“Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!” sang the young comrades attending the 2021 Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City at a rally in support of striking Alabama mine workers last Wednesday. The school was hosted by the CPUSA NY District and Chelsea Education Fund. Forty-seven young Communists representing CPUSA districts and Young Communist League clubs in Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Washington, DC, California, Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, and Arizona attended the 10-day school. Morning and afternoon classes ranged in topic from historical and dialectical materialism and the U.S. labor movement today to the struggle for women’s equality and the fight against racism. Guest lecturers included Marxist scholar Vijay Prashad and World Federation of Democratic Youth president Aritz Rodriguez. Former CPUSA chairman John Bachtell taught a class on Marxist environmentalism in which he emphasized how the fight against global warming is the broadest struggle we can engage in due to the fact that it affects everyone. After all, there is no class struggle if there is no planet to fight it on! CPUSA co-chairpersons Joe Sims and Rossana Cambron led the discussions around petty bourgeois radicalism and the political moment of today, respectively. Students were able to distinguish the special role of the Communist Party in the struggle for socialism and democracy in comparison to other groups in the wider movement. They also learned how to differentiate Marxism-Leninism from sectarian trends on the left. Chauncey Robinson, a staff member of the People’s World, talked about the importance of the working-class press and its role on social media. CJ Atkins, another staffer with the People’s World, spoke to the students about the victories and shortcomings of the CPUSA’s role in the fight for LGBTQ equality, a conversation which students greatly appreciated because of its “honesty, self-criticism, and transparency,” as one student from Virginia put it. But the students didn’t just sit in a classroom all day learning about theory: they put that theory into practice. From mutual aid drives at public housing complexes to tabling in Union Square, the young Communists learned how to engage working people on all sides of the political spectrum and even gained a few recruits in the process. The students also had the opportunity to march alongside Medicare for All advocates and striking United Mine Workers from Alabama. “They were so happy to see us,” said an attendee from Illinois. “They even came over and took a picture with us and sang the old union songs with us.” “And let’s not even get started with the food!” stated another comrade from North Carolina, referring to the various cuisines provided by the CPUSA NY District to let the students try the flavors that immigrants from around the world brought to NYC. “Greek, Arab, Caribbean, Chinese, Italian, Thai, and Indian all in one week? This is the beauty of internationalism and the USA. Immigrant workers make this country great.” The school provided students with the tools to go back to their clubs and districts to build up the Communist Party, Young Communist League, local unions, and other aspects of the democratic movement around the country in which the “communist plus” is needed. To help sustain future schools for young Marxists, please contribute to the Chelsea Education Fund here. 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 produced by CPUSA. Archives August 2021
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8/16/2021 Black women laundry workers finally get their due as organizers and leaders. By: Beatrice LumpkinRead NowA strike by the Laundry Workers Industrial Union. Featured on the cover of Jenny Carson's 'A Matter of Moral Justice', and in Julia Reichert's 1976 film, 'Union Maids'.
The right to organize was key to unionizing laundry workers for the first time way back in 1937. That right was guaranteed by the Wagner Act, passed just two years earlier in 1935. In 2021, the right to organize is again a key issue for workers and for the AFL-CIO, the country’s top labor union body. They are demanding that Congress pass the PRO Act—the Protect the Right to Organize Act. While only 11% of the U.S. labor force belong to unions, surveys have shown that 65% would join a union if they had the chance. There are lessons in Moral Justice for the next big organizing drive that the AFL-CIO is sure to launch as soon as the PRO Act passes. This reviewer has a personal reason to welcome Carson’s book. In 1937, I was on the team of CIO organizers working with laundry workers. Then I worked in laundries until 1941. Before Moral Justice was published, little had been written about laundry workers. Carson does a good job of exposing the extreme exploitation of laundry workers by their employers, with low wages, hard physical labor, bad working conditions, racism, and gender inequality all defining the industry. Black women and other women of color have made up the majority of laundry workers for the past 100 years. So it is fitting that Moral Justice centers on the fight for equality for women and for Black workers on the job and for full representation as leaders of the union. In covering laundry workers’ struggles through the stories of two Black women leaders, Carson has chosen inspiring subjects. Dolly Robinson grew up in North Carolina, moved to New York City at 13, and became a laundry worker and union activist at 15. Despite the hard days of work in the laundry, Robinson continued to take classes at night. At 24, she was appointed to the Laundry Workers Joint Board’s (LWJB) Education Department, becoming director at age 26. Charlotte Adelmond grew up in Trinidad, then part of the British West Indies. In 1924, she joined her sister in Harlem and found work in a laundry. The Garveyite movement was then strong in Harlem, and Adelmond joined, stirred by the militant Black Nationalist message. Soon, she settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and again found work in a laundry. She was a fearless defender of workers’ rights and a strong voice for equal rights for women as well as a fighter against racism. After the newly organized CIO laundry workers were taken over by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Adelmond was elected business agent of Local 327. She was re-elected again and again, a tribute to her effective leadership. Adelmond and Robinson were at the heart of what Carson describes as “the extraordinary activism of a group of workers who, in the face of incredible odds, tried to build a democratic union committed to racial justice, economic dignity, and gender equality.” Carson begins the story with a look at the 1912 strike of inside laundry workers. From the early days of the power laundry industry, the owners had established racist and gender-based bars to the higher-paid jobs. The drivers who picked up the dirty wash and delivered the laundered clean linens and clothes were the highest paid. Only white men were hired as drivers. In the early 20th century, the AFL organized each trade separately. In 1912, the inside laundry workers who did the washing, ironing, and packing were organized in AFL locals that were separate from the laundry drivers and engineers. Black women were in the majority among inside workers. The strike of the inside laundry workers in 1912 is called an “uprising” by Carson. She explains that it was part of the same upsurge demanding “Bread and Roses” that formed the needle trades unions. The laundry strikers won the support of the Women’s Trade Union League, a middle- and upper-class organization that was well-financed. At a later date, the WTUL also supported the fight by Adelmond and Robinson for Black leadership and women’s equality. However, the 1912 laundry strike was lost, largely because the drivers continued to work. The need to unite all trades within a plant in the same union was a lesson learned by those who formed the CIO in 1935. That strategy was called “industrial unionism.” “Communist Laundry Organizing” is the title of chapter 5 in Carson’s book. Starting in the Bronx, a staff of 30 CIO organizers signed up tens of thousands of laundry workers in the Laundry Workers Industrial Union-CIO. As one of those organizers, I remember the number as 20,000 and that half of the organizers were Communists. As supporters of industrial unionism, Communist Party members had earlier taken the lead to organize a Laundry Workers Industrial Union. In a way, that gave them a head start when the CIO started its organizing drive among laundry workers in 1937. But on the company side, the owners did not want to negotiate contracts with a fighting laundry workers union. At this point, the all-white leadership of the ACWA clothing workers union used its clout with the national CIO to “take over” the newly-organized laundry workers union and its 20,000 members. Soon, the democratic culture of the Laundry Workers Industrial Union—a culture that empowered the membership—was replaced by top-down decision-making by ACWA officials. Naturally, the workers fought back to defend union democracy, but they were not united. Another hindrance was the fact that the whole country was in the grip of anti-communist hysteria by 1939. Anti-communist attacks did not end until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor forced the U.S. to ally with the Soviet Union in World War II. In the poisonous atmosphere of those pre-Pearl Harbor days, the officers and business agents of local 328 were put on trial—me included. The charge against us said nothing about our work in the union. The only “charge” was that we were Communists. Some of us were and some were not; that was a false issue. We had been elected because we fought for the rights of laundry workers. All of us were found “guilty” by the two judges, top national officers of ACWA. We were then expelled from the union and our local was placed in receivership. Meanwhile, another fight for laundry union democracy was going on elsewhere in the union, led by Charlotte Adelmond, business agent of local 327. The ACWA-appointed manager began appointing local officers instead of allowing the laundry locals to continue to elect them. Often, elected Black officers were replaced by white appointees. In 1941, Adelmond publicly accused the manager of racism and was punished with three months suspension as business agent. She won her job back, thanks to her members’ support and influential friends. Both Adelmond and Robinson continued the fight for Black representation and women’s rights until 1950. Then, both were forced out of the union, ending Adelmond’s many years of fighting for laundry workers. Fortunately, Dollie Robinson had continued her studies, winning a law degree. In 1956, she became the New York State Commissioner of Labor. Both women helped lay groundwork for the renewed civil rights upsurges in the 1960s and to date. Carson clearly exposes the contradiction between the public statements and the practice of the social democratic leadership of ACWA, now renamed Workers United. After 1937, they controlled the Laundry Workers Joint Board, their affiliate. In public, these union leaders, all white, spoke up against racism and in defense of women’s rights. But in practice, they actively prevented qualified Black leaders from rising to the top of the laundry workers union whose membership was majority Black and female. Without representative top leadership, without empowering the union membership, the union did not have the strength needed to stop the extreme exploitation of laundry workers at the hands of the laundry owners’ association. In Carson’s chapter 5, she featured the work of Jessie Taft Smith in developing the fight against racism and kindly includes my work as well. Taft Smith had been my mentor in the CIO’s Laundry Workers Industrial Union. Carson quotes her throughout the book because of Taft-Smith’s knowledge of the laundry industry and union. Also, Taft Smith lived to 100 and was available for interviews. Moral Justice mentions but does not explain, the Communist campaign against remnants of racism inside the Communist Party itself. This campaign educated white as well as Black members. Mark Naison, in his Communists in Harlem During the Depression, neatly sums it up: “The drama of the Yokinen trial [August Yokinen, a CP member accused of making racially disparaging remarks – B.L.] had impressed upon white Communists, in no uncertain terms, that it was their duty as Communists ‘to march at the head of the struggle for Negro rights’.” The Communist Party’s prioritizing of the fight for Black equality played a key role in developing the civil rights movement of the 1930s and 40s. That movement centered around the fight to save the lives of Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Nine. Carson’s book shows that laundry workers were deeply involved in all of these struggles that paved the way for the Black Lives Matter Movement of today. I believe that the attempts to build a fighting, democratic union of laundry workers would have had a better outcome in 1941 if there had been unity between the Communist-led forces and the Adelmond-Robinson forces. But that would have taken willingness on the part of both groups. This need for left unity, also left-center unity, remains an important challenge for labor to this day. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice By Jenny Carson University of Illinois Press Hardcover, paper, and e-book editions AuthorBeatrice Lumpkin is a long time labor activist with laundry workers, steelworkers, and teachers. As a math professor at Malcolm X College in Chicago, she fought to restore the contributions of people of color to the educational curriculum. She has served as a multicultural consultant to textbook publishers and to public schools in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Portland, Ore. She is the author of “Always Bring a Crowd, the story of Frank Lumpkin Steelworker” and “Joy in the Struggle, My Life and Love.” Beatrice Lumpkin is an active member of the Teachers Union and SOAR. This article was produced by People's World. Archives August 2021 8/15/2021 Mass firing on Earth Day: Audubon staffers Respond with Unionization vote. By: Mark GruenbergRead NowPublic demonstration in Washington, D.C. from the Audubon For All Union website. NEW YORK and WASHINGTON (PAI)—Can you imagine a national pro-wildlife, pro-environment non-profit organization firing 100 of its staffers on Earth Day? The National Audubon Society did so to its field staff this past April. The combination of two rounds of firings—including that one–management turmoil and a “toxic work culture” at the nationwide organization for bird-watchers has led staffers to organize into the Audubon For All Union and try to become members of the Communications Workers. The result: A formal union certification election filing with the National Labor Relations Board on July 1, covering 124 remaining workers at Audubon’s national offices in New York City and D.C., but not its directors, supervisors, guards, HR employees, or employees of Audubon’s state and regional affiliates and nature centers. Ballots will be opened August 27. “Much of our organizing was prompted by the two rounds of layoffs,” starting with the one on Earth Day, worker Maddox Wolfe, a fundraising campaign manager and one of the drive’s organizers, told Press Associates Union News Service in a telephone interview. “The Earth Day layoffs affected workers at our nature centers who interface with the public.” Those workers around the U.S. aren’t in the bargaining unit, but their vulnerability alerted the headquarters workers to their own peril, too. “We saw this (layoff) as ‘a truth moment’ in which workers really needed support,” Wolfe said. The chaos at the society didn’t stop Audubon’s new CEO from hiring notorious union-buster law firm Littler Mendelson to stop CWA’s organizing drive even before the workers delivered their certified majority of signed National Labor Relations Board election authorization cards, and sought card-check recognition. The CEO flatly refused. She also pledged society neutrality during the drive, then reversed course. The Audubon workers also discovered another key fact workers at other non-profits, especially progressive ones, realize: You may be working on a mission—in their case bird and wildlife habitat conservation—but you’re still a worker. Besides, Wolfe said, “Being organized and having a union will help better our mission.” “This has been an extraordinary year and a half for everyone” as the coronavirus pandemic shut Audubon’s two headquarters, forcing everyone to work remotely—and forcing the layoffs, she reflected. “It really demonstrates the strength and resilience of Audubon workers to organize” even as the modern-day plague spread coast to coast. Union organizing has also fostered a “sense of collegiality” across Audubon, stretching from the headquarters to the field, she noted. “We were siloed in the past” with headquarters workers having little contact with field workers, Wolfe explained. “I have met and now know colleagues from across the country. “We’re creating a stronger mission and a stronger organization,” she added. And Audubon For All notes that collegiality extended to society members. Once the workers went public with the unionization drive, more than 10,000 members petitioned headquarters in favor of the union. Pro-worker comments from Audubon Society members are posted on the union’s Instagram page. In its statement about the organizing drive, Audubon For All also cited management’s decision to ignore workers’ voices, its lack of transparency, top-down decision-making, unfair treatment of women, and a health care cost hike imposed on workers in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. An independent audit uncovered an Audubon “culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism” towards workers of color and female workers. “I’ve seen several of my coworkers let go with zero warning and watched my health premiums go up—all during a pandemic,” grant accounting department manager Safiya Cathey told CWA in their release. “I want to be focused on combating climate change and saving birds’ habitats, not whether I’ll be able to afford a doctor’s visit. In order to fight for the birds, we need to fight for ourselves, which is why this union is so important.” Since the drive began, the workers also had a chance to reflect on changed conditions: They re-entered the D.C. office earlier in August, to deliver the pro-worker petitions. It was their first time there since the pandemic began, Wolfe said. The delivery occurred after workers held a nearby and cheerful public demonstration. They’re excited and optimistic about the balloting. “We were different people than when we had left” more than 14 months before, she added. “We got up to the offices and it was dead silent. Even management had left.” The workers left the petitions from Audubon’s members on a top officer’s desk. The Audubon workers aren’t the only ones in a conservation-minded non-profit group who are unionizing. Office and Professional Employees Local 2 recently announced the NLRB is close to setting a voting date for Defenders of Wildlife staffers. “We’re incredibly excited to be moving forward,” worker Kelly Russo said. And, unlike Audubon, the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity agreed to card-check recognition for its workers, who will be joining CWA Local 9415. “Joining the labor movement makes the Center for Biological Diversity an even stronger advocate for threatened communities, wildlife, and wild places. At this pivotal moment for our planet, we’re standing with workers against big polluters and other powerful interests,” the Workers for Biological Diversity Organizing Committee told CWA. “We’re stronger when we band together. And we want to thank our partners at the Communications Workers of America for helping us elevate and amplify our work.” AuthorMark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. This article was produced by People's World. Archives August 2021 8/15/2021 History as upheaval and progress enters stage with novelist Walter Scott. By: Jenny FerrellRead NowFray at Jeannie Mac Alpine’s (1836). Engraving by George Cruikshank of a scene from 'Rob Roy'. | Walter Scott Image Collection, Edinburgh University. CC BY 2.0 History is vanishing from school curricula; historical awareness is deliberately erased. Novels in historical settings portray characters as ahistorical, no different to 21st-century people, transporting a sense that people never develop, that society cannot and will not change. Such misrepresentation of the historical process fuels the sense that the world cannot be understood and any effort to change it for the better of humankind is ultimately futile. The history of literature shows that another kind of historical novel is possible, one that shows history as upheaval, people themselves as historical. Walter Scott and the historical novel Walter Scott, admired by his contemporaries Goethe, Pushkin, and Balzac, celebrated by Lukács as the founder of the historical novel, was born in Edinburgh 250 years ago on August 15, 1771. Born into the upper-middle class, his family preserved a sense of tradition of one of the great Scottish clans. This included folk heritage. Like Robert Burns, Scott grew up with the songs and legends of Scotland. He collected them and reflected them in his own work. This cultural awareness was accompanied by a deep sense of national identity.
