​As in the 1930s, a bankrupt liberalism, grotesque social inequality and declining living standards are empowering fascist movements in Europe and the U.S.

Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in their lot with discredited and reviled establishment politicians who slavishly do the bidding of the war industry, oligarchs and corporations.

The bankruptcy of the liberal class means that those who decry the folly of permanent war and NATO expansion, mercenary trade deals, exploitation of workers by globalization, austerity and neoliberalism come increasingly from the far-right. This right-wing rage, dressed up in the United States as Christian fascism, has already made huge gains in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Bulgaria and France and may take power in the Czech Republic, where inflation and rising energy costs have seen the number of Czechs falling below the poverty line double.

By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.

Extremism is the political cost of pronounced social inequality and political stagnation. Demagogues, who promise moral and economic renewal, vengeance against phantom enemies and a return to lost glory, rise out of the morass. Hatred and violence, already at the boiling point, are legitimized. A reviled ruling class, and the supposed civility and  democratic norms it espouses, are ridiculed.

It is not, as the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill points out, as if fascism ever went away. “The U.S. did not defeat fascism in WWII,” he writes, “it discretely internationalized it.” After World War II the U.S., U.K. and other Western governments collaborated with hundreds of former Nazis and Japanese war criminals, who they integrated into western intelligence services, as well as fascist regimes such as those in Spain and Portugal. They supported right-wing anti-communist forces in Greece during its civil war in 1946 to 1949, and then backed a right-wing military coup in 1967. NATO also had a secret policy of operating fascist terrorist groups. Operation Gladio, as the BBC detailed in a now-forgotten investigative series, created “secret armies,” networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union made a military move into Europe. In actuality, the “secret armies” carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres and false flag terror attacks against leftists, trade unionists and others throughout Europe.

See my interview with Stephen Kinzer about the post-war activities of the CIA, including its recruitment of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and its creation of black sites where former Nazis were hired to interrogate, torture and murder suspected leftists, labor leaders and communists, detailed in his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, here.

Fascism, which has always been with us, is again ascendant. The far-right politician Giorgia Meloni is expected to become Italy’s first female prime minister after elections on Sunday. In a coalition with two other far-right parties, Meloni is forecast to win more than 60 percent of the seats in Parliament, though the left-leaning 5-Star Movement may put a dent in those expectations.

Meloni got her start in politics as a 15-year-old activist for the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, founded after the World War II by supporters of Benito Mussolini. She calls EU bureaucrats agents of “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance.” She peddles the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white immigrants are being permitted to enter Western nations as part of a plot to undermine or “replace” the political power and culture of white people. She has called on the Italian navy to turn back boats with immigrants, which the far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini did in 2018. Her Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy, party is a close ally of Hungary’s President, Viktor Orban. A European Parliament resolution recently declared that Hungary can no longer be defined as a democracy.

Meloni and Orban are not alone. Sweden Democrats, which took over 20 percent of the vote in Sweden’s general election last week to become the country’s second largest political party, was formed in 1988 from a neo-Nazi group called B.S.S., or Keep Sweden Swedish. It has deep fascist roots. Of the party’s 30 founders, 18 had Nazi affiliations, including several who served in the Waffen SS, according to Tony Gustaffson a historian and former Sweden Democrat member. France’s Marine Le Pen took over 41 percent of the vote in April against Emmanuel Macron. In Spain, the hard-right Vox party is the third largest party in Spain’s Parliament. The far-right German AfD or Alternative for Germany party took over 12 percent in federal elections in 2017, making it the third largest party, though it lost a couple percentage points in the 2021 elections. The U.S. has its own version of fascism embodied in a Republican party that coalesces in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump, embraces the magical thinking, misogyny, homophobia and white supremacy of the Christian Right and actively subverts the election process.

