Simon Blackburn, the well known British philosopher, reviewed Knowing Right from Wrong,  by Kieran Setiya, in the Times Literary Supplement. The essay ("Taliban and Plato")  deals with Setiya's attempt to defend ethical realism (objective moral knowledge is possible) which Blackburn rejects in favor of ethical pragmatism (useful moral knowledge is possible). I think neither of these positions are tenable and the best way to approach ethics is from a Marxist perspective.

Blackburn begins with Plato's position in the Republic: the Good can only be understood by those intellectually elite philosophers who rule Plato's ideal state in the interests of the people. After their basic studies and military training the elite undergo ten years of mathematical training followed by five years of philosophy and begin to take part in ruling at the age of 55. This puts ethical knowledge out of the way of most people who must take on faith that their rulers have actually attained such knowledge.

We need something a little more accessible, Blackburn thinks, and the virtue ethics of Aristotle based on common sense, empiricism and "scientific" method provided a practical alternative to Plato's views in the Republic (the Republic does not exhaust Plato's views on this subject.)

Setiya"s book deals with, and Blackburn quotes him, "a tension between two things: the need to explain our reliability so that the truth of our beliefs can be no accident, and the need to leave room for communities that are not at all reliable."

Blackburn tells us that for Plato knowledge was different from true belief-- you might have a true belief that you picked up by accident, or a  guess, but this does not qualify as knowledge. Plato demands a "logos" for knowledge claims, "meaning," Blackburn says, "something like reason, justification or some kind of method -- and reliability seems a good yardstick for soundness."  But how do we test for "reliability?"

Here is the problem. Blackburn, for example, believes (1) in equal educational opportunities for men and women and (2) this is a reliable belief (i.e., true) based on  "cultural and historical forces" operant on Blackburn. Using the Afghan Taliban as a foil, Blackburn says they deny (1) and therefore (2) as well. "We need," he says, "a view from outside: an independent stamp of the reliability of our progress."

Where to find it? An appeal to Reason won't work. Just to claim we are "reasonable" and the Taliban are not is not  an independent outside view. What move does Setiya make that could uphold Blackburn's belief as reliable? He makes an appeal to "human nature." Setiya says "how human beings by nature live is not the measure of how they should." He uses the term "life form" for "human nature" and thinks, according to Blackburn, "in a proper environment, free from neglect or hunger or abuse" their true life form will emerge "and then they naturally gravitate towards the moral truth." This implies an objective moral truth out there (or in us) waiting for the proper environment.

Blackburn seems to contradict himself by saying this view is not meant to be "universally true" but more like natural history statements such as "dogs bark" or "finches lay eggs in the spring" which certainly seem to be, in the proper environment, "universally true."  Blackburn says: "So, the idea is that as a species, in the kind of circumstance in which we naturally live, we tend to believe what is morally and ethically true."  But this is just asserting the conclusion, there is no argument here. The Taliban could say "Fine, where we naturally live women should not have equal educational opportunities as they have different roles to play in society and this is morally and ethically true."  Blackburn's belief is not upheld. But, I think the Taliban would reject the relativism implied here and think their attitude toward education is universally true.

Blackburn sees problems with Setiya's position. When we look at history and other societies we see all sorts of, to us, strange and wicked goings on. Bertrand Russell put it this way: "When we study in the works of anthropologists the moral precepts  which men have considered binding in different times and places we find the most bewildering variety" [Styles in Ethics, 1924].

Blackburn says this leads to "a contemporary form of moral skepticism, which argues that a capacity for ethical truth would have given no selective advantage to anybody, so that it would be a miracle if it came to predominate  as a trait of our species." But this is nonsense as it assumes that the skeptic knows what ethical truth is and that nobody ever got a selective advantage from this knowledge-- neither of which the skeptic is in a reliable position to claim to know.

Setiya seeks to avoid moral skepticism, according to Blackburn, by adopting a position he calls NATURAL CONSTRUCTIVISM and defines as follows: "for a trait to be a virtue is for creatures of one's life form to believe that it is a virtue." This will not do at all. The Taliban, creatures of our life form, believe  it to be a virtue to deny equal educational opportunities to females (they may even feel it a virtue to throw acid in young girl's faces or shoot them for going to school) but really, should we think it is a virtue just because they have these beliefs. Mind you, Setiya wants to avoid both skepticism and RELATIVISM.

Well, we don't think it a virtue because our values differ from those of the Taliban and we share the same life form ( we are the same species with the same nature). But this begs the question. Blackburn has accepted female education due to the operant conditions of his culture and the Taliban reject it due to theirs. How do we escape relativism?

Setiya seems to be aware that you can't just define virtue the way he has done but he does so because he has "a certain faith in human nature." This implies the Taliban are wrong because they don't live the way our species (life form) is naturally programmed to live so, unlike us, they have not arrived at the proper ethical and moral conclusions. If you didn't already agree with the conclusion, you would never accept this argument-- if argument it be rather than just assertion.

Setiya warns us, says Blackwell, that his argument is the only way to defend moral knowledge or to have justified moral beliefs. It is "natural constructivism" based on reason and a universal human nature or, as Blackwell puts it, we may end up with "a soggy relativism" with one "truth" for the Taliban and another for those of us sharing Blackburn's operant conditioning.

Blackburn doesn't like this outcome, it "seems intolerable." He wants some justification for female educational equality, and it seems, for also thinking ill of the Taliban. If Setiya's moral realism won't work (i.e., no objective rules) he recommends a form of moral pragmatism. Blackburn's morals are more suited to our culture and useful and we (readers of the TLS and members of the culture that produced it) would shudder to live under the Taliban system-- so we definitely are going to favor female educational equality and, in fact, maintain it is the morally right thing.

Blackburn is modest, though, and admits there is a slight possibility he is wrong about this-- but this is only a theoretical possibility.  He even admits he doesn't have "the dialectical weaponry with which to topple the Taliban" and that he remains under the morality that the operant conditioning of his culture has created. He hopes that the Taliban will change because their culture is "not hermetically sealed from ours" (the expected change appears to be one way), there will be "dissident voices"  and "stirrings of modernity" and half the population "has the burning desire to change." Cultural conditioning doesn't seem to take place among Taliban females. Can it be possible that Pashtun women are completely alienated from their men folk and none of them accept the traditional culture of their people?

Blackburn tells us the difference between realism and pragmatism is that realism is interested in metaphysical problems regarding the nature of the "truths" of morality and seeks reliable claims as to this nature, while pragmatism does not believe this to be possible and there is no "foundation outside our ethics for our ethics to stand on."

What would a Marxist position be on these issues? I would propose a synthesis of ethical realism (there are objective ethical principles that should be followed if you want to create a particular type of society just as there are mathematical and physical laws you must follow if you want to fly to the Moon) and these laws also have a pragmatic dimension. Marxists do not believe in abstract metaphysical entities not rooted in the material world. They do not look for universal ethical principles applicable to all times and places.

The main motivating force of Marxism is to empower the working class, abolish capitalist exploitation of working people by the appropriation of the surplus value they create, and establish socialism and a world without one class or group of humans living off the exploitation of another. So there is a foundation to our ethics outside of our ethics which it can stand on. Whatever actions objectively further the interests of working people, which are determined by an objective scientific analysis of the social, political and economic forces in a given society, are morally and ethically correct. This is a materialist ethics based on forces objectively at work in a given historical period and has nothing to do with an idea such as "to be a virtue it is only necessary for members of your life form to believe it is a virtue" or a virtue is what readers of the TLS would think useful.

The class struggle is an objective fact of life and the sociological and economic laws that produce it are independent of the subjective desires or will of the people involved. Understanding these laws, such as the law of value, is possible and actions can be initiated in the real world to overcome this struggle and end it and the ethics and morals involved in this struggle rest on an objective materialist foundation independent of the human subject. This viewpoint I think is much more realistic than that of either Setiya or Blackburn. 

HANOI—On the evening of Aug. 10, 2022, the Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) and Vietnamese Military TV held a special event marking the 61st year since the United States military first dropped the chemical weapon known as “Agent Orange” on the people of Vietnam. People’s World was invited to attend this important event. The goal was to raise awareness and funds for Agent Orange clean up and for resources to care for the victims.

The program opened with remarks from Senior Lt. General Nguyen Van Trinh, director of VAVA. The program then shared some success stories, such as the clearing of Da Nang International Airport of the remaining dioxin. Examples of other places still in the process of being cleared were also shared. The program featured interviews with victims, their families, and their caregivers.

The program ended with thanking various people from across Vietnam that have raised funds, donated, or volunteered to help those suffering the ill effects of the toxins. This aid came from across the social and economic spectrum. Philanthropists, students, youth groups, and other grassroots initiatives were all well represented.

Starting in August 1961, until the end of the war in 1973, the U.S. military dropped Agent Orange and similar chemical weapons on 5.6 million acres of Vietnamese land. Over 90% of these lands were poisoned at least twice. By the end of the war, an estimated five million Vietnamese people were poisoned by these illegal weapons.
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But the crime didn’t end with the U.S. retreat from Vietnam. The awful effects of Agent Orange have been passed down from parent to child and from child to grandchild. This means that every year there are new victims born. Every year there are new victims that suffer the horrible disabilities and deformities caused by the toxins in Agent Orange and other dioxin weapons. Today, there are nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese still suffering from the toxins first dropped on Vietnam 61 years ago.

Today, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., remains the only consistent voice calling for the U.S. government to take responsibility for its past crimes in Vietnam. Year after year, Lee proposes legislation to help care for the victims of Agent Orange. She is joined by the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC) and other advocacy groups that try and lobby for funding for the victims. Unfortunately, year after year, the rest of Congress fails to give the initiative enough support, leading to its failure.

It is important to note that the victims of Agent Orange were not exclusively those bombed by the U.S. military. Many U.S. veterans who handled and managed the containers of the chemicals and their decedents fell ill due to their handling of the toxins. While some veterans did receive minimal compensation, the chemical companies that made the toxins have been protected by the U.S. courts from having to take any responsibility for their crimes.
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Earlier this year, it was revealed that the U.S. government was running biological labs in Ukraine. This horrifying revelation suggests the lessons from history have not been learned. While other countries seek to ban the use of unconventional weapons and create safeguards to deter their use, the U.S. military still goes in the other direction.

​For most people the idea that anyone could be part of the far right and gay seems like an unimaginable paradox. However, as my ethnographic adventures into the far-right and conspiracy theories has found they do in fact exist—and is a finding corroborated by other researchers in my field. More importantly, they seem to be gaining traction and momentum within certain sectors of the LGBTQIA2 community—both in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Many of the ideas currently being espoused promote racial hierarchies, transphobia, and even anti-gay sentiments. Where do these ideas come from? What underlying conditions were already there for the far-right to use to their advantage? And, most importantly, is there anything that can be done about it? While conservative LGBTQIA2 individuals have always existed, even during the reign of the Nazi party, in an age of increasingly divisive rhetoric these ideas and beliefs have been given new life.
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According to a 2020 study conducted by the Williams Institute approximately 9 million LGBT adults are registered voters, 15% of which are Republican and only 50% are Democrats. Like my recent peer reviewed journal article in Sexualities, some of the findings of this report make sense while others seem to contradict conventional wisdom about the individuals so studied. For instance, sexual orientation is considered an insignificant part of identity for LGBTQIA2 Republicans, yet 38% of this sample thought being an LGBT was a personal shortcoming. This recent report highlights a significant divide that has existed and persists within the LGBTQIA2 community—whether we have moved beyond the shared experience of marginalization that gave rise to the movement, or if we have entered into a “post-gay” era.  However, gay men have played a pivotal role in promoting some of the most discussed topics in conservative politics—including an idea known as “the great replacement” theory.

