7/19/2024 Review: Bill Buell – George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady (2019)By J.N. CheneyRead NowWith the surge in popularity of the Democratic Socialists of America since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, it can be argued that there’s likewise been a surge in the successes of municipal socialism. Granted this is only concerning the electoral prospects of a single organization, but at least according to Wikipedia, there are nearly 150 people holding various positions within municipal governments ranging from the Mayoral office to smaller positions such as being members of a school board between 31 different states in the US. To understand the potential of these electoral results, or even the lack-there-of, historical examples need to be studied to absorb the lessons of these experiments. Could Bill Buell’s work “George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady” serve as a lens into the achievements and shortcomings of socialism at the local level? Published in 2019, the county historian of Schenectady’s book holds the dual purpose of being a biography of George R. Lunn, a minister and politician, as well as more specifically examining his time as the only ever socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York. Lunn is also one of only four people to hold a mayoral office in New York State under some form of the socialist banner, as well as being the first to do so. The first seven chapters of this book touch upon Lunn’s early life and connections to the pulpit, as well as giving some historical context to the city of Schenectady and the standing of socialism within the United States in the early 20th century. To put it briefly, Lunn was born in Iowa in 1873, served very briefly as a chaplain during the Spanish-American War, and would later become ordained as a Presbyterian minister after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in 1901. In 1904 Lunn would move to Schenectady when he was named as pastor for Schenectady’s First Reformed Church. It was as a minister that Lunn began to gain prominence, being cited as an engaging and charismatic speaker, using his platform in the church to talk not only about religious affairs, but to address corruption within the city and speak of societal ills such as homelessness and child labor. The minister’s rhetoric would result in him leaving First Reformed in 1910, leading him to form his own congregation through the People’s Church and, soon after, officially joining the Socialist Party of America near the end of that year. Chronicling George Lunn’s entrance to the SPA introduces the real meat and potatoes of this biographical piece, his political career. Buell chronicles Lunn’s quick rise to popularity and his election to Mayor of Schenectady on the socialist ticket, taking office in 1911. The efforts of Lunn and his associates to implement elements of socialism within the framework of capitalism such as introducing free garbage pickup and a protracted effort to improve the city’s parks are laid out, examining how Lunn introduced these as well as displaying the struggles that came with working to implement such programs. Lunn’s administration faced issues with Republicans, Democrats, and the Progressive party trying to block him from following through with such economic and social programs, as well as issues within the Socialist Party itself. Particularly, there were individuals and factions who considered Lunn to be not “socialist enough” in his practices. Famed writer Walter Lippmann for a short time served as part of Lunn’s cabinet, and his reason for leaving stems from that very critique. With Lunn’s politics being influenced more by the Social Gospel and reformism than any sort of scientific socialism, these specific critiques do hold water. Buell does provide an astute recounting of Lunn’s involvement in the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913, with the Mayor serving as one of the primary catalysts in giving that struggle national attention, and bringing significant figures in labor history to New York’s Mohawk Valley as well as Schenectady, including Bill Haywood, Matilda Rabinowitz, Helen Schloss, Joseph Ettor, and more. Explaining how Lunn balanced his commitments as Mayor, his involvement in the strike, and his potential bid to run for Congress shows just how multifaceted Lunn was in his ability to juggle responsibilities. In that same vein, Buell covers Lunn’s struggles within and eventual leaving of the SPA after his second term as Mayor as well as his later career in a concise manner, though one could argue that it was too concise since he only spent three chapters including an epilogue covering Lunn’s career after this leaving the SPA. Given that this book is more specifically about Lunn’s first term as Mayor of Schenectady with some emphasis on his second, this is understandable. That being said, it would’ve been interesting and beneficial to see some more emphasis on Lunn’s third term as mayor and other political actions after leaving socialism. Bill Buell’s book is informative and is generally well-written and digestible. Buell doesn’t dive very deeply into the major theoretical conflicts between Lunn and other members of the party. Besides a brief mention of Lincoln Steffen’s dissolution with the Soviet Union, there is no explicit political bias being pushed by this book, no upholding of the socialist boogeyman that so many would use a piece like this to demonize. However, there are some shortcomings. The first being that since this book is self-published, even with the aid of the Troy Book Makers, a handful of typos managed to slip through the cracks. Though unfortunate to see, these can be forgiven as such typos are few and far between throughout the entire 200+ page book. The biggest problem to be found though is the use of one particular source. Buell utilizes the book The Red Nurse: A Story of the Little Falls Textile Strike by Michael Cooney as a source when introducing Helen Schloss and her role in the strike. For one, this is a piece of historical fiction. There are true elements to the book’s story, but to use a dramatization of historical events as an academic source shouldn’t be acceptable. Additionally, according to others who have studied the strike and the life of Schloss such as playwright Angela Harris, there are various inaccuracies in The Red Nurse. One example being that in the novel, Cooney says that Schloss resigned from a position she held in Little Falls in a rather vitriolic manner, when all actual accounts show that she resigned in a cordial manner. The story of George R. Lunn’s life and political career is not an unknown one given that there are a handful of academic articles and book chapters about the man and his career, as well as even having his own dedicated Wikipedia page. With that knowledge though, Buell’s piece serves as one of the only books dedicated to the life and times of the minister, the only other one that comes to mind being George Gardner’s The Schenectadians published in 2001. It’s not a perfect book given the aforementioned shortcomings, but George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady is worth reading and analyzing for a look at the popularity of socialism at the time in addition to the benefits and shortcomings of municipal socialism. AuthorJ.N. Cheney is an aspiring Marxist historian with a BA in history from Utica College. His research primarily focuses on New York State labor history, as well as general US socialist history. He additionally studies facets of the past and present global socialist movement including the Soviet Union, the DPRK, and Cuba. Archives July 2024
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7/17/2024 EDITORIAL: Sean O’Brien RNC Speech Shows Why an Anti-Monopoly Party Led by a Class-Oriented Labor Movement is Necessary By: S.M. CIFONE ATU MEMBERRead NowInternational Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) President, Sean O’Brien, to mixed reactions spoke to the Republican National Convention (RNC) Monday night. In a much-criticized speech, O’Brien gave a speech aimed more at the Conservative worker watching at home (and some who may be delegates in attendance) and not the ruling class elites in the room. O’Brien gave a carefully worded speech that show what many class-oriented trade unionists have been saying for a long time, the political system has thrown the American working class under the bus a long time ago. What should grab the attention of workers watching at home is the crowd’s reaction as O’Brien spoke, when speaking in vague, general terms of support for workers it was mostly applause, but when anything that could substantively benefit workers was mentioned the crowd went quiet. The IBT General President speaking at the RNC is a positive step in reaching Conservative workers who have largely been abandoned by business unionist misleadership. Despite saying things that aren’t usually allowed in mainstream political debate, like telling the American workers the corporate elite only have allegiance to profit, more is needed to bring political power back to the labor movement. “American workers own this nation” is a quote that received a mixed reaction in person, but should’ve struck a chord with the workers watching at home. There is truth behind this quote, but is simply playing two capitalist parties against each other enough for workers to exercise this ownership? No, it’s not, but Sean O’Brien breaking the Democratic stranglehold on union leadership provides an opening for class-oriented trade unionists to start a campaign to form a political party for the working class. We as class-oriented trade unionists must lead the way in shifting workers from a “left-vs.