Scott’s interest in Scottish border ballads led to his collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03), in which he endeavored to restore orally corrupted versions to their original wording. This publication made Scott known to a wide audience. His epic poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), was followed by further lyrical romances. During these years, Scott led a very active literary and social life. At the same time, he was deputy sheriff of Selkirkshire from 1799 and clerk of the court in Edinburgh from 1806, as well as part-owner of a printing press and later publishing house, which he saved from bankruptcy. Personal financial crises increasingly impacted on the course of his career and his writing became determined by the need to pay off debts. His estate in Abbotsford, furnished with many antiquarian objects, also consumed vast sums. In 1813, Scott rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had begun in 1805, which he rapidly finished in the early summer of 1814. This novel Waverley, about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, was enthusiastically received. Like all of Scott’s novels written before 1827, Waverley was published anonymously. A born storyteller and master of dialogue in both Scots dialect and aristocratic etiquette, he was able to portray sensitively the whole range of Scottish society, from beggars and farm laborers to the bourgeoisie, the professions, and the landowning aristocracy. Scott’s sensitivity to ordinary people was a new orientation. He convincingly portrayed outlandish highlanders as well as the political and religious conflicts that shook Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scott’s masterpieces include Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and his most popular novel, Ivanhoe (1819). Unfortunately, the haste with which he wrote his later books affected Scott’s health as well as his writing. In 1827, his authorship of the Waverley novels became known. In 1831, his health deteriorated badly and he died on September 21, 1832. Scott’s times Scott lived and wrote in an era of enormous upheaval: Revolutions in France and North America, uprisings in Haiti and Ireland, the Napoleonic wars, the expansion of the British Empire, its domination of the seas, the slave trade, the uprooting of large sections of Britain’s peasantry through enclosure for the purpose of sheep farming, increasing capitalist “rationalization” of the countryside, large-scale highland clearances evicting highlanders from their land. The beginnings of the Industrial Revolution consolidated the power of the bourgeoisie, and the first political organizations of the working class emerged. Such density of dramatic events suddenly made the course of history, the progression from one society to another, directly tangible. History unfolded before everyone’s eyes and, it seemed, could be influenced. This is the shifting ground on which Scott’s historical novel is set. In addition, literary production in Scotland and Ireland flourished. Here, on the colonial edges, questions of history and cultural identity, colonialism, and anti-colonialism sharply crystallized. This begins in Ireland with Swift and his magnificent writings against British colonial power from the perspective of the Irish people as early as the 1720s. In Scott’s time, the Irish people speak in their idiom in Maria Edgeworth’s novels. While England in the 18th century is preparing for the Industrial Revolution, politically it is already a post-revolutionary country, following the English Bourgeois Revolution of 1649. The emergence of the historical novel As Georg Lukács argues convincingly in The Historical Novel, this genre emerges with Scott at this time. There had been novels with historical themes in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, their characters and plots were taken from the time of the authors, who did not yet grasp their own epoch as historical. Scott’s novels introduce a new sense of history to the English realist novel tradition. While Scott neither creates psychologically profound individuals nor reaches the level of the rising bourgeois novel, he vividly embodies for the first time historical-social types. His main characters’ conflicts give artistic expression to social crises. The task of the protagonists is to find neutral ground on which the opponents can coexist. The main characters are usually tied to both camps. Pointing out a middle path is typical of Scott’s novels; this is where his political conservatism expresses itself. For Scott, outstanding historical figures are representatives of a movement that encompasses large sections of the people. This passionate character unites various sides of this movement and embodies the aspirations of the people. Through Scott’s plot, readers understand how the crisis arose, how the division of the nation came about. It is against this background that the historical hero appears. The broad panorama of social struggles illuminates, as Lukács writes, how a particular time produces an heroic person, whose task it becomes to solve historically specific problems. These leaders, directly linked to the people, often overshadow the main characters. Historical authenticity is achieved through condensed dramatic events and the collision of opposites. By interweaving personal fates of people with historical upheavals, Scott’s narrative is never abstract. Ruptures run between generations, between friends and affect them deeply down into their personal lives. Scott’s great strength lies in the credible narration of human relationships in the historical age depicted. IvanhoeWith Ivanhoe, Scott reaches far back into history. The novel is set around 1194, when the Norman Richard the Lionheart—King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou—returns to England from his various adventures in the Crusades and from prisons in Austria and Germany. The Anglo-Saxon Ivanhoe, loyal knight in Richard’s army, also appears in England in disguise. The central historical conflict of the novel is between the Anglo-Saxons of England and the Norman conquerors. The people are largely Anglo-Saxon, the feudal upper-class Norman. Parts of the Anglo-Saxon nobility, deprived of political and material power, still retain some aristocratic privileges and form the ideological and political center of Anglo-Saxon national resistance to the Normans. Yet Scott shows how parts of the Anglo-Saxon nobility sink into apathy, while others await the opportunity to reach a compromise with the more moderate sections of the Norman nobility, which Richard the Lionheart represents. When Ivanhoe, the title character and also a supporter of this compromise, disappears from the novel’s plot for quite a time and is overshadowed by secondary characters, this formal structure illuminates the historical-political reference to an absent compromise. The characters who overshadow Ivanhoe include his father, the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Cedric, unflinchingly insisting on anti-Norman positions, who even disinherits Ivanhoe because of his allegiance to Richard’s army, as well as his serfs, Gurth and Wamba. Above all, however, this includes the leader of the armed resistance against Norman rule, the legendary Robin Hood. The true heroism with which the historical antagonisms are contested comes, with few exceptions, from “below.” The folk figures are depicted with great vitality and nuance, while the antagonists tend to be stereotypes with little development. But neither does Ivanhoe change. Isaac the Jew is also stereotyped, although the same cannot be said of his daughter Rebecca, who captures the reader’s heart. Letters to Scott complained that Ivanhoe does not marry Rebecca at the end, but the comparatively pale Anglo-Saxon Rowena. The author rejected such an ending as historically indefensible. Scott proves himself here once again to be a defender of the middle road. The future belongs to Ivanhoe, knight in the service of the moderate Norman Richard the Lionheart and son of the anti-Norman Anglo-Saxon Cedric. His marriage to Rowena points to this middle ground. Scott, in depicting historical conflict in the lives of the people, shows the energies ignited in the people by such crises. Consciously or unconsciously, as Georg Lukács notes, the experience of the French Revolution is in the background. Rob RoyPublished in 1817, this novel is, along with Ivanhoe, among Scott’s most famous. Written in 1816, practically 100 years after the events it describes—the first Jacobite uprising of 1715—the aim of the rebellions was to restore the Catholic Stuart dynasty and Scottish independence. At the same time, Scott sketches the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots still living in clans, especially in the character of Rob Roy Mac Gregor. In this character, Scott creates a genuine folk hero with passionate humanity that lends heroic traits to this clan society. Rob Roy is nevertheless an individualized character, initially in disguise, a constant presence, and also a benchmark of heroism in this novel. Not only is he a center of passion in the novel, but his language is also deeply poetic. Thereby, the reader experiences the failure of the rising and the defeat of clan society as a tragic event. Typically for Scott, Rob Roy is not the novel’s main character. That is the narrator Frank Osbaldistone, son of a London merchant who refuses to join his father’s successful business and is sent to live with his uncle in Northumberland on the Scottish border. Instead of him, cousin Rashleigh enters the business. When the latter steals money and disappears with it to Scotland, Frank follows him and so meets Mac Gregor. This English narrator takes the neutral place, the common ground; Osbaldistone’s family lives on the Scottish border. At the end of the plot, he marries his Catholic cousin, Diana Vernon, who is closely associated with the Jacobins, thereby achieving a union between Presbyterians and Catholics envisaged by Scott. Vernon is a confident woman as is the indomitable Helen Mac Gregor. Both are highly intelligent people who are in complete command of their scenes. It is also important that Scott writes his extensive dialogue scenes in Scots dialect. This establishes a bond between characters and Scottish readers. Before him, Robert Burns had also written in the vernacular. To this day, this dialect establishes identification with ordinary Scots, as underlined by the two Scottish Man Booker prize winners, James Kelman and Douglas Stuart. Scott even ventures into Gaelic, translating these short expressions for the reader. Scott’s numerous annotations are culturally and historically enlightening. The Heart of Midlothian The novel following Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, is set over 20 years later, in 1736-37. Midlothian is an historic county with Edinburgh as its capital; the Heart of Midlothian, however, is its prison. The novel opens with the Porteous riots. Porteous, Captain of the City Watch, ordered his men to bloodily suppress a riot during a public execution in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in April 1736. He was lynched by the angry crowd for killing innocent civilians. As Arnold Kettle has noted, Scott unfolds a large social spectrum here, ranging from the urban underworld to the queen. At the center is Jeanie Deans, from a rural, puritan background who speaks in Lowland Scots. This young peasant woman is perhaps Scott’s greatest female character. Her unmarried sister Effie is accused of infanticide. Merely keeping a pregnancy secret was punishable by death under Scottish law at the time. Forced to conceal the birth to protect her father, Effie insists that she has not harmed the newborn. Despite great empathy for her sister’s fate, Jeanie’s puritan conscience forbids her to commit perjury that could save her sister. This is simply historically true and not modernized. Effie is sentenced to death, and the penniless Jeanie sets off for London to seek a pardon from the Queen. The trial is the central event, revealing clashing values and worlds, the conflict between David Dean’s old rural world and the world of the modern money-centered city. Jeanie’s struggle to save her sister reveals her deep humanity and courage. It shows that in crisis situations heroism can burst forth in ordinary people that is not visible in everyday life and of which people themselves are often not even aware. She proves what strength and heroism there is in the people when the situation calls for it, as it happens time and again in history. Scott brings history to life with such a portrayal of human resilience in a specific historical situation. Scott’s hallmark is depicting personal experience as part of history. Readers encounter outraged people in the Porteous Riots. Scott conveys the genuine conflict between the people and the guards, as well as the bitter hostility of the Scots towards the English state. The events clearly involve more than seduction and rescue. The second half of the novel is less successful, as Scott depicts the world not from the peasants’ point of view, but from that of the romanticized landowner, precluding realism. Parallel to the central conflict between city and country runs that between Scotland and England. Scott’s Edinburgh is not a random setting, but a Scottish city in a concrete historical situation. Scott’s characters are never outside their time. He reflects the complex relationship between personal and social forces in a person’s life. With his portrayal of historically specific circumstances and the vitality of his ordinary people, Scott prepares the ground for Dickens. Dickens, who came from the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, would little later make the ordinary people of London the heroes and heroines of his novels. AuthorDr. Jenny Farrell was born in Berlin. She has lived in Ireland since 1985, working as a lecturer in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. Her main fields of interest are Irish and English poetry and the work of William Shakespeare. She writes for Culture Matters and for Socialist Voice, the newspaper of the Communist party of Ireland. This article was produced by People's World. Archives August 2021 Tony Benn: Democracy and Marxism Tony Benn was one of the most distinctive political figures of the past 70 years. His views on the economy, The EU and foreign wars put him at odds with the political establishment and many within Labour, his own party. Tony Benn often gave us almost sage-like comments on society and the politics surrounding it, his speeches and talks reflected the deep richness of well thought out arguments delivered by a master orator. Tony Benn was a remarkable man with great gifts that he put at the service of his country. But just as importantly, and he would have emphasised this, he was in a tradition of radical socialists. He wanted his epitaph to be ‘He encouraged us’. It is from his works and reproduced speeches and writings many socialists find a little light and understanding. In his own words, Benn explains the dangers and repercussions of the Labour Party moving away from its core values and its Left-wing political doctoring’s. This resulted as we well know, in the collapse of the Labour Party under Blair, until it re-established its Left-wing credentials under Corbyn. Benn writes: “I am an example of someone who moved to the left as I got older. I have known many people who were very left-wing when they were young who ended up as Conservatives. But the experience of government made me realise that Labour was not engaged, as it said it was, in changing society but to make people change to get used to the society we had.” -Tony Benn. On the Blairites, a centrist political ideology that now forms the foundations of Sir Keir Starmer’s hollow ideology of Starmirisim, Tony Benn pointed out the collapse of public support for Blairism, and why: “We are paying a heavy political price for 20 years in which, as a party, we have played down our criticism of capitalism and soft-pedalled our advocacy of socialism.” He also said, as is today within the Labour party: “To be embarrassed by socialism was very much a characteristic of New Labour.” The Labour Party is once more heading down the road to nowhere, led by the centrists liberal elite, who have no real values or understanding of the working class and their aim to disassociate from the Labour Parties Marxist traditions is underway, we thought now would be a timely reminder of the Labour Parties association with Marxism and a little understanding of the Labour Parties roots, after all its founder Keir Hardie was a Marxist. While Sir Keir Starmer openly attacks the Left within the Labour Party and is busy digging those foundations up, an act that very much looks like his true intent is to bring the entire house down. We bring to your attention the words of Tony Benn in his address in 1982 ‘Marxism Today,’ a theoretical magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Benn was articulating a theory very different from anything said by a leading politician before. It was also, clearly subversive. Article By Tony Benn May 1982 Marxism Today Marxism has only had a limited influence in the British Labour movement: but it will play a crucial role in its future. Tony Benn Though I was not introduced to socialism through a study of Marx, and would not describe myself as a Marxist, I regard it as a privilege and an honour to have been invited to deliver this Lecture in memory of Karl Marx. The intellectual contribution made by Marx to the development of socialism was and remains absolutely unique. But Marx was much more than a philosopher. His influence in moving people all over the world to social action ranks him with the founders of the world’s greatest faiths. And, like the founders of other faiths, what Marx and others inspired has given millions of people hope, as well as the courage to face persecution and imprisonment. Since 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power in the Soviet Union, we have had a great deal of experience of national power structures created in the name of Marxism, and of the achievements and failures of those systems. Some of the sternest critics of Soviet society also based themselves upon Marx, including Leon Trotsky, Mao Tse-Tung, Tito and a range of libertarian Marxist dissidents in Eastern Europe and Eurocommunists in the West. This Lecture is concerned with only two aspects of Marxism.First, the challenge which Marxism presents to liberal capitalist societies which have achieved a form of political democracy based upon universal adult suffrage: and second, the challenge to those societies, which have based themselves on Marxism by the demands for political democracy. It is, I believe, through a study of this mutual challenge that we can get to the heart of many of the problems now confronting the communist and the non-communist countries, and illuminate the conflicts within and between different economic systems and between the developed and the developing world. Before I begin, let me make my own convictions clear. ⦁I believe that no mature tradition of political democracy today can survive if it does not open itself to the influence of Marx and Marxism. The evolution of British democracyIf an understanding of socialism begins — as it must — with a scientific study of our own experience, each country can best begin by examining its own history and the struggles of its people for social, economic and political progress. British socialists can identify many sources from which our ideas have been drawn. The teachings of Jesus, calling upon us to ‘.Jove our neighbour as ourselves’ acquired a revolutionary character when preached as a guide to social action. For example, when, in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, the Reverend John Ball, with his liberation theology, allied himself to a popular uprising, both he, the preacher, and Wat Tyler, the peasant leader, were killed and their followers scattered and crushed by the King. John Ball, one of the leaders of the Peasants‘ Revolt in England. The message of social justice, equality and democracy, is a very old one, and has been carried like a torch from generation to generation by a succession of popular and religious movements, by writers, philosophers, preachers, and poets, and has remained a focus of hope, that an alternative society could be constructed. The national political influences of these ideas was seen in 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and in the revolutions in England, America, France and Russia, each of which provided an important impetus to these hopes. But it was the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of modern trade unionism in the 19th century which provided a solid foundation of common interest upon which these Utopian dreams could be based, that gave the campaigns for political democracy and social advance their first real chance of success. If British experience is unique — as it is — in the history of the working class movement, it lies in the fact that the Industrial Revolution began here, and gave birth to the three main economic philosophies which now dominate the thinking of the world. The first was capitalism. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, developed the concept of modern capitalism as the best way to release the forces of technology from the dead hand of a declining and corrupted feudalism, substituting the invisible hand of the market and paving the way for industrial expansion and, later, imperialism. The Manchester School of liberal economists and the liberal view of an extended franchise combined to create a power structure which still commands wide support among the establishment today. The second was socialism. Robert Owen, the first man specifically identified as a socialist, also developed his ideas of socialism, cooperation and industrial trade unionism out of his experience of the workings of British capitalism. And the third was Marxism. Marx and Engels also evolved many of their views of scientific socialism from a detailed examination of the nature of British capitalism and the conditions of the working class movement within it. Yet, despite the fact that capitalism, socialism and Marxism all first developed in this country, only one of these schools of thought is now accepted by the establishment as being legitimate. Capitalism, its mechanisms, values and institutions are now being preached with renewed vigour by the British establishment under the influence of Milton Friedman. Socialism is attacked as being, at best, romantic or, at worst, destructive. And Marxism is identified as the anti-Christ against which the full weight of official opinion is continually pitted in the propaganda war of ideas. The distortion of MarxismBBC implied subliminal Corbyn wearing a Russian hat with a backdrop of the Kremilin. The term Marxist is used by the establishment to prevent it being understood. Even serious writers and broadcasters in the British media use the word Marxist as if it were synonymous with terrorism, violence, espionage, thought control, Russian imperialism and every act of bureaucracy attributable to the state machine in any country, including Britain, which has adopted even the mildest left of centre political or social reforms. The effect of this is to isolate Britain from having an understanding of, or a real influence in, the rest of the world, where Marxism is seriously discussed and not drowned by propaganda, as it is in our so-called free press. This ideological insularity harms us all. This continuing barrage of abuse is maintained at such a high level of intensity that it has obliterated — as is intended — any serious public debate in the mainstream media on what Marxism is about. This negative propaganda is comparable to the treatment accorded to Christianity in non-Christian societies. Any sustained challenge to the existing order that cannot be answered on its merits is dismissed as coming from a Marxist, Communist, Trotskyite, or extremist. All those suspected of Marxist views run the risk of being listed in police files, having their phones tapped and their career prospects stunted by blacklisting, just as those who advocate liberal ideas will be harassed in the USSR. Those who openly declare their adherence to Marxism are pilloried as self confessed Marxists, as if they had pleaded guilty to a serious crime and were held in custody awaiting trial. Even the Labour Party, in which Marxist ideas have had a minority influence, is now described as a Marxist party, as if such a statement of itself put the party beyond the pale of civilised conduct, its arguments required no further answer, and its policies are entitled to no proper presentation to the public on the media. One aspect of this propaganda assault which merits notice is that it is mainly waged by those who have never studied Marx, and do not understand what he was saying, or why, yet still regard themselves as highly educated because they have passed all the stages necessary to acquire a university degree. For virtually the whole British establishment has been, at least until recently, educated without any real knowledge of Marxism, and is determined to see that these ideas do not reach the public. This constitutes a major weakness for the British people as a whole. Six Reasons why Marxism is fearedThe People’s Charter Why then is Marxism so widely abused? In seeking the answer to that question we shall find the nature of the Marxist challenge in the capitalist democracies. The danger of Marxism is seen by the establishment to lie in the following characteristics. First, Marxism is feared because it contains an analysis of an inherent, ineradicable conflict between capital and labour — the theory of the class struggle. Until this theory was first propounded the idea of social class was widely understood and openly discussed by the upper and middle classes, as in England until Victorian times and later. But when Marx launched the idea of working class solidarity, as a key to the mobilisation of the forces of social change and the inevitability of victory that that would secure, the term ‘class’ was conveniently dropped in favour of the idea of national unity around which there existed a supposed common interest in economic and social advance within our system of society, whether that common interest is real or not. Anyone today who speaks of class in the context of politics runs the risk of excommunication and outlawry. In short, they themselves become casualties in the class war which those who have fired on them claim does not exist. Second, Marxism is feared because Marx’s analysis of capitalism led him to a study of the role of state power as offering a supportive structure of administration, justice and law enforcement which, far from being objective