It may shock readers to learn that a gay French socialite and artist named Renaud Camus coined the phrase “the great replacement” theory—an idea which has been promoted in far right circles as the idea that whites are being replaced at rate that they will be the minority by 2050 and that Democrats are attempting to accelerate this through liberal immigration policies. Camus has been photographed proudly marching alongside Neo-Nazi’s and others making him an even more bizarre figure than conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. These ideas have also been promoted by those who call themselves the IDW—a group of pseudo intellectuals promoting conservative talking points and anti-science rhetoric. Among those promoting these ideas are Jordan Peterson, gay political commentator Dave Rubin who if has not directly promoted replacement theory has promoted transphobic and anti- lesbian rhetoric, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and Sam Harris—all “members” of the Intellectual Dark Web.

While for those not familiar with the inner workings of the far right, or alt-right, this may seem like a bizarre juxtaposition, however the literature on authoritarianism gives us an idea on how one could hold these seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time. In the 1950s Theodore Adorno and his contemporaries sought to understand if there was something within individuals that could lead individuals to choosing fascist ideology. Their groundbreaking study identified a number of traits that would lead one towards supporting authoritarian leadership. Of those nine traits several stick out as important for our discussion here—the belief in ridged (especially gendered) categories, belief that hierarchies are natural and justified, and aggression towards those seeking to transgress boundaries. These traits however, had already been cultivated by the gay community long before Milo, Dave Rubin, or Replacement Theory was televised into households.

Far right ideas however are in fact embedded within LGBTQIA2 culture, and empirical research studies have continuously found threads of discrimination based on gender, race, age, and ability which coalesce and form hierarchies of beauty within gay culture. When asked why these hierarchies exist, and why some gay men choose to date only those at the top of this hierarchy, I found these men repeated some of the same talking points as those espoused by conservative political figures. These include overly racialized statements including the all too common no-fats no-femmes no-Asians. Thus, when Renaud Camus’ penned the great replacement theory he may have merely been expressing opinions which white gay men have been using as justifications for holding racist ideologies long before he published his book—one need only look to #grindrwhileblack for examples of this, or the Instagram page by the same name.

​While the gay community and LGBTQIA2 spaces may seem like an odd place for the seeds of right-wing extremism to take root, the culture that has been built post-stonewall is one that has been increasingly commodified and as such increasingly exclusive—so much so most individuals chose not to live in gayborhoods but rather elsewhere due to affordability.

An additional mechanism that has allowed far right ideology to seep into the gay community comes, ironically, from the successes of the gay rights movement in promoting gay marriage. The term post-gay was used initially by Paul Burston, a British News Journalist who when interviewed said he, “meant it tongue in cheek not in the way it has been taken recently.” The term however, was then used by several high-profile figures including an interview with Nate Silver in Out Magazine who used the term to divorce himself from political ideology. In a post-gay era, brought on by the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, they argue that one’s sexuality is distinct from one’s politics. This was the position of the first elected gay alderman in St. Louis in 2009 , when I interviewed him in my role as news reporter, and a sentiment that persists throughout Democratic and Republican parties. This sentiment, however, has exposed the far-right tendencies that have existed within gay culture.

With far-right extremism on the rise, the spread of these ideas and rhetoric represents a growing threat to the larger LGBTQIA2 community. On the ground this has played out in a variety of surprising ways—from promotion of QAnon by LGBTQIA2 persons, gay men openly using racial slurs on dating apps, and the general adoption of authoritarian positions which marginalize those at the bottom of the LGBTQIA2 world. In 2016 I witnessed how toxic this had become when lesbian protestors gathered to prevent the Long Pride parade and promote transphobic messaging. Here in the United States we’ve had parallel developments with gay men promoting ideas that naturalize hierarchies of beauty—claiming that they are natural and even a product of human evolution.

Outside of these ideas embedded within LGBTQIA2 culture we’ve also seen formal organizations that support conservative politicians. These include groups like #twinks4trump, gaysfortrump, in addition to the ones that have existed for decades before hand (i.e. Log Cabin Republicans). In interviews that I have conducted with conservative gay figures they reiterate that they want to be seen as equal to, not distinct from, their straight counterparts. Many of these men also felt rejection from the larger LGBTQIA2 community leading them to find acceptance from others. Feeling rejected, these men found a warm embrace from conservative ideologues—why else would an openly gay Black man call Pride a sin, and speak against gay pride festivals as immoral grounds for sexual gratification. Such behaviors seem to be the product of trying to appease conservative leaders, even if that means denouncing others like themselves.
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In my ethnographic work on gay culture I’ve met many men who delayed coming out, myself included, because of the “body facism” or “toxic masculinity” that exists in the gay community. Even if you reject my premise that LGBTQIA2 culture had tendencies which provided fertile ground for far right ideologies to take hold, surely we can all agree that hiding one’s identity because of perceived rejection of one’s community is reason enough to change these behaviors. Moreover, in these initial first few days of a new virus attacking MSM communities—monkeypox—gay men seem to be clinging onto the hyper-individualism which has proved so harmful to other diseases including HIV/AIDS and COVID. If the LGBTQIA2 community is to weather this storm, perhaps we need to reconsider the places, spaces and configurations that the community draws upon. COVID has given us a remarkable opportunity to reimagine what community looks like and to unravel the root causes of so many problems the LGBTQIA2 community has grappled with for decades.

By now, many will be familiar with Project MKULTRA. For decades, the CIA conducted highly unethical experiments on humans in order to perfect brainwashing, mind control and torture techniques.
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Perhaps the program’s most notorious aspect was the administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs to targets, particularly LSD. These substances were brought to Langley’s attention in 1948 by Richard Kuhn, one of 1,600 Nazi scientists covertly spirited to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip following World War II. When MKULTRA was formally established five years later, some individuals consulted directly on the project.

The unwitting dosing of U.S. citizens with LSD is infamous; among those spiked were CIA operatives themselves. That the Agency exploited mental patients, prisoners, and drug addicts for the purpose – “people who could not fight back,” in the words of an unnamed Agency operative – is less well-known.
A study by academics at the University of Ottawa’s Culture and Mental Health Disparities Lab sheds significant new light on this underexplored component of MKULTRA and illuminates a hitherto wholly unknown dimension of the program; people of color, overwhelmingly Black Americans, were disproportionately targeted by the CIA in its service.

In 1973, due to fears CIA covert action might be officially audited in the wake of the Watergate scandal, then-Agency chief Richard Helms ordered all papers related to MKULTRA destroyed.
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Tens of thousands of documents somehow survived the purge. Even more conveniently, a significant portion of the research yielded by the project’s experiments was published in freely-accessible, peer-reviewed scientific journals, as over 80 private and public universities, prisons, and hospitals – whether knowingly or not – conducted psychedelic drug experiments on behalf of the CIA. While LSD was the preponderant substance of interest, the effects of DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, and THC were also extensively explored.

In all, the University of Ottawa team analyzed 49 of these papers, published from the 1950s to the 1970s. Forty percent related to experiments conducted at the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky, which the CIA directly managed.

The site included a prison for individuals charged with violating narcotics laws, a “special ward” for drug research, and a prison populated by purported “addicts.” Researchers employed there avowedly preferred to perform tests on former and current drug users, as they were considered to be “experienced” in the effects of illicit substances and therefore better able to give informed consent than the abstinent. In practice, the CIA’s guinea pigs frequently had no idea what was being administered.

In analyzing available literature, the academics examined participants’ stated race and ethnicity, recruitment strategies, methodology, and potential dangers to participants. All studies used captured, incarcerated test subjects, coercive incentives for participation, unsafe dosing levels, and had questionable scientific merit.

In almost 90% of cases, at least one ethical violation was identified, over three-quarters employed a high-risk dosing schedule that would be unacceptable under modern guidelines, and 15% used participants with psychotic disorders. Roughly 30% exploited people of color.

While in many studies, the race or ethnicity of test subjects was not recorded, further investigation by the Ottawa academics revealed Black Americans were significantly overrepresented in the recruitment sites from which test subjects were drawn. It is inevitable that the actual number of MKULTRA studies that abused people of color is far larger. For example, while people of color constituted just 7% of Kentucky’s population at the time of experiments at the Addiction Research Center, Black and Mexican Americans represented 66% of the site’s inmate population.

In any event, that people of color suffered to a far greater degree than White test subjects at the proverbial hands of the CIA is starkly set forth in the experiments’ bloodcurdling details. For instance, a 1957 study records how numerous vulnerable individuals were psychologically and physically tortured, in particular one Black participant, who was described by researchers as if he were an animal and treated accordingly.

Dosed with LSD, he exhibited a “wild frightened look” and asked for “medicines to relieve his fear.” Their response was to place him in restraints and administer a further cocktail of drugs at far higher doses than other participants – whose race was not recorded – and to continue doing so against his will.

Similarly, the previous year, an experiment was conducted in which Black participants were given 180 micrograms of LSD each day for 85 days, while White participants received 75 micrograms each day over just eight days. One Black subject had a “very severe” reaction to their dosage and asked to drop out of the study once they had recovered. After “considerable persuasion,” however, they agreed to continue.

Undue influence was a recurrent theme identified by the academics across the papers analyzed. A variety of coercive techniques were frequently employed to solicit and maintain participation in brutal and, at times, life-threatening examinations.

For example, Addiction Research Center inmates were offered a choice of reduced sentences, or drugs such as heroin, in return for volunteering. These drugs could be taken upon completion of a study or saved in a “bank account” for subsequent “withdrawals.” Test subjects almost always chose to feed their addictions rather than get out of prison earlier.

The settings in which participants were experimented upon also differed wildly according to race – even in the same study. One in 1960 observed side-by-side the effects of LSD on a group of “Negro” men convicted of drug charges, who were dosed in a prison research ward, and another comprised of professional White Americans, who freely volunteered and received their doses in the cozy confines of the principal investigator’s home, “under social conditions designed to reduce anxiety.”
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Such cases give the appearance of having been expressly conducted to gauge potentially varying reactions to psychedelic drugs in Black and White participants, which raises the obvious question of whether the CIA had a specific – or indeed greater – interest in the effect of certain drugs on people of color, rather than the civilian population in general.

Dana Strauss, who led the Ottawa University investigation, argues that the disproportionate representation of Black Americans in MKULTRA experiments, while intensely racially charged, was simply a reflection the ethnic compositions of the institutions targeted by the CIA – although she’s certain that if the Agency’s researchers did not have a readily available prison population at their disposal, they would still have opted to targeted people of color, in the manner of the Tuskegee syphilis study.
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As Strauss explained to MintPress:

Just as the closed environments of Nazi concentration camps permitted monsters like Josef Mengele to conduct callous, horrific experiments on humans with no regard for health or safety, so too did incarcerated and/or institutionalized people of color afford the CIA an endless supply of test subjects “who could not fight back,” to be exploited and violated however Langley wished, without scrutiny or consequence.
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In the process, Strauss says, researchers tested human responses to psychedelic drugs to the absolute limit. Yet while MKULTRA researchers did not quite match the evil and barbarity unleashed in Auschwitz, at least as far as we know, a comparable contempt for test subjects is evident in several studies. Such disregard may account for the wanton and excessive nature of certain experiments, which served no clear purpose and the scientific value of which was far from clear.

In 1955, a team of researchers conducted a study on four schizophrenic patients at Spring Grove State Hospital, in Baltimore, Maryland, a now majority Black city. The test subjects were given enormous amounts of LSD over an extended period – 100 micrograms per day for two weeks, which was increased by a further 100 micrograms daily thereafter to combat rising tolerance levels. For comparison, current psychedelic research guidelines mandate a 200 microgram dose of LSD as an absolute maximum per day, and warn against extended dosing periods.