Economic collapse was indispensable to the Nazis’ rise to power. In the 1928 elections in Germany, the Nazi party received less than 3 percent of the vote. Then came the global financial crash of 1929. By early 1932, 40 percent of the German insured workforce, six million people, were unemployed. That same year, the Nazis became the largest political party in the German parliament. The Weimar government, tone deaf and hostage to the big industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans and austerity rather than feeding and employing a desperate population. It foolishly imposed severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment insurance. Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and rage rippled through the population. Mass rallies, led by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago, denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals, artists and the ruling class, as internal enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold well. 

The evisceration of democratic procedures and institutions, however, preceded the Nazis’ ascension to power in 1933. The Reichstag, the German Parliament, was as dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress.  The Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932, relied on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to largely rule by decree to bypass the fractious Parliament. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was “a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship,”  historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes.

Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own legislative impasses. As in 1930s Germany, our courts  — especially the Supreme Court — have been seized by extremists. The press has bifurcated into antagonistic tribes where lies and truth are indistinguishable, and opposing sides are demonized. There is little dialogue or compromise, the twin pillars of a democratic system.

The two ruling parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war industry, global corporations and the oligarchy, to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has established the most pervasive and intrusive system of government surveillance in human history. It runs the largest prison system in the world. It has militarized the police. 

Democrats are as culpable as Republicans. The Obama administration interpreted the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force as giving the executive branch the right to erase due process and act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was never linked to terrorism, along with 9 other teenagers at a cafe in Yemen. It was the Obama administration that signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. It was the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street and abandoned Wall Street’s victims. It was the Obama administration that repeatedly used the Espionage Act to criminalize those, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed government lies, crimes and fraud. And it was the Obama administration that massively expanded the use of militarized drones.

The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which they likely staged, by employing Article 48 to push through the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. The fascists instantly snuffed out the pretense of Weimar democracy. They legalized  imprisonment without trial for anyone considered a national security threat. They abolished independent labor unions, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications.

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation’s infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world’s largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions. Fascism in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker observed, not because people believed its conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the fact that they saw through them. Fascism thrived in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” He added, “nobody would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.”

As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation. 

Hett defines the Nazis as “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” The rise of the new fascism has its roots in a similar exploitation by global corporations and oligarchs. More than anything else, people want to regain control over their lives, if only to punish those blamed and scapegoated for their misery. 

We have seen this movie before.

​NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

While the rich embark on trips to space and fantasize about colonizing Mars, nearly a billion people have no access whatsoever to electricity. As many commentators have rightly argued, “humanity” as a whole cannot be responsible for climate breakdown when so many people barely emit any greenhouse gases at all. However, the climate crisis is not just marked by economic inequality—it is marked by imperialism. Ninety-two percent of the climate catastrophe engulfing the planet is caused by Global North, robbing formerly colonized countries of the atmospheric space required to ensure humane living standards. To make matters worse, each year, immense amounts of resources and labor power are drained from the Global South to the Global North in order to maintain the growth and profits of wealthy corporations that are killing off nearly all life on the planet.
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This fossil fuel-based capitalism is backed by the massive imperial army of NATO, a bloc of rich countries that spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. This bloc invades nations, overthrows governments, and brutally sanctions entire peoples who refuse to bow down. Proposals for a Green New Deal that do not tackle imperialism will simply turn the Global South into a green sacrifice zone, exacerbating a system that is marked by climate apartheid. It is high time that the climate movement in the Global North faces some harsh truths and embraces a path of international solidarity.

A recent study in the Lancet confirmed that the Global North is responsible for 92 percent of the climate catastrophe that is engulfing the planet. The study uses a simple method: every country has a right to the same amount of emissions in proportion to their average population size since 1850. If a country goes over its fair share, it incurs a climate debt. Based on a carbon budget that limits warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century—in line with the Paris Agreement—China will likely never exceed its fair share. Most Western countries, however, exceeded their fair share decades ago.1

In 2018, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that a maximum of 580 gigatons of additional carbon dioxide can be emitted if we are to stand a 50 percent chance of not exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming by 2100. Indian scientists T. Jayaraman and Tejal Kanitkar subsequently calculated the point at which the Global North should achieve zero emissions to stay within their fair share of that remaining budget, discarding, for the moment, all previous emissions.