-right” political debate to a “Them vs. Us” class-based politics. The way forward is to build an anti-monopoly working-class party that unites all true progressive forces behind a vibrant and militant class-oriented labor movement. Like O’Brien said, “Most legislation is never meant to go anywhere, and it’s all talk”, the only way to change that is for the labor movement to lead the way out of the capitalist-controlled duopoly. AuthorThis article was produced by Labor Today. Archives July 2024 7/17/2024 The Commune, a Living Tradition for Pumé People in Venezuela By: Chris Gilbert, Cira Pascual MarquinaRead NowFor many indigenous peoples of Venezuela, the socialist commune is not new at all but resonates with existing and previous social practices that include communal land tenure and self-governance. That is the case for the Pumé community called “Coporo Indígena,” located in upper Apure just outside Biruaca. Due to its small population, this community is registered as a communal council rather than as a commune. The history of this Pumé settlement, which takes its name from the coporo river fish, parallels that of many Indigenous communities who have been systematically displaced from their land and made victims of structural violence. Although the Bolivarian Revolution brought important reforms and programs that favored the Pumé and other Indigenous peoples of Venezuela, many injustices still persist, awaiting resolution. The men and women living in the Coporo Indígena community formerly lived in San José de Capanaparo, near the Colombian border. However, in 1980, the family of cacique Mario García settled in the territory of what is now known as Coporo Indígena. Little by little they built houses, wells, and cleared 30 acres of land for growing corn, beans, topocho [small plantain], and planted a diverse medicinal garden. Last year, the community comprised 32 families. However, in January 2024, a new group of displaced families arrived on foot from San José de Capanaparo, having fled that region due to violence from irregular groups crossing the border. Today, Coporo Indígena is home to some 50 families who maintain their language and many of their traditions. In the following testimonies, three spokespeople discuss the community’s organization and economy, along with the impact of the U.S. blockade on their daily lives. SHORT HISTORY OF A PUMÉ COMMUNITY Mario García: Criollos [non-indigenous people] often ask us where we come from and we always tell them that we are from here, from this land that you and I call Apure. We were here before the invaders came; this was our home before they took our land and our wealth by violent means; we lived here before they tried to strip us of our culture and our cosmovision. The colonial system attempted to snatch life away from the Pumé people. Still, we have preserved and nurtured the cornerstones of our culture: our belief system, which is integrated with the earth; our organizational structure, which is centered on the community; our crafts, which were passed on to us by the elders; and our language, which is key to the integrity of our people. I was born in a Pumé community in San José de Capanaparo. In fact, everyone living in Coporo Indígena hails from Capanaparo. Some of us, myself included, came here in 1980, while others arrived just a few months ago. They are the victims of irregular groups of Colombian origin that penetrated the community and forced 17 families to quietly flee their homes on the night of December 24, 2023. COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION Mario García: Maintaining a close-knit community in which the land is not individually held but instead sustains everyone who works is integral to the Pumé way of life. Thus, the commune is nothing new for us. In Coporo Indígena, we are organized as a communal council because we are a small Indigenous island in a territory settled by criollos, but we live communally. Why do I say this? The 30 hectares of land we inhabit are cared for collectively: anyone who works the land will benefit from it, and nobody in our community will go to bed hungry if the land yields its bounty. Years ago, when this tract of land was assigned to us, the National Land Institute [INTI] wanted to divide it among the families that lived here then. We didn’t like the idea of dividing the land, so we had to confront the authorities. Fortunately, we succeeded, so the only fence that you will see now is the wire around the perimeter of the Coporo Indígena tract of land. We know that fences not only divide the land, but they also divide the community. In a Pumé community, problems are discussed in meetings and we develop a plan to solve them together. This is what Chávez talked about, but it’s nothing new for us. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t need outside help. In fact, we often do. For example, as a community, we have determined that our priority right now is access to water because our communal council grew overnight when our brothers and sisters from San José de Capanaparo arrived here in January. We need water pumps, which will allow us to increase our production, and we have requested government support to make that happen. Our ancestors lived in tightly-knit communities or communes, and this kind of organization continues to define our way of life. You may ask, why stick to the old ways? Because we are here to preserve our culture, our language, and our way of life… and there is only one way for this to happen: sharing what we have while living in harmony with nature. This is something that criollo culture has yet to learn. But we are not only a people of the past. We live in modernity, and that’s why we demand attention from the government: we too need homes, electricity, water, and roads as well as healthcare and education. We don’t shy away from modernity, but we don’t embrace it blindfolded. Gladys García: In criollo society, what is yours is yours, and what is mine is mine and there’s no two ways about it. In the criollo world, you may not know your neighbor and you aren’t likely to think much about the land where you stand, about nature, about the earth. In Pumé society, we all work together and share the little that we have: shelter, water, and other goods, while the care of the community and the land is everybody’s task. That’s why, when our brothers and sisters from San José de Capanaparo arrived here in January, we opened our doors to them. What do we expect from them? That they work like us and live like us. ECONOMY Mario García: The economic base of Coporo Indígena is farming, while back at home [San José de Capanaparo], the economic base is hunting, fishing, but also subsistence farming as well as craftwork. However, subsistence farming practices have been historically threatened by those who want to commodify the land. Our agricultural production at Coporo Indígena is hybrid, joining ancestral practices with modern ones. We don’t shy away from mechanization but we also deploy the knowledge passed on by our parents and grandparents. While we are set on preserving our culture, we are not a relic of the past: we aim to technify our production and improve and modernize our living conditions. We need farm equipment, better roads, and pumps to get water out of the wells. The latter is actually an urgent matter, particularly since a group of displaced families arrived in our community earlier this year. As it is right now, we have enough water to cook and drink, but we don’t have enough water to maintain our production. As an organized community, we are working so that the Consejo Federal de Gobierno [Venezuelan state institution that funds communal projects] finances the digging of new wells and the purchase of pumps. We have 30 hectares of collective land in Coporo Indígena. Of those, ten are designated for corn production. At the moment, our corn yield is about 1,500 kilos per hectare, but we can bump that up to 4,500 by improving the wells. We could also grow ten hectares of beans with an estimated yield of 1,500 kilos per hectare, amounting to 15,000 kilos per crop. However, this will only be possible if we can solve the water supply issues that we face. Gladys García: We make many of our own utensils from “tapara” [calabash], from plates to spoons to colanders. We weave our hats and slings to carry the babies out of macanilla [a type of palm] shoots. We make toys such as the trompo [top] and the bobotó [a ball]. We learned the craft from our mothers and grandmothers, and cherish it dearly. Much of the artisanal production that we sell is made with the “cogollo de macanilla,” which is a bush similar to the coconut palm that grows in San José de Capanaparo. We weave these goods for ourselves, but we also sell some of them so that we can buy rice and sugar. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get “cogollo de macanilla” lately, but we hope to be able to get it soon: when we have stock, we can make three hats in one day, and if we sell them at 5 USD per piece, that’s 15 dollars coming into our household! Daniel García: In San José de Capanaparo we grew yuca and made our own casabe, we also grew topocho, ñame, and ocumo [root vegetables]. The land there is communal; which means that nobody from the community is kept from working the land. The land in Capanaparo is less generous than this one, so we worked it for one year at a time and then let it rest. However, in Capanaparo we could hunt and fish all year round. We hunted with bows and arrows and we caught the babas [small caiman] with a harpoon. At night you could hunt them on the side of the river when they are sleepy. IMPACT OF THE BLOCKADE Mario García: Here, in Coporo Indígena, we didn’t go hungry even during the worst of the blockade: we make auyama [pumpkin] pancakes and yuca arepas; we also have a conuco [small, diversified plot of land] where we grow corn, beans, and topocho; and we have free-range chickens that lay the best eggs; so our stomachs didn’t go growling. Sometimes we were short on coffee or sugar, but we were able to sustain our community on our own. The blockade helped us re-learn one lesson: we have the tools to break with the outside world if need be. Our way of doing things is like the bee: we ensure our colony’s wellbeing today and we save part of our production for the winter [rainy season]. Then, whatever is left gets sold or exchanged for whatever we may need. Daniel García: In San José de Capanaparo we never went hungry: we grew some of our own food, we hunted chigüires [large rodents] and caimans, and the river was there to gift us as much fish as we could eat. What did we need from the outside? Sugar, salt, and little else. However, we have seen many problems emerge with the blockade and the crisis: in recent years, irregular armed groups have grown in Capanaparo. The phenomenon is an extension of the war in Colombia: I think the economic pressures endured by Venezuela offered good conditions for the expansion of these groups. This situation is what drove 17 families to leave our homes in San José de Capanaparo on Christmas Eve [2023]. The pressure to join the irregular groups was such that we had to quietly leave town on foot in the middle of the night: we left our houses, our pigs and chickens, everything we had, and walked away! A month later we arrived here, where we were received with open arms. Gladys García: We have seen the deterioration of our community’s