All along, the researchers monitored participants without compassion, disrespecting and dehumanizing them. Objectifying language in their resultant report reflected this depraved outlook. Their perverse voyeurism extended to observing “toilet habits” and “eroticism”, and reporting on how often the four “soiled themselves” and “smeared feces”. They also noted how often the patients “masturbated or talked about sex,” and even recorded how one patient protested desperately about their mistreatment: “Dr. X, this is serious business…we are pathetic people… don’t play with us.”

For Strauss, that MKULTRA’s racial component remained unacknowledged and hidden in plain sight so long “speaks to where we are as a society.”

Just as CIA researchers devalued the lives of Black Americans and prison inmates, so to have academics ever since, even if unconsciously. Contemporarily, Strauss notes, scholars remain intensely uninterested in how non-White individuals respond to mental health treatments. She points to a recent study that found over 80% of participants in modern psychedelic research studies are non-Hispanic White.

“Psychedelic research, psychology and academia as a whole are still White-dominated fields. In 2015, over 85% of psychologists in the U.S. were White, and less than 5% were Black. A Black psychologist, Dr. Monnica Williams, was the first to investigate the research abuses and ethical violations in MKULTRA,” Strauss tells MintPress. “I think the real question is, why didn’t anybody else investigate these glaring research injustices?”
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Even more shockingly, while the morality of scientists and medical professionals using inhumane and illegal Nazi research continues to be hotly debated, no such concerns are apparent in respect of the highly unethical and fundamentally racist MKULTRA studies examined by Strauss and her team; they continue to be cited as legitimate academic work today.

Strauss hopes their paper will trigger a wider debate about the ways in which research abuses have impacted and continue to impact people of color and how mental health research can become more socially responsible and culturally competent.

More generally, there is clearly a pressing need for an official MKULTRA truth and reconciliation committee. No CIA official or participating academic was ever held accountable or punished in any way for any of the countless crimes against humanity committed under its auspices, and the Project’s full extent remains opaque and mysterious. All the time, though, in spite of ongoing obfuscation, we learn ever more about the sinister secret program, including its overseas component, MKDELTA.

In December 2021, it was revealed that for decades, the CIA had conducted invasive experiments on Danish children, many of them orphans, without their informed consent. When one of the victims attempted to access locally-held documents on the macabre connivance, authorities began shredding the papers. Questions abound as to where else in Europe the Agency may have undertaken similar efforts.

Evidently, the coverup continues – suppression surely not only motivated by a reflexive desire to conceal historic crimes, but because such records may well have relevance to CIA activities in the present.
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As MintPress revealed in April, many of the techniques of torture and mental manipulation honed by the Agency over the course of MKULTRA’s official existence were employed to devastating effect on the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. There is no reason to believe they aren’t still in use elsewhere now or won’t be in the future.

Richard Helms’ fears of congressional probes into MKULTRA eventually came to pass in 1977. Among those who testified was Edward M. Flowers, the only surviving prisoner participant of CIA mind control experiments to have been located. Flowers took part in psychedelic tests at the Addiction Research Center in the 1950s while incarcerated. While the hearings granted him a new, disquieting understanding of what had been done to him in the name of science, nothing came of it.

“I really got a first-hand insight about some things when we had the hearings…I got in touch with the fact that the CIA was behind all this…They used my ass and took advantage of me,” he recalled many years later. “I went back up on The Hill a second time. I sat down with a couple of people, and they talked about some things that had to do with compensation…and that was the last I heard of it.”

By contrast, in November 1996, as the furor over allegations the CIA had facilitated the sale of crack cocaine in California in order to finance covert operations in Nicaragua reached a crescendo, then-Agency chief John Deutch was compelled to field difficult questions from residents of Los Angeles about the reported conspiracy at an unprecedented face-to-face meeting.

There is no reason that public outcry over the Ottawa University study’s findings could not again pressure Langley representatives to explain themselves in public. And every reason that it should.

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. [1]. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts.
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Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure [2].

What is clear throughout Rodney’s work is the influence of the materialist insight that, while people make history, they cannot make it as they please, but it in the context of existing material conditions. Rather than start with abstract slogans or formulas, Rodney’s place of departure is an assessment of concrete conditions. For example, Rodney begins Groundings with a political assessment of the situation in Jamaica and he begins A View from the Third World with his analysis of the historical situation that gave way to Russia’s revolutionary era.

Walter Rodney was born March 23, 1942 into a working-class Guyanese family. According to Walter’s partner, Dr. Patricia Rodney, his parents introduced him to community activism at an early age. Growing up in Guyana in the 1950s, when the socialist movement was influential, “sociopolitical engagement was not uncommon among Guyanese youth” [3]. This was an incredibly exciting era to be a part of. It was a time of qualitative changes as the people of Guyana set out to build a whole new social and political system. “Walter and I, and our peers,” Patricia writes, “were strongly influenced by the political climate and the infectious spirit for independence that called and moved Guyanese of all generations to action” [4].

In contemporary U.S. society—a society that has been gripped by a deep reactionary counter-revolutionary force in response to the era of Walter Rodney’s generation—critical education tends to be viewed as something that can assist students in developing a critical consciousness. During the era that preceded the current one, when the colonized and oppressed world was in rebellion against colonialism and imperialist capitalism, it was the people, as Patricia Rodney alludes to above, who brought revolutionary commitments to education, not the other way around.

Walter Rodney was therefore one of countless students who took a sense of possibility with him to Queens College in Guyana. While at Queens College, Rodney became president of the historical society and deepened his interest in activism. In 1960, he won an Open Arts scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Patricia notes that “it was as a student in Jamaica that Walter first felt the disconnect between his life on campus and the grassroots community that surrounded the university” [5]. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, earning a doctorate in history in 1966 at the age of 24.
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While in London Rodney deepened his political commitments through a deep study of Marxism with a group of Caribbean students who would meet at the home of C. L. R. James on Friday evenings for hours on end.

Rodney accepted his first teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, but only stayed a year. However, Rodney would return to Tanzania for five years in 1969. Vijay Prashad says that Tanzania at the time was at the “highpoint” of its “experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, which was then called ‘African socialism’” [6].

Shortly after beginning teaching in Tanzania, “the radical students from across the region formed the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front” as a response to Tanzania’s president Dr. Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967, which called for a more direct move to socialism [7]. Nyerere was the leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), one of the post-WWII independence movements under British-controlled Tanganyika. Support for TANU grew and by 1960 the first elections were planned for the East African country. On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent republic and changed its name to Tanzania. In 1969, C. L. R. James concluded that, as a result of these developments, Tanzania stood “as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century” [8].

James specifically points to Nyerere’s focus on rethinking secondary and higher education as Tanzania’s “most revolutionary change of all…in order to fit the children and youth…for the new society which the government…seeks to build” [9]. Many of the students from across the continent Rodney encountered at the University of Dar es Salaam brought transformative, revolutionary determination, optimism, and organizational capacities with them. As a product himself of this revolutionary era, Rodney was well positioned to not just learn from, but contribute to, the radical student movement.

In 1967, Rodney was offered a position as a history professor in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where his contributions flourished. As a professor in Jamaica, Rodney was “torn by the lack of connection between academia and the working class” and having “a strong desire to bridge these worlds” [10]. It is fitting then that “unlike other professors at UWI, he chose to live with his young family outside the insular university compound housing” [11]. Rodney continued to use his position as a university professor to untether his academic labor (e.g., writing and teaching) from the white power structure of bourgeois state forces to contribute to the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Refusing to put the narrow self-interest of his academic position before the broader interests of the working class, Rodney’s commitment to revolution represents not only a recurring theme throughout his work (including A View from the Third World) but of the broader liberatory atmosphere of the times.

Rodney developed a practice for bridging the gap between academia and the working class called groundings. Groundings are a dialectical process of dialogue and exchange aimed at building the revolutionary movement. Rodney saw his studies, travels, and experiences as contributions to groundings, which he shared informally in working-class public spaces and privately through formal lectures.
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Groundings with My Brothers is a collection of lectures developed for their practical relevance. These lectures include tidbits of reflections on practice and pedagogy, but mostly include the content that contributed to the process of groundings. In offering a class analysis of Jamaica and various contributions to the Black Power movement, Rodney situates the Soviet example within this broad framework. His interest in revolutionary Russia was part of this larger project of charting “a new direction for Black Studies and African studies” [12]. As he writes in the second essay in Groundings:

Reflecting on his own position as a professor, Rodney asks if “people like us here at the university” will follow the example of Cuba and join the Soviet and Chinese-led struggle against white power, against capitalism/imperialism? Even though most who have studied at the University of the West Indies are Black, reasons Rodney, “we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system” and “a few are actively pro-imperialist” and therefore “have no confidence in anything that is not white.” Even if the professoriate is not actively and openly anti-Black but still “say nothing against the system…we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren” [14]. This silence, Rodney points out, is secured through an individualistic approach to progress, displacing the long tradition of collective struggle. As a result, “this has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the [B]lack masses of articulate leadership.” Part of the answer to the question, what is to be done is for Rodney, “Black Power in the West Indies” which “aim[s] at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the [B]lack masses” [15].
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Like his other works, Rodney’s approach in A View from the Third World is an example of what commitments to Black liberation looked like in practice. In the Foreword to Rodney’s first posthumously published book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, George Lamming offers some crucial insights into the practical lessons Rodney saw in past movements, relevant to our understanding of his approach in A View from the Third World: “every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces” [16].

Revolutionary Russia was an important source of hope in Rodney’s groundings. A View from the Third World deepens the practical relevance of his groundings on the subject by offering a thorough rebuttal and exposure of bourgeois propaganda aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and so on. Rodney also speaks to the practicality of revolution by engaging the questions of organization, assessment, and tactics and by examining, for example, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Finally, while demonstrating the correctness of the Bolsheviks, Rodney does not shy away from surfacing their mistakes, highlighting the insights their successes and mistakes offer contemporary organizers.

Rodney engages these tasks through the method of historiography. A View from the Third World compares and contrasts bourgeois, Soviet, and independent socialist writings on the Russian revolutionary era with an eye toward underscoring relevant lessons for the liberation struggles of his time and place. For example, in the first chapter, Rodney points to the international context to situate his “dialectical materialist” approach to historiography noting that, “there is every reason to be suspicious of the Western European (and American) view of the Soviet Revolution, and there is every reason to seek an African view” [17]. Rodney argues for the necessity of historical accounts that advance the view of the oppressed, of those systematically underdeveloped by the capitalist-imperialist system from which Russia was the first to make a break. In developing this view, he addresses various accusations that the Russian revolutionary era was anti-democratic or authoritarian.

Rodney describes many of the critiques against the Soviet Union, from multiple political positions, as idealist, deterministic, or stageist, because they do not deal with the concrete, materialist balance of class forces but rather with abstract concepts of the ideal, such as predetermined stages of development. Rodney engages the question of Marx and Engels’ predictions regarding where socialism would first emerge as a point mobilized to discredit either Marx and Engels or to claim the Russian revolution was a departure from Marxism.