Based on these calculations, Jayaraman and Kanitkar found that emissions must reach zero by 2025 for the United States, by 2031 for Japan, and by 2033 for the European Union. These power blocs have much higher per capita emissions than the rest of the world. Regardless, they have all set their carbon neutrality targets for 2050.

The historic climate debt preceding 2018 can be paid through climate finance for the Global South. Based on a carbon price of $135 per ton of carbon dioxide—the minimum for limiting the world to 1.5 degrees warming, according to the IPCC—the rich Group of Seven countries have a combined climate debt of $114 trillion, per the target set by Jayaraman and Kanitkar.
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Research by Oxfam International shows that the G7 countries provided only $17.5 billion in climate support in 2017—18. At that rate, they will have paid off their debts by the year 6500, when the planet has long been cooked. So who is really responsible for the climate catastrophe?

Another study in the Lancet demonstrated that high income countries are responsible for 74 percent of excess resource consumption, which drives 90 percent of biodiversity loss, fresh water stress, and various other environmental pressures. The study uses a similar methodology as the study above, but does not allow years of under-emitting to compensate for years of overshoot, which would bump Northern responsibility up to 84 percent. More importantly, due to data limitations, the study starts from the year 1970—skipping the initial period of colonialism. As such, it is safe to say that ecological breakdown has been primarily driven by the Global North.2
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We do not have comprehensive historical figures for some of the specific ecological boundaries that are being pushed, but a glance at current per capita consumption levels is in itself revealing. Single-use plastic waste? The average person in the United States consumes 53 kilograms per year; in China, this amount is 18 kilograms per person per year. Freshwater use? Daily U.S. consumption is 7,800 liters per capita per day; for China, it is 2,900 liters per day. Land footprint? North America as a whole claims 1.7 hectares per person, China, 0.44 hectares per person. Note that those figures come at a time of “rising China,” a term that not just ignores centuries of colonialism, but also the more recent neoliberal period of U.S. hegemony.

Colonial history was characterized by massive ecocide and resource extraction. From the Malay peninsula to the Dutch East Indies, forests were cut down to build colonial shipping and make space for plantation labor camps, where the local population slaved away under barbaric conditions. As Mike Davis documented in his book, Late Victorian Holocausts, the expansion of export-oriented plantation systems led to massive famines in the Global South that caused tens of millions of deaths at the height of the imperial era. Simultaneously, trillions of dollars were robbed from the colonized world, from British-occupied India to the Dutch East Indies, directly filling the coffers of Northern governments and corporations. The former colonial powers clearly bear primary responsibility for any ecological damage incurred by this system.

We do not have good data for historical deforestation, but scientific estimates of the 2021 global carbon budget suggest massive colonial responsibilities.3 Since 1850, 40 percent of emissions due to land-use change in Asia occurred between 1850 and 1947, and 55 percent of such emissions in Africa, between 1850 and 1964.4 In India and Nigeria, half of historical land-use change emissions occurred during colonialism. In Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, this number is 40 percent. In Angola? Up to 70 percent.

The countries of the Global North also massively deforested their own territories during the colonial era. As a whole, the Global North was responsible for half of all land-use change emissions between 1850 and 2019, even counting neither informal imperialism in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and China during the nineteenth century, nor trade-based deforestation after decolonization.
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The G7 countries now report negative emissions from reforestation programs. In fact, they are simply importing deforestation through unequal trade relations, vastly exceeding their domestic reforestation efforts. Between 2001 and 2015, trade-based corrections show that within the Group of Twenty, net deforestation was almost entirely driven by the countries of the Global North, not the Global South.5