health over the past few years. Now it’s hard for us to get medicines, and it is also hard to get to the hospital. When you go to the doctor, all they can do is give you a piece of paper with the medication you need written on it… but how is one to pay for it? Before the blockade, things were very different: we were able to get medicines, there were efforts to map the health situation of our community, and pregnant women got vitamin supplements and monitoring. However, we are not as dependent as other communities. We have our shaman, who visits us regularly while Señora Prudencia, our midwife, brings our children to this world in the Pumé way. Mario García: The impact of the crisis is indeed noticeable in our community. However, we have something that criollo culture doesn’t have: shamans. Shamans are our maximum authority; they teach us how to live in harmony with the earth and can cure many maladies with leaves and flowers, or with chants and ceremonies. That doesn’t mean that we are against what some call “scientific medicine.” Some ailments can be cured by our shaman, while others require conventional treatment. THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE INDIGENOUS STRUGGLE Mario García: Before Chávez came to power, state violence against us [Indigenous people] was part of everyday life: the displacement of Indigenous communities with the participation of police and military forces, who were at the service of the terratenientes [large-scale landowners], was not uncommon in Apure. The Marcos Pérez Jimenez dictatorship [1953-58] was particularly bloody. Back then, in Las Piñas [Guachara municipality, Apure], more than a thousand people were killed. The massacres didn’t end there, however, although they de-intensified. In 1996 or 1997, a large Indigenous family was massacred by the state’s repressive forces. The police and the armed forces have never been our friends. The revolutionary process saw an important reduction in violence against us [Indigenous peoples]. Additionally, we saw advances in political representation at the national level. Finally, the Bolivarian Process was important in the preservation of our ethnolinguistic practices: in school, many Indigenous kids around the country are learning how to read and write in their mother tongue, and many communities have direct control over the schools in their territory, although this happens with Ministry of Education oversight. That is the case with the bilingual school in our territory: the Paula Ruiz School has been under our purview since 2015, when we requested that it be transferred from the Ministry of Education to the community. With the Bolivarian Process, access to higher education also widened for Indigenous people like myself. When I was a kid growing up in San José de Capanaparo, we could only study through 6th grade. If we wanted to go on studying, the only option was a Catholic school. My family, like most Indigenous families, couldn’t pay the fees that the priests demanded, so Indigenous kids saw their education truncated. When Chávez came into power, I was able to graduate from high school via Misión Ribas. From there I went to Misión Cultura, where I got a degree in education. This would not have been possible without the Bolivarian Process. We have seen many advances over the past 25 years, but the historical debt of criollo society with us hasn’t been settled: many serious socio-economic problems, from housing to healthcare, persist, while structural violence is still present. There is a long road to go: we have many challenges, from historical injustices to the U.S. blockade. We need to be heard, but we stand with President Nicolás Maduro and with the Bolivarian Revolution. AuthorCira Pascual Marquina is Political Science Professor at the Universidad de Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas and is staff writer for Venezuelanalysis.com. This article was produced by Venezuela Analysis. Archives July 2024 Originally published: Morning Star Online on July 5, 2024 by Roger McKenzie (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Jul 10, 2024) THE Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang is at the geographical centre of Eurasia. The region borders eight other countries which makes it a vital part of Chinese plans for the greater integration of Eurasia and the westward opening up of this nation of 1.4 billion people. The Comprehensive Bonded Zone in the city of Kashi is central to co-ordinating the booming trade links that China has established with its immediate neighbours. Xinjiang, one of the largest regions in China, is a gateway to Russia, India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. It occupies around 643,000 square miles of China–a space larger than six Britains. Its sparse population of approximately 25 million is mainly Muslim and made up of around 65 different ethnic groups including Chinese Han, Uighurs, Kazakhs and Hui, among others. I lost count of the number of mosques that I saw during my recent trip. I visited a thriving Islamic Centre in the city of Urumqi–which has received millions in funding from the Chinese government for its development to teach its around 1,000 students. I had the honour of sitting in the mosque’s main hall attached to the centre alongside the imam and hearing him talk about the support the centre had received from the government. I also visited the magnificent and extremely busy Id Kah Mosque in the city of Kashi. Both times the imams took the time from their busy schedules to speak about how grateful they and worshippers at the mosque are for the support provided by the government. They told me about how the right to worship any religion is considered a private matter in China and protected in law. That’s why it provides funds to a wide range of religious bodies representing Muslims, Buddhists and Christians among others. None of this is recognised in the West. Instead tall tales are told about supposed widespread religious persecution. In particular Western politicians and their stenographers in the corporate media continue to spin untruths about the treatment of religious minorities. To be crystal clear: at no time did I witness any attempt to block anyone from being able to worship according to the Islamic faith or, for that matter, any other religion. I heard no criticism of the government over religious persecution from senior religious figures or anyone else I met during my visit. I was never stopped from speaking with anyone in any of the large crowds of people that I found myself in across the region. Having made the effort to actually visit five cities in 10 days in the region rather than pontificate from thousands of miles away, I can honestly say that for a country that supposedly routinely oppresses ethnic minorities China seems to spend an inordinate amount of time celebrating them. By that, I don’t mean the half-arsed patronising so-called celebration of diversity that now appears customary across Britain. Leading figures in Britain trip over themselves to take a knee and say how much black lives matter to them but continue to do nothing about racism in their organisations. It doesn’t look to me like a Black History Month-type gig where a big show is made for a short tokenistic period and then ignored for the rest of the time. Talking up the richness of the region’s cultural diversity wasn’t just an isolated thing in Xinjiang–it was everywhere. Celebrations of the Islamic culture were everywhere for anyone to see. I can already hear some saying that either I wasn’t looking hard enough or I was having the wool pulled over my eyes. I did look hard and I don’t believe an elaborate hoax was being played on me. I spoke with lots of people in private with no restrictions placed on me whatsoever. In fact, my dreadlocks, and I dare say, the colour of my skin, meant I was a target of curiosity, especially among the young, many of who wanted to come and chat and have a photo taken with me. That was frankly the most uncomfortable thing about the trip! What I saw was lots of people going about their business in much the same way as I have seen people trying to do in many parts of the world. I met many Communist Party officials who were questioned over the allegations made against them and their country. All of them said the only way to counter the propaganda war being waged against them was for people to come and see for themselves. They told me how hard they were working to open up the region to more tourism so that people could experience this beautiful area but also so more people could bear witness to the truth about them. So why is this propaganda war being waged against China in general and in particular against Xinjiang? The geographical position of the region provides the answer. As the centre of the Silk Road renaissance, the region will be the focal point of Chinese trade and its economic heartbeat. It means the continuing economic growth of China is disproportionately linked to Xinjiang. Its trade routes through its eight neighbours to its wider partners will be critical to sell Chinese-made goods as well as to buy the resources needed to continue to power the country’s economy. The U.S. is the world’s leading economy and wants to keep it that way. Its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance asserts that it will use any means necessary to maintain the pre-eminence of U.S. capital. I think we can take this to mean that the U.S. will not hesitate to spread misinformation about China. After all, it’s not as if the U.S. does not have form for this type of behaviour. They have been doing it for years, particularly across Africa and Central America where they buy organisations to ferment internal dissent against governments deemed not to be compliant. Sprinkled with an always unhealthy dose of sinophobia the move by the U.S. to undermine the reputation of China has largely economic foundations and false allegations of mistreatment against ethnic minorities–particularly the Uighurs–are completely without foundation. On the contrary, there seems to me to be far more evidence of the Chinese at a national and regional level actively celebrating cultural diversity as well as striving to put in place the economic prosperity that looks as though it is undermining attempts by terrorist groups–likely funded by the West–to sow discontent in Xinjiang. I will talk about this and the allegations of forced labour in some detail in the second part of this three series about my visit to China. In the meantime, to anyone reading this article in disbelief and who believes that either I am