Marx and Engels’ predictions of the socialist future—which were far and few in between—were informed by dialectical or historical materialism rather than idealism, since they were based on the information they had available rather than on predetermined, universal stages of development. Rodney writes that “historical or dialectical materialism is a method that can be applied to different situations to give different answers. Marx’s comments on Western Europe were based on a thoroughly comprehensive study of the evidence that he had before him… Hence to say anything about Russia would also require close study of what was going on in Russia” [18].
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The practical relevance of Rodney’s groundings work to build a mass movement is readily apparent here: without an assessment of concrete conditions, organizers are left with irrelevant and/or incorrect abstractions and formulas not likely to gain much traction. Driving home the practical implications of this point for organizers, Rodney is instructive:

From questions of spontaneity in the February Revolution to the issue of dissolving the Constituent Assembly in the October Revolution, Rodney makes a strong case for supporting the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership. He refutes the claim that the U.S., for example, was more democratic than the Soviet Union because it had two major parties. The difference, Rodney points out, is that the U.S. had a bourgeois democracy where the major parties represented the interest of the capitalist class, while the Soviet Union had a proletarian democracy whose ruling party was responsible to–and largely emerged from–the working class and peasantry.
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Rodney also addresses the major debates within the international socialist movement. For one example, he foregrounds the international significance of the harsh condemnation of the Bolsheviks by the German socialist Karl Kautsky, “who had known both Marx and Engels since his youth, and after their deaths he became their principal literary executor” [20]. Kautsky argued that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy was not yet possible in Russia since the proletariat were not the majority. Consequently, Kautsky concluded that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power represented an anti-democratic dictatorship that imposed its will on the peasantry. Rodney summarizes Lenin’s response to Kautsky, setting the record straight that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the political domination of the exploited classes over their former exploiting ones.

Rodney exposes the counter-revolutionary role of academia as one of the primary locations producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Explaining the hegemony or dominance of the bourgeois approach to revolutionary Russia and history more generally, he interrogates “the university institutions that are responsible for the vast majority of research and publications in the field” as “an important element in the superstructure.” Elite universities exist to “serve the interests of the capitalist or bourgeois class” [21]. At the individual level, for example, “the conservative historians always expose themselves by their contemptuous attitude toward the working people” [22].

Even more explicitly exposing the role of universities in serving the larger interests of the bourgeoisie, Rodney points to a 1957 publication by R.N. Carew Hunt, who was “widely believed to be a British intelligence agent” parading as a “scholar and authority on the Soviet Union” [23]. Beyond individual professors, Rodney implicates entire university projects such as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War and Peace, which “is notorious for its connections with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department” [24].

Using himself as an example to deepen the practical relevance of his critique, Rodney rhetorically asks, “what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall into the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment…How do we break out of this…captivity” [25]. He offers three suggestions for academics: 1) to confront pro-imperialist and racist knowledge production; 2) to challenge the idea that racial harmony defines our “post-racial society” by moving beyond the intellectual division of labor in bourgeois academies; and 3) to connect with the masses of Black working and poor people.
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Expanding on these directives, Rodney makes an important pedagogical statement that, in challenging the many myths of white supremacist imperialism in the process of connecting with the masses, “you do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they will add something to what you are saying” [26]. As a result of engaging the Jamaican working class as subjects with valuable knowledge, “Rodney encountered a Black Power movement in Jamaica that was already well underway” [27]. But it was a two-way street, and what Rodney contributed was “a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and that gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries, who continued to be marginalized” [28]. In the Introduction to A View from the Third World, Robin Kelley affirms this contention, writing that “the way Rodney engaged society as a university lecturer was considered ‘strange’ and even dangerous that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment” [29]. Outlining what this pedagogy, this practice, looked like in motion, in action, Rodney elaborates:

Rodney’s groundings emerged from this powerful combination of research and teaching with his eagerness to learn from, and be taught by, those looked down on by mainstream academia. Committed to the revolutionary fervor of the times, the resulting perception and treatment of Rodney as a threat to the establishment was not an effective deterrent. Rodney’s remarkable and unyielding achievements are among the fruits of the post-WWII revolutionary crisis. As the crisis of capitalism and of the white power structure deepens, so too does the influence of Rodney’s life and legacy.

By the age of 38, Rodney had become part of the same “tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas” that includes “Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James” [30]. It is important to note that for Rodney, scholarship was not simply an academic exercise but one central to making the academy relevant to the liberation of the oppressed. Jamaican professor Verene A. Shepherd argues that it is Rodney’s pedagogy that is the model for the activist academic, a model that remains relevant because activists in academia are still rare and still desperately needed [31].

A recurring theme throughout not only A View from the Third World, but throughout all of Rodney’s work, is  Marx and Engels’ caution against “applying the dialectic mechanically” because the specific historical development of the balance of competing class interests does not proceed in predetermined, inevitable ways, and that what people do matters [32].
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The Liberation School study guide for A View from the Third World will help today’s organizers and activists do just that.

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References

[1] Karim F. Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Daraja Press, 2017), xi.
[2] For a more in-depth analysis of Rodney’s pedagogy see Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements, ed. D. Ford, (Boston: Brill, 2019), 210-225. For more on Rodney’s life, legacy, and pedagogy, see Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer,” Liberation School, 12 August 2021. Available here.
[3] Patricia Rodney, “Living the Groundings–A Personal Context,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, ed. A.T Rodney and J. Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2019), 77-85, 77.
[4] Ibid., 77-78.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Vijay Prashad, “Foreword,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso, 2018), vii-xiii, viii.
[7] Ibid., viii.
[8] C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 118.
[9] Ibid., 128.
[10] Rodney, “Living the Groundings,” 80.
[11] Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution, xix-lxxiii, xxviii.
[12] Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, xi-xxii, xvi.
[13] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 1969/2019), 11.
[14] Ibid., 28.
[15] Ibid., 29.
[16] George Lamming, “Foreword,” in Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), xvii-xxv, xix.
[17] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2018), 3.
[18] Ibid., 50.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 105.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 15.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Ibid., 18. For a different example of the same line of inquiry, see Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” Monthly Review, 27 June 2022. Available here.
[25] Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 66.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Kelley, “Introduction,” xxviii.
[28] Ibid., xxviii.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lamming, “Foreword,” Rodney, xvii.
[31] Verene A. Shepherd, “The Continued Relevance of Rodney’s Groundings,” In W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 101-108.
[32] Rodney, A View from the Third World, 170.

The philosopher Galen Strawson published a few years ago a 448 page book entitled SELVES: AN ESSAY IN REVISIONARY METAPHYSICS. This article is based on Thomas Nagel's review in the London Review of Books 5 November 2009 ["The I in Me"].

Nagel tells us this is a book of "shameless metaphysics" [in the good sense] in which GS argues that there are such things as "selves" [you probably think you have one] but they "are not human beings" [we'll see about that]. GS is not some kind of wild idealist. He refers to himself as a materialist and so thinks if you have a self it could NOT "exist apart from your central nervous system." Well. Marxists would agree with that. There is a catch, however. All your experiences are brain events and for "orthodox" materialists brain events, and hence experiences, are events that take place in the physical world. But GS doesn't think that our experiences can be properly explained by an appeal to the properties of the material world.

This does NOT mean there is some other non physical world involved. It means that the material world is of greater extension than the world described by physics. "This means,' Nagel writes, "that the conscious brain has a mental character that is not revealed by the physical sciences, including neurophysiology." Pretty strong stuff. Maybe Marxists  should say "not YET revealed", etc. But let's see where GS is going.

Here is the direction of the argument according to Nagel. GS begins with phenomenology ( the subjective feeling of experience of the self) and moves to metaphysics (the objective nature of the self itself). We are told the "results are radical and unexpected." Consciousness is the experience of a subject. A subject is for GS a SINGLE mental thing. If there is a "self" it is a "subject as a single mental thing" which GS calls a SESMET. Your sesmet in the form of "I" thinks of itself as persisting through time as a single entity.

GS thinks this may be an incorrect thing to think and asks how the "I" as a sesmet can persist through discontinuities of consciousness. The human being that you are is the host of fleeting sesmets but there is really no underlying "I" which belongs to all of them. So there are a series of "selves" in the human being-- when you go to sleep and are unconscious one sesmet ceases and a new one comes into being when you regain consciousness-- a new "I"-- which due to the memory storing capacity of the brain links the new sesmet with some memory content stored from the the previous sesmet or "I"-- the feeling you have of a persistent "I" existing in the past and having a future is an illusion-- maya!

GS goes so far as to say that when he remembers today what "he" did yesterday he has no sense that it is the same "I" today as was the "I" of yesterday. Nagel thinks this very strange and suggests that GS has a very atypical conception of himself. Nagel quotes GS as follows:

"The episode of consciousness is certainly apprehended from the inside, and so I take it for granted that it is mine, if I care to reflect: I take it for granted that it is an episode of consciousness of the human being that I am. But there is no sense, affective or otherwise, that it was consciousness on my* part.' [Nagel explains: The asterisk indicates the use of 'my' to refer to the subject of present consciousness.] "My past in mine* in the sense," GS continues, "that it belongs to me,* but I don't [ should the "I" have an asterisk?--tr ] feel that I* was there in the past."

GS again: "When I consider myself in the whole-human-being way I fully endorse the conventional view that there is in my case-- that I am-- a single subject of experience-- a person-- with long-term diachronic continuity. But when I consider myself as an inner mental subject and consider the detailed character of conscious experience, my feeling is that I am-- that the thing that I most essentially am is-- continually completely new."

Nagel is not the only one to not be able to feel this way about his own "I". To think, as GS says in the following, "that there simply isn't any 'I' or self that goes on through (let alone beyond) the waking day, even though there's obviously and vividly an 'I' or self at any given time"-- is to think about the "I" quite differently, most Marxists think, than most of humanity. But that is his phenomenology and will lead, as Nagel says, to an "equally strange metaphysics."

Since we experience the "self'" both DIACHRONICALLY [a technical term philosophers like to use meaning through time or historically] and SYNCHRONICALLY [at a particular instant in time] all we know about the self arises from experience. Without experiences, no self. A thing is experienced only insofar as its properties are experienced. In fact, a thing and its properties are indistinguishable.

Warning-- thin ice ahead. Nagel: "Further, this thing cannot be distinguished from its properties, and those properties are exhausted by the experience, which is in turn identical with the experience's contents." Is this really materialism? Subjects have experiences and if the thing's properties are exhausted by the subject's experiences this does not leave the possibility of a thing having an existence or property independent of the subject and that smells, most Marxists would think, of idealism.

In any case, Nagel says that the foregoing discussion of the self and its experiences means that at any given time the "self" is just an episode or unity of a given set of existing experiences-- a sesmet. This is why there is a synchronically, but no diachronically, existing "I". But since GS also supports MATERIALISM the self must be a brain process, or as he says in his book, "a synergy of neural activity which is either a part of or (somehow) identical with the synergy that constitutes the experience as a whole."

As a sequence of sesmets the self of one moment is not the self of the next. The human being has a new self with every consciously aware brain process episode's set of experiences for any given moment in time, but has no diachronic existence. GS says, that Materialists "take the mind-- the mind-brain-- to have non-experiential being in addition to experiential being that provides all the ontic depth anyone could possibly want." By "ontic depth" [from ontology, the science of being] he means the feeling we have of a persistent being of a diachronic "I", that is myself and has memories and past experiences belonging to it even when not consciously present at every given moment.

Does all this sound like a lot of complicated play on words? Why not just say the feeling we have of a "self" is the I's awareness of its present consciousness PLUS what it remembers of past experiences. Brain processes give rise to consciousness and also store memories which can be recalled at different times. Why postulate and try and prove that we have zillions of fleeting selves (sesmets) rather than basically just one? Why multiply entities needlessly? Marxists are not the only ones who would apply Ockham’s razor here.

GS replies: "Philosophy, like science, aims to say how things are in reality, and conflict with ordinary thought and language is no more an objection to a philosophical theory than a scientific one." But science is based on experimentation with regards to the physical world and not speculation with regard to metaphysical theories. By analogy a religious person could say: "Religion aims to say how things are in reality also, so religious ideas that conflict with ordinary thought and language should not be objected to anymore than scientific theories that do the same."