Modern industrial agriculture is another prime perpetrator when it comes to ecological breakdown, responsible for trespassing three planetary boundaries (phosphorus pollution, nitrogen pollution, and the destruction of wildlands) and contributing significantly to four more planetary threats (climate breakdown, chemical pollution, biodiversity collapse and freshwater scarcity). So why did the world adopt industrial agriculture?
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The so-called green revolution of industrial agriculture that spread across the globe was heavily financed by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and pushed by the U.S. government to roll back the threat of left-wing movements worldwide. To avoid facing questions of land redistribution, the U.S.-imposed order hoped to be able to maintain colonial-era inequalities by massively ramping up food production. But the green revolution was only buying time: industrial farming heavily depletes the soil, slowly reducing its yields and leading to a vicious debt cycle as farmers become increasingly dependent on patented seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides from Western multinational corporations. In India, this has resulted in 300,000 farmer suicides and the largest farmer protests in history.

Traditional agro-ecological agriculture—a carbon sink that also aids in freshwater retention and helps preserves biodiversity—is much more labor-intensive. A scaled transition to agro-ecological farming would therefore require a halt or even reversal of the massive rural-urban migration flows that result from the dire poverty of rural peoples, who represent the vast majority of the world’s extreme poor and undernourished. Only a significant redistribution of land to the poorest peoples on the planet can make such a thing possible. Yet when governments make a modest attempt at land distribution, they are heavily targeted by imperialism.

In 1954, for example, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup after he attempted a modest land redistribution program. The coup brought to power a string of dictators that murdered 200,000 Indigenous peoples and rolled back Árbenz’s land reforms.

More recently, when a Zimbabwean grassroots movement of Black landless peasants seized their land back from white settler elites in 2001, the country was heavily sanctioned by the Western world. Perversely, Zimbabwe itself was then blamed for the collapsing economy by Western media, despite the fact that the Black farmers produced excellent yields.

Clearly, the land question cannot be addressed without addressing imperialism.

The 8 percent of responsibility for climate breakdown that lies within the Global South (per the aforementioned Lancet study on national responsibility) is also a direct result of imperialism. The country that most over-shoots its budget is Kazakhstan, which was once a major military industrial center for the Soviet Union and crucial to halting the advance of the Nazi army.

The historical record is clear that the Soviet Union and China had major security considerations when deciding to industrialize, especially in the most heavily polluting industries. Imperialism largely forced their hand. The Western powers had tried to destroy the Bolshevik experiment in its cradle by invading during the Russian Civil War, a war that killed eight to twelve million people. After the Second World War, the United States had plans to wipe both the Soviet Union and China off the map, potentially killing an estimated 600 million people using nuclear weapons. Although it is certainly true that state socialism has had its fair share of ecological disasters, these imperial pressures are rarely taken into account, as are socialist states’ various ecological achievements.
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The other major over-shooters in the Global South are equally telling: the so-called Asian Tigers and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. These countries are all heavily in the Western geopolitical sphere—including in most cases, direct deployment of Western military bases on their soils—and received space for industrial development in return for their Western and anti-communist loyalties.

Tackling climate breakdown and ecological collapse while delivering on human needs requires strong government intervention. Various studies on quality-of-life indicators, such as life expectancy and education, show that socialist countries outperform their capitalist counterparts with the same level of gross domestic product (GDP) by a very wide margin.

Extensive research has conclusively demonstrated that GDP has a huge impact on environmental and energy footprints. To deliver on human needs with a small environmental footprint therefore requires socialist policies that center human needs, such as free public education and health care. Otherwise, too much production is wasted on luxury, planned obsolescence, and incredibly wasteful private service systems. There is simply no other way.