and impartial in its dealings with the people, was, he argued, in fact, an expression of the interests of the established order and the means by which it sustains itself. One recent example of this was Lord Denning’s 1980 Dimbleby Lecture. It unintentionally confirmed that interpretation in respect of the judiciary and is interesting mainly because few 20th century judges have been foolish enough to let that cat out of the bag, where it has been quietly hiding for so many years. Third, Marxism is feared because it provides the trade union and labour movement with an analysis of society that inevitably arouses political consciousness, taking it beyond wage militancy within capitalism. The impotence of much American trade unionism and the weakness of past non-political trade unionism in Britain have borne witness to the strength of the argument for a labour movement with a conscious political perspective that campaigns for the reshaping of society, and does not just compete with its own people for a larger part of a fixed share of money allocated as wages by those who own capital, and who continue to decide what that share will be. Fourth, Marxism is feared because it is international in outlook, appeals widely to working people everywhere, and contains within its internationalism a potential that is strong enough to defeat imperialism, neo-colonialism and multinational business and finance, which have always organised internationally. But international capital has fended off the power of international labour by resorting to cynical appeals to nationalism by stirring up suspicion and hatred against outside enemies. This fear of Marxism has been intensified since 1917 by the claim that all international Marxism stems from the Kremlin, whose interests all Marxists are alleged to serve slavishly, thus making them, according to capitalist establishment propaganda, the witting or unwitting agents of the national interest of the USSR. Fifth, Marxism is feared because it is seen as a threat to the older organised religions, as expressed through their hierarchies and temporal power structures, and their close alliance with other manifestations of state and economic power. The political establishments of the West, which for centuries have openly worshipped money and profit and ignored the fundamental teachings of Jesus do, in fact, sense in Marxism a moral challenge to their shallow and corrupted values and it makes them very uncomfortable. Ritualised and mystical religious teachings, which offer advice to the rich to be good, and the poor to be patient, each seeking personal salvation in this world and eternal life in the next, are also liable to be unsuccessful in the face of such a strong moral challenge as socialism makes. There have, over the centuries, always been some Christians who, remembering the teachings of Jesus, have espoused these ideas and today there are many radical Christians who have joined hands with working people in their struggles. The liberation theology of Latin America proves this and thus deepens the anxieties of church and state in the West. Sixth, Marxism is feared in Britain precisely because it is believed by many in the establishment to be capable of winning consent for radical change through its influence in the trade union movement, and then in the election of socialist candidates through the ballot box. It is indeed therefore because the establishment believes in the real possibility of an advance of Marxist ideas by fully democratic means that they have had to devote so much time and effort to the Even serious writers and broadcasters in the British media use the word Marxist as if it were synonymous with terrorismmisrepresentation of Marxism as a philosophy of violence and destruction, to scare people away from listening to what Marxists have to say. These six fears, which are both expressed and fanned by those who defend a particular social order, actually pinpoint the wide appeal of Marxism, its durability and its strength more accurately than many advocates of Marxism may appreciate. Marxism and the Labour PartyIf the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media having tasted blood would demand next that it expelled all its socialists The Communist Manifesto, and many other works of Marxist philosophy, have always profoundly influenced the British labour movement and the British Labour Party, and have strengthened our understanding and enriched our thinking. It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would be to establish university faculties of astronomy, anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously. There is also a practical reason for emphasising this point now. The attacks upon the so-called hard Left of the Labour Party by its opponents in the Conservative, Liberal and Social Democratic Parties and by the establishment, are not motivated by fear of the influence of Marxists alone. These attacks are really directed at all socialists and derive from the knowledge that democratic socialism in all its aspects does reflect the true interest of a majority of people in this country, and that what democratic socialists are saying is getting through to more and more people, despite the round-the-clock efforts of the media to fill the newspapers and the airwaves with a cacophony of distortion. If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media having tasted blood would demand next that it expelled all its socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and again when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus, British capitalism, it is argued, would be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the national agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed — which it will not — it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years. Weaknesses of the Marxist positionBut having said all that about the importance of the Marxist critique, let me turn to the Marxist remedies for the ills that Marx so accurately diagnosed. There are many schools of thought within the Marxist tradition, and it would be as foolish to lump them all together as to bundle every Christian denomination into one and then seek to generalise about the faith. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of the central Marxist analysis which it is necessary to subject to special scrutiny if the relationship between Marxism and democracy is to be explored. I have listed some of these aspects because of their relevance to this Lecture, and which explain in part why I would not think it correct to call myself a Marxist. Marx seemed to identify all social and personal morality as being a product of economic forces, thus denying to that morality any objective existence over and above the interrelationship of social and economic forces at that moment in history. I cannot accept that analysis. Of course, the laws, customs, administration, armed forces and received wisdom in any society will tend to reflect the interests and values of the dominant class, and if class relationships change by technology, evolution or revolution, this will be reflected in a change of the social and cultural superstructure. But to go beyond that and deny the inherent rights of men and women to live, to think, to act, to argue or to obey or resist in pursuit of some inner call of conscience — as pacifists do — or to codify their relationships with each other in terms of moral responsibility, seems to me to be throwing away the child of moral teaching with the dirty bathwater of feudalism, capitalism or clericalism. In saying this I am consciously seeking to re-establish the relevance and legitimacy of the moral teachings of Jesus, whilst accepting that many manifestations of episcopal authority and ritualistic escapism have blanked out that essential message of human brotherhood and sisterhood. I say this for many reasons. First, because without some concept of inherent human rights and moral values and obligations, derived by custom and practice out of the accumulated experience of our societies, I cannot see any valid reason why socialism should have any moral force behind it, or how socialism can relate directly to the human condition outside economic relationships; for example, as between women and men, black and white, or in the relationships within the home and in personal life. Second, because I regard the moral pressures released by radical Christian teaching, and its humanistic offshoots as having played a major role in developing the ideas of solidarity, democracy, equality and peace, which have contributed to the development of socialist motivation. Third, because without the acceptance of a strong moral code the ends always can be argued to justify the means, and this lies at the root of some of the oppression which has been practised in actually existing socialist societies. Fourth, because the teachings of Marx, like the teachings of Jesus, can also become obscured, lost, and even reversed by civil power systems established in states that proclaim themselves to be Marxist, just as many Christian kings and governors destroyed, by their actions, the faith they asserted they were sworn to defend. And if Jesus is to be acquitted of any responsibility for the tortures and murders conducted by the Inquisition, so must Marx be exonerated from any charges arising from the imprisonment and executions that occurred in Stalin’s Russia. Fifth, because without a real moral impulse and a warm human compassion, I cannot find any valid reason why Marx himself should have devoted so much of his time to works of scholarship and endless political activities, all of which were designed to achieve better conditions for his fellow creatures. That no doubt is why Marx is sometimes regarded as the last of the Old Testament prophets. If I am asked where these moral imperatives come from it not from the interaction of economic forces, my answer would be that they spring from the wells of human genius interacting upon our experience of life, which were also the sources of inspiration for Marx in his work. It is very important for many reasons that religion and politics should not be separated into watertight compartments, forever at war with each other. For centuries, the central social arguments and battles which we now see as political or economic, were conducted under the heading of religion. Many of the most important popular struggles were conceived by those who participated in them as being waged in pursuit of religious convictions. Similarly, some of the most oppressive political establishments exercised their power in the name of God. Unless we are prepared to translate the religious vocabulary which context of politics runs the risk of excommunication and outlawry. served as a vehicle for political ideas for so many centuries into a modern vocabulary that recognises the validity of a scientific analysis both of nature, society, and its economic interests, we shall cut ourselves off from all those centuries of human struggle and experience and deny ourselves the richness of our own inheritance. Marx and Marxist historians have, of course, consciously re-interpreted ancient history in the light of their own analysis, but no real dictionary can be restricted to a one-way translation based upon hindsight. We need a two-way translation to enable us to understand and utilise, if we wish to do so, the wisdom of earlier years to criticise contemporary society. It is in this context that I find some other aspects of Marxism unsatisfactory. Marx made much of the difference between scientific socialism and Utopian socialism, which he believed suffered from its failure to root itself in a vigorous study of the economic and political relationships between the social classes. The painstaking scholarship which he and Engels brought to bear upon capitalism has left us with a formidable set of analytical tools without which socialists today would have a much poorer theoretical understanding of the tasks which they are undertaking. But having recognised that priceless analytic legacy that we owe to Marx, in one sense Marx himself was a Utopian in that he appeared to believe that when capitalism had been replaced by socialism, and socialism by communism, a classless society, liberated by the final withering away of the state, would establish some sort of heaven on earth. Human experience does not, unfortunately, give us many grounds for sharing that optimism. For humanity cannot organise itself without some power structure of the state, and Marx seems to have underestimated the importance of Lord Acton’s warning that power ‘tends to corrupt’ mistakenly believing this danger would disappear under communism. Morality, accountability and the British labour movementTony Blair proclaimed that God will judge whether he was right to send British troops to war, echoing statements from his ally George Bush But we think while he is on this mortal realm a simple Inquiry would do. It is here that both the moral argument referred to above, and the issue of democratic accountability, which have both played so large a part in the pre-Marxist and non-Marxist traditions of the British labour movement, can be seen to have such relevance. For allowing for the weaknesses of Labourism, economism and the anti-theoretical pragmatism which have characterised the British working class movement at its worst, two of the beliefs to which our movement has clung most doggedly were the idea that some actions were ‘right’ and others were ‘wrong’; and to the obstinate determination to force those exercising political or economic power over us to accept the ultimate discipline of accountability, up to now seen mainly through the regular use of the ballot box, through which all adults would have their say in a universal suffrage to elect or dismiss governments. The British working class movement has over the years clung passionately to these twin ideas of morality and accountability in politics and they constitute the backbone of our faith. Some Marxists might argue that these objectives are too limited, are not specifically socialist, and constitute little more than a cover for collaborationist strategies which underpin bourgeois capitalist liberal democracy, complete with its soothing religious tranquillisers. I readily admit that a humanitarian morality and accountability are not enough, in themselves, to establish socialism, but they are essential if socialism is to be established, and if socialism is to be worth having at all. A socialist economic transformation may be achieved by force, but if so, it then cannot be sustained by agreement, and socialism may degenerate into the imposition of a regime administered by those whose attempts to maintain it can actually undermine it rather than develop it. The issue of parliamentary democracy How then, on this analysis, should we approach the arguments between the Marxist and some non-Marxist socialists which have in the past centred around their different assessment of the importance that should be attached to the role of parliamentary democracy? Before we can do that we have to examine, in some detail, what is meant by the phrase parliamentary democracy, for it lends itself to many definitions. Seen from the viewpoint of the establishment, Britain has enjoyed parliamentary government since 1295. All that has happened in the intervening period is that the Queen-in-Parliament has agreed to exercise the Crown’s powers constitutionally. This means accepting legislation passed ‘by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled’ and accepting that an elected majority in the House of Commons is entitled to expect that its leader will be asked to form an administration by the Crown; and that that administration will be composed of Her Majesty’s ministers, who in their capacity as Crown advisers will be free to use the Royal prerogatives to administer and control the civil and military services of the Crown. These democratic advances are circumscribed in four significant respects. First, in practice by the actual problems confronting an elected Labour government in establishing democratic control over the highly secretive self-directing and hierarchical executive of state power. Second, by the constitutional power of the Crown to dismiss a government and dissolve a parliament at any time. Third, by the fact that a government so dismissed, and a parliament so dissolved, lose all legal rights over the state machine and all legislative powers. Fourth, by the subordination of all United Kingdom legislation even when it has received the Royal Assent, to the superior authority of Common Market Law or Court judgements, which take precedence, under the European Communities Act, over domestic legislation, where the two conflict. It is worth noting that British accession to the EEC involved, in this sense, a major diminution of the powers of the Crown, in that Royal Assent to legislation rendered invalid by the EEC is itself invalid. Set out baldly like that, it can be seen that in a formal sense Britain is far less democratic in its form of government than those countries whose peoples may elect a President, both Houses of their Legislature and have entrenched their rights in written constitutional safeguards. Why then does the British labour movement appear to be so satisfied with our democratic institutions? In one sense, of course, it is not. The abolition of the House of Lords and the abrogation of British accession to the Treaty of Rome are amongst the items likely to feature high on the agenda for the next Labour manifesto. Those who call themselves revolutionary socialists and denounce the rest of us as nothing more than left-talking reformists, are not, in my judgment, real revolutionaries at all.I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield The Labour Party just assumes that the Crown will always act with scrupulous care within the constitutional conventions that govern the use of the prerogative, and for that reason have never put this issue on its political agenda. Beyond that Labour believes that the reality of power precludes the possibility that our democratic rights might be overturned by an abnormal use of those formal powers which still reside in the non-elected elements of our constitution. In sharp contrast to the establishment view, Labour’s broad interpretation of the parliamentary democracy we have secured is that by a succession of extra-parliamentary struggles over the centuries the Crown was made accountable to parliament, the Lords were made subordinate to the Commons and the Commons were, through regular election, subordinated to the will of the electorate, made up first of men and later of women too, who have won, in fact, if not yet in constitutional theory, the sovereign rights which belong to the people — which is what democracy is all about. It is manifestly true that such an achievement, formidable as it is, falls short of a constitutional entrenchment of the sovereignty of the people, and that it secures no more than the right to dismiss governments and MPs and substitute new MPs and new governments. It certainly does not offer, of itself, any control over the extra-parliamentary centres of financial or economic power, which remain whichever government has been elected, or even guarantee ministerial or parliamentary power over the apparatus of the state. To that extent, democracy in Britain is still partial and political but not economic or social. But if, as I believe, the real strength of parliamentary democracy lies in the fact that the power to remove governments without violent revolution is now vested in the people, that is a very significant gain which should not be dismissed as being of little account, a fraud to be exposed, by-passed and replaced. One of the reasons why the British Labour Party and the British people are so suspicious of certain supposedly revolutionary schools of Marxist thought is that they believe that insufficient attention is paid by them to the importance of our democratic institutions, thus defined; and fear that if they were to be dismantled we should lose what we struggled so hard and so long to achieve. We would then be set back, perhaps with no gains to show for it. Parliamentary democracy is an evolving system, not yet fully developed, which enjoys wide support for what it has achieved so far. The myth of revolutionary activity in BritainUnlike other civil wars in England, which focused on who should rule, this war was more concerned with the manner in which the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland were governed. Given the fact that all our rights in parliament have been won by struggle, I must add that I have not observed any serious revolutionary movements pledged to destroy parliament anywhere across the whole spectrum of socialist parties of the Left in Britain today. Those who call themselves revolutionary socialists and denounce the rest of us as nothing more than left-talking reformists, are not, in my judgment, real revolutionaries at all. They are nothing more than left-talking revolutionists, who, while pointing to the deficiencies in our parliamentary democracy, offer themselves as candidates for parliament, and none of them are planning an armed revolution or a general strike to secure power by a coup d’etat. If such people do exist I have not met them, heard of them, or become aware of any influence they have in any known political party or grouping of the Left. Nor for that matter is there much hard evidence to suggest that there would be wide public support for a counter-revolution to topple an elected Labour government by force on the Chilean model. I appreciate that in playing down some of the most cherished fears of both ultra-Left and ultra Right, I am laying myself open to a charge of naivete, and depriving the mass media of one of their favourite and most spine-chilling horror myths, which they use to undermine public support for socialism. If there ever were to be a right wing coup in Britain it would not be carried out by paratroopers landing in central London, as it once seemed they would land in Paris just before de Gaulle came to power, but by an attempt to repeat what happened to Gough Whitlam when the Governor-General dismissed him as Prime Minister. And if the labour movement and the Left were ever to resort to force in Britain, it would not be to overthrow an elected government but to prevent the overthrow of an elected government, ie, in defence of, and not in defiance of, parliamentary democracy. It is, in this sense, and only in this sense, that the use of popular force would ever be contemplated by the labour and socialist movements. Raising the banner Labour Heartlands The role of extra-parliamentary activity.Though these may seem to be highly theoretical matters, it is necessary, to complete the analysis, to refer briefly to the varying circumstances in which popular action is legitimate. There is clearly an inherent right to take up arms against tyranny or dictatorship, to establish or uphold democracy, on exactly the same basis, and for the same reasons, that the nation will respond to a call to arms to defeat a foreign invasion, or repel those who have successfully occupied a part of our territory. In a different context, we accept certain more limited rights to defy the law on grounds of conscience, or to resist laws that threaten basic and long established liberties, as for example if parliament were to prolong its life, and remove the electoral rights of its citizens. The defence of ancient and inherent rights, as for example the rights of women, or of trade unionists, or of minority communities, could legitimately lead to some limited civil disobedience, accompanied by an assertion that the responsibility for it rested upon those who had removed these rights in the first place. And, at the very opposite end of this scale of legitimate opposition, lies the undoubted right to act directly to bring public pressure, from outside parliament, to bear upon parliament to secure a redress of legitimate grievances. Such extra-parliamentary activity has played a long and honourable part in the endless struggle to win basic rights. To assert that extra-parliamentary activity is synonymous with anti-parliamentary conspiracies is to blur a distinction that it is essential to draw with scientific precision if we are to understand what is happening and not to mistake a democratic demonstration for an undemocratic riot; a democratic protest for an undemocratic uprising; or a democratic reformer for an undemocratic revolutionary. The labour movement in Britain, egged on by a hostile media, is now engaged in a microscopic examination of its own attitude to the role of extra-parliamentary activity. Such an examination can only help to advance socialism. Perhaps the simplest way to understand these issues is to examine the attitude of the Conservative Party to the same issues. The Tory Party and its historical predecessors have never wasted a moment’s valuable time upon such constitutional niceties. Throughout our whole history, the owners of land, the banks and our industries, have been well aware that their power lay almost entirely outside parliament, and their interest in parliament was confined to a determination to maintain a majority there to Trotsky should be remembered as the first and most significant Soviet dissident, hunted and later murdered by Stalin. Leon Trotsky in November 1920, when still a key member of Russia’s new Soviet regime. Photograph: PA safeguard their interests by legislating to protect them. Extra-parlia- mentary activity has been a way of life for the ruling classes, from the Restoration, through to the overthrow of the 1931 Labour government, and the election in 1979 of Mrs Thatcher. In power they use parliament to protect their class interests and reward their friends. In opposition they use the Lords, where they always have a majority, to frustrate the Labour majority in the Commons, and supplement this with a sustained campaign of extra-parliamentary activity to undermine the power of Labour governments by investment strikes, attacks upon the pound sterling, granting or withholding business confidence, all using, when necessary, the power of the IMF, the multinationals and the media. Labour has real power outside parliament, and the people we represent can only look to an advance of their interests and of the prospects of socialism if Labour MPs harness themselves to the movement outside and develop a strong partnership which alone can infuse fresh life into parliament as an agent of democratic change. These matters and the associated issues of party democracy have received a great deal of attention within the labour movement over the last few years and it is not hard to see why. We want the Labour Party to practise the accountability it preaches. Seen in that light, the adherence of the labour movement to parliamentary democracy, and our determination to expand it, becomes a great deal more than a romantic attachment to liberal capitalist bourgeois institutions. By contrast, it can be seen to have a crucial role to play in achieving greater equality and economic democracy. The critiques of Leon Trotsky examined. Those who dismiss the role of parliamentary democracy, thus defined, can be seen to be engaged in weakening, rather than strengthening, the prospects of establishing a durable, democratic socialist society. In this context there are some within the Labour movement who have underestimated the potentiality of the democratic foothold which has been established in parliament. This misjudgment of what can be achieved is, in particular, associated with the school of thought inspired by Leon Trotsky, who rejected the Soviet system as it evolved after the death of Lenin, when Stalin imposed a rigid, centralised and ruthless tyranny in the name of socialism. Trotsky has had an immense influence on the world socialist movement, so much so that many different Trotskyite groups have been established. Trotsky should be remembered as the first and most significant Soviet dissident, hunted and later murdered by Stalin. His critiques of Stalinism merit respectful study and his contemptuous expose of the milk-and-water socialism of some Labour leaders in the 1920s in his book Whither Britain, entitles him to a place in our history. He was the first man to identify and warn against the betrayal of Ramsay Macdonald and to prophesy the birth of the SDP 55 years before it was formed. Moreover, he did urge the German Left to unite against the Nazis. But having said all that, Trotsky’s profound ambivalence about the nature of parliamentary democracy led him into error, both of judgment and of prescription. As I have said earlier, I do not believe that those socialists in Britain who claim to represent the views of Trotsky, are in any sense serious revolutionaries. They constitute schools of socialist thought whose ideas need to be discussed and argued over. In my view, the weakness of their argument lies in their underestimate of what has been and can be achieved, and the confusion which they perpetuate between the absence of actual reform and the inevitability that reform, if pressed, is bound to fail. The constraints on capital and the gains achieved by the trade union and labour movement over the years have been formidable. It is, I believe, a major error to argue that the advocacy of reform, rather than of revolution, is synonymous with betrayal and capitulation, for it undermines the very working class confidence which is central to the success of the movement, spreading pessimism about the prospects of victory — which is what the establishment has been trying to do for centuries. Some followers of Trotsky appear to substitute a ritualistic and dogmatic recitation of slogans which cannot connect with the life experience of those they are hoping to reach, thus minimising their public influence. Moreover, by suggesting that parliamentary democracy has only a limited role to play, and by speaking vaguely of direct action to bypass it, they seem to imply that socialism can be introduced by some industrial coup. They are also unacceptably vague about what would follow such an event if it ever occurred. Without the acceptance of a strong moral code the end always can be argued to justify the means.