When I said above GS's materialism gave off a whiff of idealism for Marxists I had this in mind; this opening his conception of philosophy gives to idealist theories. A well founded materialism closes the door on religious speculation, it does not leave a crack open for the irrationalists to squeeze through. Bertrand Russell, the philosophical forbearer of GS as well as Nagel, defined philosophy as the no man's land between science (what we do know) and religion (what we don't know) and this is the territory that GS's theory of the self inhabits.

Nagel does not think GS has made his case in any event, but highly recommends the book both for the high level of philosophical argumentation it contains as well as the wealth of information on the opinions of other philosophers and the answers that they have come up with regarding the mind and the nature of the self. "SELVES is a work of profound philosophical reflection," Nagel writes, and he credits GS with being a philosopher of "imagination and audacity" as well as of "intellectual power and exemplary integrity." Nevertheless, I don’t see how Marxists could appreciate his views.

​The promotion of the concept of privilege is spreading like wildfire. A class is being taught at Harvard, and everybody is talking about the privilege of being of a preferred group. Preferred by whom, is the issue.  
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The main thrust concerns privilege afforded within our society based on being white. If one is white and male one is considered even more privileged. Privilege manifests as being the preferred employee, the preferred representative, and the preferred voice.  Greater wealth, not being discriminated against, not being profiled, and not having the law applied as stringently are just some of the benefits or advantages of being privileged.  

Today, some degree of privilege is ascribed to almost every category.  Given the concept of intersectionality, the overlapping of different social dimensions, one can be Black and poor, but still privileged because one is not gay or dark skinned. Today’s concept of privilege is a powerful construct, but powerful toward what end is the gnawing question.

The problem with the concept of privilege, as it is bandied about today, is not just that it is devoid of all class content.  The problem is that today’s concept of privilege, instead of inspiring struggle against social ills, instigates a subtle affinity for the status quo and an insidious resentment toward those who are classified in one way or another as non-privileged.  But, the Marxist concept of privilege is different.  

Marx discussed bourgeois privilege as the power over the cultural, political, social, and economic realms afforded the ruling classes because of their ownership of society’s productive means. Lenin discussed the privilege of the ruling class of the oppressor nation and the elevation and domination of their language, culture, and nationality over all others. Critical to the point is Marx and Lenin’s call for the working class to recognize that the privilege of the ruling class is not shared by the working class, even if they are of the same race and nationality.  Hence,  the objective of Marx and Lenin was to explain that working class forces have an interest in struggling against bourgeois racist gendered privilege.   Marx’s discussion of bourgeois privilege isolates them off from the rest of us. Lenin’s discussion of the privilege of the oppressor nation’s ruling class segregates them off from the rest of us.  

​Marx and Lenin were attempting to clear the path of struggle, identifying which side with which we should associate if we were not really owners of wealth producing property. In other words, if you are not part of the .01 percent, don’t be fooled into thinking and behaving as if you are.
 
To make a long story short, I would argue the concept of privilege as used today contributes to a lack of clarity and muddies the water.  Anything that muddies the water is perfectly fine with the .01 percent.
 
To simply dismiss the discussion of privilege based on old arguments is not enough today. I use to make the argument that what passes as privilege for white workers is actually the absence of  discrimination.  Today, we are compelled to modify that formulation somewhat. It is not that discrimination is absent for white workers, but that discrimination is greater for non-white workers. Today especially, it needs to be exposed how white workers are in fact discriminated against culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Working class culture is debased, the working class style of life is shamed, few if any working class representatives hold political office, and economically, not only are white workers exploited, but in today’s economy the quality of life of white workers, as is true for all of us, has significantly declined.

The fact there still is a wealth and wage gap between white and black is less so true if one segregates out white workers, from the whole of white people, in comparison to Black people.  The point is, there is more in common between white workers and the oppressed than there is between white workers and the ruling class, and it is in our collective interest to unmask the commonality while still recognizing disparities and elevating the importance of the fight for equity within the overall struggle against inequality, including class inequality. Oppression based on being non-white is real, and the struggle is to expose this form of inequality and win white workers in the first place to the fight for equality because they too are unequal.
 
Marxist consciousness seeks to disassociate not from the oppressed and exaggerate commonality with the oppressor. Marxist consciousness, because of the contribution of Lenin, seeks to unite workers of the oppressor race and nationality with all of the oppressed based on common interest against the oppressor.  Even more, the point is to cultivate common struggle and not the lethargy of what ultimately is fictitious social status.  Nothing about white workers is appreciated in this culture unless white workers completely prostrate themselves in service to the ruling circles. In service to the ruling circles, they are allowed, even encouraged, to believe and behave as if they are one of them instead of one of us.
 
The whole point of the ruling class, the .01%, is to win allies to itself and sow confusion and disunity among the masses. The concept of privilege as used today puts us in touch with a preferred status if one is so anointed.
The truth is the greatest privilege we have, as working class people, is to allow through a lack of consciousness the illusion, the appearance, of privilege to instigate our participation in our own oppression.
 
Privilege, as put forward today, is a powerful illusory camouflage, with material aspects, that turns those so labeled toward an association with the status quo. The concept is powerful because it has elements of truth. In an effort to nurture equality in meetings one can hear during the call to order the uttering of the expression, “leave your privilege at the door”.   

Collectivity is a different response to the same concern.  Collectivity is a fundamental organizational principle geared toward the complete involvement of the racially oppressed, women, youth, and workers in meetings, actions, and on all levels of leadership on the basis of full equality.  Collectivity does not just happen; collectivity is consciously cultivated and intentionally struggled for and implemented.  

A frontal attack on today’s concept of privilege is not my objective here.  Many use and elaborate the concept in the attempt to contribute to an analysis of our society.  But, our goal as Marxists is not just to produce an analysis of our society.  Our goal is to construct an analysis that can contribute to the organization and mobilization of working class forces in the first place, along with all of the oppressed (women and youth included), who can change our society.  Rather than a caustic attack on those who use the concept of privilege, we should want to wage a struggle to win them to a deeper analysis, a more Marxist analysis.

Address by President Comandante Daniel Ortega during the celebration of the 43rd Anniversary of the Air Force  of the Army of Nicaragua:


Nicaraguan brothers, families of this nation of Dario and Sandino, brothers, compañeros of the Nicaraguan Air Force, which is turning 43 today, an Air Force which, along with the Army, was born with the Revolution. That is why, 43 years ago, the Sandinista People’s Army was born and the Sandinista Air Force was born.

Then, with the passage of time, changes of government, a consensus was reached in the National Assembly so that both the Sandinista Popular Army and the Sandinista National Police were to be called the Nicaraguan Army and the Nicaraguan Police.

However, it is important to underline the origins of the Air Force that was born in the heat of the struggle for self-determination, for independence, for the sovereignty of Nicaragua. It was those flags that flew over the birth of the Nicaraguan Army and the Nicaraguan Air Force, and there was present and is present, the thought, the example of our General Sandino, present throughout Nicaragua, and of course present in the Nicaraguan Air Force…

Today is a day when we are honored to be commemorating the 43rd anniversary of the Air Force, and with it the 43rd anniversary of our army, the Nicaraguan Army, the People’s Army.

How much joy it gives us when we listen to the reports of the head of the army, General Avilés, summarizing the many tasks of the Air Force and the relations the Air Force maintains in the region. And we clearly see it is an Air Force with a role of service for peace, of service for integration.

Yes, because integration is something indispensable and something inescapable for our nations, and so the Army practices it, the Air Force practices it. Beyond political or ideological differences, there is a sense of responsibility that, united, fighting for the well being of our peoples, we do much more than we could do each on our own.

These are times that call for integration. Today more than ever they call for integration in Central America, here in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in that integration process, along the way, even before the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, there was ALBA.

The ALBA dawn was like a bridge that appeared, inspired by our Brother Comandante Hugo Chávez, by Fidel, the bridge that opens up with a spirit of solidarity, a spirit of developing collaboration, cooperation, taking into account the asymmetries between our countries.

At no time was ALBA considered as simply a trade project, but rather as a project full of humanism, full of solidarity, full of love, and naturally that did not go down well with imperialism. Since ALBA brings benefits to the most impoverished peoples of this region, with no conditions, both to Central America and to the sisters and brothers of the Caribbean, many benefit from it. 

Then the empire trying to destroy ALBA, and in doing so, to affect the poorest people of our region; because the empire has not been able to provide the levels of unconditional cooperation ALBA has provided, made possible by the Bolivarian Revolution of our peoples, despite the empire being a thousand times more powerful in economic terms, in financial terms, than Venezuela [or] Cuba. And all of this undoubtedly has contributed, despite the blows that the empire has given against ALBA, to the benefits brought by ALBA, the fruits.

And here we cannot forget, we can never forget, that in 2006, when there was a third neoliberal government ruling in our country under the tutelage of the United States government, [that] illiteracy, poverty, [and] hunger had multiplied, education and health had been privatized, and the works that we had been developing since the triumph of the Revolution had been abandoned. They were simply governments that thought only about strengthening, enriching… a minority.

They also did not care about the country, they committed acts they did not understand, through their ambition they did not realize that they were putting the knife into themselves, when the energy services in our country began to disappear. Yes, it is incredible, but the energy services were disappearing because they were wanted to get wealthy at any cost, they neither sought to, nor did they, invest in the energy sector. And already by 2006, with the third neoliberal government in Nicaragua, we had blackouts every day, energy plants were paralyzed, economic activity affected… Everyone! In other words, if there is no energy, a country simply goes under.

And we were aware… that we were fighting for the government in the election battle of the year 2006. That was a terrible challenge, a huge challenge, because the country was without electrical power, and we were looking for how to get closer to people or governments that could contribute in that sector with Nicaragua, on the basis of which we hoped… to win those elections and get into government for the year 2007.

So, as a result of the relationship that had begun with President Chávez, we went on to propose some programs to bring energy to at least some sectors, such as municipalities, [by] twinning municipalities, looking for how to bring energy projects to the municipalities. And before we triumphed in the elections, the first agreement with Venezuela was already signed. We signed it in Caracas with Comandante Chávez. He was a light in the darkness at the time.

Well, we won the elections, we came into government, and we found that the problem was present there. It’s true, a first step had been taken in that agreement with Venezuela within the framework of Petrocaribe, it was the generous attitude of Venezuela to supply fuel for energy under very fair, favorable conditions.

No country, no capitalist government in the world offered us that kind of cooperation, not to their neighboring countries, nor to the African peoples who had been subjected and enslaved by them. And here in Latin America it was the same: there was no government, no great power—the United States with all its power was not willing to provide cooperation, to share bread. It was not willing to love others, the United States cared little about the tragedy our peoples were experiencing in Latin America and the Caribbean.

And we won the elections, and President Chávez came for the inauguration, and right there we signed up to ALBA and Petrocaribe. I remember speaking with him and saying “the big problem we have here is that there is no power, no power plants.” There was no investment in generating plants, and the power plants that existed were already outdated, and that was the big problem that we mentioned.

What was the answer he gave us? Immediately came some generating plants that had actually been contracted for Venezuela, part of a process in which Cuba and Venezuela were combining efforts to bring generating plants for Venezuela and for Cuba.

And Chávez told me, like a good brother and a good Christian, “we can solve this right now, we have plants going to Venezuela, we have them there in Cuba, we are going to bring them now to Nicaragua so you can count on having the energy to be able to guarantee the basic, minimum activities of this people.”

