board. He teaches at The City University of New York. This article was republished from Left Voice. Archives July 2021 7/9/2021 There’s a Dirty Tricks Campaign Underway in Peru to Deny the Left’s Presidential Victory. By: Jose Carlos Llerena Robles & Vijay PrashadRead NowThe campaign to overturn Peru’s presidential election results is one of “unconventional warfare.” Half an hour’s taxi ride from the House of Pizarro, the presidential palace in Lima, Peru, is a high-security prison at the Callao naval base. The prison was built to hold leaders of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), particularly Abimael Guzmán. Not far from Guzmán’s cell is that of Vladimiro Montesinos, intelligence chief under former President Alberto Fujimori, who is also now imprisoned. Montesinos was sentenced to a 20-year prison term in 2006 for embezzlement, influence peddling, and abuse of power. Now, audio files from phone calls made by Montesinos from his prison indicate an attempt to influence the results of Peru’s presidential election after Pedro Castillo, the candidate of the left-wing Perú Libre party, won the election. By the evening of June 6, 2021, Peru’s National Jury of Elections should have declared Pedro Castillo the winner of the presidential election. But it did not. A month later, matters remain in stasis as Peru does not yet have an official winner of the election. Castillo’s opponent, Fuerza Popular’s Keiko Fujimori—the daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori—has hired a range of Lima’s top lawyers to obstruct any decision by the state’s electoral commission. In addition, her team has cast aspersions against the campaign of Castillo and Perú Libre, accusing them—without evidence—of being financed by disreputable groups, including drug cartels. The Peruvian media, largely controlled by the oligarchy, have gone along with Fujimori’s allegations; their apparent goal is to paint Castillo as an illegitimate winner and to set aside the verdict of the electorate. BribesMeanwhile, hard evidence continues to emerge of the dirty tricks at the heart of Fujimori’s campaign to steal the election. Montesinos, the right-hand man of Fujimori’s father, made 17 phone calls from the prison between June 2 and June 24. Twelve of these calls resulted in a phone conversation; there was no answer to five of them. The Peruvian naval authority in charge of the prison said that Montesinos had applied to call his girlfriend. On June 26, Peru’s Defense Minister Nuria Esparch indicated that the navy will conduct an investigation. Montesinos did not call his girlfriend. Instead, the old spymaster—and former CIA agent--called Pedro Rejas, a former commander in Peru’s army who is close to the Fujimori campaign. Montesinos tells Rejas in one call on June 10 to bribe the three members of the election commission $1 million each. “The only solution is to work through Guillermo in order to transfer the payment in favor of the three electoral jury members, who are supposed to be open to the bribe, and therefore guarantee the result.” The “Guillermo” in the conversation is Guillermo Sendón, who is on record affirming his relationship with one of the members of the electoral commission, Luis Arce Córdova. Sendón says that he helped Arce in his failed campaign to become president of the Supreme Court and met Arce several times in this period. Sendón’s last recorded visit to Arce was on June 22. The audios are damning. In Peru, the case is known as Vladiaudios. This is a nod to a 20-year-old scandal called Vladivideos, when Montesinos was caught on tape bribing congressman Alberto Kouri to support Perú 2000, the party of Alberto Fujimori. In the months that followed, more videos came out: Montesinos offering millions of dollars to Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 5, and Channel 9 if they prevented the opposition from coming on their television programs. The Vladiaudios are as damning as the Vladivideos, both showing Montesinos attempting to use bribery to secure the electoral victory of the Fujimoris. Where will the money come from? Montesinos proposes that Rejas approach Dionisio Romero (the CEO of Credicorp) and Rafael López Aliaga. It seems he has thought about everything: what to do and how to do it. Sitting in jail, this old intelligence agent could not do it himself. He required an accomplice and phone calls that were recorded and leaked to the media. Involve the CIA In one of the calls, Montesinos tells Rejas to involve the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “Look, what they have to do is to go to the U.S. Embassy and talk with the embassy intelligence officer. Bring all the fraud documentation… Go to the embassy and talk with the person in charge of intelligence at the embassy. That is in the Office of Regional Affairs.” The Office of Regional Affairs in Lima is the CIA station. Montesinos gives precise instructions. Keiko Fujimori’s husband “can go [to the embassy], since he is an American citizen.” Her husband is Mark Villanella, whom she met at Columbia University in 2004. “Take the documents,” Montesinos advises. “Show them. Deliver them to the embassy and ask them to bring them to their chief in Washington… And in Washington, the chief can bring it to the notice of the president, and the White House spokesperson can issue a statement to prevent Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua from imposing their will in Peru. With such a statement, they have great leverage.” Montesinos is not the only one in Fujimori’s circle with a history of trying to involve the United States in Peru’s elections. Her close adviser Fernando Rospigliosi has a long history of walking into the U.S. Embassy and asking for assistance in preventing the left from prevailing in elections. The current U.S. ambassador in Peru—only recently appointed—is Lisa Kenna, a former CIA agent. Unconventional Warfare Montesinos is an expert in unconventional warfare. The followers of Fujimori, he tells Rejas in one of the conversations, want to use a conventional approach, but “this will not work.” “There is conventional warfare and unconventional warfare,” he says. “In unconventional warfare, you have to use special procedures… Conventional lawyers are not going to succeed because the procedure is irregular.” Arguments before the courts, in other words, are not sufficient; bribes are required. Luis Arce, the man on the electoral commission, is now under investigation by Peru’s public prosecutor. Meanwhile, the National Jury of Elections has still not closed the election in favor of the winner, Pedro Castillo. What we have instead is unconventional warfare with the U.S. Embassy as a player in the drama. Coups nowadays in Latin America do not need armies. Having good lawyers, bags of money, and a handful of thugs in and out of jail is all that is needed. AuthorJosé Carlos Llerena Robles is a popular educator, member of the Peruvian organization, La Junta, and representative of the Peruvian chapter of Alba Movimientos. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2021 7/9/2021 The Limitations and Hypocrisies of the Color-blind, Post-Racial Doctrine. By: Jymee C.Read NowIn examining the development of race and ethnicity in the United States, a number of ideologies and approaches have been formulated to address these developments. Black Nationalism and multiculturalism, among other ideals have historically had great effect over public discourse and societal proceedings. Of the worldviews that came into fruition in response to issues regarding race and ethnicity, Colorblindness is one that saw a prominence particularly around the liberal masses of the United States. Colorblindness in these terms refers to the view that a person does not “see color” in a person, in addition to believing that in order to overcome the racial and ethnic disparities/inequalities in society, aspects of both need to be ignored in discourse and every day affairs rather than addressed to achieve social, political, and economic equality. This ideology, while built off of good intention, is fundamentally flawed in practice due to the reality of history and contemporary material condition. The internal contradictions of colorblindness as a worldview are ones that fundamentally weakens discourse on race and ethnicity, and as such, disproving the narrative of these ideals is a necessity for further development of both societal perceptions and ideological expansion. The fallacy of the colorblind ideology is that in order to achieve a true form of racial harmony and stability, those who follow it believe that discussions of racism and ethnic discrimination are detrimental rather than beneficial to the racial and ethnic orders of society. Followers of this worldview also tend to emphasize that they are, in one way or another, upholding the doctrine of Martin Luther King Jr. and his view of judging a person based on their character rather than their skin color. The contradiction in the colorblind conviction, however, is that their application of this concept is ill-informed and more often than not bolsters the racial disparities in the United States rather than weakens it. A number of those who espouse these beliefs bring along with them a liberal worldview, and it is common for these beliefs to be held by white people, albeit well-meaning white people.