‘You talk about cancer? I feel very strongly about people whose entire life depends on the working class movement. Every office you held was because of Labour and then you left. Now that is a cancerous growth.’ Prescient words from Tony Benn on right-wing MPs Roy Jenkins and the SDP leaving Labour. This time they stayed and took over the Party But we must never forget that a socialist government that came to power by the exercise of industrial muscle, rather than by election, would be compelled to retain itself in office by a similar exercise of industrial power. Even if such a government could retain its formal control of all the instruments of state power, attacks by the forces marshalled against it by capital would rapidly intensify. Such forces would also be able to claim that, in the circumstances, they were also the champions of democracy. This combination of intense pressure from the dethroned domestic establishment, international capitalism and an angry electorate deprived of the traditional ballot box rights, would almost certainly overpower the new government and release counter-revolutionary forces on a massive scale, against which no effective democratic defence could be mounted, because all those who once believed in parliamentary democracy would have been demoralised by what had occurred. Having said all that, I am profoundly opposed to any attempt to outlaw, expel or excommunicate the followers of Leon Trotsky from the Labour Party. Some of them may, as I believe, be too simplistic in their analysis of Britain but, if so, the correct response is to discuss the issues with them, and within the labour movement these discussions are taking place and are exercising a mutual influence on those who take part on both sides. The main recruiting agents for Trotsky’s ideas in Britain have been those who have so cynically betrayed their faith in both socialism and democracy, while occupying high positions with the parliamentary Labour leadership, and then defected to the Social Democrats. These right-wing entryists used their positions as Labour MPs to obstruct the advance to socialism, and retain their seats in defiance of democracy. But no comment on the role of revolution would be complete without adding that what applies in the context of Britain, does not necessarily apply in countries that have not won the rights we have. The Russian people could never have won power through the Duma in Tsarist Russia, nor could the Zimbabwe Africans through Ian Smith’s rigged electoral system. The revolutionary route to democracy is almost certainly the only one open to the peoples of South Africa, Turkey, El Salvador and Chile, and many countries which the West so dishonestly classify as ‘our partners’ in the free world. Here in Britain, we have acquired, by struggle, precious democratic rights which we must defend and extend. I believe that communist countries could best evolve their socialism by consent if they studied and applied our experience. The problems that face a socialist government in Britain.In saying that, we also know that a Labour electoral victory, with a working majority on a socialist programme, could unleash tremendous opposition, including serious extra-parliamentary pressures. These will be formidable obstacles to overcome. Yet overcome them we must. Our best prospect of doing so lies, not in abandoning democracy, but in deepening it and widening it to win the public support upon which we shall have to rely. If we are to do that we must, above all, have confidence in the democratic process, and anyone who spreads doubts about its efficacy is abandoning the battle before it has even begun. At least we can comfort ourselves with the certain knowledge that however inadequate parliamentary democracy may seem to be to some in the labour movement, the establishment think otherwise. Socialist rhetoric they can live with easily, and revolutionary opportunism plays straight into their hands. But they know a real challenge when they see one and believe that parliamentary democracy, buttressed and sustained by a free, democratic and politically committed labour and trade union movement outside, can and will be strong enough to effect radical socialist reforms. Let me sum up this section on democracy and Marxism in Britain in this way. First, that Marxism occupies an integral part in our socialist tradition, and without it we should fail to understand the system we are seeking to change. Second, that the commitment of the British labour movement to parliamentary democracy, linked closely to the organisations of labour in the country, is not only right in principle but also offers the best way forward along the road to socialist transformation by consent. This is the process that the majority of the people of Britain have used, are using and must use to advance their interests. The experience of Marxist societies.I now want to turn to the experience of socialist societies founded by Marxist leaderships, and consider how they are responding to the pressure for democratic rights from their own people. It is an historical fact that such societies, almost without exception, emerged in countries which previously had no vehicle for peaceful transformation available. Russia1918 The Russian Revolution of 1917 against the Tsar took place against a background of war in a country without an established parliamentary democracy. The same was true of Yugoslavia, where the partisans liberated the country from the Germans and established a socialist state. In China the Communists fought against the Japanese invaders and the forces of Chiang Kai Shek who was backed by the USA. In Cuba socialism also emerged out of civil war against the dictator Batista. The socialist regimes in Eastern Europe came into being as a result of the war and were imposed by the USSR as part of its security policy to protect itself from attack after three invasions from the West — 1914, 1920 and 1941 — which had cost the lives of well over 20 million people. All that is a matter of historical record and those who took power by force could lay claim to the same legitimacy as was asserted by the American colonists in 1776, or the French revolutionaries in 1789. And this is the route followed by colony after colony as they won that freedom from undemocratic imperialist control. But the Stalinist distortion of Marxism created a political system that followed revolution based upon the theory of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This followed on from a period under Lenin when Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were actually both represented in the Soviets. Under Stalin’s doctrine, the overthrow of capitalism by the working class had been undertaken by the Communist Party as the self-styled leadership of that class. However, this historical explanation of how the revolutions were planned and executed at the time does not end the matter. For socialism achieved by revolution lacks the explicit endorsement of the people, which is what democracy is about, and the Communist Parties which control such countries by limiting or denying basic rights of political expression, assembly, organisation and debate, and the right of the people to remove their governments, are open to the abuses of civil rights which occured under Stalin and continue today. Governments ruling by force — whether socialist or not — are also permanently vulnerable to violent upheaval and the task of liberalisation is difficult. And in a world of rapid communications, undemocratic regimes will find it increasingly hard to survive. It is very important for many reasons that religion and politics should not be separated into watertight compartments, for ever at war with each other. Picture: Fortepan/Pesti Srác licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, where Soviet troops were sent in to restore order after expressions of popular discontent, revealed this vulnerability, and undermined the claim of the Communist Parties there to enjoy majority support. Similarly, the imposition of martial law in Poland, though it may, in practice, have averted a Soviet invasion, has also confirmed the public unacceptability in Poland of the Communist regime as it was. The Western media make much of this, whilst ignoring the dictatorships which exist under the protection of the West. But above all, in the USSR itself, 65 years after the revolution, the maintenance of a government by state power — even when three generations have been born under communism, and only the very oldest people remember pre-revolutionary days — suggests, to outsiders, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union does not itself believe that its leadership would receive popular endorsement. Yet the very refreshment of socialism must require at least a genuine public choice between alternative views as to how it should develop. Budapest Downtown with a Soviet Tank and the Head of the Previously Toppled Stalin Statue Socialism as a system is greatly weakened, worldwide, if it is seen to rest anywhere upon state enforcement. The forces of capital in the West have concentrated their attack upon democratic socialism — to good effect — by suggesting, quite falsely, that what is being advocated in the West involves the imposition of a Soviet-style regime upon our society and that the first election won by socialists would also be the last. They know it is not true, and it is a sign of the strength of socialist ideas that they have to pretend that they believe it. The British labour movement not only accepts the democratic process but claims, correctly, to have created it. We will never accept a socialism that is imposed. Liberalisation and detente and the emergence of Eurocommunism.The Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe — entrenched in the Brezhnev doctrine — is in fact based on security considerations for the USSR. If the pressure for political freedom is denied in these countries, and there are popular uprisings, then the Soviet Union may believe its security depends upon an intervention to suppress them, with the most serious international consequences up to, and including, the risk of nuclear war. Therefore, for practical reasons, a framework for the liberalisation of Eastern Europe should be developed which does not carry with it any threat to Soviet security. It is for this reason that the campaigns for European nuclear disarmament, a new pan-European security system to replace NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and for more economic cooperation between East and West, are so important. Liberalisation can only occur in an atmosphere of detente. The emergence of Eurocommunism in Western Europe offers us fresh hope here. The Italian Communist Party, for example, which accepts the need for a pluralistic political system, that guarantees the right of the electorate to replace communist governments in free elections, brings Eurocommunists back towards the mainstream of democratic socialism, and provides a direct link with the libertarian Marxists in the communist world. Here too, the British Communist Party and its programme The British Road to Socialism can be seen as pointing in a similar direction, and differentiates the party from its earlier and uncritical pro-Soviet stance which isolated it from the democractic traditions of the British labour movement. Socialism, democracy and Marxism The need for dialogue.In conclusion, may I make it clear that I believe a reconciliation of Marxism and political democracy is possible, necessary and urgent, if humanity is to solve the pressing problems which confront it and avoid the risk of war. But if we are to achieve that synthesis, there is much that needs to be done, and I suggest a draft agenda that we might use to guide us. First, the acceptance in the West of the importance of the socialist analysis of society within which Marxism must be seen as playing a key role. Second, the acceptance in the socialist societies of the principle of democratic accountability and full political rights as central to the practice of socialism. Third, the beginning of a regular series of structured national and international dialogues between socialists, Eurocommunists and Marxists of all schools of thought, to explore the relationship between democracy and Marxism and the experience of actually existing socialist parties and socialist societies. Fourth, the reunification of the world trade union movement, which was divided during the cold war when the ICFTU broke away from the WFTU, partly to permit a reunited world trade union movement to enter into the dialogue described above. To attempt these tasks will meet with powerful opposition even though they represent a very modest start for a process that will need to continue over a long period. For it is essential that an understanding of Marxism should become more widely available to strengthen the worldwide democratic movement, and that the practice of democracy be harnessed to protect the integrity of Marxism from the corruption of power which is inescapable under any system of government which seeks to impose itself without popular consent. If the peoples of the world are to end exploitation, reduce the levels of violence, avoid nuclear war, and enter into their rightful inheritance at last, we must achieve a synthesis of socialism and freedom and work for it here and now. -Tony BennThe collapse of the Labour vote has been a direct result of the party failing its founding principles, and the support of its traditional supporters. The seeds of decline were sown following Tony Blair as leader under the banner of New Labour, from which time the party lost its moral compass, the result of which only the Tories and the right-wing have ever benefited. The current bloodletting within the party is part of a blame game in which Jeremy Corbyn has become a scapegoat for the failure of the party membership, who have prioritised remaining in a neoliberal EU over principles and economic ideology. The insidious politics of the far right is able to exploit a vacuum of electoral participation by a confused electorate. It is against this background the Labour Party membership will have to assert with some urgency the revising of the principles on which it was founded in creating the politics of economic and social equality. Failure to do so will compound continued decline in electoral support. But to do this Labour members must carry out their own internal revolution and reclaim the Party or stay wedded to an authoritarian oligarchy in perpetuity. -Paul Knaggs. 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 produced by Labour Heartlands. Archives August 2021 8/14/2021 Show the Children the Green Fields and Let the Sunshine into Their Minds: The Thirty-Second Newsletter (2021). By: Vijay PrashadRead NowDear friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Exactly two years ago, I walked with my colleagues from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research through the Camp Marielle Vive (‘Marielle Lives’) outside of Valinhos in the state of São Paulo, Brazil with a great sense of déjà vu. The camp resembles so many other communities of the desperately poor on our planet. The United Nations calculates that one in eight people on our planet – one billion human beings – live in such precariousness. The homes are made of a jumble of materials: blue tarpaulin sheets and bits of wood, corrugated iron sheets and old bricks. A thousand families live in Camp Marielle Vive, named after the Brazilian socialist Marielle Franco, who was assassinated in March 2018. Camp Marielle Vive is not an ordinary ‘slum’, a word with so many negative connotations. The mood in many slums is desolate, criminal gangs and religious organisations providing them with fragile social glue. But Camp Marielle Vive exudes a different aura. Flags of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) are everywhere. The residents give off a quiet and friendly dignity, many of them wearing t-shirts or caps from their organisation. They have an air of preparation: prepared to defend their camp from eviction by the local authorities and prepared to build a genuine community for themselves. Community kitchen at Camp Marielle Vive, 2019 At the centre of the camp is a community kitchen where some of the residents eat their three meals. The food is simple but nutritious. Nearby is a small clinic that is visited by a doctor once a week. Outside the homes are flower beds and vegetable gardens. The municipal authorities of the adjoining town stopped allowing the school bus to pick up children from the camp and transport them to the town’s school. As parents struggled to get their children to school every day, Camp Marielle Vive built an on-site classroom for after-school activities, which has continued during the pandemic. Tassi Barreto of the MST told me in early August 2021 that the camp has had no deaths to COVID-19 because they have ‘taken firm action to avoid the spread of infection’. The local municipality denied the camp water, which is – as Barreto says – ‘a human rights crime’. The residents continued developing their collective work, strengthening the community kitchen and the community health centre, and advancing agroecological production in the vegetable garden, which is built in the shape of a mandala. The garden has been so productive that the camp has been able to sell baskets of produce in the nearby cities of Valinhos and Campinas. The classroom sits in a prominent part of Camp Marielle Vive. But, Barreto told me, ‘the children and young people of school age had great difficulty because there were no face-to-face classes [at the municipal school] and there were virtual activities in which they could not participate’. The camp’s leadership had to innovate: worksheets had to be printed and distributed to the students each fortnight and – since the public school teachers could not review them – the camp turned to educators from the UNICAMP, a nearby public university, to supervise their work. Education for the children has been a serious challenge. From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes a dossier, CoronaShock and Education in Brazil: One and a Half Years Later (August 2021), that goes into depth about the crisis of public education as a result of the pandemic. Our dossier cites a UNICEF study that shows that, by the end of 2020 in Brazil, roughly 1.5 million children and adolescents had abandoned their studies and 3.7 million were formally enrolled but were unable to access remote classes. The United Nations estimates that 90% of students across the world – 1.57 billion children – were unable to attend in-person schooling during the length of the pandemic, many of them told to go online. However, a recent UNESCO study shows that half of the world’s population does not have an internet connection. That’s 3.6 billion people with no internet access. According to the study, ‘At least 463 million or nearly one-third of students globally cannot access remote learning, mainly due to a lack of online learning policies or lack of equipment needed to connect from home’. Half the global population has no internet, and many of those who are able to access the internet cannot afford the technologies and tools required to participate in distance learning. The digital divide is even more sharp along gender lines: in the less developed countries, only 15% of women used the internet in 2019, compared to 86% of women in the so-called developed world. The turn to digital education has emboldened mega-corporations to enclose the commons of public education, making it harder and harder for the masses of children to have access to any education at all. Big business sees the opportunity clearly. As Microsoft explained, ‘The fallout from COVID-19, continuing advances in digital technology, and intensifying pent-up demand for student-centred learning have combined to present an unprecedented opportunity to transform education across whole systems’. As Bia Carvalho of Brazil’s youth movement (Levante Popular da Juventude) told us for our dossier, ‘For these businessmen, distance education is more profitable because it allows them to cut a part of their expenses and it gives them access to a much larger number of students. From the point of view of [looking at] education as a commodity, where they sell classes, distance education makes a lot more sense’. Public funds have already been used to underwrite the massive expansion of private digital education systems. Our dossier closes by highlighting three key issues: the need to increase investment in public educational infrastructure (while ensuring no stealth privatisation of education); the need to value, train, and support the professional development of teachers; and the need to struggle for a new educational project. The latter is of great importance. It asks questions about the purpose of education, which sets the stage upon which young people learn to ask questions about their society, about their values, about the discrepancy between their values and their social institutions, and about what one can do about that discrepancy. There is a direct line from the student protests that convulsed Chile in 2011, in South Africa in 2015, and India in 2015-16 to the sentiment in our dossier. This new educational project needs to be elaborated. It is a necessity. After-school classroom in Camp Marielle Franco, 2021 (photograph by the Communication Sector, MST–Sao Paulo) When we walked through the Camp Marielle Vive in 2019, two young women, Ketley Júlia and Fernanda Fernandes, joined us. They told us about their schooling, including the English classes they were taking at the camp’s classroom. In the past two years, Ketley joined other women in the camp as a key leader in her community. She coordinates the mandala garden, helps at the storeroom, and organises the donations of clothes and blankets, all of this despite fighting off challenges to her own health. ‘In the midst of the barbarism’, Barreto told me, ‘hope always has a way of appearing’. Ketley is now pregnant, ‘a joy that encourages us in our struggle’, Barreto said. Fernanda now lives in Camp Irmã Alberta near São Paulo, where she continues in the MST as she raises two children. Fernanda’s children and Ketley’s child provide hope, but they also need hope to be fashioned through a world with a humane and hopeful educational project. In 1942, the English poet, socialist, and pacifist Stephen Spender wrote ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’. The children in the slum school, Spender wrote, have a future ‘painted with a fog’, their maps ‘slums as big as doom’. We must break the windows of that slum, Spender wrote, And show the children to green fields, and make their world Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues Run naked into books the white and green leaves open History is theirs whose language is the sun. Warmly, Vijay AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. this article was produced by Tri continental. Archives August 2021 8/14/2021 Anti-Government Protests in Cuba Provoked by U.S. Embargo Has Right-Wingers Salivating at the Prospect of Regime Change. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowThe Washington Post featured this photo as an example of anti-government protests but it is clearly a pro-government rally in which the demonstrators are waving the Cuban flag in solidarity with the Cuban revolution. The man behind the flag in the baseball cap is Gerardo Hernandez, a well-known leader of the Committees in Defense of the Revolution and one of the Cuban 5, who spent 16 years in prison in the U.S., framed up for his work helping to stop terrorist attacks on Cuba. [Source: washingtonpost.com] U.S. Media have played up the recent anti-government protests in Cuba as a harbinger of regime change and a reason for U.S. intervention But they deceitfully hide the fact that anti-government protestors (funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and CIA) number only a few hundred, whereas pro-government supporters—in defense of the revolution and opposed to U.S. intervention—have been flooding the streets, not by the hundreds, but by the hundreds of thousands The July 11th protests in Cuba had the Cuban opposition salivating with the hope of once again being the benefactors of an American takeover of the island of 11 million. As we have seen in the last couple of weeks, this has not been the case. On the contrary, the 17th of July saw more than 100,000 Cubans take the streets of el Malecón in defense of the revolution and against U.S. intervention. There were also demonstrations in other provinces across the island, altogether dwarfing the U.S.-backed opposition hecklers of the previous week. Nonetheless, the opposition protests, although insignificant in size and duration (in comparison to the pro-revolution assemblages), have provided fertile ground for Western media to perform their traditional role in setting the stage for the imperial war drums. The war drums have been played, as Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and the Cuban exile community have urged the Biden administration, to implement a “humanitarian intervention,” one that does not take airstrikes off the table. City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez joins Cuban exiles at a rally in front of the Versailles Restaurant in the Little Havana section of Miami on Sunday, July 11, 2021. [Source: peoplesworld.org] Although a Biden administration pivot toward military intervention does not seem likely, Biden has sustained and expanded on the Trump aggression on Cuba. On July 22nd Biden implemented a series of new sanctions on Cuba and assured that “this is just the beginning.” Whether this means military intervention is on the table is unknown, but what it confirms is that, without strong pressure from the American Left, his campaign promise to return to the Obama-era relationship with Cuba seems unlikely. Although the July 11th protests, as Madea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores note, “pale in comparison, both in terms of turnout and in state repression, to mass mobilizations that have rocked Colombia, Haiti, Chile, Ecuador and other Latin American countries over the past few years—or even Portland, Oregon, or Ferguson, Missouri,” they are nonetheless the largest oppositional protests since the 1994 Maleconazo uprising during which Cuba was undergoing what it called el Período especial (the Special Period). Scenes from 1994 Maleconazo uprising. [Source: translatingcuba.com] Situating this event in its proper long- and short-term historical contexts is necessary to provide a holistic understanding of it. It is not sufficient merely to point to the Trump administration’s tightening of the blockade, even if we agree that such actions are what immediately generated recent events. Instead, we must understand the blockade itself historically. Only then can we know how and why it is effective. Conditioned to Be SweetAlthough for centuries Havana was an important port for the Spanish empire, it was not until the 18th century that Cuba became the sugar hub of the world.[1] Starting in 1763, the Cuban export economy was centered around sugar, a process it would sustain for the centuries to come. Forty years before the 1959 revolution “sugar accounted for 82% of Cuba’s export earnings.”[2] Cuban sugar mill in the 19th century. [Source: latinamericanstudies.org] This historically determined sugar dependency shows how the ancestral fingers of colonialism created the precondition for the Cuban economy being at the whim of global sugar price fluctuations. Beyond this, the centuries-long monocropping of Cuba’s economy, coupled with the destructive industrial means through which this monocropping took place, has left Cuba, according to the United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP), with “over three-quarters of its 6.6 million hectares of arable land affected by soil erosion.” As the UNEP states, “The result is that Cuba imports 80 per cent of its food necessities at a cost of nearly two billion dollars a year—a heavy burden for any developing country, especially one that continues to suffer an ongoing economic embargo from a major world power.” In our globalized world every country is dependent on international trade for acquiring the basic necessities for its people. Just think what would happen to the U.S., a country territorially about 90 times bigger than Cuba (with far greater soil biodiversity), if it were blocked from trading with the rest of the world and put into a commensurable position with the position it has put Cuba in. What would the material conditions in our country be like? How would this trade limitation affect us in moments of crisis, when basic necessities are scant, and allocation is based on our market logic? If, under our current condition as the global hegemon, we have 42 million people experiencing food insecurity, the famines that would result if we were in Cuba’s shoes are unimaginable. Yet, no such famine has ever occurred in Cuba. Even in the toughest of times, rationing measures have allowed the population to get what it needs to survive. The Cuban revolution did not come about in a void. Instead, it came about in a country shackled by centuries of plunder, having to face the results of forces that were already in the world before they were thrown into it. In this world, Cuba has international trade as an absolute imperative for its existence. The blockage of this capacity by the world’s largest empire represents a constant existential threat for the island. Fidel Castro on horseback. [Source: isreview.org] Early U.S. Imperialism and Pre-Revolutionary CubaIn 1898 Cuba ended its century-long anti-colonial struggle against Spain and began its soon-to-be half-century anti-imperialist struggle against the U.S. which, with a sprinkle of yellow journalism, intervened in Cuba’s war against Spain. For Cuba, this was not just a transition from one master to another. Instead, this transition marked a qualitative leap into a new stage of capitalism, one which Lenin, a couple of decades later, would describe as Imperialism. From 1898 until the 1959 revolution, Cuba would be militarily occupied three times by the U.S. (1898-1902, 1906-1909, 1917-1922), including a continuous occupation since 1903 of the U.S.’s favorite torture spot, Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo Bay at time of U.S. conquest. [Source: time.com] Nonetheless, even before the Cuban War of Independence, the U.S. was already engaging in practices that were making Cuba economically dependent on the U.S. For instance, in 1865, 65% of Cuba’s sugar exports were going to the United States.[3] Cuba’s sugar dependency became inextricably linked to its ability to trade with the U.S. After 1898 the U.S.-Cuba relationship transcended dependency and entered into complete political-economic supremacy by the U.S. over Cuba. U.S. companies had nearly total control over the central industries in Cuba. For instance, by 1920, 95% of the sugar industry’s harvest was controlled by U.S. investors.[4] A similar condition existed in other industries, “by the late ’50s, U.S. financial interests included 90 percent of Cuban mines, 80 percent of its public utilities, [and] 50 percent of its railways.” For a small percentage of Cubans, those who compose the first generation of exiles, this condition was a paradise: “In 1946, less than 1% of all Cuban farmers controlled 36% of the farmland, and 8% of the farmers controlled 70% of farmland.”[5] For the great majority of the population this was a wretched existence, where 93% of rural households lacked electricity, 85% lacked running water, 54% lacked an indoor or outdoor toilet, 96% lacked a refrigerator, and fewer than half of children were enrolled in school.[6] U.S. control of Cuba allowed the island to become a gangster’s paradise. Havana was the city of sin that would make modern-day Las Vegas look like it was owned by Puritans. A viewing of the classic film The Godfather II should remind one of pre-revolutionary Cuba and the Mafia-loving corruption of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had killed about 20,000 Cubans by the time the revolution came to Havana.[7] It is in this context that the revolution arrived. As Cuban revolutionary folk singer Carlos Puebla said: Here they thought they could Carlos Puebla [Source: vintagemusic.fm] The Revolution, the Blockade, and the Historical Toolbox of Imperialism Shortly after the triumph of the revolution in 1959, the new revolutionary government would implement an agrarian reform which would distribute land amongst the campesinado and establish limitations for landholdings. As a cherry on top, these reforms would offer compensation to the previous owners that was “fixed on the basis of its value on the municipal tax rolls prior to October 10, 1958.”[8] Cuban peasants who benefited from agrarian reform after the revolution. [Source: watershedsentinel.ca] Similar expropriation conditions would be offered to U.S. and other foreign companies in Cuba under the 851, 890, and 891 laws. These en masse expropriations eventually led to the nationalization of all of Cuba’s central resources and industries, establishing conditions where for the first time Cuba would belong to Cubans. Although a partial embargo (on arms) had already been imposed on Cuba in 1958, in the first couple of years after the revolution the U.S. sustained and expanded it. Each activity the revolutionary government would take to implement distributive measures was met with increased pressure from the expanding embargo. Such increased pressures would often be met with further expropriations. For instance, the Eisenhower administration prohibited the transport of oil to Cuba, forcing the island to turn to the USSR for imports. Then, as a reaction to “Washington’s orders, multinational oil companies refused to refine the Soviet oil, leaving Cuba no choice but to nationalize the companies.” This back-and-forth culminated in the Kennedy administration’s full implementation of the blockade in 1962. [Source: govbooktalk.gpo.com] The Cuban revolution, from its inception, represented a grave threat to U.S. economic and political interest in the region. Such a rejection of U.S. hegemony existing right under the nose of the U.S. was unacceptable in Washington. Thus, from the outset, the reasons for the blockade have been clear. As Lester Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in 1960: “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy [blockade] is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Lester Mallory [Source: oncubanews.com] In the same memorandum Mallory stated that “the majority of Cubans support Castro (the lowest estimate I have seen is 50 percent),” and there is “no effective political opposition.” Therefore, “the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” By removing Cuba’s historical and geographically natural trading partner and removing access to the planet’s largest economy to all countries which dared to trade with Cuba, the policy intended to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government” was in full swing. Nonetheless, one would be wrong to consider the blockade the only method of force the U.S. has used against Cuba. Instead, the last 60 years have shown that nothing is off the table, the toolbox of American imperialism is open to anything, from military attacks, attempted assassinations, biological warfare, and terrorism. Some of these beyond-economic attacks on Cuba include: a) the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, squashed within three days; b) the 600+ CIA led unsuccessful attempts on Fidel’s life (some whose creativity is quite laughable); c) ten or so biowarfare attacks, most famously, as CAM reported, the 1971 CIA-orchestrated African Swine Fever virus spread; and d) the backing and funding of groups and individuals who partook in terrorist bombings, the cases of Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles are perhaps the best known, specifically the latter’s involvement in the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airline’s flight 455 which killed 73 people—both are celebrated figures of the Miami exile community. Luis Posada Carriles [Source: wikipedia.org] Orlando Bosch [Source: nytimes.com] As the 1962 Operation Northwoods shows, the U.S. government was considering orchestrating a “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which “would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Declassified document detailing plans to invade Cuba. [Source: upload.wikimedia.org] Effectively, the consideration was to terrorize U.S. cities to delegitimize Cuba and justify a full fledged U.S. military intervention. This surface-level assessment of the beyond-economic forces used to topple the Cuban government shows that, for the U.S., the means through which regime change is sought are irrelevant. Castro holds up newspaper documenting CIA plots to kill him. [Source: theguardian.com] The policy of the U.S. toward Cuba, from the emergence of the revolution until now (with a slight variation during the Obama administration) has been the following: Cuban socialism must be overthrown by any means necessary. Thus, over the last 60 years Cuba has not only been at the whim of the global market because of inherited colonial-era economic dependencies but, stemming from the breadth of the U.S. empire’s blockade and the variety of regime-change tactics used, it has also been dependent on the existence of a global counter-hegemonic force to American Imperialism. Until the mid-1980s the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc provided a global alternative that was necessary to ameliorate the effects of the blockade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was left to fend for itself outside of U.S.-dominated neoliberal capitalism. Nonetheless, even under the difficulties of the Special Period, Cuba was able to remain a global beacon of hope and, through the devastating economic hardships, it was able to sustain a revolutionary and innovative spirit that kept it alive until solidarity arrived via the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 and the subsequent “pink-tide” that swept across Latin America, creating the counter-hegemonic force that Cuba needed to re-stabilize itself. Fidel and Hugo Chávez: resisting empire. [Source: pri.org] It is a truly impressive feat that, even under such conditions as the ones Cuba suffered in the 1990s, it was still able to develop innovative and sustainable agricultural reforms which served as the precondition for its current state as the “most sustainable developed country in the world.” Organic agriculture in Cuba. [Source: greenleft.org.au] Obama, Trump, and the Pandemic It would take 55 years from the triumph of the revolution for minimal positive change in the aforementioned U.S.-Cuba relationship to come about. In 2014, though sustaining the economic embargo, the Obama administration would begin normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, a process that was mediated with the help of Pope Francis. This process, known as the Cuban Thaw, saw the easing of travel and export sanctions; the opening of a Cuban government bank account in the U.S., allowing it to free itself of the burden of having to handle financial affairs in cash; the removal of Cuba from the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism”; mutual openings of embassies; Obama’s visit to Cuba, which was the first time a U.S. president had done so since Calvin Coolidge in 1928; and much more. The Obamas deplane at Havana’s José Martí International Airport on historic visit. [Source: theguardian.com] Although this normalization process was mutually beneficial, it was the partial easing of the 60-year-old blockade weight off Cuba’s back that was the most significant. Within a year of the initial moves toward normalization, Cuba would have one of the highest GDP growth percentages in all of Latin America. With the election of Donald Trump and the backing he received from the Cuban exile community, the minimal advances of the Obama era were rolled back. Trump’s cancellation of the Obama policies toward Cuba included restricting travel to Cuba, banning the sending of remittances, reinstating Cuba to the list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and implementing 243 new sanctions on the island. Trump’s draconian policies won him praise among right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami. [Source: theconversation.com] The effects of such measures cost Cuba $9.1 billion between April and December of 2020, a number which rises to about $1,300 billion when accounting for the six decades-long blockade and the dollar’s depreciation against the value of gold in the global market. It is also important to note that the tightening of the blockade on Cuba comes at a time when its largest trading partner, Venezuela, is also facing dire conditions thanks to a similar blockade and various regime-change efforts. Protesters in Miami demand end to U.S. embargo of Cuba. [Source: cubanmoneyproject.com] Although an analysis of U.S. imperialism in Venezuela is beyond our scope, it is important to note that a central reason why the tightening of the blockade has been so effective in crippling Cuba also has to do with the pre-established and continued imperial policy against Cuba’s central allies. While Trump’s maximum pressure strategy toward Cuba was effective in causing economic distress on the island, the emergence of the pandemic would intensify these hardships. The COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for every country in the world. In the U.S. millions have lost their jobs, employer-based health insurance, and more than 600,000 have lost their lives. Cuba has had to endure the blockade, the pandemic (resulting in the closing of the border and the commensurate losses to the tourism industry), and the U.S.’s exploitation of the pandemic to increase pressure for regime change. The combination of the pandemic and the blockade has created a situation where, over the last year and a half, the Cuban government has struggled to procure the basic medical necessities to treat the virus. For instance, in April 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, the U.S. blocked Cuba’s ability to buy ventilators. In the same month the U.S. would block a shipment of coronavirus aid to Cuba coming from the Jack Ma Foundation. Similar events have occurred throughout the pandemic. Nonetheless Cuba, as the country with the most doctors per capita, has sent volunteer doctors all over the world to help countries deal with the pandemic. For these efforts the U.S. and its media puppets have produced unsubstantiated allegations of the doctors’ missions as “forced labor” and has urged its allies to refuse Cuban medical aid. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who expelled Cuban doctors, quickly begged for their return, as their departure left Brazil’s medical system in egregious condition. Cuban doctors arrive in Italy to help fight COVID-19. [Source: theconversation.com] However, the world has not been fooled by these preposterous allegations. For its courageous internationalism which has saved countless lives around the world, the Henry Reeve Brigade, named after an American who fought and died in the first Cuban revolutionary war with the army of liberation, has created a movement for it to receive the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. The ProtestsOn the 23rd of June, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution concerning the U.S.’s embargo on Cuba. As CAM reported, the result was clear: 184 countries voted in favor of lifting the embargo, 2 (U.S. and Israel) voted against. [Source: mintpressnews.com] This decision marks the 29th consecutive year that the General Assembly has called for an end to the U.S.’s economic, commercial and financial embargo on Cuba. For 29 years the U.S. has been ignoring the near unanimous will of the world and has continued, as Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla stated, a blockade that, “like the virus… asphyxiates and kills.” This systematic rejection of international will is at the core of the material conditions that led to the events of July 11th. The policies of the blockade and its intermingling with the conditions of the pandemic have led Cuba to a state where, months before the protests, shortages in various areas arose. As Cuban President Díaz-Canel stated in his speech on the day of the protests: “This whole situation [blockade + pandemic] caused a situation of shortages in the country, especially of food, medicines, raw materials and supplies to be able to develop our economic and productive processes that at the same time contribute to exports. Two important elements are cut off: the ability to export and the ability to invest resources. And from the productive processes, to then develop goods and services for our population.” These shortages, manifested through the annoyance of long lines, power outages, and rationing, ensure a quantitative and cumulative process of dissatisfaction. The U.S. Capitalist media seizes on this dissatisfaction to further indict Cuba’s socialist economy, ignoring the impact of the U.S. blockade and long war on Cuba. Further ignored is the fact that Cuba, despite a syringe deficit and vaccination slowdown, has produced 5 vaccine candidates, two (Abdala and Soberana) of which have already been shown to be safe and effective. Man gets vaccine on outskirts of Havana in May. [Source: peoplesworld.com] Overlooking the Underlying Source of Malaise Like in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the July 11th anti-government protesters are capable of seeing only the immediacy of the shadows. In a world limited to only seeing the government’s role in rationing, discourse on the blockade sounds as irrational as the escaped slave explaining to the others what it’s like outside the cave. Nonetheless, the misguided upheavals were not simply the spontaneous expression of a genuine opposition grounded and influenced solely by the Cuban situation. In these upheavals there exists an externally added variable which organized, funded, and facilitated these rabble-rousings as yeast does to water and flour when baked. This external variable is the decades-long U.S. funding of the Cuban opposition and its anti-government propaganda media outlets under the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which allowed television broadcasting from the U.S. into Cuba and also tightened the embargo and permitted Cubans who had become U.S. citizens to sue in U.S. courts anyone who had purchased property once belonging to them in Cuba but was confiscated by the regime after the revolution. [Source: radiogritodebaire.cu] Yankee Meddling Tracey Eaton, founder of the Cuba Money Project, has found that, between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—the CIA’s two new fronts—and the U.S. State Department, more than $1 billion has been given to Cuban opposition groups and media, both within Cuba and in the Cuban exile community.