lying or have been the victim of what would be a truly elaborate hoax my suggestion is: go and see for yourself. It’s a long way away but I honestly believe you will be surprised by the wonderful vibrant people and cities that will greet you. This is the first of three eyewitness articles from Morning Star international editor Roger McKenzie on his recent visit to China. AuthorRoger McKenzie This article was produced by Morning Star. Archives July 2024 Originally published: In Defense of Marxism on May 24, 2024 by Ben Curry (more by In Defense of Marxism) (Posted Jun 24, 2024) Honoré de Balzac is renowned as a prolific literary genius and was one of Marx and Engels’ favourite authors. He was a pioneer of the Realist style that would be taken up by such famous authors as Émile Zola and Charles Dickens. In this article, Ben Curry explores Balzac’s Realist method, the predominant themes of his vast body of work, known collectively as The Human Comedy, and the fascinating paradox that lies at its heart. You’re deluding yourself, dear angel, if you imagine that it’s King Louis-Philippe that we’re ruled by, and he has no illusions himself on that score. He knows, as we all do, that above the Charter there stands the holy, venerable, solid, the adored, gracious, beautiful, noble, ever-young, almighty, Franc! The period between the great revolutions of 1789 and 1848 was one of unprecedented upheaval in France. This was the epoch of the galloping advance of the French bourgeoisie. At its outset, this class formed part of the oppressed ‘Third Estate’ under the absolutist Bourbon regime; by its close, it was the undisputed ruling class and had begun to transform French society in its own image. Contemporary with this era of storm and stress, at one and the same time its historian and the artist who best depicted its moving spirit, lived one of the giants of world literature, the father of the Realist novel, Honoré de Balzac. Balzac, a favourite of Marx and Engels, was no revolutionary. Quite the contrary. And yet, Engels was able to say of his immense literary output: There is the history of France from 1815 to 1848… And what boldness! What a revolutionary dialectic in his poetical justice! A lifetime of furious nocturnal work, fuelled by immense quantities of coffee (it is estimated that he drank 500,000 cups in his lifetime!), sent Balzac to a tragically early grave at the age of just 50. In two decades of work, however, Balzac penned no fewer than 90 novels, novellas and short stories—60 of them full-length novels, and dozens of them masterpieces in their own right. But Balzac’s novels, great as they are taken singly, cannot be fully appreciated other than in connection with each other. His tremendous opus, known collectively as The Human Comedy, represents a single, masterful panorama of French society from the fall of Napoleon until 1848: Paris and the provinces; soldiers, police spies and politicians; aristocrats and peasants; bankers, artists, journalists, bureaucrats, criminals and courtesans—all are expertly depicted with strokes that cut straight to the heart of their world. More than a portrayal of French society, it portrays bourgeois society as it was and as it is: petty, grasping and brutal. The Realist novel Balzac was born in 1799, the same year that Napoleon overthrew the Directory, marking the closing chapter of the French Revolution that had aroused and dashed such immense illusions among the downtrodden masses of France. One form of exploitation had been exchanged for another. In the words of Marx and Engels, “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions,” the bourgeoisie “substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” With the victory of the bourgeoisie, the authors of The Communist Manifesto explained how man was “at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” In the volumes of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s art acted like powerful smelling salts, assisting in sobering up this world whose illusions were crashing down around it, forcing it to look reality in the face. Instead of a retreat into an idealised past in the Romantic style then all the rage in France, we find the present, with its sores and all, fully on display. Balzac’s method was wholly materialist. Under the banner of ‘Realism’, it represented a new departure in literature and the arts at large. Stefan Zweig, in his essay on the genius of Balzac, gives a vivid description of his method: The idea—which he christened ‘Lamarckism’, and which Taine was later to petrify into a formula—that every multiplicity reacts upon a unity with no less vigour than does a unity upon a multiplicity, that each individual is a product of climate, of the society in which he is reared, of customs, of chance, of all that fate has brought his way, that each individual absorbs the atmosphere by which he is surrounded as he grows to adulthood and in his turn radiates an atmosphere which others will absorb; this universal influence of the world within and the world without upon the formation of character, became an axiom with Balzac. Everything flows into everything else; all forces are mobile, and not one of them is free—such was his view. Although Balzac explicitly rejected the label ‘materialist’, what is this but a clearly materialist method? And, what is more, it is an extremely dialectical method. Balzac intended The Human Comedy to be a complete, living representation of all the “social species” that inhabit the world, not simply a dry accumulation of ‘facts’. No art can ever hope to chronicle every one of society’s details; nor does it need to. The real purpose of art is to reach beyond the accidental in order to grasp deeper, more essential truths. Balzac didn’t need to portray 30 million Frenchmen and women to give a portrait of France. It was enough to capture the essential types of the age. With his pen, the 2,000 or so characters of The Human Comedy sufficed for this task. In The Human Comedy—perhaps counterintuitively for a work of Realism—we find men and women painted in bold, exaggerated colours, as Renaissance painters used the method of chiaroscuro, the bold opposition of dark and light, to highlight the drama in human expressions and motion. Balzac’s characters are frequently depicted as unusually singular in their passions. But they are all the more real for that fact: they form archetypes of their class and of their motivating passions. Baron de Nucingen stands in as the archetype of the whole class of millionaire bankers; Grandet plays the same role for misers; Gobseck for usurers; Crevel for bourgeois parvenus; Madame Marneffe for the bourgeois courtesan; de Rastignac and de Rubempré for ambitious provincials; and Vautrin for the whole criminal underclass of Paris. Just as the chemist breaks down for analysis the innumerable compound substances of nature into their purified constituent elements, so Balzac sought to “analyse into its component parts the elements of that compound mass which we call ‘the people’”. Balzac’s ability, as he put it, “to rise to the level of others”, “to espouse their way of life”, “to feel their rags on his shoulders” was something unequalled: I looked into their souls without failing to notice externals, or rather I grasped these external features so completely that I straightaway saw beyond them.
In the earliest novel in The Human Comedy, Les Chouans set in 1799, we meet the aristocratic leaders of the Chouannerie—a reactionary guerrilla rising in Brittany. In Les Chouans the Republican army is a disciplined fighting force, consisting of peasants who earnestly imagine their First Consul Napoleon to be the defender of the land they actually gained thanks to the Revolution. On the other hand the Chouan guerrillas, consisting of Breton peasants, are depicted as having joined the Royalist ranks merely to rob stagecoaches and the bodies of dead Republican soldiers—a practice solemnly sanctified at clandestine forest Masses by the Church. As for their aristocratic leaders, we get their full measure when they confront their leader to greedily press their demands for titles, estates and archbishoprics as reward for their continued allegiance to the King. In Lost Illusions and Père Goriot, we find the old nobility: petty, bigoted, two-faced and egotistical, restored once more in the saddle, thanks to the reactionary armies of Europe. But it was one thing for Louis XVIII to re-establish his Court and for the aristocracy to re-establish their salons in Paris, it was quite another to establish the old property relations on which the Ancien Régime once stood. France had been changed irrevocably, and money formed the new axis around which it now turned. The rising bourgeoisie pressed against the old aristocracy in every sphere: in the theatre box, in politics, in the press. The faded nobles might scorn admitting the upstarts to their salons, but it was to the Stock Exchange that they entrusted their fortunes. It was to the bourgeois timber agents that they sold the wood felled from the forests of their manors, and it was to the bourgeois usurer that they turned to fund their marital infidelities. In the provinces, where the nobility found itself on a slightly firmer footing, Balzac describes the most worthless rabble: All the people who gathered there had the most pitiable mental qualities, the meanest intelligence, and were the sorriest specimens of humanity within a radius of fifty miles. Political discussions consisted of verbose but impassioned commonplaces: the Quotidienne was regarded as lukewarm in its royalism; Louis XVIII himself was considered to be a Jacobin. The women were mostly stupid, devoid of grace and badly dressed; every one of them was marred by some imperfection; everything fell short of the mark, conversation, clothes, mind and body alike… Nevertheless, comportment and class consciousness, gentlemanly airs, the arrogance of the lesser nobility, acquaintance with the rules of decorum, all served to cloak the void within them. What is this if not a class that was doomed to extinction and deserving of its fate? Balzac’s beloved Catholic Church is depicted as little better. Like all the last bastions of the old order, it found itself besieged from all directions and forced to become bourgeois itself: “It stoops, in the house of God, to a disgraceful traffic in pew rents and chairs… although it cannot have forgotten Christ’s anger when he drove the moneychangers from the Temple.” In birth, marriage and death, we find the representatives of the Church, with their palm extended, collecting their fee at every stage.