[1] Through a privileged lens, the colorblind ideology allows for white people to effectively ignore and even deny the existing racism that persists in the modern age, subsequently giving justification to these same racial orders. One of the strongest shortcomings of racial colorblindness is the inability to address nuanced forms of racism, forms that have often been embedded into the human perception due to years of exposure and the normalization of these continuing racist perceptions. According to the colorblind point of view, if an act is not explicitly racist and latent with slurs and negative stereotypes, then it practically cannot be racism as society has supposedly moved past the abundant history of racism. This notion essentially promotes “racist absolutism,” falsely equating racism only with the most blunt of examples, placing a veil over the reality of housing discrimination, disparities in quality of education for whites and nonwhites, and other such racist aspects of society that have ultimately strengthened, contrary to the doctrine of colorblindness.[2] While achieving a greater prominence in the modern day, the idea of a colorblind society is not a particularly new or original worldview. Even in the earlier stages of so-called colorblindness in American society and politics, the views and actions associated with the idea have brought deterioration and weakness to the progress of nonwhites. The Reagan administration of the 1980s brought with it a strong colorblind influence on existing policy designed to benefit nonwhites and historically oppressed groups.[3] President Reagan, those within his cabinet, and others close to conservative leader had been opposed to policies such as Affirmative Action other legislation relating to Civil Rights had enacted an institutional shift in racial and ethnic politics; ultimately these shifts sought to bring about a popularized right-wing view of race for the 1980s, this was enacted “under the guise of supporting a ‘colorblind society,’ and supporting ‘equality and fairness.’”[4] The Reagan administration’s detrimental shift in racial and ethnic discourse has not been exclusive to the political realm. In general society and public institutions, this colorblindness has succeeded in embedding itself deep within the structure of such establishments. Although in legal terms segregation is thought to have been dissolved, there maintains the presence of segregation within American culture and societal relations. To quote sociologist Margaret Anderson, as cited in an article from The Society Pages; “losing a focus on racial inequality may be especially likely in institutional settings where there is some inclusion of diverse groups, but where the institutions remain structured on the needs and experiences of the dominant groups.”[5] This examination displays the inherent privilege that accompanies the idea of a colorblind society and colorblindness as a whole. Superficial adherence to promises of diversity and equality in institutions such as schools are often mistaken for larger steps towards racial and ethnic societal progression, however the greater trust in these superficial gestures allows a strengthening of “whiteness” in American culture and society. This superficial understanding tends to bolster the lingering sentiment of the “white man’s burden,” in essence granting the delusion that they are doing something for the good of people of color, when in reality they’re simply reaffirming their privileged status. This “whiteness” ultimately leads to a fractured understanding of racism, thus creating an ignorance based on lack of consciousness towards race and the material conditions surrounding race and ethnicity.[6] The supposed “post-racial society” described by many who accept the colorblind doctrine is often understood to have risen to prominence as a result of Barack Obama’s election to President in 2008. Obama’s rise to prominence bolstered societal colorblindness due to both the level of public consciousness during and after Obama’s election, and by Obama himself in his various speeches and his approach to racial and ethnic issues. Post-racial colorblindness has utilized the election of Obama to advance the narrative that society has moved past race as a legitimate issue, that the ability to elect a black president in the United States is evidence enough that racism is a thing of the past. This serves as an example of the misguided reliance on superficial progression, as this assertion ignores the privilege exhibited by Obama himself, such as his background of ivy-league education and rise to prominence as a senator prior to his ascension to President.[7] This notion plays on a fallacy of individualism, conflating the achievements of one person with the achievements of a certain race in its entirety. In addition to this ignoring of privilege, the sensationalism of Barack Obama’s election ultimately lead to the dismissal of stories detailing the continuing detriment experienced by nonwhites and the persistent racism that remains embedded into American politics and culture. As a result of crusades to be “tough on crime” and the “war on drugs,” the criminal justice system has embarked on a process of mass incarceration of nonwhites at disproportionately high rates, particular people of African-American or Hispanic-American background, often for minor and/or non-violent offenses. In addition to exuberant rates of racially motivated arrest and incarceration, education, employment, and housing have maintained a disparity in access and affluence for nonwhites, as exemplified through 2010 census data explaining that upwards of t25% of African-American and Hispanic people were living in impoverished conditions in the US, contrasted by the significant lower rate of poverty for white people at a rate of 9.4%.[8] As mentioned before, Barack Obama through his own rhetoric has worked to perpetuate the notion of colorblindness and the post-racial society. In a commencement speech delivered to Morehouse College in 2013, then-president Obama provided a contradictory display encouraging black empowerment while simultaneously perpetuating the individualist fallacy and the supposed establishment of a post-racial United States. In order to promote the collective ascension of African-Americans, Obama utilized the history of black struggle and those prominently involved with such struggle to imply that the graduates being addressed are essentially the new torch bearers for black empowerment and enfranchisement, effectively stressing the actions of black people as a whole and as a movement. “You now hail from a lineage and legacy of immeasurably strong men – men who bore tremendous burdens and still laid the stones for the path on which we now walk. You wear the mantle of Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and Ralph Bunche and Langston Hughes, and George Washington Carver and Ralph Abernathy and Thurgood Marshall, and yes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”[9] Despite this push for furthering collective enfranchisement, Obama would go onto to play into the fallacious rhetoric of colorblindness. Diving into the realm of individualism, Obama would go on to cite that “too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices.” Essentially, Obama is trivializing the struggle of the modern black/nonwhite youth through the colorblind lens by stating that the modern struggle is nowhere near as brutal and discriminatory as hardships faced by the likes of Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes, practically saying that since those in the past had dealt with and overcome discrimination on a much higher level, the younger generations can put up with the “minimal” racism still existing today. Engaging in the ahistorical fallacy, and by extension historical revisionism, Obama had effectively reduced the struggle against racism, discrimination, and other such ugly acts to an individual struggle, making claim that many of the prominent Civil Rights activists had gone about the individual route rather than addressing the system at hand.