Los Aldeanos received NED funds. [Source: concerty.com] Recently, the San Isidro Movement—whose joint work with Gente de Zona in the song “Patria y Vida” has become the token expression of the recent protests—has been shown to be heavily funded by the NED and USAID. As Max Blumenthal writes, “Leading members of the San Isidro Movement have raked in funding from regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Agency for International Development while meeting with State Department officials, U.S. embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.” [Source: havanatimes.org] In the era of woke intersectional imperialism, this afro-Cuban “movement” has been the perfect token for the regime-change goons. Altogether, the uprisings on July 11th have not only had their source in the difficulties created by the combination of the blockade and the pandemic, but also in a heavily funded opposition which was intentionally created by the U.S. to channel the natural distress of the politically unconscious into the streets to protest the government. It is important to note that the orchestration of the protests by U.S.-funded agents takes place a few weeks after yet another near unanimous vote against the blockade in the United Nations. The protests and the media treatment of it (examined below) help redeem the blockade-justifying narrative of the “Cuban police state” pushed by the U.S. at a time when international opinion is unanimously against the blockade. People Fail to Come Out Nonetheless, what is impressive here is how, with the combination of the blockade, pandemic, and U.S.-funded opposition and propaganda campaigns, so few Cubans were at the protests. Considering the breadth of public and covert tactics used by U.S. imperialism, it has been a laughable defeat to see that all its efforts and spending was only able to materialize into a few thousand hecklers in the streets for less than a day. These protesters quickly disappeared, given that shortly after Díaz-Canel told revolutionaries to hit the streets. Tens of thousands of them did so—chanting “these are Fidel’s streets,” “I am Fidel, I am Díaz-Canel,” “Homeland or Death,” while waving Fidel portraits and the black and red 26th of July Movement flags—dwarfing the anti-government groups. Protesters carry Che Guevara banners in support of the Cuban revolution in July. [Source: reuters.com] Media Disinformation The MVP (most valuable player) of the July 11th protest must be awarded to the media. Both mainstream and social media coverage of the protests tossed any shred of journalistic integrity aside and showed themselves for what they really are—lapdogs of the American empire whose sole function is to manufacture consent for wars and plunder abroad. By ignoring the blockade, the U.S.’s exploitation of the pandemic, and the U.S.’s role in funding and organizing the opposition, the media were able to spin the myth that a majority of Cubans were protesting a repressive, one-party dictatorship. For anyone familiar with the structure of Cuba’s participatory democracy, these “dictatorship” allegations are laughable, especially as they take place on the heels of the 2019 enactment of the citizen-drafted and massively supported socialist constitution. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel casts his vote during the referendum to approve the constitutional reform in Havana, Cuba, February 24, 2019. [Source: telesurenglish.net] A critique of the audacity and hypocrisy liberal democracies in accusing Cuba of being undemocratic and repressive—governed in reality as dictatorships of capital—is beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, it is important to ask what standing a government with the largest incarceration rate in the world—with just 4.4% of the world’s population yet approximately 25% of the world’s prisoners—to talk about repression in Cuba? Similarly, what standing does the government, whose elections are 91% determined by who can raise the most corporate money, have to talk about the problem of democracy in Cuba? For the media’s coverage of the July 11th protests, nothing was off the table: From fake photos to twitter bots, everything was fair game. For instance, mainstream media outlets like the Guardian, Fox News, Boston Globe, Financial Times, Yahoo! News and NBC’s Today have used images from large pro-government demonstrations in previous years and claimed them to be from the July 11th protests. CNN also used a picture of a rally in Miami and titled it “Cubans Take to Streets in Rare Anti-Government Protest Over Lack of Freedoms, Worsening Economy.” [Source: fair.org] After public humiliation most of these outlets have removed these “errors,” but their intended effect remained. One must ask: Was this an issue of ignorance or willful action? It seems hard to miss the massive 26th of July Movement flags in the pro-government demonstrations. It also seems unlikely that one would miss the southwest Miami street signs and the red Make America Great Again hats in CNN’s images. In the case of Fox News any claim of ignorance is preposterous: In its July 13th segment with Ted Cruz, in which he discussed the “bravery” depicted in the images of the protesters, the image that appeared on screen in that moment was of a pro-government rally where the words on the sign—“the streets belong to the revolutionaries”—were intentionally blurred and quickly replaced by a clip of a Miami rally in front of the famous Cuban-cuisine Versailles restaurant in the Little Havana section of the city. [Source: sputniknews.com] The U.S.-funded Cuban opposition has also been effective in creating false narratives about the protests’ size, police repression, and claims about the destabilizing effect the protests have had on the government. For instance, photos of mass protests and demonstrations in Washington, D.C. (2007), Egypt (2011) and Argentina (2021) have been used and described as Cuban anti-government protests. This photo was actually taken during the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. [Source: verifythis.com] To spark sentimentalism, the opposition has also used photos of an 11-year-old boy who was shot in the face in Caracas, Venezuela, and claimed that the Cuban police shot and killed him. To intensify the narrative of “police repression,” the opposition has created Facebook groups dedicated to those allegedly lost after being kidnapped or killed by the Cuban police. These claims have been shown to be false. Such was the case of Juan Carlos Charon, who was alleged to have been killed but who appeared in a phone call with Cubadebate to be quite alive and angry at his image’s tokenization by the Cuban opposition. One of the most repulsive tactics used has been bribes. As exposed private messages have shown, the Cuban opposition has attempted to bribe Cubans with phone recharging points if they beat themselves up and then make a video claiming the police did it. Furthermore, there have also been fabricated claims intended to produce the narrative that the government was losing power. For instance, claims were made that, in Camaguey, the “people” had seized power and kidnapped the first secretary of the province’s Communist Party. This information was quickly disproven by images of thousands of pro-government demonstrators and with an interview conducted with the (supposedly kidnapped) first secretary of the party, who not only affirmed by his presence that he had not been kidnapped but also attested to the conditions in Camaguey as normal. The opposition has also used a 2015 picture of Raul Castro exiting an airplane for the Third Summit of Latin American and Caribbean States in Costa Rica and declared he had fled to Venezuela because of the protests. Photo of Raul Castro that was used to make the false claim that he had fled the country. [Source: twitter.com] This misinformation campaign was made viral with the “Bay of Tweets” bot campaign. Days before the protests broke out in Cuba, the hashtag #SOSCUBA began to show up on Twitter. On the day of the protests the hashtag started trending thanks to thousands of newly created Twitter accounts that were retweeting it at speeds impossible for mere mortals. Although a clear violation of Twitter’s “coordinated inauthentic behavior” rules, Twitter allowed the bot scheme to unfold, propelling an en masse campaign to distribute the sort of fabricated information discussed above. Concerning this bot campaign, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said he had “irrefutable proof that the majority of those that took part in this (internet) campaign were in the United States and used automated systems to make content go viral, without being penalized by Twitter.” This would not be the first time the U.S. has used a social media bot campaign to push regime change, as Ben Norton noted last year when the same tactic was used to prop up the right-wing opposition in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico. For instance, during the 2019 coup in Bolivia, there were 68,000 fake Twitter accounts made to support the coup. ConclusionFor the U.S., as we have seen, the “by any means necessary” philosophy remains intact in its regime-change efforts in Cuba. The plot laid out more than 60 years ago by Lester Mallory continues today: Starve the population and agitate around their dissatisfaction. Although new equipment has been added, the David and Goliath battle—a gigantic empire dripping in blood and dirt vs. a small, autonomous, socialist, and internationalist island 90 miles away—remains. On July 23rd, an open letter entitled “Let Cuba Live,” signed by 400 prominent activists, scientists, intellectuals, and artists urging Biden to remove the criminal blockade on Cuba, appeared in The New York Times. As folks living within the empire, now is not the time to criticize Cuba or measure its deficiencies against our ideals. Now is the time to stand in solidarity with the Cuban people and their revolution. This requires doing everything in our power to push the Biden administration to end the blockade. The words of the late Howard Zinn ring as true as ever today—“you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Work Cited
AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. This article was produced by Covertaction Magazine. Archives August 2021 In honor of Fidel Castro’s birthday, Vijay Prashad writes about his legacy for the peoples of the Third World and his clarity in raising the primary crises facing humanity. I first saw Fidel Castro in person during the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in New Delhi in 1983. Castro had come to hand-over the chair of NAM from Cuba, which hosted the 1979 meeting, to India. He was greeted at the Delhi airport by India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whom he called “sister.” At the meeting, Castro was the star. He held together the 101 countries that gathered under an entirely new leadership. India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Yugoslavia’s Tito – the founders of NAM in 1961 – were no longer present; the new names were Gandhi and Castro with new revolutionary leaders such as Grenada’s Maurice Bishop and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Even as many NAM members drifted away from the Third World Project, their leaders turned to Castro to speak what they had begun to hide deep inside their hearts. The new context was dire: Mexico declared bankruptcy in 1982 due to the escalating Third World Debt Crisis, with twenty-one countries present in the room afflicted by repayment difficulties (two years later, Brazil opened criminal proceedings against former Minister Delfim Neto for poor stewardship of public money). The total debt was about $1 trillion, with most of it owed to private banks. Most of the countries in the room faced serious issues of default. They had been asked by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to enter a Structural Adjustment Program, which meant to subordinate their own national development strategy to the interests of wealthy banks and wealthy bondholders. The catastrophe was evident. Fidel Castro used the 1983 NAM meeting and a meeting on debt held in Havana in 1985 to urge the members of the Third World to go on a debt strike. The NAM states did not agree to a debt strike, but the NAM economic commission – chaired by Nicaragua – produced a strong statement on financial suffocation. A new international monetary system was needed to “put an end to the dominance of certain reserve currencies, guarantee developing countries a role in decision-making, while ensuring monetary and financial discipline in the developed countries and preferential treatment for developing countries.” The goal on the table was to revive discussion of the New International Economic Order, passed by the UN General Assembly in 1974, and now a point of discussion emanating from Cuba. I remember all 1.9 meters of Fidel Castro sailing through the hallways, talking to the delegates, urging them to focus attention on the financial suffocation of our dreams. Not only did Castro do the key political work – ensuring that Palestine’s Yasser Arafat remain in the meeting after a clash with the NAM secretariat – but he reminded the Third World of its mission, namely, to defend the rights of most of humankind against the casino of capitalism and the weapons of imperialism. When Castro spoke, he smiled, and his smile lit up a room even as he told the world the key truths of our time. In 1983, the key dilemma of humanity was the debt crisis. Castro focused our attention on the great debt overhang, which was used then and is used now to starve the national liberation projects of necessary resources. At the Havana meeting in 1985, Castro mobilized all the tools of his enormous rhetorical range to make a key point: the debt cannot be serviced, and it cannot be paid. “They blame me for saying the debt cannot be paid. They should blame Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Pascal or (Lovacheski) or any ancient, present, or modern mathematician you prefer. Mathematics and mathematicians’ theories are the ones which demonstrate that the debt cannot be paid.” It remains unpaid and unpayable. During this current pandemic, 64 countries spent more to service their debt than to pay for health care. At every moment in his life, Fidel Castro lifted up the crisis of the moment and focused attention upon it: the attempt by imperialism to prevent decolonization, the warmongering of the imperialist states, the growth of the financial casinos, the terrible climate catastrophe, the imperialist information war against ideas of humanity…. Each of these great dilemmas needed attention, but because of the information war by the imperialist institutions, they were not properly addressed. Castro’s role for those of us in places such as India, was to be the loudspeaker for humanity, to raise the kinds of issues that we needed uplifted. The second time I saw Fidel Castro at an international meeting was in 2001, during the World Congress Against Racism in Durban (South Africa). South Africa’s people had overthrown the apartheid regime in 1994, the scars of that terrible history unhealed. Castro forthrightly condemned racism and other intolerances, but he – in his characteristic fashion – linked the scourge of racism to the ongoing debt crisis. “There are the huge and unpayable debts, the disparate terms of trade, the ruinous prices of basic commodities, the demographic explosion, the neoliberal globalization and the climate changes that produce long droughts alternating with increasingly intensive rains and floods. It can be mathematically proven that such a predicament is unsustainable,” he said. Because of this and due to the plunder of the colonial era, Castro argued for reparations as a “moral duty to the victims of racism,” namely to the victims of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. I can hear his voice still, a voice of great moral clarity that the world heard from his 1953 speech in the courtroom (“History will absolve me”) to his 2016 column in Granma (“The Uncertain Fate of the Human Species”). What defined Castro’s great international contribution is not only his leadership of the Cuban Revolution, which was considerable, but his role as the great teacher for the Third World of the terrible violence of imperialism and capitalism, which manifested itself in hunger and environmental desolation, war and the grip of profit. Castro’s voice was sharp, but it was not his voice alone. It was the voice of the Third World, a voice that constantly checked to see if it was not moving away from the pulse of hope. When Fidel addressed the vast crowd in Havana in 1959, he turned to his closest comrade Camilo Cienfuegos and asked, ¿Voy bien, Camilo?; Camilo, who died tragically in a plane crash a few months later, responded, Vas bien, Fidel. You’re doing fine, Fidel, your words and legacy are inspired wisdom for us. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by People's dispatch. Archives August 2021 8/13/2021 Are Bezos and Musk Launching Us Into a New Space Age, or Just a U.S. Space Grab? By: Prabir Purkayastha & GlobetrotterRead NowWe are entering a new space age in which billionaires can leave this world, which they are destroying, hoping to find another world to conquer and destroy. The space race was once between two countries—the Soviet Union and the United States. It is now (at least on the surface) between three billionaires—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Two of them—Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, and Bezos, founder of Blue Origin—recently rode their respective companies’ suborbital flights (meaning that they cannot be considered proper spaceflights, as they did not reach a stable orbit around the Earth). Branson’s space ambitions seem to be limited to developing a market for the exotica of space tourism. Elon Musk and his company SpaceX have been playing for the long haul, with a series of rockets and launches already to the company’s credit, including to the International Space Station. Bezos and Blue Origin also fall into the latter camp. Behind this apparent show of rich kids playing with their expensive space toys, there are bigger forces at play—namely, that big capital is entering spaceflight, hitherto the exclusive domain of nation-states. While it appears that three men with deep pockets are funding their respective space ventures, the reality is that it is the U.S. taxpayers who are funding these space efforts. In this new space age, the U.S. is also proposing to ride roughshod over the space agreements that space is a “global commons.” The U.S. would like to convert space into its “final frontier,” under the premise that space belongs to any country that can mine its riches. Many people take for granted that the U.S. was the winner of the space race against the Soviet Union, since they beat the Soviets to the moon. But what is overlooked in this narrative is that the space competition is not simply about who sent the first man to the moon, but also about who built the better rockets. Strangely enough, it was the fall of the Soviet Union that brought forth information that Soviet technology produced rocket engines that had consistently outperformed the American ones. Today, the Russian-produced rocket engines—RD-180 and RD-181—still power U.S. rockets. The Atlas rocket line, which is the mainstay of U.S. heavy-lift launch vehicles, uses RD-180 engines. Atlas is owned by United Launch Alliance (ULA), which is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. When Orbital Sciences (now a part of Northrop Grumman) was looking for launch vehicles for its Antares program, they used Soviet-era 40-year-old, mothballed NK-33 rocket engines. After one of them blew up due to cracks in the aging engines, Antares switched their rocket engines—to yet another engine designed and produced by Russians, the RD-181. In 1992, just as Russian rocket engines were becoming the mainstay of the U.S. space program, the U.S. imposed sanctions on the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and Russia’s Glavkosmos. Glavkosmos was Russia’s space marketing arm for selling cryogenic rocket engines and technology. These sanctions were only withdrawn after ISRO developed its own cryogenic engine technology. Russia’s contribution to India’s rocket program was the seven cryogenic engines that it sold to ISRO, a part of the N1 upper stage of the Soviet Union’s moon mission. Why did the Soviet-era rockets perform better than the U.S. rockets? It is because the Soviets had mastered what is called the closed-cycle rocket engines well before the Americans. For any rocket capable of spaceflight, it needs both fuel—e.g., kerosene, hydrogen, or methane—and a burning medium, such as oxygen. Meanwhile, in an open-cycle engine—Saturn V of the Apollo program was an open-cycle design—a part of the fuel does not reach the main combustion chamber. It is used to power a turbo-compressor pumping fuel and oxygen and exits directly into the atmosphere. This results in a loss of efficiency for the engine, which then has to be compensated by carrying more fuel. In a closed-cycle engine, or what is called “staged combustion,” the products of the first-stage combustion powering the turbo-compressor are fed to the main combustion chamber, avoiding any loss of fuel. The Soviet engineers had solved the problem of materials that had to withstand the extremely harsh conditions of injecting the products of oxygen-rich combustion into the main combustion chamber. The U.S. engineers thought that this was simply not possible and were shocked when, while visiting Russia in the ’90s, they were shown the mothballed engines of the ill-fated N1 project, the Soviet attempt at the moon shot. These were the engines that Orbital Sciences tried to use for their Antares program, christening them as AJ-26, before they switched to the more advanced Russian RD-181 engines. Following the Ukraine crisis of 2014, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on many Russian companies. However, it still uses rocket engines sourced from Russia for its space program, both civilian and military. After the U.S. space shuttle program was shut down in 2011, taking U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station and bringing them back was left to Russian Soyuz rockets. It was only after SpaceX developed its space shuttle that the U.S. again had a spacecraft for carrying its astronauts to the International Space Station. The U.S. Congress has decreed that U.S. companies will have to phase out the Russian engines from their military launches by the end of 2022. This is where Bezos and Musk come in, as both are vying for the future launches that the U.S. military and NASA are planning. Though it appears as if Musk and Bezos are developing the rockets using their own money, it is still NASA that is footing the bill. NASA pays upfront development costs and, later, price per launch. If the rocket engines are the key to any serious space program, where does the U.S. stand in this new space age? ULA has had to switch to the U.S.-made engine as per the new NASA requirement. It has chosen the BE-4 rocket engine from Bezos’ Blue Origin, though ULA is reportedly unhappy with delays by Blue Origin and the lack of “attention and priority” the company is putting on the engine. The other rocket engines in the fray are from Musk’s SpaceX. Orbital Sciences still appears to be tied to Russian engines for its cargo services to the space station. So the U.S. rocket engines seem to be restricted to BE-4 from Blue Origin and SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket/Raptor engines. The American space race is essentially a two-horse race between the two super-rich billionaires. How do Bezos and Musk fund their space ventures? The public believes it is with money that the ‘visionary’ billionaires have made as a result of their acumen for entrepreneurship—they represent a version of Ayn Rand’s ‘heroes’ from her novels. The brutal truth is that Bezos as a capitalist has squeezed his workers, increasing their workload so much that they are unable to even take bathroom breaks. Amazon pays its workers wages that are “close to the poverty line for a family of four” and need to be supplemented by social welfare. The company has destroyed the small retail sector, and it competes with its own suppliers with Amazon-branded products and is “crushing them with competitive pricing.” Musk claims to be the other visionary by developing Tesla, the electric car of the future. While the existing automakers were slow to develop electric cars, Tesla has an edge of being the early mover and cashing in on the environmental regulations in various countries that demanded that automakers earn carbon credits by selling a certain percentage of their output as electric cars. For example, in the first quarter of 2021, almost all of Tesla’s profits came from carbon credits it sells to other automakers. Since Tesla makes only electric cars, it has surplus carbon credits that it sells for a profit to other automakers. The crucial component of electric cars is the batteries, which Tesla outsources to others. One of the key battery suppliers to Tesla is Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), which is the largest lithium battery manufacturer in the world. Its owner, Zeng Yuqun, has a net worth more than that of Jack Ma of Alibaba. What Musk has is a huge social media presence, which he has leveraged in hyping up his auto, and now space, ventures. The other disturbing aspect of the new space age ushered in by the space billionaires is the U.S. policy of grabbing space for its private companies. This violates the Outer Space Treaty. The U.S. position is that whether or not outer space is a global commons, its commercial exploitation is open to all. This is a position the U.S. had on seabed mining in international waters as well. Such a policy privileges the powerful and technologically advanced states and is another way of blocking the essence of the global commons. Behind this hype of a new space age is the reality of a new space grab. This is what Bezos and Musk represent: a new space age in which the billionaires can leave this world they are destroying in the hope of discovering new lands to conquer and again destroy. AuthorPrabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement. This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter. Archives August 2021 “Well Fred, are we ready to discuss our next Chinese thinker?” “You mean Wang Chong? I am, but maybe you should put him in context. I’m not really familiar with the historical background. Chan [Source Book in Chinese Philosophy] speaks of the ‘Western Han’ period from 206 BC to 8 AD and the ‘Eastern Han’ period from 25 to 220 AD. Wang was living in this latter period, but there is a gap of sixteen years! “ “I’ll give you a brief update from where we left off in the Qin Dynasty. “ “I remember the Qin Dynasty from our discussion on the Legalists.” Karl walked over to his book case and pulled down a blue paperback. “I’m going to base this on Jacques Gernet’s A History of Chinese Civilization. I read this book a few years ago when my TV was in the shop.” “Fill me in.” “Basically it goes like this. In the 3rd Century BC the Qin Kingdom expanded and conquered the six or seven other major independent states in China and by 221 BC had established the first historical empire in Chinese history [in the sense of complete centralized control]. The Qin ruler, King Zheng, then called himself huangdi which we translate as ‘emperor’ or ‘august sovereign.’ Notice the word ‘august.’ By choosing to translate huangdi based on the title of Augustus Caesar we assimilate Chinese reality to a Western understanding. But no harm done in this instance. Huangdi is the title of the Chinese supremo so we translate it ‘emperor.’ King Zheng is known as the first [shi] emperor so we call him by the name Shi Huangdi or Qin Shi Huangdi which was shortened to Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor (of Qin). He lived from 259 to 210 BC. He died prematurely, please note, from taking Daoist [religious not philosophical ] elixirs for youth and longevity so this should remind us, especially the Daoists among us, not to mess with Mother Nature!” “Get on with it!” “The Legalists, as you remember, influenced Qin Shi Huang (First Emperor) who was fairly intolerant. He thought that in order to hold his empire together everyone should basically think the same way-- his way.” “We’ve seen how successful that tactic is!” “In 213 BC First Emperor ordered the destruction of all books (he kept copies for his files) in order to get rid of different ways of thinking. So there was a big bonfire in his capital city Xianyang. He also wiped out all his critics that he could find. But he overdosed on his Daoist potion three years later and his son became emperor (Second Emperor). By the way, that big terra cotta army that has become so famous of late, as a big Chinese tourist attraction, that’s from the recently discovered tomb of First Emperor.” “Oh yeah! That’s a famous discovery. You see stuff about the terra cotta army everywhere.” “To make a long story short, after the death of First Emperor all sorts of revolts and insurrections broke out against Second Emperor and the Qin state was gone by 202 BC. It was replaced by the Han Dynasty founded by Han Gaozu (Liu Bang, one of the rebels). This dynasty lasted until 220 AD with one interruption by a usurper named Wang Mang who ruled from 9 to 23 AD. Wang Chong lived right in the middle of this period, more or less, from c. 27 to 100 AD or so.” “Are we ready to get into his philosophy now?” “Almost Fred. I just need to point out that after the book burning of 213 BC a new script for writing developed and all the texts that survived were copied or reconstructed with this script. This was called ‘new text’ and, please note, that Dong Zhongshu’s philosophy was developed on the basis of the new texts.” “So?” “So this. Under the Emperor Wudi (147-87 BC) a big discovery was made of a cache of the ancient Chinese classics from before the Qin period. They were found hidden in Confucius’ old house! These were written in the old script and a school grew around them called the Old Text School.” “I see. There were differences between the same works depending on whether they were old texts or new texts.” “That is exactly right. The upshot of all this is that the mystical magical tendencies of Dong derive from the new texts. Wang Chong based himself on the old texts and these became the orthodox version of the classics. Here is what Gernet says (p.165)-- i.e., ' that the victory, after the Han period, of the old texts ‘was to cause the almost total disappearance of the vast esoteric literature of the Han period, and it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that certain scholars and philosophers took it into their heads to rehabilitate the forgotten tradition represented by the works of Dung Zhongshu and others.” “So Dong really is only of historical interest.” “Yes, and I should note Wang Chong was dormant as well until a couple of centuries ago. Now, Fred, what have you got there on Wang Chong?” “Here is what Chan [Source Book in Chinese Philosophy] says, and I’m glad for the digression into history-- it makes Chan a little clearer. He lists six characteristics of Wang’s intellectual environment. 