Throughout The Human Comedy we can read fictitious accounts of the numerous, real tragedies of what family life in particular becomes under capitalism. We find fathers swindling sons; men wooing women for dowries; adulterous fathers ruining families to support mistresses; daughters placed on bread and water by rich and ‘thrifty’ miser-fathers; husbands aiding their wives’ infidelities for career advancement; children treated as chattel by parents. As Marx and Engels put it, The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. Criminals and capitalists Balzac’s critique touches in turn upon all aspects of bourgeois society, only a few of which can be mentioned here. In Père Goriot, a retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear in the bourgeois age, the real hero of that story, if he can be called such, is Eugene de Rastignac, an impoverished provincial nobleman. A new arrival in Paris, he is drawn between two ways to make his fortune: the ‘honest’ method, of seducing one of Père Goriot’s daughters, made wealthy through marriage to the banker de Nucingen; or through a shortcut involving the shedding of blood, offered by the branded criminal Vautrin. What is the difference? In the opinion of Vautrin, who counsels de Rastignac through his pangs of conscience, the difference is little more than moral and legal hypocrisy: There’s not one article [of the law] that does not lead to absurdity. The smooth-tongued man in his smart yellow gloves has committed murders without bloodshed, but someone has been bled all the same; the actual murderer has jemmied open a door; two deeds of darkness! The capitalist kills just as surely as the murderer, although without spilling a drop of blood himself. The words of condemnation thrown in the face of the whole of bourgeois society do not fail to hit their target on account of being placed in the mouth of a branded miscreant: Are you any better than us? The brand we bear on our shoulders is not as shameful as what you have in your hearts, flabby members of a putrid society. Ultimately, de Rastignac is forced to agree with Vautrin: He saw the world as it is: laws and morality unavailing with the rich, wealth the ultima ratio mundi. ‘Vautrin is right, wealth is virtue,’ he said to himself.
[The] only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac. In his day, the cause of the bourgeois republic as yet represented progress relative to the outworn, lingering relics of feudalism. In the years depicted in The Human Comedy, the class that would come to challenge bourgeois rule, the working class, remained as yet a largely unorganised mass; only just becoming conscious of its own interests; scattered throughout small and medium-sized workshops. It is undistinguished from the general mass of the urban poor in Balzac’s novels. But with his piercing insight, Balzac saw that the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ that the revolutionary republicans aspired to was a chimera that could only end in the naked rule of the bourgeoisie. In this assessment he was correct, and was proven so in the revolution that broke out in 1848, the same year that Balzac put down his pen for the very last time. This was also the year in which the working class of Paris rose up for the first time, arms in hand, under its own banner. Reciprocally, the bourgeoisie recoiled in fear from its revolutionary tasks, stooped down and allowed itself to be yoked by the adventurer Louis Bonaparte, and demonstrated all the decadence, cowardice and paltriness that Balzac had shone a piercing light on. What is left when we leave aside the reactionary dreams contained in Balzac’s work is a withering critique of bourgeois society and its hypocritical morality. The Realist method that he pioneered would inspire other great writers, like Charles Dickens and Emile Zola, to take up the task of depicting the conditions of the industrial proletariat. And it would also exert a fructifying influence on the authors of The Communist Manifesto, whose pages first saw the light of day in 1848, just as Balzac’s great literary career was drawing to a close. In The Communist Manifesto—much like in The Human Comedy—we see the unstoppable wheels of history in motion. For the backward-looking Balzac, it was a matter of deep regret that this onward motion destroyed his idealised old society, with its deference to the King, God and the Family. But Marx and Engels, on the contrary, looked ahead and saw how this same destructive power that Balzac depicted was also a tremendous creative power. It was laying the basis for a new, classless society, in which all the vices of class society that capitalism had brought to their apex would be done away with forever. AuthorBen Curry This article was produced by In Defense of Marxism. Archives July 2024 “The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole,” writes the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” What he has described are the nodal points where, after the contradictions within totalities intensify, conditions are created for great ruptures for qualitative leaps into new worlds. This is what multipolarity signifies. It is a geopolitical revolution, a qualitative leap into a radically new world. It is premised on the intensification of the contradictions inherent in the Western imperialist system, especially the unipolar form it took since 1991 when it had free reign to dominate the world after the fall of the Eastern socialist bloc. That was a time when the West proclaimed, laughably, that we had arrived at the “end of history.” The subject for this proclamation, of course, was Francis Fukuyama – but he spoke on behalf of the arrogance and hubris of the Western world as a whole. The West’s short-lived fantasy of the end of history has itself come to an end. As Vladimir Putin said in a seminal speech of September 2022, “The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation.” In proclaiming the end of history, the West showed an ignorance of the best insights its thinkers have provided to the world. How absurd is it that the civilization that gave birth to Heraclitus and Goethe and Hegel and Marx could come to naively accept such a static and historical position? It was Heraclitus who taught us that “everything flows and nothing abides” and that “everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” It was Goethe, speaking through Mephistopheles in Faust, the greatest work in the history of German literature, who wrote that “all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.” The unipolar world, dominated by the US and its NATO junior partners, came to be in the last decade of the 20th century. But, as Mephistopheles might have predicted, three decades later, we are seeing it perish wretchedly. We are in a period of transition where the drive, as Pepe Escobar has written, “towards a multipolar, multinodal, polycentric world” is evident. Putin, in his speech at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), called it a “harmonic multipolar world.” Here too, Putin is developing insights that should not be foreign to the West. “The world’s virtue,” wrote the great Pythagoras, “is harmony.” It is one that contains within it a relational complementarity between the many. It is a world, as Mexican economist Oscar Rojas has written, where nations and civilizations can function as Free Associated Producers – sovereign, unhindered by external powers seeking to unilaterally impose their will on the world. Putin is also here following in the footsteps of the insights developed by China’s civilizational state, as Zhang Weiwei calls it, which has always emphasized “building a harmonious society” and a “harmonious world” (the latter popularized by Hu Jintao), phrases developed from the ancient Chinese concept of taihe (overall harmony). It is a worldview in line with China’s constitutional commitment to “work to build a community with a shared future for mankind,” a frequent expression used by Xi Jinping and top Chinese leadership. This future is premised on developing a world that breaks from the unilateral imposition of one nation’s will over another and instead centers itself on win-win relations between sovereign nations and civilizations. The expansion of multipolar institutions such as BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, and others are beginning to build the skeleton for the new world. The proposals for a new BRICS+ payment infrastructure and an “apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments,” called The Unit, which is “anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%),” signifies significant steps toward de-dollarization – an integral component of breaking US global dominance and building a multipolar world. As an American, I inhabit a world that is crumbling wretchedly. While I look cheerfully upon the development of the new world (what I have called a post-Columbian, post-1492 world), I recognize that it is the elite of my country, those who our politicians represent, who are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their global system and abort the birth of the new world. The leaders of the West are right to assume that they are fighting an existential struggle. However, they’re wrong in postulating that what is at stake is "democracy" or Western values and civilization. Instead, what is actually at stake is their colonial and imperialist dominance over the whole world. What is actually at risk of perishing wretchedly is not the West per se, but the system – erected more than 500 years ago – which elevates the accumulation of capital to the level of supremacy, over and above the community, the individuals and families, and civilizational traditions. It is the system that brought forth the genocide of the natives, the enslavement of the Africans, the looting of the world, and the impoverishment, oppression, and