[10] The ahistorical basis of colorblindness is a primary reason as to why these ideals need to be done away with. By ignoring historical reality and by extension contemporary realities, the colorblind mythos allows for culturally inherited racism to continue passing down from generation to generation, falsely claiming that the actions of the past have ultimately no effect on the modern day. The contradictions, revisionism, and fallacious foundation of racial colorblindness and claims of a post-racial society despite the persisting inequalities only strengthens and fuels the continuing of racism on a cultural and structural level. Anything that perpetuates inequality, especially on such a high level, is not something that must be maintained, it is something that requires eradication. The consensus for addressing the problems of colorblindness is the promotion of a multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism based on a legitimate racial consciousness. By actively studying the realities of contemporary discourse regarding race and ethnicity, in addition to the histories of Civil Rights, institutional racism, and other such significant factors, such a racial consciousness has the potential to be built. In establishing this consciousness, it is hoped that people will eventually be able to challenge the inherent dichotomy of “whiteness” through both the intellectual and the interpersonal means. This education, however, cannot exist only on an individual level. In order to properly address this issue, the colorblind narrative that is entrenched into the American educational system must be challenged on an institutional level, and thus the introduction of study material and other scholarly outlets into American grade-school and college level education, so as to combat the post-racial delusion on a mass level. Notes [1]Williams, Monnica. “Colorblind Ideology Is a Form of Racism,” December 27, 2011. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism. [2]Powell, J. (2013). Tracing the History of Racial Inclusion and Debunking the Color-Blind/Post-Racial Myth. Human Rights, 40(1), 17-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24630111 [3]Miah, Malik. “Race and Politics: A Color-Blind America?” Against the Current, no. No. 79 (n.d.). https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1784.html. [4]Miah. “Race and Politics: A Color-Blind America?” [5]Burke, Meghan A. “Colorblindness vs. Race-Consciousness-An American Ambivalence.” The Society Pages, July 24, 2013. https://thesocietypages.org/specials/colorblindness-vs-race-consciousness/. [6]Burke. “Colorblindness vs. Race-Consciousness-An American Ambivalence.” [7]Thomas, Sheila. "Debunking the Myth of a Post-Racial Society." Human Rights 37, no. 4 (2010): 22-23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23032409. [8]Thomas. “Debunking the Myth of a Post-Racial Society.” [9]Branch, Lessie. “Reexamining the ‘Obama Effect’: How Barack Obama’s Rhetoric Spread Optimistic Colorblindness in an Age of Inequality.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 6 (n.d.): 7. http://contemporaryrhetoric.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Branch13_5.pdf. [10]Branch. “Reexamining the ‘Obama Effect’: How Barack Obama’s Rhetoric Spread Optimistic Colorblindness in an Age of Inequality.” AuthorJymee C is an aspiring Marxist historian and teacher with a BA in history from Utica College, hoping to begin working towards his Master's degree in the near future. He's been studying Marxism-Leninism for the past five years and uses his knowledge and understanding of theory to strengthen and expand his historical analyses. His primary interests regarding Marxism-Leninism and history include the Soviet Union, China, the DPRK, and the various struggles throughout US history among other subjects. He is currently conducting research for a book on the Korean War and US-DPRK relations. In addition, he is a 3rd Degree black belt in karate and runs the YouTube channel "Jymee" where he releases videos regarding history, theory, self-defense, and the occasional jump into comedy https://www.youtube.com/c/Jymee Archives July 2021 Moïse had been ruling Haiti by decree after delaying elections, sparking protests that he illegally stayed past his term. The country is also facing growing poverty and gang violence. | Photo: Twitter/@ajplus From the beginning of his political career, he was considered an actor prone to increase the country's dependence on the U.S. Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated Wednesday in Port-au-Prince, led Latin America's poorest country during 2017-2021, marked by deepening economic and political crisis, violence and insecurity, and radicalization of social protest. Born in 1969 in the commune of Trou-du-Nord (North-West department), the former governor studied Political Science at the private Quisqueya University, located in Port-au-Prince, and then made a career in the business sector. He was designated in 2015 as a presidential candidate by former president Michel Martelly (2011-2016) of the Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK). According to the media, he was already considered prone to increase the country's dependence on the United States and international aid from that moment on. Moreover, his eventual election was seen as the occasion for a possible setback in the country's human rights situation. Months later, in November 2016, he was elected President in the first round with 55.6 percent of the votes in elections. According to experts, about 21 percent of the eligible voters voted. Massive protests against his government broke out in the summer of 2018 when the population took to the streets to reject the elimination of fuel subsidies, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This measure led to substantial gasoline price hikes. Another generalized wave of discontent shook the Caribbean country at the beginning of 2019, motivated by the deterioration of living conditions, the increase in prices of the basic food basket, inflation, and the devaluation of the national currency (gourde). The economic crisis, coupled with the effects of COVID-19 and the growing situation of insecurity (marked by clashes between criminal gangs, assaults, and kidnappings), drew the protests that began in mid-2020. Subsequently, the mobilizations incorporated the demand for Moïse to step down and make way for a democratic transition. Civil society pointed out to him that his mandate had ended in January 2021, but he reiterated that he would not leave the presidential chair. The national political crisis also deepened since the former president ignored the legislative and local elections scheduled for 2019. Since then, he was left alone in power, and the opposition pointed out that he governed in an authoritarian manner. His mandate was also tinged by allegations of corruption, as it happened when several sectors pressed to know the destination of funds delivered to the nation by the Petrocaribe energy cooperation agreement. In an investigation report delivered to the Legislative, the Superior Court of Accounts of Haiti assured that companies belonging to the President and his predecessor, Martelly, were benefited with millionaire sums funds that were never seen again by the public. AuthorThis article was republished from teleSUR. Archives July 2021 7/8/2021 Hours After Haiti’s President Is Assassinated, 4 Suspects Are Killed and 2 Arrested. By: Paul KnaggsRead NowAssassination of Haiti's President Haiti police battle gunmen who killed president, amid fears of chaos More than 200 years after slaves on the island of Hispaniola led a successful rebellion against French colonial government and proclaimed their liberty and independence, Haitians still aren’t free. The state is a predator and the rule of law remains elusive. A narrow cartel of special interests controls most of the economy. Didier Le Bret, a former French ambassador to Haiti, said the situation in Haiti had become so volatile that “many people had an interest in getting rid of Moïse.” He said he hoped Mr. Joseph would be able to run the country, despite his lack of political legitimacy. Mr. Le Bret criticized the international community for ignoring the volatile political situation in Haiti and said it should now come help the country “to ensure a smooth transition.” Haiti’s security forces were locked in a fierce gun battle on Wednesday with assailants who assassinated President Jovenel Moise at his home overnight, plunging the already impoverished, violence-wracked nation deeper into chaos. The police had killed four of the “mercenaries” and captured two more, Police General