And so, from word to action, and it was incredible how the power plants arrived, and how the Nicaraguan people breathed a sigh of relief, and how the pro-imperialist capitalists who did not worry about investing in power plants breathed a sigh of relief after having been in government for 17 years, in power. And of course the United States was not willing to provide this cooperation to this people, only a revolution with a truly generous soul, a revolution like the Bolivarian Revolution, could behave in that way.

At that time, he didn’t ask us for money or guarantees, or for us to sign a contract to guarantee that the plants will be paid for later… No, they were just brought here! And the plants came, and that is what has allowed Nicaragua to make its way as it has been doing, so that Nicaragua could grow as it had been growing, totally in peace, such that Nicaragua achieved a great alliance between workers, people, [and] entrepreneurs.

Because it was possible to have that basic instrument enabling a country to get going, and that gave us the strength to be able to make that great alliance, to develop the country, to combat poverty, to strengthen the institutions of the Nicaraguan state, including the Army, the Police, the Air Force, the Navy, counting of course on the cooperation of other brotherly peoples already in those areas.

There has always been invaluable cooperation ever since the triumph of the Revolution, cooperation in all fields that we added to another Revolution: the October Revolution, the first revolution that occurred in the world and, in the midst of all the antagonisms, in the midst of the harassment, in the middle of the blockade, because with all the counter-revolution that had thrown itself against the October Revolution, we found ourselves together with the Soviet Union, led by Russia.

There a fraternal relationship was established, with no conditions, including cooperation so as to be able to have the basic tools for the Army, and thus too for the Air Force, for all the Armed Forces, for the various different forces of our Army, to have means for defense. They were not means to attack anyone, they were not means to attack any other country, it was simply to guarantee the defense of our country, which was then threatened again by the United States government.

There have been two extraordinary moments in our history: one being the invaluable cooperation of the Russian people, then part of the Soviet Union, and now in this new stage we have had the invaluable cooperation of the Revolutionary Bolivarian Republic led by Comandante Hugo Chávez. And now too, in this new stage, as one might expect, we have linked up again with the Russian Federation, we have linked up again, and it was normal that we should link up with a sense of cooperation, a sense of friendship.

When has the United States ever donated wheat? No, they sell it on the market. The brothers and sisters of the Russian Federation have donated wheat to this people.

Here, in those 17 years of neoliberal governments, the public transport vehicle fleet was never renewed and was totally destroyed. There too, the Russian Federation gave us cooperation, sharing with Mexico also in cooperation, for which we are ever grateful to the people and government of Mexico, and thus  we reactivated with the Russian Federation, that earlier relationship, historic, respectful, fraternal, and naturally fighting both of us for peace in the world, fighting for the defense of the sovereignty of peoples, fighting for the rights of peoples, of nations.

And today, beloved sister and brother Nicaraguans, beloved families, in a world that goes from one explosion to another as we have seen, and as I said on one occasion, this has to do with birth of a new order being born into the world, one that is burying imperialism, burying the colonialists, and opening up a democracy of nations, a multipolar world that is becoming clearer in many ways.

We see initiatives springing up in different spaces, and we see another side to US imperialism, trying to maintain its hegemony at all costs, even at the risk of damaging its own economy; but in their arrogant attitude they need to feel they can still maintain their hegemony, that they can and must defend their hegemony, when what they are doing is sinking themselves, and they are going under, such that they are causing great harm to the United States’ people.

And with all the sanctions that have been imposed on the Russian Federation, which is waging a just war against fascism, against the Nazism installed as a result of the coup in Ukraine, they are destroying the European economy, and NATO too, as is clear with each aggressive action, with all the multiple decisions that have been taken in attempting to destroy the Russian Federation.

They also aim to try to destroy the People’s Republic of China, because they see those two countries as the two great powers that are already leaving them behind, in terms of development, in terms of science, in terms of technology. And so they have moved against the Russian Federation, and thus Russia is fighting gain the battle against fascism. Fascism did not disappear with the fall of the Reichstag, where the first to arrive were the soldiers of the Red Army who hoisted their flag there where the command of the tyrant Hitler had been.

Fascism left behind its roots and is entrenched in some European countries, and it is entrenched in American society, and it is entrenched there in Ukraine, yes, a fascist government. And even though there is a situation affecting the richest countries, affecting all of humanity, affecting the world economy, the American empire does not care, thinking that its strength is so great that it will manage to get ahead by overrunning and destroying the world.

And it is clear to all who can see in the insane way the US is launching aggression against the People’s Republic of China. What harm has the People’s Republic of China done to the United States? What harm has the People’s Republic of China done to the peoples of the world? What harm has the People’s Republic of China done to the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, of Africa, of Asia?

The self-same ideologues of imperialism state that what worries them is that they see the People’s Republic of China bringing benefits to these peoples and they feel that there they are losing the power to keep these peoples enslaved. They say it very clearly, namely they are upset, outraged, because the People’s Republic of China is making available billions in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America.

These are investments for the development of our peoples. Ah, they see that as bad for them, but why can’t they do the same? Why can’t they bring those investments? Why have they never brought investment with the same conditions that the People’s Republic of China is making available?

Instead, in a real act of madness, they launch themselves against the People’s Republic of China, simply because it is a power that is growing, without harming anyone, and the US mounts a challenge, a provocation, earlier today, when we saw a high official of the US State, the government of the United States, in an arrogant attitude of invasion… And it is an act of invasion!

That’s in the blood of the Yankee empire, the practice of invasion, and they announce, here I come! Here I come! They feel they have the right to invade a territory even knowing very well, because they were party to the agreements, party to the resolutions that were taken at the United Nations when they agreed on the existence of one China.

But they disagreed fundamentally, and the proof is that now we see them launching a provocation, and it is a provocation, because a power like the United States is invading, entering another country with its official plane, one of the highest ranking officials of the United States is entering, just because she decided to do so and government of the United States is endorsing that and applauding, since of course she is part of the government, that she set out in her plane, sure that the People’s Republic of China was not going to do what the United States does, launching a drone at them to destroy the plane. Because the US is accustomed to launching drones everywhere, killing people.

A drone was launched at our brother Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela during an event where all the ministers, officials, Army commanders who were with Nicolás presiding over the event, were going to get blown up. And that was the US.

And now they are launching drones again in Afghanistan and boasting that they sent a drone, killing a leader that they describe as a terrorist. After they left, fleeing Afghanistan, after they signed agreements right there that this practice was going to disappear, now they come along as if they need more blood now, so they launched the drone and the cowboy appears bragging about it.

And as I was telling you, they launched the plane knowing very well that the brothers and sisters of the People’s Republic of China are not terrorists and were not going to shoot down that plane or send a drone against it. An act of arrogance, of trying to reaffirm that they are the dominant power, and remain the dominant power setting out to destroy the Russian Federation when in fact they are destroying the countries of the European Union, destroying the economy, destroying trade and they are destroying the possibility even of living, because Winter comes and they may well have no heat. In other words, the situation exposes them to death.

And this step they have taken today, which of course we have condemned, is an act one can only describe as insane, of those who feel that their empire is collapsing; they are like the insane actions of Hitler, by people feel that they’re still an Empire, and so they look for ways to strengthen their positions lunging to challenge the People’s Republic of China, to invade, and it is an invasion, what occurred today, that is an invasion, it is an offense, a crime, both an offense and a crime, it is an invasion.

We are sure, indeed, that the strength, the age-old intelligence, of the Chinese People, and the experience there under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, prevails there, and we are sure that they will know how to give the right answer, one that will strengthen the People’s Republic of China even more and will weaken even more the hegemony that the US government is trying to maintain at all costs.

And here Nicaragua is a small nation, but they are always fighting with Nicaragua with their habitual arrogance, on the one hand they send us messages, though they are not interested in opening up communication, for several months now. But since we know them very well, which is why I keep recalling Sandino’s story, one of dialogue, peace, communication, for what? So they could murder him. So we have preferred to keep our distance from the messages that have been sent to us.

And indeed they sent a messenger who was here in Nicaragua, they did not do it officially, but a State Department functionary was here, who now wanted a meeting, and he was told that he would have to come through the official channels, it would have to be a communication via our Ambassador there in Washington and of course through the US Embassy here, so as to be able to receive an emissary but not in the way he came, since he came clandestinely.

Then they said they are going to appoint a new Ambassador, and they sent the proposal for who would be the new Ambassador… well, based on what one could read in the profile of the candidate to be Ambassador, we said, let’s give him the agrément.

So they went then to Congress with the agrément, because without that they could not take the proposal to Congress, but we had given the agrément for the candidate to be an ambassador in Nicaragua to present to Congress, and, well he started talking as if he was William Walker, as if he was going to be the governor of Nicaragua, coming here to put an end to the government of Nicaragua. Yes, speaking calmly as you like to the US Congress!

So then we immediately informed them we were withdrawing the agrément, because it is basic, we already know that any Yankee ambassador comes here with conspiratorial purposes, they are always conspiring, but really, as the song says, “outside, outside let them say what they like, but here on Nicaraguan soil, our flag is respected.”

These issues are basic, they are in the rules of the Vienna Accords as every ambassador knows, and however much they represent a government that wants to destroy the very government with which they are establishing communication, it behooves any ambassador to at least take care not to send aggressive, disrespectful messages to that country.

Of course, they conspire yes, in the embassies they conspire, they meet, they do what they do there, we know that perfectly well, but well, at least the principle is respected, but here was someone not yet come to the country and he has already started raving. Well, let him stay outside, outside, shouting whatever he wants, but here on Nicaraguan soil our flag is respected…Yes, our flag is respected!

Now, I don’t know to what extent, I can’t confirm the information, but they were reporting on Voice of America that they had interviewed a State Department official who said they are going to keep this fellow as ambassador. Are they going to want to put him in a little plane like they the one they sent to Taiwan? How far will the arrogance, the madness of these people go?

They have to learn respect, the United States has to learn to respect all the peoples of the world, if they want to be respected themselves; meanwhile, the struggle will continue.

And as I said, in the midst of all these explosions of violence that are present everywhere on our planet, the economic stress, the tensions around fuel, tensions around food, that is, all the major symptoms of stress in the world in these times, in the midst of all this, taking shape, a new world is being born and this new world is going to be a democratic world, where there will be respect between nations, where there will be cooperation between the nations, where there will be no threats among nations. I am certain, quite sure, that this world is being built, it is already being forged, it is being forged now, and that this world is going to bring peace, stability, to humanity.

Beloved brothers and sisters, beloved compañeros and compañeras, let us continue with our efforts, with the tasks that you carry out every day, contributing to the forging of this new world. Our grain of sand, yes, we offer it from Nicaragua, contributing to the forging of this new world.

Long live the 43rd Anniversary
of the Nicaraguan Air Force!

Long live the 43rd Anniversary
of the Nicaraguan Army!

And Long live blessed Nicaragua,
Forever free!

Remarks by Rosario Murillo, vice president of Nicaragua, after the celebration of the 43rd Anniversary of the Nicaraguan Air Force:

A very good evening, compañeras, compañeros, and a very good evening, beloved families of Nicaragua. An embrace to the households, the homes, the communities, the neighborhoods, where we know that you have been following this important and historic act. An embrace because we are together always, looking forward and making our future, the one we all deserve.

Today marks 43 Years of our heroic brilliant Air Force, part now of the Army of Nicaragua, an Army that is the people themselves in uniform, the Air Force of the people of Nicaragua. And it is true that when we say that the Air Force is a demand of our people, we know it, we feel it, we live it, especially in difficult times when we face climatic events, what we call natural disasters, when we work hard so that valuable Nicaraguan lives are not taken from us.