The Sustainable Development Index, which weighs both human development and its ecological and carbon footprint, shows that in 1991—just before the massive neoliberal shock doctrine went into full effect—half of the top ten performing countries were formerly socialist. As late as 2019, the last year with available data, the top ten included four post-socialist countries that did not fully dismantle their welfare systems, joined by communist-ruled Cuba and the Indian state of Kerala.6 Other countries that performed well, such as Sri Lanka and Costa Rica, all had strong public service systems.
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Yet charting such an ecosocialist path is extremely difficult. Ecosocialist leader Thomas Sankara, who planted four million trees during his short rule in Burkina Faso, was assassinated by U.S. and French intelligence agencies in 1987. Explicitly ecosocialist governments in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela were also targeted for regime change. The moderately leftist government led by the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which reduced deforestation rates in the Amazon by 70 percent while dramatically reducing poverty rates, was deposed in a U.S.-backed lawfare coup in 2016. Cuba, one of the most sustainable countries on the planet, is suffering under a sixty-year long embargo from the United States. Need we go on?

The major (neo-)colonial powers—the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States—have been at war for most of the last five hundred years. Every revolution and independent political formation was colonized, suppressed, overthrown, coerced, co-opted, or drowned in blood. Not a single country on Earth has remained unaffected by these contemporary, (neo)-European warmongers. The development of a true ecosocialist path within the Global South first requires national sovereignty, freed from imperialism. The prime target for opening up that space should be the current tip of the imperial spear: the NATO war machine.

The U.S. military emits more carbon emissions than 140 countries across the planet. Importantly, however, the real carbon footprint of the military is vastly higher than the Pentagon’s direct emissions. The entire military-industrial complex supplying the these forces with munitions, airplanes, submarines, and massive aircraft carriers should be fully included in its footprint. The total worldwide military carbon footprint is estimated at 6 percent of total worldwide emissions, roughly on par with India or the European Union, and twice the emissions of Africa. These figures do not include the emissions from rebuilding the deliberately destroyed infrastructure of entire countries, such as Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, and Libya.
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NATO countries are driving a global arms race by spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined, and seventeen times more than the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the military alliance of Russia. As such, NATO is primarily responsible for this massive waste of atmospheric space for the purpose of death and destruction.

And the destruction goes way beyond carbon emissions. During the Vietnam War, an estimated 85 percent of U.S. bombs were aimed not at the enemy, but at the environment sheltering them. The total tonnage of ordnance dropped during that U.S. invasion approximately tripled the totals for the Second World War. If that cannot count as ecocide, what can?

The infamous napalm bombs were not only used by the United States en masse to deforest Vietnam, but also in Korea, just as the French did in Algeria and Vietnam and the British in Kenya. The U.S. military has repeatedly used chemical and radioactive weapons in their wars in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The radioactive pollution in Fallujah, Iraq, became so severe that incidences of malformed babies occurred fourteen times more frequently than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs.
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The massive network of U.S. military bases across the globe are poisoning the water and air of surrounding communities with chemical compounds, even within the country itself. Clearly, the war machine is not just destroying the climate. They are murdering everyone and everything that stands in its way.

The carbon footprint of the military is only half the story. More important is the military’s “climate shadow,” the less obvious, less visible impact of the military on human civilization’s trajectory on our planet.

Military considerations have locked NATO economies—especially United States, the imperial guarantor—firmly into carbon dependence. In the name of energy security, the United States and Canada have become two of the largest producers of oil and fracked gas, the latter of which is vastly more polluting than natural gas. NATO’s economic war against Russia—which now forces the European Union to embrace more coal, as well as U.S. and Qatari shale gas—repeats the same process in Europe.