Director Leon Charles said in televised comments late on Wednesday, adding that security forces would not rest until they had all been dealt with. “We blocked them en route as they left the scene of the crime,” he said. “Since then, we have been battling with them.” “They will be killed or apprehended.” Jovenel Moïse was killed in an attack on his private residence on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The authorities said late Wednesday that they had intercepted “suspected assassins.” Four people suspected of being involved in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti were killed by the police in a gun battle and two others were arrested, Haiti’s police chief said late Wednesday. The chief, Léon Charles, also said that three police officers who had been held hostage were freed. “The police are engaged in a battle with the assailants,” he said at a news conference, noting that the authorities were still in pursuit of some suspects. “We are pursuing them so that, in a gunfight, they meet their fate or in gunfight they die, or we apprehend them.” The authorities did not name any of the suspects or cite any evidence linking them to the assassination. Mr Moïse’s wife, Martine Moïse, was also shot in the attack, the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, said in a statement. Ms Moïse was transported to a hospital in southern Florida for treatment. “A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” the prime minister said, but there was little solid information about who might have carried out the assassination. Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond, told Reuters in an interview the gunmen were masquerading as U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents as they entered Moise’s guarded residence under cover of nightfall – a move that would likely have helped them gain entry. Fears of chaos and a power vacuum loomCuba condemns assassination of Haiti’s President Millions of Haitians anxiously huddled around radios and televisions throughout the day, staying off the streets as they tried to understand who killed the president, why and what the coming days might mean for the country. The assassination has created a political void that threatens to deepen the turmoil that has gripped Haiti for months. The brazen assassination, which drew condemnation from the U.N. Security Council, the United States and neighbouring Latin American countries, came amid political unrest, a surge in gang violence, and a growing humanitarian crisis in the poorest nation in the Americas. The government declared a two-week state of emergency to help it hunt down the assassins, whom Edmond described as a group of “foreign mercenaries” and well-trained killers. The gunmen spoke English and Spanish, said interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, who assumed the leadership of the country, where the majority speak French or Haitian Creole. “I am calling for calm. Everything is under control,” Joseph said on television alongside Police General Director Charles. “This barbaric act will not remain unpunished”. The U.N. Security Council condemned Moise’s assassination and called on all parties to “remain calm, exercise restraint and to avoid any act that could contribute to further instability.” The council is due to be briefed on the killing in a closed-door meeting on Thursday. The U.N. Security Council expressed deep shock and sympathy over Moise’s death ahead of a closed-door meeting on Thursday, requested by the United States and Mexico, to evaluate the situation. A U.N. peacekeeping mission – meant to restore order after a rebellion toppled then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 ended in 2019 with the country still in disarray. In recent years, Haiti has been buffeted by a series of natural disasters and still bears the scars of a major earthquake in 2010. U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the killing as “heinous” and called the situation in Haiti – which lies some 700 miles (1,125 km) off the Florida coast – worrisome. “We stand ready to assist as we continue to work for a safe and secure Haiti,” he said. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a call with Joseph, expressed Washington’s commitment to work with Haiti’s government to support “democratic governance, peace, and security,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement. Many people in Haiti had wanted Moise to leave office. Ever since he took over in 2017, he faced calls to resign and mass protests – first over corruption allegations and his management of the economy, then over his increasing grip on power. Lately, he presided over a worsening state of gang violence that rights activists say is linked to politics and business leaders using armed groups for their own ends. Now, the political vacuum left by Mr Moïse’s killing could fuel a cycle of violence, experts warned. More than two centuries ago, Haitians fought to throw off the yoke of colonial France and bring an end to one of the world’s most brutal slave colonies, which had brought France great wealth. What started as a slave uprising at the turn of the 18th century eventually led to the stunning defeat of Napoleon’s forces in 1803. But the suffering of the Haitians did not end with the ouster of the French. More recently, the country suffered under more than two decades of dictatorship by François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and then his son, Jean-Claude, known as Baby Doc. In 1990, a priest from a poor area, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected president. But in less than a year, he was deposed in a coup. Since a devastating earthquake 11 years ago, the country has not rebuilt, and many say it is worse off, despite billions of dollars of reconstruction aid. The United States, which is Haiti’s top aid donor and has long exerted an outsized weight in its politics, had on June 30 condemned what it described as a systematic violation of human rights, fundamental freedoms and attacks on the press in the country. The Biden administration urged the Haitian government to counter a proliferation of gangs and violence. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) expressed concern on Wednesday that the violence could deal a setback to efforts to fight COVID-19 in Haiti – one of only a handful of countries worldwide that has yet to administer a single shot of coronavirus vaccine. AuthorPaul Knaggs is an Editor, founder, Labour Heartlands, Labour Party member and activist. Citizen journalist, Ex-British Army combat veteran. Drifting towards Revolutionary socialism. Fighting a constant struggle with dyslexia that's overcome with a burning desire to speak out against the corrupt political system and the social injustices it creates. Advocate for Free speech and open, accountable, democracy. This article was republished from Labour Heartlands. Archives July 2021 7/8/2021 Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity. By: Tricontinental InstituteRead NowDossier no. 42 Co-publication with The Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group Some of AFRICOM’s known permanent and semi-permanent military bases on the African continent, 2019. How do you visualise the footprint of Empire? The images in this dossier map some of AFRICOM’s military bases on the African continent – both ‘enduring’ and ‘non-enduring’, as they are officially called. The satellite photos were gathered by data artist Josh Begley, who led a mapping project to answer the question: ‘how do you measure a military footprint?’ For this dossier, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research physically projected images and coordinates of these hidden-away sites onto a map of Africa, visually reconstructing the apparatus of militarisation today. Meanwhile, the pins and thread connecting these places remind us of the ‘war rooms’ of colonial domination. Together, the set of images is a visual testament to the continued ‘fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’, as this dossier writes. We refuse simple survival. We want to ease the pressures, to free our countryside from medieval stagnation or regression. We want to democratise our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future. We want to change the administration and reconstruct it with a different kind of civil servant. We want to get our army involved with the people in productive work and remind it constantly that, without patriotic training, a soldier is only a criminal with power. That is our political programme. Thomas Sankara (President, Burkina Faso) at the United Nations, 4 October 1984. On 30 May 2016, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) held its 601st meeting. Though the agenda was broad, members of the PSC came to the meeting concerned about a range of conflicts: the collapse of the Libyan state and the impact that this had across the Sahel, the ongoing struggles in the Lake Chad region with the persistence of Boko Haram, and the wars that marked the Great Lakes region (with the loss of sovereignty by the Democratic Republic of the Congo on its eastern flank). The ‘primary responsibility for ensuring effective conflict prevention’, the PSC noted, ‘lies with the Member States’, namely the fifty-five countries on the African continent from Algeria to Zimbabwe. The PSC needed no lessons from anyone on its own limitations, which were two-fold:
In the aftermath of the NATO war on Libya, the Sahel region experienced a number of conflicts, many of them driven by the emergence of forms of militancy, piracy, and smuggling. Using the pretext of these conflicts, and inflamed by NATO’s war, France and the United States intervened militarily across the Sahel. In 2014, France set up the G-5 Sahel, a military arrangement that included Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, and expanded or opened new military bases in Gao, Mali; N’Djamena, Chad; Niamey, Niger; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The United States, for its part, built an enormous drone base in Agadez, Niger, from which it conducts drone strikes and aerial surveillance across the Sahel and the Sahara Desert. This is one of the many US bases on the African continent. The United States has twenty-nine known military facilities in fifteen countries on the continent, while France has bases in ten countries. No other country from outside the continent has as many military bases in Africa. The number of foreign military bases on the African continent alarmed the PSC, which raised this as an important issue in its May 2016 meeting: Council noted with deep concern the existence of foreign military bases and establishment of new ones in some African countries, coupled with the inability of the Member States concerned to effectively monitor the movement of weapons to and from these foreign military bases. In this regard, Council stressed the need for Member States to be always circumspect whenever they enter into agreements that would lead to the establishment of foreign military bases in their countries. Since 2016, little advance has been made on the PSC statement. It is telling that the PSC did not name the countries that have the most bases on the continent, a question of quantity that has an impact of the quality of suppression of African sovereignty. Had the PSC named the United States and France as the main countries that have military bases in Africa, it would have had to acknowledge the particular reasons why the US and France continue to require a military presence for their ends. Arba Minch, Ethiopia 6.040864 | 37.588118 Source: Google Maps It is important to acknowledge that these developments are neither the norm for Africa’s modern history nor are they inevitable. In 1965, Ghana’s former President Kwame Nkrumah published an important book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, which reflected on the phenomenon of military bases. These had been commonplace during the time of high colonialism, with bases across the continent from the British base at Salisbury in former Rhodesia (present-day Harare, Zimbabwe) to the French base at Mers El Kébir in Algeria. Both the British and the United States militaries had bases in Libya, from the Wheelus Air Base to the military posts in Tobruk and El Adem. In return for the land and the right to barrack troops at these places, the UK and the US provided Libya with ‘aid’, which Nkrumah rightly said was a payment for the loss of sovereignty. Here is Nkrumah’s assessment of these bases in Africa: A world power, having decided on principles of global strategy that it is necessary to have a military base in this or that nominally independent country, must ensure that the country where the base is situated is friendly. Here is another reason for balkanisation. If the base can be situated in a country which is so constituted economically that it cannot survive without substantial ‘aid’ from the military power which owns the base, then, so it is argued, the security of the base can be assured. Like so many of the other assumptions on which neo-colonialism is based, this one is false. The presence of foreign bases arouses popular hostility to the neo-colonial arrangements which permit them more quickly and more surely than does anything else, and throughout Africa these bases are disappearing. Libya may be quoted as an example of how this policy has failed. In 1964, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser called for the removal of these bases, and in 1970 – after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overthrew the monarchy – the bases were removed. Five years before this, Nkrumah correctly judged the mood of the Libyan people. This mood, from 1965, runs through to the present. Since it was set up in 2007, the US government’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has not been able to find a home on the African continent; the headquarters of AFRICOM is in Stuttgart, Germany. The African people continue to pressure their governments not to give in to US demands to shift the AFRICOM headquarters from Europe to Africa. Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah noted, seeks to fragment Africa, weaken African state institutions, prevent African unity and sovereignty, and thereby insert its power to subordinate the aspirations of the continent for pan-African consolidation. Neither the Organisation of African Unity (1963-2002) nor the African Union (2002 onwards) have been able to realise the two most important principles of pan-Africanism: political unity and territorial sovereignty. The enduring presence of foreign military bases not only symbolises the lack of unity and sovereignty; it also equally enforces the fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments. Nzara, South Sudan 4.634998 | 28.26727 Source: Google Maps The Surrender of Our Sovereignty In 2018, the US Department of Defense proposed that the US and Ghana agree to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a $20 million deal that would allow the US military to expand its presence in Ghana. In March, widespread unhappiness of this agreement swept large sections of the population into the streets; opposition parties, who worried about the possibility that the US would build a military base in the country, raised their objections in parliament. By April, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said that his government had ‘not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America’. The US Embassy in Accra repeated this statement, saying that the ‘United States has not requested, nor does it plan to establish a military base or bases in Ghana’. The SOFA agreement was signed in May 2018. It does not require a close reading of the agreement’s text to know that there is in fact the possibility that the US could build a base in the country. Article 5, for instance, states, Ghana hereby provides unimpeded access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas to United States forces, United States contractors, and others as mutually agreed. Such Agreed facilities and areas, or portions thereof, provided by Ghana shall be designated as either for exclusive use by United States forces or to be jointly used by United States forces and Ghana. Ghana shall also provide access to and use of a runway that meets the requirements of United States forces. Through this article, the US is permitted to create its own military facilities in Ghana. By any definition, this means that it can set up a base. The surrender of Ghana’s sovereignty also comes to light where the SOFA agreement states (Article 6) that the US would ‘be afforded priority in access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas’ and that said use and access by others ‘may be authorised with the express consent of both Ghana and United States forces’. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 12.361688 | -1.511828 Source: Google Maps Furthermore, Article 3 says that US troops ‘may possess and carry arms in Ghana while on Official duty’ and that the US troops shall be accorded ‘the privileges, exemptions, and immunities equivalent to those accorded to the administrative and technical staff of a diplomatic mission’. In other words, the US troops can be armed and, if they are accused of a crime, they will not be tried in Ghana’s courts. In March 2018, Ghana’s minister of defence, Dominic Nitiwul, was challenged on a radio station by Kwesi Pratt of the Socialist Forum Ghana (SFG). Nitiwul said that there was nothing peculiar about this agreement, since other African countries – like Senegal – had signed such agreements. Ghana, said Nitiwul, had signed similar agreements with the US in 1998 and 2007, but these were done in secret because there was no tax waiver. Pratt warned that Ghana would be ‘surrendering sovereignty’ in entering this agreement. The general sentiment in the country was opposed to the base, which is why both the Ghanaian government and the US denied that a base would be built. Pratt was right. The US presence at Kotoka International Airport in Accra became the heart of the US military’s West Africa Logistics Network. By 2018, weekly flights from Ramstein Air Base in Germany landed in Accra with supplies (including arms and ammunition) for the at least 1,800 US Special Forces troops spread out across West Africa. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said in 2019 that this weekly flight was ‘basically a bus route’. At the Kotoka airport, the US maintains a Cooperative Security Location. This is a base in all but the name. The US Footprint The African continent does not have an unusually large number of foreign military bases. These can be found across the world, from the US bases in Japan to the British bases in Australia. No country has a greater military footprint around the world than the United States. According to the US National Defense Business Operations Plan (2018-2022), the US military manages a ‘global portfolio that consists of more than 568,000 assets (buildings and structures), located at nearly 4,800 sites worldwide’. In 2019, AFRICOM produced a list of some of its known military bases on the African continent, distinguished between those with an ‘enduring footprint’ (a permanent base) and those with a ‘non-enduring footprint’ or ‘lily pads’ (a semi-permanent base): Enduring Footprint 1. Chebelley, Djibouti 2. Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti 3. Entebbe, Uganda 4. Mombasa, Kenya 5. Manda Bay, Kenya 6. Libreville, Gabon 7. St. Helena, Ascension Island 8. Accra, Ghana 9. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 10. Dakar, Senegal 11. Agadez, Niger 12. Niamey, Niger 13. N’Djamena, Chad Non-enduring Footprint 1. Bizerte, Tunisia 2. Arlit, Niger 3. Dirkou, Niger 4. Diffa, Niger 5. Ouallam, Niger 6. Bamako, Mali 7. Garoua, Cameroon 8. Maroua, Cameroon 9. Misrata, Libya 10. Tripoli, Libya 11. Baledogle, Somalia 12. Bosaso, Somalia 13. Galkayo, Somalia 14. Kismayo, Somalia 15. Mogadishu, Somalia 16. Wajir, Kenya 17. Kotoka, Ghana The list does not contain the bases where the US uses ‘host nation facilities’, such as in Singo, Uganda and in Theis, Senegal. The large presence of the US Armed Forces on the African continent is not a surprise. The US has the largest military force on the planet, both in terms of the vast number of resources that the US puts into its military and the reach of the military via its base structure as well as its naval and aerial capacity. No other military force in the world matches that of the United States, which spends more on its military budget than the next eleven countries combined. China, which follows the US in military spending, disburses only a third of what the US spends per year. The footprint of the US military on the African continent is not only quantitatively larger than that of any other non-African country’s bases on the continent, but the sheer scale of the military’s presence and activities gives it a qualitatively different character; this character includes the capacity of the United States to defend its interests on the continent and to attempt to prevent any serious competition to its control of resources and markets. There are two tasks that the US military fulfils on the continent:
These two points – the gendarme function and the New Cold War – require further elaboration. Agadez, Niger 16.950278 | 8.013889 Source: Google Maps Resource Exploitation Africa is the world’s second-largest landmass with the second-largest continental population (1.34 billion people in 2020) – more than the population of North America and Europe combined (1.1 billion people). Asia is the largest continent with the largest population (4.64 billion people). Africa’s subsoil holds a range of important natural resources: 98% of the world’s chromium, 90% of its cobalt, 90% of its platinum, 70% of its coltan, 70% of its tantalite, 64% of its manganese, 50% of its gold, and 33% of its uranium, as well as a significant share of the world’s reserves of other minerals such as bauxite, diamonds, tantalum, tungsten, and tin. The continent holds 30% of all mineral reserves, 12% of known oil reserves, 8% of known natural gas, and 65% of the world’s arable land. The UN Environmental Programme estimates that Africa’s natural capital accounts for between 30% and 50% of the total wealth of African countries. In 2012, the UN estimated that natural resources accounted for 77% of total exports and 42% of total government revenue. African states’ reliance upon the export of raw materials of various kinds – due to the power of multinational corporations and the lack of sufficient industrialisation in a range of African countries – has put them in a position of dependency on foreign capital. This condition of dependency was structured by the policies of the colonial rulers, who maintained economic activity in Africa based on the extraction and growth of raw materials which were then sold through colonial concessions to the countries of their rulers. This dependency was inherited by generations of post-colonial elites, who derived rents from it and did nothing to alter the structure. African states, therefore, rely upon external revenues from the export of raw materials, on aid programmes from Western governments, and on institutional aid. Entebbe CSL, Uganda 0.046175 | 32.45588 Source: Google Maps Such dependency creates undue avenues for manipulations by these foreign governments who have a permanent interest in Africa. Ruling governments use the endowed natural resources to secure aid from foreign partners without paying particular attention to the aid requirements and conditions. These aid terms leech African countries of necessary revenues. For instance, the UN Economic Commission for Africa reports that over the past fifty years, illicit financial flows have resulted in the loss of at least $1 trillion, ‘a sum nearly equivalent to all the official development assistance the continent received during the same period’. These are precious funds that could be used to diversify African economies, build missing infrastructure, and enhance social wages on the continent. Economic dependency narrows the options for African governments, which become more and more subordinate to foreign interests and powers. Amongst governments who are economically subordinated, the political will to resist military intervention – from establishing new foreign bases to allowing foreign militaries to operate in a myriad of other ways – is negligible. Several pan-African platforms have emerged over the past decade to rectify this dependency, including the African Alternative Framework for Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation (1989), the Africa Mining Vision (2008), the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainable Development in Africa (2012), the Arusha Declaration on Africa’s Post Rio+20 Strategy for Sustainable Development (2012), the African Development Forum’s communique at the eighth summit (2014), and then culminating in the African Union’s adoption of the First Ten-Year Implementation Plan (2014-2023), outlined in the third document of Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want (2015). Each of these documents – with different levels of emphasis – points to the need to break the reliance on raw material exports, better manage the contracts signed with multinational companies, and use the resources earned from exports to improve the conditions of social life as encapsulated in the UN agreements on Sustainable Development Goals. The failure to properly harness resources and drive a people-centred development programme produces the social context for both political and military conflicts, including insurgencies that are often refracted along ethnic and religious lines, and for the expansion of migration around the continent and towards Europe. These two results of the deeper economic crisis of African states – conflict and migration – produce the surface-level excuse for countries like the United States and France to establish military bases on the continent.