Comandante Daniel has taken us on a journey through these historic times, emphasizing in these historic times everything it takes for the new world to be born, and emphasizing the courage of those peoples who fight and who give of themselves, because we do fight and we do give of ourselves, so that this new world is born.

And as he said, Nicaragua, a small country but full of patriotism and conscious of the importance of defending sovereignty, national dignity, plays its part. That is why we are quick and eloquent in pronouncing our opposition in the face of aggression, interventions, invasions, as our Comandante Daniel said, because we have also suffered them, and when I say suffered, I mean faced, fought and defeated them, because here the imperialists of the Earth have always been defeated.

A small country, but great in spirit, great in courage, in honor, in honor, glory and victories! That is our historical memory and it has only been increasing, because, believe me, with every aggression of the imperialists out to destroy the world when the peoples do not allow it, that strengthens our souls every day, strengthens us because we know we must continue fighting… striving for peace!

We have fought and defended peace at all times, and we have always won. And, given a world that has fallen, destroyed by them, one where the very same imperialists of the Earth have buried their daggers, of avarice, greed, selfishness and eagerness to dominate, without even realizing it, because they really are insane, not even realizing how all of that is blowing back, how all of that is going against them, and how that is all very clearly seen in the everyday life of millions of poor people in the United States and in Europe, created by their system that devours human beings, destroys human beings.

Here we live a simple life, here we are used to hearing one thing said one day and something different another day, but here we are also well aware of the firmness, fierceness, love, passion, enthusiasm that we are familiar with and have ourselves.

How much love, how much passion, how much enthusiasm for life was bequeathed to us by the prince of peace, of love. Christ Jesus taught us to be great in love, courageous, and to defeat hatred, the hatred we still see today appear from time to time. And the most incredible thing, hate coming from mouths of people who are supposed to spread messages of love, of Christianity, of solidarity.

We can well believe it, because we have suffered, suffered and fought also those who have been vociferous, believing themselves to be “pastors”, against our people and families, and the right of families to live peacefully, working, prospering and achieving wellbeing.

That hatred still appears, but we are strong and powerful, because we are full of love, and with love we overcome hatred. Because love is stronger, love throughout our history, love for Nicaragua, love for the nation, love, respect for our sense of national dignity is what prevails and has prevailed. And the demons, those who are full of hatred, the sour, the acidic, the bitter, they fall by the wayside, they disappear, because the wind lifts them away, they are already part of what the wind carries away, and did carry away.

Here we are in a blessed Nicaragua, full of patriotism, full of idealism, full of values, always free, always one family, always aware that our strength is our faith, our spirit, and all we have inherited from great love. The love that is stronger than hate, the love that builds, that does not destroy.

So today, on the 43rd anniversary of the people’s Air Force of the Army of Nicaragua, we feel proud, content, pleased to be celebrating together with the strength of victories, and to be celebrating together with the vision of the future that characterizes us. We do not look back, but seek to build, and we look forward to continue building what we are: a brave people, a people of honor, glory and victories!

An embrace to all the compañeros and compañeras of the Air Force, of the Nicaraguan Army, an embrace to all those of the Naval Force that soon we will also be celebrating, and to the Army in general… the army of our people, an army that defends our national sovereignty as we all defend it, because we love our blessed and always free Nicaragua! And that phrase of Sandino that we say every day, “always further on”, illuminates us like the sun that never sets!
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An embrace for all, compañeros and compañeras. Let us head onwards!

The Atacama salt flat in northern Chile, which stretches 1,200 square miles, is the largest source of lithium in the world. We are standing on a bluff, looking over la gran fosa, the great pit that sits at the southern end of the flat, which is shielded from public view. It is where the major Chilean corporations have set up shop to extract lithium and export it—largely unprocessed—into the global market. “Do you know whose son-in-law is the lithium king of Chile?” asks Loreto, who took us to the salt flat to view these white sands from a vantage point. His response is not so shocking; it is Julio Ponce Lerou, who is the largest stakeholder in the lithium mining company Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) and the former son-in-law of the late military dictator Augusto Pinochet (who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990).

SQM and Albemarle, the two major Chilean mining companies, dominate the Atacama salt flat. It is impossible to get a permit to visit the southern end of the flats, where the large corporations have set up their operations. The companies extract the lithium by pumping brine from beneath the salt flat and then letting it evaporate for months before carrying out the extraction. “SQM steals our water to extract lithium,” said the former president of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Atacameño, Ana Ramos, in 2018, according to Deutsche Welle. The concentrate left behind after evaporation is turned into lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, which are then exported, and form key raw materials used in the production of lithium-ion batteries. About a third of the world’s lithium comes from Chile. According to Goldman Sachs, “lithium is the new gasoline.”
​

Evo Morales, former president of Bolivia (2006-2019), in an interview with British journalist Matt Kennard at his home in El Trópico, a small town four hours from Cochabamba in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, called for an international campaign to eliminate NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

According to Morales, this campaign should explain to people worldwide that “NATO is—ultimately—the United States. It is not a guarantee for humanity or for life. I do not accept—in fact, I condemn—how they can exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. When the U.S. has intervened in Iraq, in Libya, in so many countries in recent years, why have they not been expelled from the Human Rights Council? Why was that never questioned?”

Morales continued: “We [in the Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS] have profound ideological differences with the politics implemented by the United States using NATO, which are based on interventionism and militarism. Between Russia and Ukraine they want to reach an agreement and [the U.S.] keeps provoking war, the U.S. military industry, which is able to live thanks to war, and they provoke wars in order to sell their weapons. That’s the other reality we live in.”

Morales is one of the most successful presidents in Latin American history who closed down a U.S. military base in Bolivia, expelled the CIA and DEA, and helped reverse half a millennium of colonial history by helping Bolivia to industrialize its economy.

In November 2019, Morales was ousted in a U.S./UK-backed coup that culminated with the army’s massacre of anti-coup protesters. Morales survived an assassination attempt only because Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, sent a plane to rescue him.

​The beneficiary of the coup, Jeanine Áñez—a conservative Christian who lost the October 2020 election to Luis Arce of MAS—was sentenced to 10 years in prison in June after being convicted of terrorism and sedition.

Morales—who returned to Bolivia after Arce’s election in October 2020—believes that the coup was prompted by his move to nationalize Bolivia’s oil and gas reserves.

Morales told Matt Kennard that “I continue to be convinced that the empire, capitalism, imperialism, do not accept that there is an economic model that is better than neoliberalism. The coup was against our economic model…we showed that another Bolivia is possible.”

In 2021, the British Foreign Office released documents which showed that the British embassy in Bolivia had paid an Oxford-based company to optimize “exploitation” of Bolivia’s lithium deposits the month after Morales fled the country after being ousted in the coup.

The documents also showed the UK embassy in La Paz acted as “strategic partner” to Áñez’ coup regime and organized an international mining event in Bolivia four months after democracy was overthrown.

Bolivia possesses the world’s second largest reserves of lithium, a metal used to make batteries, which has been increasingly coveted due to the burgeoning electric-car industry.

Under the traditional imperial dynamic which had kept Bolivia poor, rich countries extract raw materials, send them to Europe to be made into products, and then sell them back to Third World countries like Bolivia as finished products at a mark-up.

With Bolivia’s lithium deposits, Morales was adamant this system was finished. Bolivia would not just extract the lithium; it would build the batteries too. He told Kennard,“We started with a laboratory, obviously with international experts that we hired. Then we moved on to a pilot plant. We invested around $20 million, and now it’s working. Every year it produces about 200 tonnes of lithium carbonate, and lithium batteries, in Potosí [the capital of the Spanish empire where the Spanish had undertaken silver mining in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.]”
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Morales continued, “We had a plan to install 42 new [lithium] plants by 2029. It was estimated that profits would be five billion dollars. Profits! That’s when the coup came. The U.S. says China’s presence is not permitted but…having a market in China is very important. Also in Germany. The next step was with Russia, and then came the coup. Just last year, we found out that England had also participated in the coup—all for lithium.”

When Kennard told Morales that the UK Foreign office had denied that a coup took place, Morales responded that this was hard to comprehend and reflected “a totally colonial mindset. They think that some countries are the property of other nations. They think God put them there, so the world belongs to the U.S. and the UK. That’s why the rebellions and the uprisings will continue.”

Morales has great admiration for Julian Assange whose detention, he said, “represents an escalation, an intimidation so that all the crimes against humanity committed by the different governments of the United States are never revealed. So many interventions, so many invasions, so much looting.”

Currently, Morales is working on building independent media in Bolivia, where he says that most of the media “belong to the empire or the right-wing.”

Optimistic about the recent victory of left-wing political forces in Peru, Chile and Colombia and Lula’s expected return to the presidency in Brazil, Morales told Kennard that, “in politics we must ask ourselves: Are we with the people or are we with the empire? If we are with the people, we make a country; if we are with the empire, we make money. If we are with the people, we fight for life, for humanity; if we are with the empire, we are with the politics of death, the culture of death, interventions, and pillaging of the people. That is what we ask ourselves as humans, as leaders: ‘Are we at the service of our people?’”

​(Popular Resistance) by Jeremy Kuzmarov

We begin with section 1. “Soft Targets” composed of thirteen paragraphs.
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1.This paragraph alleges that Yuri Andropov, the KGB leader in 1982, tried to negatively influence the election of Reagan (would that he had succeeded)  by having his operatives  infiltrate  the DNC and RNC. The only “evidence” provided is some notes provided by a KGB defector to Great Britain. The notes were his own, hand written and typed,  not original nor photo copies and there is controversy over their authenticity. [It maybe true but unproven.]

2. This paragraph mentions that both the Soviets and the US were engaged in activities against each other including subversive work in other countries: typical cold war activities. After the end of the Soviet Union the CIA requested that Russia quit spreading fake news about the US and the Russians agreed. No mention of a quid pro quo was made. In 2000 another Russian defector told the US the Russians didn’t keep their word — that nothing changed. [Probably goes for both sides but unproven]

3.  Here we are told Putin often points out the interference of the US in other countries and accuses it of  “hypocrisy.” Putin also believes the US has been behind the overthrow of the governments in some former soviet republics. The US has also funded Russian dissident groups and supported anti government demonstrations in Russia. The article doesn’t provide any proof either way. The article lists “nongovernmental” agencies that Putin says are used on behalf of fomenting “regime change.” The nongovernmental “agencies” mentioned are: The National Endowment for Democracy (funded by the US government), Human Rights Watch (independently funded but with many former US officials working for it), Amnesty International (independently funded but with some former US government officials working for it) and Golos (Russian independent election monitoring organization with some US government funding). [Falsely suggests nongovernmental “agency” is not government  sponsored].

4. This paragraph tells us that some US government officials reject Putin’s criticism and don’t agree with his implication of moral equivalence. It’s true that the US has been so much more interventionist and ruthless in its foreign policy than anything the Russians have done since the collapse of the Soviet Union that it’s an insult to Russia to compare it morally to the US. [Falsely suggests the US is more moral than Russia.]

5. This next paragraph is just empty propaganda having nothing to do with the 2016 election. It uses loaded terms and tells us what Putin’s inner mental states were: he “loathed” Obama, Obama has an “Administration”, Putin has “cronies”, there was an “invasion” of eastern Ukraine rather than an “uprising” in eastern Ukraine (these are all loaded terms to subliminally nudge the reader towards the US point of view — it’s an excellent propaganda technique used throughout the article). The rest of the paragraph tells us Trump said nice things about Putin in 2007 and 2013, and in 2016 he said Putin was a more effective leader (for Russia) than Obama was (for the US) — probably true: he put his man in place and then came back to power and Obama left behind Trump. [Empty propaganda]

6. Neither the RNC nor the DNC had proper security measures on their computers but John Podesta, HRC’s campaign chairman, should have known better. [True]

7. Quotes from Podesta on how his team goofed and outsiders got into his email. [True]

8. This is a description of the current political divisions in the US and how they provide fertile ground for disinformation (they use the Russian word to seed the coming argument.) The “fractured media environment” seemed ripe for conspiracy theories; climate change = Chinese hoax, Obama’s fake birth certificate; they left out the one about Putin hacking the DNC and our elections. The first two are pretty lame but the author’s seem to favor the last one.