Make no mistake, however: so-called energy security is just the nationalist justification for fossil fuel drilling. The United States has been able to provide for its own energy needs for years and, before the boom in gas from shale, steadily relied on its petrodollar system for decades. The United States consciously ramped up its fossil fuel production in the 2010s to drive down global energy prices—and therefore the stability of oil and gas revenue-dependent competitors such as Venezuela, Iran, and Russia—in a coordinated effort with the Saudi Arabian government.7

When Hugo Chavez revived the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 2001, initiating a historic period of high fossil fuel prices that immensely boosted the competitiveness of solar and wind energy—he was quickly targeted for regime change. Similarly, Saddam Hussein’s threat of lowering oil output for political goals was a well-documented motivation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. NATO military installations, numbering about 950 in foreign countries, are dotted throughout most of the major oil-producing countries and along international pipelines and transit routes in order to project power across the globe, with the ability to cut off major oil routes if necessary. And while the Western geopolitical sphere controls the majority of the world’s oil production and a plurality of the world’s gas production, the same cannot be said of metals used  to produce clean-energy technologies, the extraction and processing of which are dominated by China and the non-aligned Global South.8 As such, the very power base of the U.S. imperial alliance is heavily dependent on a global economy based in fossil fuels.

It is no surprise then that China, rather than the United States, has been far and away the largest investor in renewable energy throughout the 2010s and ‘20s. In fact, during the latest years with available data (2020—21), China installed nearly 20 percent more solar and wind capacity than the entire Western geopolitical bloc, whose combined economy is nearly three times larger than China’s.9

Since 1974, the Gulf monarchies have become a key factor for U.S. economic and financial power. That year, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used the threat of military invasion to force Saudi Arabia to sell all of its fossil fuels in dollars, ensuring that the dollar remained the global reserve currency. This allows the United States to run enormous export deficits without dropping the value of the U.S. dollar, essentially forcing the world to subsidize the U.S. economy.

The neoliberal turn, so disastrous for the environment and the people of the Global South, was directly facilitated by militarized, fossil fuel geopolitics. The major U.S. banks, flooded with petrodollars, were able to invest their humongous surpluses in the Global South, extracting huge profits. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank pried open southern markets for foreign investment, forcing privatization and ushering in a catastrophic period of human stagnation—even increasing poverty in the case of sub-Saharan Africa—combined with a rapid escalation of climate and ecological breakdown.
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The military was not only crucial for facilitating gun-boat diplomacy during the oil crisis of 1973; the sector also directly benefited from the petrodollar system it helped create. Most of the oil profits are recycled through weapons purchases from the Western military-industrial complex. Saudi Arabia, which has never been invaded, has spent between 7 and 19 percent of its GDP on the military since the petrodollar system was put into place. Between 1974 and 2021, this country of 35 million inhabitants was the second biggest arms importer in the world, nearly all of which came from NATO countries. This pattern of wildly extravagant weapons purchases from the West is replicated by all the Gulf monarchies.

The military-industrial complex has had a profound impact on the way our economies are organized. The military depends on a thriving heavy-industry sector that leads militarized states to having substantially higher emissions, independent of their GDP. Major polluting industries such as industrial farming and industrial fishing derived their fundamental technologies and strategic aims from the military industrial complex. The major technologies driving our economies today, from smart phones to the Internet, were all originally projects of the military.
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Yet militarization also drives economic growth, because the ability to produce en masse can be rapidly mobilized for multiple purposes in wartime. It is no secret that economic growth has long been considered a national security issue. In fact, the very concept of GDP arose in the context of war in the United States, in order to be able to quickly measure the total production of materials. As such, it is no coincidence that GDP, originally conceptualized to fuel death and destruction, is utterly useless in measuring human and ecological needs, yet has become the prime focus of most governments throughout the globe under the tutelage of the U.S.-dominated system.

The military has a profound impact on humanity’s priorities. Western military strategists, who have been preparing for climate breakdown since the 1960s, have openly planned for resource wars and for accelerated border imperialism. They have fostered a mode of thinking that holds that climate catastrophe can be handled through global apartheid, rather than tackling the problem firsthand.

The never-ending wars—against drugs, against terrorism, against “the next Hitler,” against,” the next “troika” or “axis of evil”—have directly encouraged hatred and racism, further fueling the far right. On the international stage, they have fostered division and tensions where we direly need cooperation to tackle the ongoing climate crisis.