1.) Dominance of Confucianism-- thanks to Dong Zhongshu by the way. 2.) The Yin-Yang mysticism had corrupted Confucianism into less than rational positions-- also thanks to Dong. 3.) Man and Nature were reciprocally influencing one another. 4.) Omens and unexplained events were to be interpreted in the light of #3. 5.) Heaven had ends and purposes but it was ‘not anthropomorphic.’ It’s ‘will’ could be determined by omens and such. 6.) Spiritual beings abounded and could also influence us by means of signs and wonders. ‘Wang Chong rose in revolt against all these prevalent beliefs. He was a new Xunzi!’” “Yes, he is considered a rationalist or a naturalist according to what I’ve read. But I don’t think he surpasses Xunzi.” “OK. The quotes I’m going to read to you all come from Wang’s book The Balanced Inquiries, or Lunheng.” “Lets hear them!” “This is called ‘On Original Nature’-- chapter 13: ‘Man’s feelings and nature are the root of government by men and the source of ceremonies and music. Therefore as we investigate the matter, we find that ceremonies are employed to check the excess of the nature and feelings and music is used to regulate them. In man’s nature there are the qualities of humbleness, modesty, deference, and compliance. Hence ceremonies have been instituted to adjust them to their proper expression. In men’s feelings there are the qualities of like and dislike, pleasure and anger, and sorrow and joy. Hence music has been created to enable their feelings of reverence to be expressed everywhere. Nature and feelings are therefore the reason why systems of ceremonies and music have been created.’” “Good explanation, but sounds Mencian rather than like Xunzi.” “He continues: ‘Shi Shi of the Zhou ( Zhou Dynasty: 1111-249 BC) maintained that in nature some are born good and some are born evil. Take the good nature and cultivate it, and goodness will develop. Take the evil nature and cultivate it, and evil will develop. Thus in nature some belong to yin (passive cosmic force) and some belong to yang (active cosmic force), and some are good and some are evil. It all depends on cultivation.’ So he has influences from Mencius and Xunzi.” “ Shi Shi was a third generation Confucian, but I don’t go for some are born good and some evil. I’m holding out for nurture not nature. I agree with Wang about ‘cultivation’ but I think in general we are born neutral and we turn out as we are cultivated in whatever society we are born into.” “Well Wang seems to like Shi Shi as he goes on to maintain that both Mencius and Xunzi are wrong about human nature being at birth one (good) or the other (evil). He also attacks Dong Zhongshu’s position that Mencius and Xunzi were both correct as the former was talking about yang (nature) and the latter about yin (feelings). But Wang thinks it’s more complicated as both nature and feelings are a mixture of yin and yang.” “Well, so much for my speculations, how does Wang resolve all this?” “His thesis is: ‘The truth is that in nature, some people are born good and some born evil. It is just as some people’s capacity is high and some people’s is low.’ And so he concludes, ‘At bottom I consider Mencius’ doctrine of the goodness of human nature as referring to people above the average, Xunzi’s doctrine of evil nature of man as referring to people below the average, and Yang Xiong’s (53 BC - AD 18) doctrine that human nature is a mixture of good and evil as referring to average people.’” Y”ang Xiong?” “Chan has a little three page chapter on him right before Wang. He is mostly remembered for the theory that Wang mentions.” “There seem to be a lot theories about this Fred, and they all seem non-verifiable. Anyway, since all the sages agree that it is education that brings about the correct activity all the theories are practically equivalent. A pragmatist would think they are all the same in the long run.” “Chan has a comment on this as follows: ‘Wang’s own theory is new but it is not a real advance, for the presence of either good or evil is not explained. In accepting Yang Xiong’s theory of mixture as referring to average people, he seems to believe in three grades of human nature.... However, his main thesis is dualism. Inasmuch as the Western Han period is characterized by a dualistic approach to human nature, in terms of good nature and evil feelings, Wang’s own dualism, in terms of good and evil natures, shows little progress.’” “So we have a dualism of some sort-- either of natures or of nature versus feelings?” “Thus far Wang hasn’t particularly distinguished himself. I will now turn to ‘On Spontaneity’-- his chapter 54.” “OK.” “He says, ‘When the material forces (qi) of Heaven and Earth come together, all things are spontaneously produced, just as when the vital forces (qi) of husband and wife unite, children are naturally born. Among the things thus produced, blood creatures are conscious of hunger and cold. Seeing that the five grains are edible, they obtain and eat them. And seeing that silk and hemp can be worn, they obtain and wear them. Some say that Heaven produces the five grains in order to feed man and produces silk and hemp in order to clothe man. This is to say that Heaven becomes a farmer or a mulberry girl for the sake of man. This is contrary to spontaneity. Therefore their ideas are suspect and should not be followed.’” “This must be the aspect of his thought that leads to his being called a naturalist.” “I think you are correct Karl. He continues, ‘Let us discuss these concepts according to Daoism. Heaven (Tien, Nature) gives forth and distributes material force universally into all things. Grains overcome hunger and silk and hemp save people from cold. Consequently people eat grains and wear clothing of silk and hemp. Now, that Heaven does not purposely produce the five grains and silk and hemp in order to feed and clothe man is very much like the fact that there are calamities and strange transformations but not for the purpose of reprimanding man. Things are spontaneously produced and man eats them and wears them, and material forces spontaneously change [in strange ways] and people are afraid of them. To talk otherwise may be agreeable to the minds of people. But if lucky influences from Heaven are intentional. where would spontaneity be, and where would non-action (wu wei) be found?’” “It looks like his naturalism stems from his study of Daoism. But this is also the Confucianism of Xunzi or at least very similar to it .” “Listen to this: ‘Someone asks: Man is born from Heaven and Earth. Since Heaven and Earth take no action [that is, Karl, they just are as they are] and since man is endowed with the nature of Heaven [and Earth] , he should take no action either. And yet he does take action. Why?’” “A good Daoist question Fred. What does Wang say?” “He says, ‘I reply: A person who is rich and pure in perfect virtue is endowed with a large quantity of vital force and is therefore able to approximate Heaven in being spontaneous and taking no action. Those who are endowed with little vital force do not follow moral principles and do not resemble Heaven and Earth. They are therefore called unworthy. By that is meant that they are not similar to Heaven and Earth. They are therefore called unworthy. Since they do not resemble Heaven and Earth, they do nor belong to the same class as sages and worthies and therefore take action.’ And he concludes, ‘Heaven and Earth are like a furnace. Their work is creation. Since the endowment of the vital force is not the same in all cases, how can all be worthy?...’”. “I have a problem with Wang about this Fred.” “What is it?” “I don’t like the idea of transmission of virtue or worthiness being based on Nature. I understand that people are worthy and unworthy but I’m not going to grant that it is due to their original vital force given at birth by Heaven or some such idea. I don’t see that the view that some people are born good and some evil is actually an advance on Mencius or Xunzi. They at least don’t break humanity into two contrary groups-- the worthy and the unworthy based on what we today would call hereditary principles. Except in rare and unusual instances Mencius and Xunzi at least hold to the basic unity of humanity. We can all be sages with the right education in both of their systems. But in Wang’s I don’t see that this is the case. There is a ‘class’ of sages and worthies based on an original endowment of vital force. However progressive Wang is with regard to rejection of spirits and omens, etc., he is definitely a social reactionary with regard to his ideas on the origin of a ‘class’ of worthies.” “I tend to agree with you about this Karl. But let’s see what else Wang has to say.” “Go on.” “He says, ‘The way of Heaven is to take no action. Therefore in the spring it does not act to start life, in summer it does not act to help grow, in autumn it does not act to bring maturity, and in winter it does not act to store up.... When we draw water from wells or breach water over a dam in order to irrigate fields and gardens, things will also grow. But if rain falls like torrents, soaking through all stalks, leaves and roots, in an amount equivalent to that in a pond, who would prefer drawing water from wells or breaching water over a dam? Therefore to act without acting is great. ‘” “I get it Fred. If we just follow nature things will work out for us. But, you know, sometimes we are forced to act whether we like to or not. Wang’s Daoist view, however, does have a lot of merit. Look what our economic system based on private profit is doing to the environment!” “Here is Chan’s comment about all this. ‘The net effect of Wang Chong’s naturalism is to depersonalize Heaven and to deny the existence of design in any form. One would expect that his rationalism and naturalism would promote the development of natural science in China. Joseph Needham, however, has suggested that instead of fostering the development of science, Wang actually deterred it, for according to Needham [Science and Civilization in ], there must be a lawgiver before there can be natural laws. If Wang Chong were alive, the first question he would ask would be, “What is your evidence to prove it?”’” “And quite rightly so Fred. Needham misses the ball here. Xunzi had the same idea about Heaven and Naturalism before Wang came along so why didn’t he get blamed for retarding science? The reason is that major intellectual events such as the growth and development of science are not due to this or that individual but to the circumambient cultural forces of a given historical environment in toto.” “So you don’t need a ‘lawgiver’?” “I don’t think so, but at least the notion of regularity such as the non-personal nous postulated by Anaxagoras. ‘Spontaneity’ may be a confusing concept from the scientific point of view if it implies that there is no regularity involved, which I don’t think is what Wang and the Daoists mean.” “Now we come to his ‘Treatise on Death’, his chapter 62. We have a view similar to that of Epicurus! Wang says, ‘People today say that when men die they become spiritual beings (gei, ghosts), are conscious, and can hurt people.... If a man has neither ears nor eyes (senses), he will have no consciousness.... When the vital forces have left man... [The whole body] decays and disappears. It becomes diffused and invisible, and is therefore called a spiritual being (gei shen, earthly and heavenly spirits).... When a man dies, his spirit ascends to heaven and his flesh and bones return (gei) to earth, and that is why an earthly spiritual being (gei) [and a heavenly spiritual being (shen) ] are so called. To be an earthly spiritual being (gei) means to return (gei) .... To be a heavenly spiritual being (shen) means to expand (shen). When the expansion reaches its limit, it ends and begins again. Man is born of spiritual forces. At death he returns to them. Yin and Yang are called gei shen. After people die, they are also called gei shen).... After a man dies he does not become a spiritual being, has no consciousness, and cannot speak. He therefore cannot hurt people.’” “Today we would call that a secular humanist position.” “Chan also has additional selections of Wang’s views. This one, from Chapter Five, concerns ‘Accidents vs. Necessity’: ‘Crickets and ants creep on the ground. A man lifts his foot and walks across it. Those crickets and ants he steps on are pressed to death, whereas those he does not step on remain completely alive and unhurt. When fires sweep through wild grass, that which has been pressed down by wheels does not burn. Some ordinary folks are delighted and call it lucky grass. Now, what the feet do not step on and what the fire does not reach are not necessarily good, for the lifting of the foot and the spread of the fire are accidental.’” “So what goes down, goes down not as a result of Heaven’s ‘plan’ it’s just sort of random-- i.e., accidental. He doesn’t mention necessity at all in what you read Fred. This more than anything might explain the failure on his part to have stimulated the growth of science, not, as Needham said, the lack of a ‘law giver’. We are like crickets and ants in the face of Nature.” “This is his view on ‘Strange Phenomena’ -- chapter 43: ‘As the ruler acts below, the material force of Heaven comes after man accordingly. But I say: This is also doubtful. For Heaven can activate things, but how can things activate Heaven? Why? Because man and things are bound by Heaven and Heaven is the master of man and things.... Therefore man living in the universe is like a flea or louse being inside a garment or a cricket or an ant inside a hole or a crack. Can the flea, louse, cricket, or ant, by being obedient or disobedient, cause the material force inside the garment or the hole to move or to change? Since the fleas, louse, cricket, or ant cannot do so, to say that man alone can is to fail to understand the principle of the material force of things. As the wind comes, trees’ branches swing. But trees’ branches cannot cause the wind.’” “Crickets and ants again! This is pretty good in some respects for the first century AD. Just think of the kinds of superstition about things like this even today. But there is a down side.” “And what might that be Karl?” “The science problem again. It's this passive attitude towards Nature or Heaven. Humans are different from crickets and ants in the Western tradition. We are rational animals says Aristotle. Bacon set out to understand Nature and control it. ‘knowledge is power’,’Nature to be commanded must first be obeyed,’ etc. So we learn about the material force, unlike the crickets and ants, and use it to our advantage. Failure to think in these terms inhibited the development of theoretical science more than a lack of a ‘law giver.’” “You have a point Karl. Now, another question. Have you ever wondered why bad things happen to good people?” “Often.” “Well then, here is Wang on ‘Fate’ (Chapter Six): ‘With respect to man’s appointment of fate, when his parents give forth their vital forces, he already gets his fortunes and misfortunes.’” “Sounds like genetic determinism! Don’t tell me Wang is a nature over nurture determinist.” “Hold your horses Karl. Let me finish with Wang’s ideas here. ‘Man’s nature is different from his fate. There are people whose nature is good but whose fate is unlucky, and there others whose nature is evil but whose fate is lucky. Whether one is good or evil in his conduct is due to his nature, but calamities and blessings, and fortunes and misfortunes, are due to fate. Some people do good but get calamities. This is a case of good nature but unlucky fate. Some people do evil but get blessings. This is a case of evil nature but lucky fate.” “So what can this mean? The transformative power is neglected here-- good and evil is by nature he says. And fate is due to the vital force from the parents? I think I know where he is coming from here, but I see you only have one quote left so let me return to this with a little end presentation I have here.” “OK. I think we see the philosopher kings putting in an appearance in this last quote. It's from chapter 56 ‘The Equality of Past and Present.’ Here is what he says, ‘The world was well governed in earlier ages because of sages. The virtue of sages earlier or later was not different, and therefore good government in earlier ages and today is not different.... In ancient times there were unrighteous people, and today there are gentleman of established integrity [as in olden times]. Good and evil intermingle. What age is devoid of them?’” “And that is the end of Chan on Wang?” “Yes.” “Well, before we say goodbye to Wang, I want to be sure we have him down pat, as it were, so I will make a few concluding remarks.” “Go ahead.” First, I just want to list here the five ‘Major Ideas’ that are attributed to Wang. This list is from Randall L. Nadeau’s article on Wang in Great Thinkers of the Eastern World. The list sums up our discussion.” “So list the list.” “OK. 1. Natural events have natural causes. 2. Beliefs in gods, ghosts, and supernatural phenomena are superstitious falsehoods. 3. There is no correspondence between human events and natural phenomena; the processes of nature are not influenced by human behavior and have no moral significance. 4. There is no correspondence between moral virtue and personal destiny; fortune and misfortune are the result of fate. 5. Human nature may be good or evil; those of good nature can become evil, and those of evil nature can become good.” “Finished?” “Just about. Our discussion and my list indicate that Wang Chong was pretty much of a rationalist, but he had one weakness of his era.” “Such as?” “It appears that number three on the list above may have to be modified since he had a weakness for astrology. Jacques Gernet writes, ‘Criticizing the notion of individual destiny (ming)... he sees the diversity of human destinies as the result of three independent factors: innate physical and intellectual aptitudes, the chance combination of circumstances and accidents, but also-- and here Wang Chong shows how much he remains a prisoner of his age-- the astral influences which acted on the individual at his birth (p.165).’” “Well then, as they say, ‘his virtues were his own, his vices those of the age.” Next UP: The Daoist Liezi whose work dates from around 300 AD. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here. To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here. To read the Mozi Dialogue click here. To read the Laozi Dialogue click here. To read the Zhuangzi Dialogue click here. To read the Gongsun Dialogue click here. To read the Great Learning Dialogue click here. To read the Doctrine of The Mean Dialogue click here. To read the Book of Changes Dialogue click here. To read the Dong Zhongshu Dialogue click here. 8/13/2021 How a Black Lives Matter Leader Started a ‘Freedom School’ Summer Program for Kids. By: Sonali Kolhatkar & Independent Media InstituteRead NowJasmine Richards views the education and empowerment of young Black and Brown children in her community to be just as important as fighting racist police brutality. Middle- and upper-income parents know that summers are an opportunity to give one’s children the sort of well-rounded education that can enhance future college applications. Summer camp rosters fill up months in advance, and price tags for enrichment programs can run upwards of $500 a week. This is especially true in high-priced Southern California, where I live and where Jasmine Abdullah Richards started the Black Lives Matter Pasadena Freedom School, a free, three-days-a-week summer camp for children who live in her neighborhood. “Freedom School is for the ’hood. It’s for low-income families,” she explained as we sat together on the Metro train heading from the Los Angeles-area suburb of Pasadena to the California African American Museum near downtown LA. We shouted to be heard by one another through our COVID-19 face masks and over the din of more than a dozen Black and Brown children aged 9 through 15 who were wearing their new Freedom School T-shirts and chatting animatedly with one another. Many had never before been on a train or left the borders of Pasadena. Interrupting our conversation, Richards warned the raucous and excited children to keep it down, yelling, “Hey, hey, hey, we gotta lower it down just a little bit.” Richards has led the Pasadena chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM) since 2014, when I first met her alongside Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of BLM, for an in-person interview about the Ferguson uprising in Missouri. Both Cullors and Richards had just returned from Ferguson, where the latest chapter in the movement for racial justice was blazing into existence. Richards called that trip an “eye-opening experience,” and said that “Black Lives Matter changed my life.” A year later, she was confronting Pasadena police over their fatal shooting of a young Black man in her neighborhood named Kendrec McDade and protesting alongside McDade’s mother, Anya Slaughter. She has since been on a mission to ensure no more mothers lose their children to police violence, and Freedom School is one effort to that end. Seventeen-year-old Emoni Waiters and 20-year-old Amari Stewart are both graduates of the first session of Freedom School that Richards organized in 2018. Both young women are now working as camp counselors with Richards to guide a new generation of neighborhood kids and expose them to sights and sounds they might not otherwise have access to. Waiters confessed that before she attended the school, “I would just sit at the park and hang out. I would get into bad stuff.” But then, “when Jasmine started the Freedom School, it was a way for me to get away and do nothing but positive things.” Stewart had a similar experience. “It changed me a lot,” she said. “Jasmine taught us how to speak to others so you can make a good first impression.” Indeed, ‘Auntie Jasmine,’ as the children call her, dished out sage advice to her camp attendees during the museum field trip every chance she got. While waiting for the train to arrive, she asked the kids, “So, how many of you know about gangs?” The mask she wore muffled her voice, and one little boy who mistook what she said responded excitedly, “oh, I got all games on my phone!” “G-A-N-G-S,” Jasmine spelled out patiently, unmasking her face for a moment. An older Latino boy answered, “I don’t know anything about gangs.” “Yes, you do, Gustavo,” she countered, looking him straight in the eye. “Let me tell you about my experience in gangs,” she said and went on to share her own story. Richards’ family moved to Pasadena when she was seven, and she grew up north of the 210 freeway, where most of the city’s low-income Black and Brown residents live and where Pasadena police officers routinely patrol. “My neighborhood was a ‘zero-tolerance zone,’ so even if we wanted to hang out in front of my apartment, we were considered a gang member,” she told me. When she was 14, Richards’ older brother, who eschewed gangs, was murdered in a drive-by shooting. The trauma of losing her brother left her reeling, and she spiraled into drug and alcohol abuse. Getting involved in BLM changed everything, and today Richards is clean and sober and in a healthy relationship with herself and her partner. Freedom School “gives me purpose, it gives me life,” she said. “I get them at a young, impressionable age when they can either go left or right, and if I have anything to do with it, I want them to go the right way.” She sees her work with the school as central to her BLM-related activism, saying, “there is no revolution without the kids.” The obstacles arrayed against low-income Black and Brown children are immense. Many of the kids enrolled in Freedom School have had routine and terrifying encounters with the police in their neighborhood. Seventeen-year-old Runnit, a Freedom School attendee, is one of them. He said that Freedom School teaches kids, “that we’re not supposed to be afraid when the police show up.” He’s grateful for the opportunities that the program has given him and his young cousin Jaden, who accompanied him on the museum trip. “She’s [Richards has] been doing good stuff for our kids and taking them to places where kids can really be kids. We meet up at the park. We ride the bus safely as a group—we all got shirts on to show that we’re in a group.” Learning how to interact with the police is part of Freedom School’s curriculum. “Don’t run, even if the police talk to you,” said Richards to the kids during another one of her impromptu lectures on the train. “If you steal something, you stop with the thing you stole [indicates throwing it to the ground] and say, ‘here, I don’t even want it, take this shit back.’ Don’t ever run. Don’t run, or they will shoot you.” It was a version of “the talk” that generations of Black parents have had to give their children to best ensure their odds of survival, and an informal version of the “know your rights” trainings that Richards includes as part of the camp curriculum. But Richards wants more than survival for her neighborhood children. “I want to get them to start lovin’ on themselves and [teach them] how to iron out their own problems because all they see is gang-banging and stuff.” On the choice of the California African American Museum, she said, “Representation matters. I want them to see stories of people like them.” Richards sees Freedom School as following in the tradition of the Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program. While she started the program in order to fill a void in Pasadena—city-run summer programs this year are not free of charge—the camp seems to have grown into a far more stimulating experience for the children than anything the city might be offering. Eleven-year-old Jaden was buzzing with so much excitement about the prospect of visiting the museum that he could hardly stand still. “I came here today because my mom wanted me to know about my culture and my history, about what we did in the past,” he said. Illustrating just how much impact Freedom School has already had on him, he expostulated, “all the white people, they raised us as slaves and let us pick cotton and they whipped us, and it was bad and hurtful. That’s why we’re here today to learn about everything that we have in our history.” Organizing programs like Freedom School costs money, and Richards, ever the innovator, has made something out of nothing, tapping into her own social network and her national reputation to raise thousands of dollars for the program. She earned that profile the hard way. In 2016 she made headlines for becoming the first African American ever to be convicted on a charge of “felony lynching” in connection with intervening in a police arrest in her neighborhood. Richards said she had been on the police’s radar for months, facing constant harassment from officers. Today she has turned the national reputation that the police inadvertently bestowed upon her into what she calls “social capital.” Proud of what she has accomplished, she delighted in the fact that “tons of people are giving money, all my followers on Facebook, Instagram, just random people,” as she asks them to “help me help my ’hood.” Using the donations, she has purchased branded T-shirts for the camp enrollees to wear on field trips, train and museum tickets, and bathing suits for swim days. She is also paying the two Freedom School graduates, Waiters and Stewart, to be camp counselors. Richards has bigger plans for her neighborhood kids beyond Freedom School. When Victor Gordo ran for Pasadena mayor last year, she met with him demanding that he act like a civil servant. “I told him, ‘if we vote for you, bro, I need you to do something for our community.’ So that’s what he vowed to do.” Gordo won the mayor’s race and has agreed to work with Richards on a city-level apprenticeship program for graduating teens, such as Waiters, who will be attending a welding program at Pasadena City College in the fall. Not one to rest on her laurels, Richards said, “I told him, ‘I’m not gonna stop the pressure on you. If you don’t do these things, then you gotta go too.’” In using all the tools at her disposal, including her political sensibility, life experiences, fundraising prowess, adeptness at holding politicians accountable, and the trust that her neighbors have placed in her, Richards offers a model for progressive change that places children at the forefront. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives August 2021 8/13/2021 A Viable—and Perhaps the Only—Path to Lasting Peace in Afghanistan. By: Vijay Prashad & GlobetrotterRead NowAs each day goes by, the Taliban’s forces edge closer to controlling all of Afghanistan. In the first week of August, the Taliban swept through the northern provinces of the country—Jawzjan, Kunduz, and Sar-e Pul—which form an arc alongside the borders of the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The violence has been severe; the pain inflicted upon civilians by the intensity of the fighting has been terrible. Having withdrawn its ground forces, the United States sent in its B-52s to bomb targets in the city of Sheberghan (capital of the province of Jawzjan); reports suggest that at least 200 people were killed in the bombings. It shows the weakness of the government in Kabul that its Ministry of Defense’s spokesperson Fawad Aman cheered on the bombing. It’s unlikely that the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani will outlast the Taliban’s lightning strikes. The U.S. bombing will slow the advance, but it will not be able to reverse the tide. That is why regional powers in Asia have deepened contacts with the Taliban’s leadership, whose governance of the entire country seems inevitable. ‘Moderate’ Taliban“The Taliban is not an entity by itself,” Heela Najibullah said when I spoke to her during the second week of August. “It is made up of groups of extremists and militants who use the rhetoric of jihad to achieve power.” Najibullah, author of the important book Reconciliation and Social Healing in Afghanistan (2017), is the daughter of Mohammed Najibullah, the president of Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992. Since the Doha Agreement (2020), Heela Najibullah said, “the Taliban has demonstrated in action that it is not moderate but has become even more extreme in the type of violence it is carrying out against the Afghan people and state.” The Taliban has rejected every overture of a ceasefire from Afghan peace organizations. A close look at the Taliban leadership reveals little change since its founding in September 1994. The public face of the Taliban—Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar—founded the Taliban and was a close associate of the first emir of the movement, Mullah Omar. After the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, it was Baradar who took Mullah Omar on the back of a motorcycle to their refuge in Pakistan. Baradar, trusted by Pakistani intelligence, puts no daylight between himself the current leader of the Taliban—Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada—and his two deputies—Mullah Yaqoob (son of the late Mullah Omar) and Sirajuddin Haqqani (leader of Pakistan’s Haqqani network). Akhundzada ran the Taliban’s judicial system from 1997 to 2001 and was responsible for some of the most heinous of its judgments. When COVID-19 infected most of the leadership, decision-making fell to Baradar. At the March 2021 international peace conference in Moscow, the entire 10-person Taliban delegation—led by Baradar—was male (to be fair, there were only four women among the 200 Afghans in the process). One of the four women at the table was Dr. Habiba Sarabi, who was appointed as minister of Women’s Affairs in 2004 and then became the first female governor of an Afghan province in 2005. It is important to note that she was the governor of Bamyan, a province where the Taliban had blown up two sixth-century statues of Buddha in March 2001. In October 2020, Dr. Sarabi pointed out that Afghan women are “more mobilized,” although Afghanistan now faces “a crucial moment in our fight.” Reports have already appeared of forced marriages and public floggings of women in Taliban-controlled areas. National ReconciliationWomen are more mobilized, says Dr. Sarabi, but they are not a powerful social movement. Afghanistan’s more liberal and left social forces “are active underground and are not an organized force,” Najibullah tells me. These forces include the educated sections, who do not want “extremist groups to drag the country into another proxy war.” That proxy war would be between the Taliban, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and other militant groups that are no less dangerous than the Taliban or the U.S. government. Najibullah reaches back to the time when her father proposed the Afghan National Reconciliation Policy. A letter President Najibullah wrote to his family in 1995 could have been written today: “Afghanistan has multiple governments now, each created by different regional powers. Even Kabul is divided into little kingdoms… unless and until all the actors [regional and global powers] agree to sit at one table, leave their differences aside to reach a genuine consensus on non-interference in Afghanistan and abide to their agreement, the conflict will go on.” Heela Najibullah says that the National Reconciliation Policy would require the political participation of a range of actors in an international and a regional conference. These actors would include those who have used Afghanistan for their own national agendas, such as India and Pakistan. At such a conference, Najibullah suggests, Afghanistan needs to be “recognized officially as a neutral state,” and this “neutral state” should be endorsed by the UN Security Council. “Once this is achieved, a broad-based government can be in charge until elections are held, reforms are discussed, and mechanisms are drawn for its implementation,” Najibullah says. Proxy PoliticsIn the 1990s, President Najibullah’s policy was hampered by the deepening of proxy politics. Foreign powers acted through their armed emissaries—people such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Sibghatullah Mojaddedi—to cause mayhem in the country. They opened the door to the Taliban, which swept out of northern Pakistan across Afghanistan. Najibullah took refuge in the UN compound in Kabul, and then was killed mercilessly by the Taliban inside that compound in September 1996. Neither the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistani-backed forces (from Rabbani to Mojaddedi) nor the Taliban were interested in any kind of reconciliation policy. Nor are they now invested in a genuine peace. The Taliban have shown that they can make significant advances and that they will use their territorial gains for political advantage; nonetheless, pragmatic members of the Taliban say that they just do not have the resources and expertise to govern a modern state. President Ashraf Ghani barely controls his own government, largely defenseless without U.S. air power. Each could bring something to the table in a reconciliation process, but its likelihood is low. Meanwhile, foreign powers continue to treat Afghanistan as a battlefield for their regional ambitions. Blindness to history governs the attitude of several capitals, who know from previous experience that extremism cannot be contained within Afghanistan; it devastates the region. Heela Najibullah’s call to consider her father’s National Reconciliation Policy is not merely a daughter’s hope. It is perhaps the only viable path for peace in Afghanistan. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives August 2021 8/11/2021 Díaz-Canel: Those with the Strength, the Energy and the Capacity are the Youth. By: Yaima Puig MenesesRead NowAn encouraging gathering marked by sincerity and commitment took place yesterday at the University of Havana, where the President of the Republic conversed for almost four hours with 100 young Cubans from different sectors of society Photo: Estudios Revolución The diversity, commitment and wealth of the ideas of Cuba’s youth were once again made clear at the historic University of Havana yesterday, August 5, during an honest, casual dialogue. The sun was just rising as 100 young Cubans gathered in the emblematic Cadenas Square waiting for a special guest: they had an appointment with the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. The group waiting included university students; teachers; farmers; health workers, service workers... and also self-employed, with representation not only of young people from the capital, but from all of Cuba. This is how they were introduced by the first secretary of the National Committee of the Young Communist League, Aylín Álvarez García, beginning of the meeting, when she expressed her certainty that "we are who must contribute, transform, support, participate..." The meeting provided an encouraging display of sincerity and commitment, as the President of the Republic conversed for almost four hours with those present, taking notes on the comments and proposals made by a variety of participants. Concluding the dialogue, the President commented, "For me it is clear that there are a number of challenges in society, in life today, challenges to what we want to do... Those who have the strength, the energy and the capacity (to overcome the challenges) are young people - without denying anyone’s contribution, because here everyone must participate and we must give all generations their space - but the future lies in our youth. "I am convinced of this... I believe in our youth," and there is always a task for the young, there is a task calling them, engaging them, because we know that if it is in your hands, it will be stronger, it will be more developed and it also engages you and provides you a space to participate, he said. AuthorThis article was produced by Granma. Archives August 2021 Left: Protest against Canadian interference in Haiti in 2004 after coup against popular Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide. [Source: globalresearch.ca]. Right: Haiti’s new Prime Minister below flags of countries that selected him. [Source: haitilibre.com] It is déjà vu all over again. On July 17th, the Core Group (U.S., Canada, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, UN and OAS) published a note saying Ariel Henry was the prime minister of Haiti. Within 48 hours the other individual claiming the position fell into line behind Henry, who was a member of the U.S./France/Canada created “Council of the Wise” that appointed the prime minister after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in 2004.
As a result, many Haitian civil society and political actors have criticized the Core Group’s “selection of Haiti’s leader by statement.” To understand their concerns, imagine the Jamaican, Congolese, Guatemalan and Filipino ambassadors releasing a collective statement on who should be prime minister of Canada. The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse reflects the disintegration of Haitian politics after a decade of foreign intervention that empowered the neo-Duvalierist PHTK since an earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince and surrounding regions in January 2010. Jovenel Moïse, with first lady Martine and Prime Minister Claude Joseph at ceremony commemorating creation of Haitian flag, weeks before his assassination. [Source: apnews.com] Instead of dispatching Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Teams to help with relief and medical support after the quake, Ottawa sent 2,000 troops to join more than 10,000 U.S. troops deployed to Haiti. As internal Canadian government documents show, they were deployed out of concern over a “popular uprising” amidst the political vacuum and the return of Haiti’s most popular politician, Aristide, from forced exile. Canadian troops in Haiti. [Source: Canada.ca] While their massive capacities offered certain logistical benefits, the foreign troops trampled on Haitian sovereignty by seizing control of the airport and port. Simultaneously, the government was sidelined from international reconstruction. In the months after the quake the U.S. and Canada demanded the Haitian parliament pass an 18-month state of emergency law that effectively gave up government control over the reconstruction. U.S. soldiers patrol Haiti’s capital Port-Au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. [Source: chinadaily.com] Not viewing then-President Renée Préval as sufficiently compliant, the U.S. and Canada pushed for elections to take place only months after the horrific earthquake. With rubble throughout Port-au-Prince and hundreds of thousands living in camps, Canada’s then-Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon demanded Préval hold elections by the end of the year. In May 2010 Cannon said, “the international community wants to see a commitment, a solid, serious commitment to have an election by the end of this year.” (With far fewer logistical hurdles, it took two years to hold elections after the 2004 U.S./France/Canada coup.). As a result of various obstacles tied to the earthquake and a devastating cholera outbreak introduced to the country by negligent UN troops in October 2010, hundreds of thousands were unable to vote during the first round of the November 28, 2010, election. Another factor dampening turnout was the exclusion of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas from participating.
Michel Martelly [Source: miami.cbslocal.com] Nevertheless, Ottawa and Washington pushed the Haitian government to accept the OAS’s recommendations. Cannon said he “strongly urges the Provisional Electoral Council to accept and implement the [OAS] report’s recommendations and to proceed with the next steps of the electoral process accordingly.” In an interview Canada’s foreign minister warned that “time is running out,” adding that “our ambassador has raised this with the president [Préval] himself.” As part of their full-court press, Haitian officials had their U.S. visas revoked, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Port-au-Prince and there were threats that aid would be cut off if Martelly’s vote total was not increased as per the OAS recommendation. Michel Martelly and Hillary Clinton [Source: haitilibre.com] The pressure worked. But only about 20% of potential voters participated in the second round of elections, which Martelly “won.” Washington and Ottawa backed Martelly as he failed to hold constitutionally mandated elections and became ever more violent. As president, Martelly surrounded himself with former Duvalierists and death-squad leaders who’d been arrested for rape, murder, kidnapping and drug trafficking. When brutal dictator Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier returned to Haiti after 25 years, Martelly told The New York Times no one wanted him prosecuted except for “certain institutions and governments” abroad. Michel Martelly and “Baby Doc.” [Source: haitilibre.com] During repeated visits Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird praised Martelly for “going in the right direction” and operating “a really functioning government.” John Baird and Michel Martelly. [Source: haitilibre.com] In 2013 Baird and Minister for the Americas Diane Ablonczy met Martelly and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe in Port-au-Prince saying, “we share with Haitian leaders the goal of seeing a self-sustaining economy with opportunity for all Haitians and a greater role for private-sector actors, including Canadian companies.” Ottawa backed Martelly until protests forced him to leave office at the end of his five-year mandate. They also helped Martelly make the little-known Jovenel Moïse his successor. The U.S. and Canada pushed to move forward with the second round of voting after mass protests broke out over election irregularities. When the second round was finally canceled Global Affairs Canada put out a statement headlined “Ministers Dion and Bibeau concerned by postponement of Haiti’s presidential elections.” A subsequent audit of the election results found that 92% of polling place tally sheets had significant irregularities and a stunning 900,000 of the 1.5 million votes cast were from ‘accredited poll observers’ who could vote at any voting station. In a new election a year later barely one in five eligible voters participated. According to official figures, Moïse received fewer than 600,000 votes — just 9.6% of registered voters. Voter suppression was widespread.
Knowing they had no chance of gaining power via the ballot box in the foreseeable future, the foreign-backed opposition parties cried foul. After initially describing the elections as “a great success for the Haitian population,” the OAS subsequently criticized the counting method in a handful of Senate seats (as had been done in previous elections, the electoral council determined the 50 percent plus one vote required for a first-round victory by calculating the percentages of the top four candidates). The opposition boycotted the subsequent presidential election, which they had no chance of winning. A USAID poll of 1,002 Haitians conducted on the eve of the November 2000 presidential election showed that Aristide was far and away the most popular politician and Fanmi Lavalas was the preferred party by an incredible 13 to one. In one of the most impressive feats of 21st-century imperial propaganda, supposed “irregularities” in the May legislative and municipal election became the justification for destabilizing and ultimately overthrowing Aristide. In other words, the 2004 coup against President Aristide began with an effort to discredit elections he neither participated in nor oversaw. Aristide supporter with Aristide’s portrait. [Source: repeatingislands.com] The U.S.- and Canada-sponsored destabilization campaign included an aid embargo, funding for opposition groups, diplomatic isolation and paramilitary attacks. It culminated with U.S., French and Canadian troops invading the country to physically remove the president. Incredibly this was all planned, in broad outline, in advance in Canada. In 2003 Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” where high-level U.S., French and OAS officials discussed ousting Haiti’s elected president, re-creating the dreaded army and putting the country under UN trusteeship. Thirteen months after the meeting Aristide was forced out and Haiti was under UN occupation. The military was subsequently re-created. An RCMP officer trains members of the Haitian National Police in 2004. [Source: breachmedia.ca] The current Core Group traces its roots to the 2003 Ottawa Initiative on Haiti meeting. Some have labeled it a “fourth branch” of the Haitian government. But the Core Group’s success at rallying the PHTK behind Ariel Henry demonstrates its influence may be greater than that. The vast majority of Haitians are right to be angry at foreign interference in their country. Look at where it has led. AuthorYves Engler is a Montreal-based writer whose 2009 book, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, was short-listed for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction. Yves can be reached at: yvesengler@hotmail.com. This article was produced by CovertAction Magazine. Archives August 2021 One of the late 20th Century’s most influential thinkers was Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) whose philosophy of "deconstruction" has influenced religion, psychotherapy, feminism, law, Marxism, literary criticism, architecture, art and cultural studies. Derrida’s deconstructionist career began in the 1960s, peaked in the 1980s, and is now, it seems, in decline. Deconstruction may turn out to have been only a fad that was nurtured by bourgeois "radicals" who were looking for solutions to the problems generated by the economic and social contradictions of late capitalism but shied away from traditional Marxist analysis. What was Derrida’s deconstructionist philosophy? He began with a critique of Structuralism which was a wide spread philosophy popular in French intellectual circles in the 1950s and 60s-- displacing Existentialism as the dominant mode of thinking. Hegelians and Marxists can relate easily to the major premises of Structuralism, namely that, as Franz Hugdahl writes, the "object under consideration is the system that is comprised of the reciprocal relations among a series of facts, as, opposed to the study of particular facts in isolation." Structuralists believe that after a proper investigation of your subject matter (linguistics, anthropology or whatever) you can attain meaning and understanding by revealing the structural relationships of the concepts and ideas (and their real world counterparts) under consideration. This understanding is expressed in words with definite meanings put forth in speaking or writing. This was challenged by Derrida who maintained that references associated with words are so numerous and even contradictory that any explanation, view or text can be "deconstructed" to show that whatever you might have thought the text was saying, you could find that it said something else as well and therefore there was no privileged interpretation, no canonical reading, to which you will be forced to adhere. This way of thinking never caught on in philosophy, but was the rage, for a while, in English (and French) departments and in literary and cultural studies. The beginning of the end for "deconstruction" came in 1987. That year marked the fourth anniversary of the death of Derrida’s most important American proponent, Paul de Man, who had been a professor at Yale. De Man could take any text and argue (usually fallaciously by logic chopping, using puns and word play, taking words and phrases out of context, etc.)that it had more than one, and perhaps several, different (and even contradictory) interpretations none of which could be claimed to be the "correct" one. De Man, four years after his death in 1983 was exposed in the New York Times as having been a Nazi sympathizer in his native Belgium during World War II. He wrote anti-semitic articles for a Nazi paper supporting the Nazi cause and proposed deportation as a "solution to the Jewish problem." For Derrida and other deconstructionists this was a major embarrassment as they thought their new movement, poststructuralism, was radically progressive-- empowering marginalized elements of society by allowing them to read their own stories into the texts and traditions of Western civilization. As Jim Powell points out, "those given to deconstruction had always thought of themselves and their approach as revolutionary, iconoclastic and anti-totalitarian." Derrida rose to the defense of de Man by publishing an article "deconstructing" the anti-semitic and pro-Nazi texts of De Man’s newspaper articles. Derrida claimed that while on the surface these texts looked Nazi, nevertheless, he could detect in them subtle anti-Nazi traces and meanings. This basically dishonest application of deconstruction (in an attempt to rehabilitate de Man not the Nazis) revealed that it was a useless method with which to try and discover "meaning" as it was only the subjective desires of its practitioners that were being projected onto the text and nothing revelatory was necessarily produced at all. So what is left of "poststructuralism"? Not much I think. But neither should the foolishness of some of Derrida’s late productions ("Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War") obscure the importance of his early work. His 1967 "Of Grammatology'' remains a classic critique, for better or worse, of Structuralism, and, as Christopher Johnson points out, its lesson "is that one cannot simply step outside of a philosophical tradition and reason independently of it." Hegel’s view that a philosophical position must succumb to internal criticism was also developed by Marx in Das Kapital where capital’s failures are explained by the discovery of internal contradictions within its own premises not by attacking it from the outside. Derrida’s day has, nevertheless, passed. In closing I would be remiss not to point out that Derrida had progressive tendencies as a person and that he was a supporter of the anti-Apartheid movement and of the rights of North Africans living in France. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives August 2021 |
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