indebtedness of working people within the West itself, it is this system, which stands as a vampire sucking the lifeblood of humanity, which is finding an end to its reign. Where does this leave America? Where does this leave Americans? We must recall the famous words of Peruvian indigenous politician Dionisio Yupanqui, uttered in his 1810 speech to the Cortes de Cádiz, “A people that oppresses another cannot be free.” The American people have not been benefactors of the global dominance of their imperialist government. For all their government’s talk of democracy, freedom, and government of, by, and for the people, what the American people have actually experienced has been an oligarchy, dictatorship, and government of, by, and for the owners of big corporations, banks, and investment firms. The so-called representatives of the American people have, all along, been in reality the representatives of the exploiters, oppressors, and parasitic creditors of the American people. What we have seen, as American political theorist Michael Parenti has written, is how the American empire has “fed off the republic.” In the words of Tupac, the American hip-hop sensation, the imperialist state has always had money for war but never to feed the poor. There are always hundreds of billions that can be scrambled for Neo-Nazis in Ukraine and for the Zionist entity to continue its genocide in Palestine, but never for infrastructure, for fighting poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance, and for guaranteeing housing and healthcare – there is never money for lifting the living standards of the hard-working people upon whose backs and labor the existence of the country is premised. If multipolarity means an existential threat to the American elite, what does it mean for the American people? Quite simply – HOPE. The real enemies of the American people are those who wish to colonize Russia, China, and Iran… those who sanction a third of the world’s population and who seek to loot the resources and super exploit the labor of foreign lands. It is those – currently being defeated by Russia and the Axis of Resistance in multinodal frontlines – who send our countrymen abroad to lose limbs, scar their souls, and sometimes return in caskets, all to murder people whom they had more in common with than the filthy parasites who sent them there and who profited from their misfortune. The real enemies of the American people are those who keep us poor, indebted, and desperate, and it is this same enemy – and the system they’re a personification of – that the multipolar world is challenging. The interests of the American people, therefore, are in line with the interests of the Russian struggle against NATO encroachment, of the Axis of Resistance’s struggle against the Zionist entity, and of China’s struggle against US encirclement, delinking, and provocations in Taiwan. The interests of the American people, in short, are aligned with the bourgeoning multipolar world. It is in the interests of America to be a pole in the multipolar world. America, as a young civilizational project, is in many ways similar to China. China’s ancient (yet highly modern) civilization emphasizes, as Zhang Weiwei writes, the “Confucian idea of unity in diversity.” But so does the American project, at least its best parts – the parts the people are most fond of. The Confucian idea of unity in diversity is captured in E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), the motto of the United States. Here we find an acknowledgment of the importance of pluralism that is contained within monism, that is, of particulars that are contained within a totality through which they obtain their meaning, and reciprocally, influence its general trajectory. The premises for accepting America as a pole within the multipolar world are, therefore, already present in the values the American people accept as common sense. We would be a part of that complementary many, of that multiplicity, which would both be conditioned by the new relations of a multipolar world but reciprocally capable of playing a constructive role in its development. This could be the future the American people are incorporated in once the world dominated by their parasitic leaders is brought down. However, this transition will never be offered to us by those same interests who threaten humanity with a global holocaust via a third, nuclearized, World War to sustain their decrepit hegemony and global power. America’s incorporation into this bright new future can only be, as was our revolution in 1776, a product of a deep struggle against the old, decaying world of our oligarchs and political class. It is a world that has to be won by the fighting spirit of the American people. As the cleavage in our country between the elite and the people becomes more pronounced than ever before, it will be the forces that can give the people’s varied forms of dissent some coherence, unity, and direction, which will ultimately win out. Only then can America be incorporated as a constructive partner in the building of a multipolar world. Only then, when our society is actually of, by, and for the people, will the impetus of global dominance be squashed, and America find itself as a participant in building a community with a shared future for mankind. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. This article was first published in Al Mayadeen. Archives July 2024 Much of the world is tired of monsters and seeks not a "re-set" but a rebirth of its original identities and historical legacies… which have been held too long hostage by a ruthless all-devouring Empire. Since the early 1900s, Mackinder's "Heartland doctrine" dominated the geopolitical mindset and actions of the West (primarily the British, but also Nazi Germany adopted this obsession). The strategy initially envisaged the undermining, dismantling and total takeover of the "Russian Empire"… the domination of the entire European and Asian continents would follow… and then the rest of the world. As Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Friedmann of Stratford pointed out, it was always about controlling the rich resources and geopolitical position of Russia and Asia. But following WW2, during the ensuing Cold War, this essentially British agenda no longer seemed to be the order of the day, as the imperial and colonial centre of power had shifted away from the UK to the US… and the US had already begun pursuing its many imperial ambitions in other parts of the world to expand its own influence (through various wars, proxy wars and conflicts around the world (Vietnam, Korea, West Asia, Africa, Central, and South America). For a while (in historical terms: 1945-1989) it seemed as though the "Heartland Doctrine" no longer had any relevance. In reality, it led a shadowy existence, as no one spoke about it openly… because a certain group – the neocons – did not yet have enough sway over the politics and public opinion of the US… But we know now that they remained engaged in this agenda behind the scenes. The global geopolitical situation began to shift in the late 1980s. (And the big change came abruptly in 1989 with the Fall of the Wall in Berlin and the end of the Soviet Union.) The haste and zeal with which first Gorbachev and then Yeltsin sought to bring about and implement changes and "reforms" in the giant Soviet empire proved later on to be counterproductive, if not fatal, and not only led to the collapse of the USSR but also severely debilitated Russia. This was compounded by the Soviets' ingenuous belief that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the enmity and the ideological conflict with the West would also disappear… and that "normality" would take its place. (Yeltsin to Jeffrey Sachs, from 1:19:08: "We want to be normal.") But exactly what the Russians (or the Soviets) understood back then by "normality" (with regards to capitalism/US imperialism) remains unclear to this day. Following this dramatic downfall, Russia was economically, militarily, politically, culturally and socially devastated. The Western elites around the neocons, intoxicated with the unexpected "victory" over their "enemy", set out to devour Russia and the rest of the former USSR. They saw themselves as the undisputed autocrats of the world according to the motto: "winner takes all". Now nothing stood in the way of the true "American dream", namely the domination of the entire world – excepting perhaps those few smaller states that had not yet recognised this paradigm shift or were not prepared to accept it. To deal with those pesky obstacles, neoliberal tools came to the rescue: infiltration, the corrupting of governments and their elites, colour revolutions… and, if those didn't help, bombing and terror. The first bombs fell on Iraq in 1990; in 1999, NATO, helmed by the US, bombed Yugoslavia; then followed the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria… According to US General Wesley Clark (link), seven countries were to be invaded within five years and subjected to "regime change": Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. In the meantime, the unstoppable eastward expansion of NATO began, despite the promises made to Russia. Russia's offer of a partnership between equals and even its participation in NATO was rejected. Instead, the US demanded Russia's subordination to its hegemony… but this was rebuffed by Yevgeny Primakov (1999 – "the U-turn across the Atlantic") and again by Vladimir Putin… who has now set Russia on a whole other set of sovereign tracks. Today, while the neocons remain "stuck behind at the Mackinder station" of an outdated, festering British imperialist agenda… the locomotive of The Grand Eurasian Project is speeding ahead on newly laid tracks - not seeking hegemony but harmonic partnerships in a new and multipolar world. The descent