9. Some quotes from Oleg Kalugin a retired KGB general living in the US who wrote two books about Soviet spying and with William Colby, former director of the CIA, created a computer game Spycraft. He said Russia tries to take advantage of American weaknesses. No doubt and vice versa.

10. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, released a report in early January claiming Putin ordered an operation to support Trump, undermine HRC, and cast doubt on the US democratic process. The authors admit the report is “more assertion than evidence.”

11. This paragraph informs us that re the Iraq War the US intelligence agencies put forth assertions that were untrue but they argued over the extent of the untruth. This time they all agreed with the same assertion. This is supposed to make it more credible  but it’s still, so far,  just an assertion.

12. Clapper makes his assertions to Congress about Putin and adds that WikiLeaks was in on it spreading “fake news” [i.e., willfully spreading known falsehoods in order to deceive]  and pro Trump “messages.” [ No proof of any of this was given, nor any information on WikiLeaks shown to be false. The authors fail to draw the obvious conclusion that publishing the truth about the DNC and HRC  does not amount to being pro Trump!]

13. A long paragraph reveals that Trump first rejected  Clappers’ unfounded assertions but later “grudgingly accepted ” them adding that the Russians had no effect on the election’s outcome. Then quotes are offered by an anti-Putin Russian journalist (Yevgenia Albats) about what Putin “probably” does or doesn’t believe, what he’s interested in and what he “wanted.” Such telepathic transmissions are, however, even less evidentiary than Clapper’s assertions.

This is the end of part one. From reading part one of The New Yorker Article you  will not have learned anything at all about whether or not the Russian government or Putin had anything to do with the “hacking” of the DNC or if they interfered with our elections.  Maybe we will learn something in part two.

Reformers in the Auto Workers won day one strike pay at the union’s constitutional convention in Detroit last week. They also forced open debate on the top concession that has weakened the union in the last 15 years--tiered contracts that condemn newer workers to lower pay and benefits beside “legacy” workers doing the same job.

This was the first UAW convention since a leadership corruption scandal erupted, reformers won a member referendum last fall to adopt one-member-one-vote for top officers, and the auto industry began a serious transition to electric vehicles. Held every four years, the meeting has usually been a stale coronation of leaders. A newly organized reform movement turned the convention into a rowdy debate that, for moments, even overruled the top union leaders.

Again and again, members of the Unite All Workers for Democracy reform caucus (UAWD) and other delegates gathered the numbers to put their issues on the convention floor. (That is, in between endless speeches from politicians, glowing videos about top union officers, and other time-wasting snoozes.)

After debate, the dissenters were often voted down by loyalists of the Administration Caucus (AC) that has commanded every top office in the union since the 1950s. But reformers found enough new allies to rack up some remarkable victories.

Strike pay across the union will now start on the first day of a strike, instead of its eighth. This will make a huge difference in the ability of thousands of UAW members to start and sustain a strike.

Jessie Kelly, a skilled moldmaker at GM near Detroit, has seen the low-paid and the higher-paid ends of the auto workforce. She was a temp for three years and said, “Strike pay on day one was one of the most important issues to me coming in. We have a lot of low- and bottom-tier members who live paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard as hell for them to go a week with no pay.”

UAWD developed the day one strike pay resolution as a top priority, and the caucus passed it through locals representing more than 40 percent of the membership. Another part of the resolution included a strike pay raise from $275 to $400 a week, which top UAW officers chose to adopt before it hit the convention floor.

In campaigns for the union’s top officers, individual donations will be capped at $2,000 from 2026 on. The constitution committee had proposed no maximum. This was a spontaneous effort from the floor that passed with about 70 percent. Supporters spoke to the need to check the financial sway of top officers and staff, whose salaries are often triple what members make.

UAWD’s top priority was a constitutional amendment to block expansion of tiered contracts, and work towards ending tiers entirely. In a tiered contract, workers hired later do the same job as more senior workers at far lower pay and benefits. After hundreds of delegates supported bringing the amendment to the floor, it garnered nearly a third of the vote, much higher than dissidents’ numbers in the past.

AC supporters argued that bargaining was the place to deal with tiers, and that while they too despised tiers, they needed flexibility to keep them to avoid other concessions, and longer-term organizing to cut tiers out. Predictably, the next day newspapers reported that delegates had declined to repudiate tiers, while voting in a 3 percent raise for top officers.
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Other key resolutions were forced to the floor for landmark debates. Yasin Mahdi, three months on strike at CNH Industrial, advanced a resolution from the floor to raise strike pay even more: “We need to come to bargaining with $500 a week, from day one, so they know we mean to stop the corporate fuckery.” The measure passed with a two-thirds majority before AC leaders organized to overturn it a day later.

UAW conventions have been notable for their intolerance of dissent, even when the number of reformers was small. In 2018 and some prior conventions, loyalists handed out noisemakers to drown out speakers who dared to dissent.

This year, whether due to the rising reform movement or because the union is under a federal monitorship, the tone was far more civil. Dissidents were rarely booed at the mic, and due process was largely followed. While frequent challenges and process points from delegates sometimes led to confusion and griping on the floor, they also showed a union convention that, for a few days, stepped beyond the top-down pageants of recent decades.

Willie Holmes is supporting incumbent president Ray Curry for re-election, but he said, “This is the best convention we’ve had. All this debate, all this questioning the people up at the front, it’s holding them to the fire. It might seem raucous. That’s what convention is supposed to be.

“Every time before, we’d show up and be told, here’s the slate. Then we’d wait around for three days for it to be over.”

Holmes is local union president at a General Motors axle and engine parts plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. During the union’s 2019 strike at GM, International officers ordered his local to return to work to fill a military order. Instead, Holmes and his local decided to stay out on strike. After proving their crucial point in the supply chain, the local ended tiers in their plant’s contract.

A few days before the convention, the federal monitor overseeing the Auto Workers issued a report bemoaning union officers’ failure to cooperate with his investigations, or even to reply to his requests for information. The monitor has 19 investigations into corruption ongoing, on top of the 13 UAW officials already convicted and sent (briefly) to jail.

With the important exception of the raise in strike pay, stonewalling also seemed to be the AC policy for the convention. No UAWD resolution or constitutional amendment was put on the official docket for discussion, despite their support from many locals. The proposal to end tiers was not even printed in the “Submitted Resolutions” booklet. It was as if the AC expected to replicate past conventions where it presided with impunity.

Rebranding as the “Mass Caucus,” at least for now, the AC held daily meetings where leaders laid out the plans for the day. With future staff jobs and attention for their locals on the line, delegates were told to follow orders from the top in the name of “solidarity” and “respecting the union.” One reformer who attended described the caucus environment as a “captive audience meeting.”

​A troubling sign came with a change approved for the union’s Membership Advisory Committee on Ethics. This oversight group was created in 2021 by a random, jury-style selection of eight of the 120 members who applied. A convention majority decided that instead, the union’s regional directors will now select the members who oversee their ethics. Without further changes or pressure, the foxes’ pups might be the ones to guard the coop.

UAWD is a reform caucus allying members from the union’s traditional blue-collar base in manufacturing with the higher education and legal workers who now make up a quarter of the 400,000-member union. Younger members’ tech savvy was on full display in the use of Whatsapp updates and chats, with delegates, alternates, and others able to discuss in real time next steps on the floor.

The caucus was founded just before the pandemic to fight to replace convention-based elections with one-member-one-vote, and it gained new traction when the federal government put the UAW under the monitor. With UAWD as the main organizers of a “yes” campaign for one-member-one-vote, last November members voted by almost two-thirds to adopt the new system, and for the first time this fall, officer candidates will have to face the membership.

Shunte Sanders-Beasley, vice president of a Detroit-area Stellantis local, said her plant went 89 percent for one-member-one-vote last fall and that “because of the things that happened over the last 40 years, there’s no connection between the administration and the rank and file. It’s been a dictatorship. Members want to feel that they’re involved.”

Perhaps reflecting that disconnect, turnout for the referendum was low. UAWD members—many of them new to union politics—have spent this year organizing their local members to pass convention resolutions and elect delegates on the platform “No Tiers, No Corruption, No Concessions.”

They are backing a slate called UAW Members United: Shawn Fain, a dissident international representative for president; Margaret Mock, a former local shop chair, for secretary-treasurer; and Lashawn English, a three-term local president, for director of Region 1, one of three regions in Michigan. Both Fain and English fought imposition of the dreaded 3/2/120 work schedule in their plants.

At a gathering for the slate held in a nearby bar Monday night, Fain referred to contract concessions the union made in 2009 when Chrysler and GM were in danger of bankruptcy and said, “Those [concessions] are still there, even though the companies are making money hand over fist… We have to set a standard that will make people want to be part of this union.” Mock mock-apologized for not handing out backpacks with her name on them, a reference to a recent scandal by her incumbent opponent giving out goodies for self-promotion.

Bob Bickerstaff, a 39-year member and president of a Toledo Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) local, thought one-member-one-vote had opened a new day. “It should have been like this all along,” he said. “We can’t grow the union without everybody having input to take on the companies.”
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At their morning meetings, UAWD members cheered wins on strike pay and the hard-won openness of debate. Caucus co-chair Scott Houldieson said, “We made history yesterday. We passed an amendment from the floor. As far as I know, that hasn’t happened since the early 1980s.”

On the convention’s final day, the Administration Caucus went on the attack. The daily opening prayer, by Herb Taylor from Local 31, sought to warn and divide reformers: “I have a message for the young people: Stop disrespecting this union.” The many older auto workers who had spoken for reform were apparently not worth mentioning. Some AC supporters broke from prayer to give a standing ovation.

Next came a charade of kissing up. AC supporters spent practically an hour nominating a union trustee candidate over and over from the floor, gleefully defying a rule allowing only two speakers per candidate.

To make up for lost time, a book of more than 20 resolutions from the leadership was then approved as a block, without debate. This included a resolution on electric vehicles (EVs) focused on backing politicians and tax rebates to steer this growing non-union sector into the UAW, with hardly a mention of organizing battery and assembly workers themselves. A UAWD resolution to drive worker-led organizing at EV plants never made the floor.

Finally, hours before adjourning, when some delegates had already left for the airport, AC delegates moved to rescind the $500 strike pay resolution passed barely a day before. Since that idea had been submitted by a lowly striking worker on the floor, establishment allies claimed the move had paid insufficient respect to the “highly educated men and women” of the leadership and how they chose resolutions in advance.

In the end, with debate cut off before any objections could be voiced, delegates voted 421-181 to lower strike pay from $500 back to $400 a week.

For all the let-downs at the end, Kelly celebrated the convention’s big step forward: “I was at convention in 2018. After the convention, I came home and felt sick. That was what I’d been organizing under, spending all my free time to build up?

“This year, there’s so much more debate. It’s more democratic. It’s beautiful to see.

“I really believe our membership is so intelligent. We can get so organized when we need to. But that’s not how we were treated. Now, you see one day of this, you see how smart we are.”
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Keith Brower Brown is a member of UAW Local 2865 at the University of California and was a delegate to the convention. Jane Slaughter is a former editor of Labor Notes.