In Central Africa, AFRICOM has been engaged for over a decade in training the army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), particularly in Camp Base, a military base just outside of Kisangani. According to a communiqué by AFRICOM in 2010, the military training would be ‘part of a long-term, multi-lateral US-DRC partnership to promote security sector reform in the country, [which] will assist the DRC government in its ongoing efforts to transform the Armed Forces of the DRC’. These relations between the DRC and AFRICOM have since deepened. A large discovery of oil (estimated to be 1.7 billion barrels) was made at the border of Congo and Uganda in the Lake Albert region in 2007. It is no surprise, therefore, to see that this region became heavily militarised. This is particularly evident in the town of Beni, North Kivu. Beni is the epicentre of scores of gruesome murders often attributed to the Ugandan rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which has operated in the Congo since the early 1990s. On 27 January 2021, a delegation of AFRICOM officers arrived in the DRC to discuss with the Congolese military the need for ‘cooperation and engagements, security and stability efforts, and working together to further professionalise the DRC military and strengthen ties’. On 10 March 2021, the US State Department designated the ADF as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation’ and ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorists’, although local organisations and the UN Group of Experts on the DRC say that there is no evidence to link the ADF to ISIS. The US State Department adopted this stance based on a claim made by the Bridgeway Foundation, the charity arm of the Texas-based investment firm Bridgeway Capital Management. This designation allows for an increased US military presence in the Congo. The main area for this presence will be adjacent to the oil reserves. The US military will also continue to provide stability for the African strongmen, who have come to rely on US support for their longevity.
European attempts to stop the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea have been futile. Foreign militaries have been used in the Sahel to limit migration and keep migrants as far as possible from the European border. That is partly why France assembled the G5 Sahel Initiative and why the US built the large drone base in Agadez, which provides important aerial surveillance of migration in the region. What the countries of Europe have done is to export their borders far from their own territory and to make sure that the harsh interdiction of refugees and migrants is done outside the coverage of their own media. This is a kind of arms-length outsourcing of the refugee crisis: the West gets to drive its terrible anti-migrant policies at the same time as it gets to appear innocent while its subsidiaries do its dirty work. Europe has moved its southern border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern rim of the Sahara Desert, now dotted with military bases from Mauritania to Chad. The surface arguments of conflict prevention and migration management are commonplace. But, once in a while, deeper motivations are clarified by some US officials. As Commodore John Nowell, who runs the Africa Partnership Station of AFRICOM, said in 2008, ‘We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t in [US] interests’. By ‘here’, Commodore Nowell meant the African continent. The New Cold War In the US government’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the authors wrote that, ‘Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential of any nation to militarily compete with the US and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US advantages’. In fact, China’s military capacity is largely defensive, since China has built up its military abilities in order to defend its coastline and its territory. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has emphasised that his country is committed to multilateralism: ‘China never seeks global hegemony’, he said on 24 April 2021. What the US planners more precisely indicate is that they would not like to see Chinese commercial and political power challenge the overall hegemony of the United States. As Commodore Nowell put it, US interests are the reason for the country’s presence in the region; any threat to those interests must be undermined by any means necessary. Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti 11.544409 | 43.14707 Source: Google Maps In 2013, the Chinese government inaugurated the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Prior to the formalisation of the BRI, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation was set up in 2000 between Beijing and, initially, forty-four African countries (fifty-three out of fifty-five countries on the continent have since established relations with China under the Forum). Since 2013, China has invested in almost all African countries, all of which – except for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) – have broken ties with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China. Over the years, China has signed several Memorandums of Understanding with the African Union, including one in 2015 within the framework of Agenda 2063 to support building infrastructure. China has invested large amounts of money in key infrastructure such as the Mali-Guinea rail project and the Sudan-Senegal railway line; in energy infrastructure, such as a 2600MW Mambilla hydropower project in Nigeria and the 400MW Bui Dam in Ghana; and in telecommunications, such as telecom equipment for Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Sudan. In December 2020, construction began on the new China-funded $80 million Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters south of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. There are now about 600 completed BRI projects globally. Chinese aid – unlike IMF aid, Western commercial investment, and overseas development assistance – does not come with the vice of debilitating conditionalities. Evidence for more favourable terms comes in the various agreements signed by China, but more than that, it comes from China’s theory of patient capital, which has until now been adopted within the boundaries of China but has slowly – through Chinese state banks – emerged as a major investor outside its territory. China is now the second-largest investing country in the world, with the China Export-Import Bank and China Development Bank being major investors. The loans that these state agencies provide are long-term investments and are not on short repayment schedules. China fully understands that its loans are given to release infrastructure bottlenecks and to therefore support social development. Borrower countries are given flexibility as benefits are forecast to come in the long-term. For example, 30% of the investment in Central Asia and 80% of the investment in Pakistan will not be recovered. Rather than develop its own humane commercial and development aid policy that would benefit the African people, the United States has opened up a ‘new cold war’ against China on the African continent. The development of AFRICOM in 2007 alongside the escalation of US and allied foreign military bases in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere are part of this New Cold War. Fundamentally, the New Cold War has been structured by a (mis)information war, which consists of two main elements:
The African Union In 2016, the African Union (AU) raised the issue of foreign military bases on the African continent. The discussion has not been deepened since then. The African Union’s dependence on external funding and resources for its operations, including peacekeeping, has limited its freedom to take independent, strategic, and tactical decisions in its operations. For peacekeeping, for instance, African states raise only 2% of the cost of the AU’s peace and security operations, while foreign funders – such as the European Union – provide 98% of the funds. This has constrained the ability of the Peace and Security Council to drive its own agenda and is why the AU has not been able to effectively continue the discussion around the foreign military bases. On 15 October 2003, Nile Gardiner and James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation in the US published a white paper called US Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution. They argued that the US government should create a US Africa Command that would intervene in Africa ‘when vital [US] national interests are threatened’ in the same tradition as was done in Latin America and the Caribbean with the establishment of the US Southern Command in 1963. This became a reality in 2007. Two African countries, Botswana and Liberia, indicated that they would be pleased to house the headquarters of AFRICOM. At that time, South Africa voiced opposition to AFRICOM’s move to the continent. Through AU intervention, both Botswana and Liberia backed off. The mood to prevent AFRICOM’s headquarters from being based on the continent remains amongst the African people. However, this has not stopped US and some African heads of state. In a meeting with the US Secretary of State Blinken on 27 April 2021, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari asked the US to relocate AFRICOM Headquarters from Stuttgart, Germany to the African continent in order to help fight insurgencies. Growing pressure from Islamic and other dissidents and increased instability in Nigeria may have been a contributing factor to President Buhari’s appeal, though he fell short of suggesting Nigeria as host for AFRICOM. Nigeria’s position is a major shift from its initial stand which, a decade ago, was against the presence of AFRICOM in Africa. Nonetheless, US military bases proliferated after that date. The AU referred to the danger of this proliferation in 2016 but, even at that time, all that the AU could muster were the tepid words: ‘concern’ and ‘circumspect’. Despite these words, AFRICOM insinuated itself into the AU with an attaché to the PSC and staff in the AU Conflict Prevention and Early Warning Division, as well as the Peace Support Operations Division. With the entry of AFRICOM into the AU in the name of ‘interoperability’ to link US military forces with AU peacekeepers, the US has begun to shape the AU’s security framework more directly. In his book on neo-colonialism in Africa, Nkrumah wrote: The danger to world peace springs not from the action of those who seek to end neo-colonialism but from the inaction of those who allow it to continue. … If world war is not to occur it must be prevented by positive action. This positive action is within the power of the peoples of those areas of the world which now suffer under neo-colonialism but it is only within their power if they act at once, with resolution and in unity. These words from 1965 ring true today. Camp Simba, Kenya -2.171847 | 40.897016 Source: Google Maps References: Campbell, Horace G. ‘The Quagmire of US Militarism in Africa’, Africa Development 45, no. 1 (2020): 73-116. Charbonneau, Bruno. ‘De Serval à Barkhane: les problèmes de la guerre contre le terrorisme au Sahel’, Les Temps Modernes 2 (2017): 322-340. de Montclos, Marc-Antoine Pérouse. ‘La politique de la France au Sahel: une vision militaire’, Hérodote 172, no.1 (2019): 137-152. Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Evrard, Camille. ‘Policier le désert. Ordre colonial, <<guerriers nomades>> et État postcolonial (Niger et Mauritanie, 1946-1963)’, Vingtiéme Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 4, no. 140, (2018): 15-28. Gwatiwa, Tshepo, and Justin van der Merwe, eds. Expanding US Military Command in Africa: Elites, Network, and Grand Strategy. New York: Routledge, 2020. Klin, Tomasz. ‘The Significance of Foreign Military Bases as Instruments of Spheres of Influence’, Croatian International Relations Review 26, no. 87 (2020): 120-144. Lutz, Catherine, and Cynthia Enloe, eds. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Luzzani, Telma. Territorios vigilados: Como opera la red de bases militares norteamericanas en Sudamérica. Buenos Aires: Debate, 2012. Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1965. Sun, Degan, and Yahia Zoubir. ‘Sentry Box in the Backyard: Analysis of French Military Bases in Africa’, Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia) 5, no. 3 (2011): 82-104. Turse, Nick. ‘Pentagon’s Own Map of US Bases in Africa Contradictions Its Claim of “Light” Footprint’, The Intercept, 27 February 2020. United States Government Accountability Office. DOD Needs to Reassess Options for Permanent Location of US Africa Command: Report to Congressional Committee. Washington, DC: GAO 13/646, 2013. United States Africa Command Public Affairs Office. Fact Sheet: United States Africa Command. 15 April 2013. Wang, Lei. ‘China and the United States in Africa. Competition or Cooperation?’, China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies 6, no. 1 (2020): 1–19. Vine, David. ‘No Bases? Assessing the Impact of Social Movements Challenging US Foreign Military Bases’, Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (February 2019): S158-S172. Vine, David. Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015. Yeo, Andrew. ‘The Politics of Overseas Military Bases.’ Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 1 (March 2017): 129-136. Yeo, Andrew. Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. AuthorTricontinental Institute This article was republished from Tricontinental. Archives July 2021 Image: People’s World. The following is a joint statement by the CPUSA International Department and communist and workers’ parties from around the world, published on SolidNet. The Communist and Workers’ Parties of the world wish to say in a loud and clear voice that we condemn the aggressive anti-communist rhetoric coming out of the latest meeting of NATO leadership. The U.S., the de facto leader of the NATO alliance, has made it clear that its interests lie in igniting a “new Cold War” centered around anti-Chinese and anti-communist propaganda. This is a threat to all workers around the world. Since the infamous “Pivot to Asia” under President Barack Obama, it has been clear that the U.S. capitalist elite has seen the rising successes and power of the People’s Republic of China as a threat to its unipolar, neoliberal world order. During the administration of Donald Trump, the U.S. government became increasingly aggressive in its anti-China and anti-socialist policies, and many began to talk about a “new Cold War.” Some might have hoped that with the election of a new president the U.S. might become less hostile towards the PRC, but they would now be greatly disappointed. In many ways, the foreign policy of the Biden presidency has amped up the hostility towards China and its largest strategic ally, Russia. At the most recent meeting of the leaders of NATO — an alliance that owes its entire existence to policies of anti-communist aggression — “new Cold War” rhetoric was abundant. NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg even said that “the rise of China” presents a security threat to NATO. Why does the world’s largest country’s lifting itself out of poverty constitute a security threat to the NATO powers? The answer is that it doesn’t. It does, however, constitute a threat to U.S. hegemony and capitalists’ profits. Both China and its strategic ally Russia find themselves surrounded on all sides by hundreds of U.S. and NATO military bases. Despite promises to not expand into Eastern Europe, NATO has continuously expanded closer and closer to Russia’s borders and is aiding anti-Russian, fascist forces in Ukraine while using economic sanctions to punish the people of Russia. The world cannot be allowed to descend into another anti-communist Cold War. Despite the name, the Cold War of the 20th century was more often than not a hot war and cost the lives of millions of people around the globe. From Southeast Asia to Africa and Latin America, millions of workers, those seeking freedom and a better world for themselves, and their families were slaughtered in the name of global capitalism. These wars did not spare the youth of the U.S. and its military allies. History cannot be allowed to repeat itself in an even more dangerous form. No new Cold War! Your party is invited to endorse this joint statement. SolidNet parties signing Communist Party of Albania Communist Party of Australia Democratic Progressive Tribune-Bahrain Communist Party of Bangladesh Brazilian Communist Party Communist Party of Brazil New Communist Party of Britain Columbian Communist Party Socialist Workers’ Party of Croatia Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia Communist Party of Denmark Communist Party of Finland French Communist Party German Communist Party Hungarian Workers’ Party Tudeh Party of Iran Communist Party of Kurdistan-Iraq Communist Party of Ireland Workers’ Party of Ireland Party of the Communist Refoundation Socialist Party of Lithuania Communist Party of Norway Philippine Communist Party (PKP-1930) Communist Party of Spain Communist Party of the People of Spain Communist Party of Ukraine Communist Party USA Other signatories Communist Party of Aotearoa Galizan People’s Union-UPG AuthorCPUSA International Department This article was republished from CPUSA. Archives July 2021 |
Details
Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|