into irrationality The centuries of imperialist hegemony of the Western elites, which had secured a life of progress and prosperity for themselves and their subjects at home by deliberately preventing these very advantages for others - a key principle of colonialist ideology that guaranteed them success - led to the moulding of their psyche, general mindset, personality and ultimately their identity, the effects of which can be seen in their supremacy, racism, fascism, and hubris. However, the Western elites began to fear that their liberal capitalist system would collapse sooner or later, with the consequence that they (the elites) would be confronted with serious and dangerous economic, political and social upheavals, revolts, revolutions at home, and a loss of power and hegemony on a global scale. Their wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the bellicose tensions created by them in the South China Sea, as well as the actions, statements, and reactions of Western politicians and their media, clearly demonstrate their desperation. In the face of resistance and opposition from other nations, Western elites have always responded with threats, sanctions, and the corruption of their leaders, and if these were not effective they resorted to covert terror ops, proxy wars, and ultimately hot wars. But now they are standing on the edge of their own abyss, and the abyss is gazing back into them. The mere thought of losing power and prestige is fuelling their insanity. Their growing panic led them to become increasingly irrational in their decisions, leading them to make reckless misjudgements and grave errors. Their own states became saturated with Russophobia, Islamophobia, cancel culture, the arming of police and security agencies for counter-insurgency purposes, detrimental immigration policies, the defamation and persecution of opposition figures, the synchronisation of the media, the breakdown of infrastructures, of education, of society itself, a general erosion of morals and ethics… and a Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, who are concocting deranged plans for the future of mankind. The agony of the Empire: it cannot win, and it cannot walk away… The "Cold War" was "cold" because a kind of military balance was created between "East" and "West", as both sides consisted of territories with nuclear powers. Today, not much has changed from a nuclear-military point of view with regard to the possession of nuclear weapons. However, the situation back then (during the Cold War) required politicians and elites in the West to think and act realistically and rationally, which is no longer the case today – and that is the critical point at which we find ourselves. The point has been reached where the West can only decide in favour of a retreat… or a fight to the finish, as it is ultimately an existential battle for them. And - seeing as there are currently too many insane people, contemptuous of human life, in political and military leadership positions in the Western camp who operate according to the motto "all or nothing" and "if we don't get to have it, no one else should get it either" - it seems they are deciding in favour of fighting to the bitter and final end, which could lead to nuclear Armageddon. With such a mindset, the West has led itself into an extremely desperate situation that is typical of people who are suicidal, with one difference: the West has chosen to play the role of suicide bombers. But a third potential option for the Western elites might be - if they still refuse to admit their defeat but were at least able to finally feel deterred by a nuclear threat - that they create a new division in the world between "the West and the Rest" by erecting sine Iron Curtain of their own and … a kind of new "Cold War", during which they would go on living in a bubble where they could remain under the illusion of preserving their supremacy in a delusional manner… like a patient in a psychiatric clinic who cannot be cured but has at least been pacified. This sorry state of affairs is best manifested in the figure of the "most powerful man in the world" (as promulgated by the Western propagandists): Joe Biden (aka Genocide Joe). The figure of Biden – almost by some "cosmic coincidence" - embodies today's Western world. He is in fact its icon... moribund and rotting... with a zombified view of the world, clinging not to life but only to ruthless power… and completely out of touch with reality. Without realising it, Tucker Carlson just described in this video (in which he says: "Biden is dying in real time") not just Biden's condition, but the condition of the entire Western hegemony. The Hegemony has nearly reached its end… but it is not going quietly. The other side… entering an era of new global perceptions and visions for harmony and cooperation The decaying state of the West has led to the empowerment of more and more non-Western states, starting with China, Russia, Iran, India, South Africa, Brazil… all of whom already had their own bitter historical experiences with the supremacist and violent nature of Western colonialism. Following the formation of BRICS and other such alliances, other non-western countries have begun to turn away from the West and seek more opportune alliances and harmonious partnerships. In Asia and elsewhere in the world, a multi-nodal, poly-centrist, multipolar system is now emerging, spearheaded by a resurgent Russia, that is not per se "anti-West", but rejects its several centuries old colonial hegemony and its "rules-based order" and yearns for a new world founded on justice and equality. Much of the world is tired of monsters and seeks not a "re-set" but a rebirth of its original identities and historical legacies… which have been held too long hostage by a ruthless all-devouring Empire. AuthorTariq Marzbaan Independent researcher of geopolitics, colonialism; Filmmaker This article was produced by Almayadeen. Archives July 2024 When they push to automatically assign you for the draft, it means they will try to force you to fight for them if you don't want too. Record Low Recruitment: It is no secret that the US among many western nations is facing record low recruitment levels. So it is no surprise why the US would, as global tensions rise, push a bill that would make any adults between 18 to 26 years old be automatically added to the selective service military draft. Meaning when you turn 18, or you are between the ages of 18-26, your name will be automatically listed and pulled if the draft is ever initiated for war. With the exception if you are mentally or physically incapable. This has sparked nation-wide anger as it completely removes the choice millions of Americans wanted; since many, with the increase of technology, have seen how utterly useless most of these wars are, as many of these wars was for profit and hegemonic power/influence. Global Tensions Rising: Global tensions are beginning to rise as nations around the world are getting tired of us sticking our nose into other nation’s business, and worse creating a crisis that didn’t exist prior because the country we hate decided to take charge of their own destiny. As BRICS rises and multipolarity becomes a new reality with major nations like Russia, China, Iran, Palestine, DPRK and others deciding how they want to rule their nations and space; the US is acting more belligerent as the global south begins moving away from doing business with the US and US Dollar. Now, as the tensions rise, the US aims to prepare for war with either Russia, China, Iran, DPRK or others who continue to rule without US corporate domination or US geopolitical bullying. Especially and most likely with China. Which is no surprise as China is overtaking the US economy and military. You Don’t Owe the US Government a Damn Thing: Americans, your government has abandoned you; they’ve increased your prices while letting your wages suffer. They have increased tracking on you and placed 2 million of you on a watchlist for questioning them. They have taxed you several times in several ways to cover the cost of a over bloated military budget to abuse foreign nations. They have let corporations find new ways to rob us of every penny with not a single one of those corporations being properly punished. They divided you with propaganda to make you hate each other, they gaslit you to believe two parties owned by the same corporations and hedge funds will have your interests at heart, and that the US election will save us. This year of 2024 there is 37.9 million Americans suffering poverty and in 2023 78% of the entire population lives paycheck to paycheck while 3 men own as much wealth as half the nation and 3 million Americans have as much wealth as 291 million Americans. You do not owe this backwards, hateful, and violent government a damn thing. They have abandoned you, it is your turn to abandon them. The only solution at this point, if the US wishes to force us to fight their corporate war to maintain a imperialist global bully, is to turn on the imperialist machine. Revive the anti-war movement, revive the labor movement, revive the socialist movement. Rebel in all ways that bring the machine to a grinding halt. AuthorIslamic Socialist This article was produced by Islamic Socialist ML. Archives July 2024
In the year of the Russian presidency of BRICS, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) had to deliver something special.
And deliver it did: over 21,000 people representing no less than 139 nations – a true microcosm of the Global Majority, discussing every facet of the drive towards a multipolar, multinodal (italics mine), polycentric world. St. Petersburg, beyond all the networking and the frantic deal-making – $78 billion-worth clinched in only three days – crafted three intertwined key messages already resonating all across the Global Majority.
Message Number One:
President Putin, a “European Russian” and true son of this dazzling, dynamic historic marvel by the Neva, delivered an extremely detailed one-hour speech on the Russian economy at the forum’s plenary session. The key takeaway: as the collective West launched total economic war against Russia, the civilization-state turned it around and positioned itself as the world's 4th largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP). Putin showed how Russia still carries the potential to launch no less than nine sweeping – global – structural changes, an all-out drive involving the federal, regional, and municipal spheres. Everything is in play – from global trade and the labor market to digital platforms, modern technologies, strengthening small and medium-sized businesses and exploring the still untapped, phenomenal potential of Russia's regions. What was made perfectly clear is how Russia managed to reposition itself beyond sidestepping the – illegitimate – sanctions tsunami to establishing a solid, diversified system oriented towards global trade – and completely linked to the expansion of BRICS. Russia-friendly states already account for three-quarters of Moscow’s trade turnover. Putin’s emphasis on the Global Majority’s accelerated drive to strengthen sovereignty was directly linked to the collective West doing its best – rather, worst – to undermine trust in their own payment infrastructure. And that leads us to… Glazyev and Dilma rock the boat. Message Number Two: That was arguably the major breakthrough in St. Petersburg. Putin stated how the BRICS are working on their own payment infrastructure, independent from pressure/sanctions by the collective West. Putin had a special meeting with Dilma Rousseff, president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). They did talk in detail about the bank’s development – and most of all, as later confirmed by Rousseff, about The Unit, whose lineaments were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik: an apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments, anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%). The day after meeting Putin, president Dilma had an even more crucial meeting at 10 am in a private room at SPIEF with Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Macro-Economy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Glazyev, who had previously provided full academic backing to the Unit concept, explained all the details to President Dilma. They were both extremely pleased with the meeting. A beaming Rousseff revealed that she had already discussed The Unit with Putin. It was agreed there will be a special conference at the NDB in Shanghai on The Unit in September. This means the new payment system has every chance to be at the table during the BRICS summit in October in Kazan, and be adopted by the current BRICS 10 and the near future, expanded BRICS+. Now to… Message Number Three: It had to be, of course, about BRICS – which everyone, Putin included, stressed will be significantly expanded. The quality of the BRICS-related sessions in St. Petersburg demonstrated how the Global Majority is now facing a unique historical juncture – with a real possibility for the first time in the last 250 years to go all-out for a structural change of the world-system. And it’s not only about BRICS. It was confirmed in St. Petersburg that no less than 59 nations – and counting – plan to join not only BRICS but also the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). No wonder: these multilateral organizations now finally have established themselves on the forefront of the drive towards the multimodal (italics mine) – and to quote Putin in his address – "harmonic multipolar world". The Top Sessions for Further Reference All of the above could be followed, live, during the frantic two and a half days of forum’s sessions. This is a sample of what were arguably the most engaging. The broadcasts should be very helpful as references going forward – all the way to the BRICS summit in October, and beyond. On the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and Arctic expansion. Best motto of the session: “We need icebreakers!” The essential discussion to understand how the current global trade supply chains are not reliable anymore and how the NSR is faster, cheaper and reliable. On the BRICS business expansion. On the BRICS goals for a true new world order. On the 10 years of the EAEU. On the closer integration between EAEU and ASEAN. The BRICS+ roundtable on the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). This session was particularly crucial. The key actors of the INSTC are Russia, Iran and India – all BRICS members. Actors on the margins which will profit from the INSTC – from the Caucasus to Central and South Asia – are already interested to be part of BRICS+. Igor Levitin, a top Putin advisor, was a key figure in this session. The Greater Eurasia Partnership (GEP). This was an essential discussion on what is eminently a civilizational project – in contrast with the collective West’s exclusionary approach. The discussion shows how GEP interlinks with SCO, EAEU and ASEAN and stresses the inevitable complementarity of transport, logistics, energy and payment structure all across Eurasia. Glazyev, Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk and former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl – always ultra-sharp – are key participants. Extra – astonishing – bonus: Adul Umari, acting Minister of Labor in Taliban Afghanistan, interacting with his Eurasia partners. On the philosophy of multipolarity. Conceptually, this session interacts with the GEP session. It offers the perspective of a concise inter-civilizational dialogue under the framework of BRICs+. Alexander Dugin, the irrepressible Maria Zakharova and Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University are among the participants. On Polycentricity. That involves all Global Majority institutions: BRICS, SCO, EAEU, CIS, CSTO, CICA, African Union, the renewed Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Glazyev, Maria Zakharova, Senator Pushkov and Alexey Maslov – director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University – discuss how to build a polycentric system of international relations. As Project Ukraine Faces Doom… Finally, it’s inevitable to contrast the – hopeful, auspicious – mood at SPIEF with the collective West’s hysterics as Project Ukraine faces doom. Putin made it quite clear: Russia will prevail, no matter what. The collective West may rekindle “the Istanbul solution”, as Putin noted, but modified “based upon the new reality” in the battlefield. Putin also deftly defused all the pre-fabricated, nonsensical nuclear paranoia infesting Atlanticist circles. Still, that won’t be enough. On the packed corridors at SPIEF, and in informal meetings, there was total awareness about the Hegemon’s desperation-fueled warmongering masked as "defense." There were no illusions that the current dementia posing as “foreign policy” is betting on a genocide not only for the sake of the “aircraft carrier” in West Asia but mostly to cow the Global Majority into submission.
That would raise the serious possibility that the Global Majority needs to build a military alliance to deter this – planned – Global War.
Russia-China, of course, plus Iran and credible Arab deterrence – with Yemen showing the way: all of that may become a must. A Global Majority military alliance will have to show up one way or another: either before the – incoming, planned – disaster, to mitigate it; or after it has totally engulfed West Asia into a monstrous, vicious war. Ominously, we may be nearly there. But at least St. Petersburg offered glimmers of hope. Putin: "Russia will be the heart of the multipolar harmonic world." Now that’s how you clinch a one-hour speech. AuthorPepe Escobar
This article was produced by Sputnik International.
ArchivesJuly 2024 Some more insights into the thinking behind the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (BSW), which is polling at 14 percent. In October 2023, 10 members of the German parliament (Bundestag) left Die Linke (the Left) and declared their intention to form their own party. With their departure, Die Linke’s parliamentary group fell to 28 out of the 736 members of the Bundestag, compared to the 78 members of the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD). One of the reasons for the departure of these 10 MPs is that they believe that Die Linke has lost touch with its working-class base, whose decomposition over issues of war and inflation has moved many of them into the arms of the AfD. The new formation is led by Sahra Wagenknecht (born 1969), one of the most dynamic politicians of her generation in Germany and a former star in Die Linke, and Amira Mohamed Ali. It is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW) and it launched in early January 2024. Wagenknecht’s former comrades in Die Linke accuse her of “conservatism” because of her views on immigration in particular. As we will see, though, Wagenknecht contests this description of her approach. The description of “left-wing conservatism” (articulated by Dutch professor Cas Mudde) is frequently deployed, although not elaborated upon by her critics. I spoke to Wagenknecht and her close ally—Sevim Dağdelen—about their new party and their hopes to move a progressive agenda in Germany. Anti-War The heart of our conversation rested on the deep divide in Germany between a government—led by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz—eager to continue the war in Ukraine, and a population that wants this war to end and for their government to tackle the severe crisis of inflation. The heart of the matter, said Wagenknecht and Dağdelen, is the attitude to the war. Die Linke, they argue, simply did not come out strongly against the Western backing of the war in Ukraine and did not articulate the despair in the population. “If you argue for the self-destructive economic warfare against Russia that is pushing millions of people in Germany into penury and causing an upward redistribution of wealth, then you cannot credibly stand up for social justice and social security,” Wagenknecht told me. “If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium, while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe that you would stand up for the millions of employees whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of whole industries brought about by the rise in energy prices.” Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless his government is able to solve the pressing problems engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse this image. Rather than try to push for a ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine, Scholz’s coalition of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, say Dağdelen, “is trying to commit the people of Germany to a global war alongside the United States on at least three fronts: in Ukraine, in East Asia with Taiwan, and in the Middle East at the side of Israel. It speaks volumes that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock even prevented a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the Cairo summit” in October 2023. Indeed, in 2022, Thuringia’s prime minister and a Die Linke leader, Bodo Ramelow, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the German federal government must send tanks to Ukraine. When Wagenknecht calledGaza an “open-air prison” in October 2023, the Die Linke parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch said that he “strongly distanced” himself from her (the phrase “open-air prison” to describe Gaza is used widely, including by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967). “We have to point out what is happening here,” Dağdelen tells me, “It is our duty to organize resistance to this collapse of Die Linke’s anti-war stance. We reject Germany’s involvement in the U.S. and NATO proxy wars in Ukraine, East Asia, and the Middle East.” Controversies On February 25, 2023, Wagenknecht and her followers organized an anti-war protest at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that drew 30,000 people. The protest followed the publication of a “peace manifesto,” written by Wagenknecht and the feminist writer Alice Schwarzer, which has now attracted over a million signatures. The Washington Post reported on this rally with an article headlined, “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in Germany.” Dağdelen tells me that the bulk of those who attended the rally and those who signed the manifesto are from the “centrist, liberal, and left-wing camps.” A well-known extreme right-wing journalist, Jürgen Elsässer tried to take part in the demonstration, but Dağdelen—as video footage shows—argued with him and told him to leave. Everyone but the right-wing, she says, was welcome at the rally. However, both Dağdelen and Wagenknecht say their former party—Die Linke—tried to obstruct the rally and demonized them for holding it. “The defamation is intended to construct an enemy within,” Dağdelen told me. “Vilifying peace protests is intended to put people off and simultaneously mobilize support for repugnant government policies, such as arms supply to Ukraine.” Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration, but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says, must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD. “Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me, “we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone to that party out of frustration and in protest at the lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.” The point of her politics, Wagenknecht said, is not anti-immigration as much as it is to attack the AfD’s anti-immigrant stand at the same time as her party will work with the communities to understand why they are frustrated and how their frustration against immigrants is often a wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said, “that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus to pro-working-class politics. Polls show that the new party could win 14 percent of the vote, which would be three times the Die Linke share and would make BSW the third-largest party in the Bundestag. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter Archives July 2024 |
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