While major media in the West are obsessed with China and Russia—or whoever is next in line—crucial energy, resources, and attention are siphoned away from the predicament that we find ourselves in. As such, Germany could raise its military budget in one fell swoop by $113 billion dollars while claiming with a straight face that the paltry $100 billion in climate financing that was promised to the Global South (from the entire Global North) remains impossible.

The latest IPCC climate report warning that it is now or never for the world was almost completely ignored in Western media in favor of one-sided Russia-bashing. The war in Ukraine received almost twice as much coverage (562 minutes) in top-viewed U.S. media within one month as the climate breakdown received (344 minutes) in the entire year of 2021.
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Even more pathetically, 2021 was a record year for climate news coverage, with more coverage than the previous three years combined (275 minutes). In 2016, the climate crisis was barely covered at all. All the wars examined in the study fared better, being equally (or nearly equally) covered in just one month than the climate was in its very best year.10

In the case of U.S. invasions from Iraq to Afghanistan, news coverage was almost invariably positive, including straight-up staged propaganda scenes.

All of this has nothing to do with human rights concerns. The U.S. military deliberately destroyed the entire civilian infrastructure of the countries it targeted—its military doctrine is very open about this—a level of destruction even senior U.S. defense officials admit that Russia has not reached in Ukraine so far. The U.S.-led War on Terror alone is estimated to have killed six million people. Clearly, the media’s main priority is to manufacture consent for war, whether economic or military, and not to tackle the main issues threatening our lives. These psychological techniques—originally developed by the U.S. military—are copied to great effect by the Western oil industry, which employs many influential spin doctors who first built their careers as U.S. agents in psychological warfare.

In fact, the line between Western state and oil propaganda is very thin. We know Shell and BP directly financed UK Cold War propaganda during the ’50s and ’60s, and that Dick Cheney and George Bush’s election campaigns were heavily financed by Big Oil, corporations that went on to directly participate in the planning of the invasion of Iraq.

We see the same propaganda pattern on social media, where Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are downgrading antiwar voices in their algorithms and often censoring them outright. In creating these censorship policies, these social media giants are directly working with think tanks that receive funding from Western governments, arms corporations, Gulf monarchies, and the fossil fuel industry.
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Not only do these policies continue to fuel an imperialist drive to war that forms the basis for fossil fuel-based capitalism, they also have a direct impact on the climate movement. Critical programs against U.S. fracking, for example, have been censored outright for being aired on Russia Today. In contrast, climate denial continues to be spread largely unhindered on Western social media and is often even amplified by social media algorithms.

Plans for a Green New Deal that do not address neo-colonialism threaten to intensify the extraction of resources from the Global South. The “ecological overshoot” of Northern consumption levels is predominantly caused by resources that are being drained from the Global South, year in and year out, through unequal trade relations—and none of this is reflected in official climate and ecological policies and targets.

The numbers are massive: every year, 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy, and the equivalent of 188 million years of human labor, are net extracted from the Global South. The amount of land and energy that is robbed yearly would be sufficient to feed 6 billion people and build out and maintain the necessary infrastructure for decent housing, healthcare, education, sanitation, and so on, for 6.5 billion people.

And that does not even account for the enormous European colonial land-grabs, whose settler colonies still encompass half of the entire land-surface outside of their homeland.11 Countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia—some of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, after the massacre of most of the Indigenous population—have massive amounts of domestic resources available.

Yet Indigenous peoples continue to resist bravely. An estimated 25 percent of fossil fuel emissions in the United States and Canada were halted by Indigenous resistance movements. Some 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity remains protected by Indigenous peoples, who steward only 22 percent of land on Earth. Clearly, Land Back campaigns are crucial for fighting climate and ecological breakdown. Yet the antithesis is also true: continued land dispossession enables Northern governments to buy off their settler populations, who benefit from the massive theft of fossil fuels and material resources.

In The Wealth of (Some) Nations, Zak Cope demonstrates that the working classes in high-income countries—both settler and non-settler—are in fact under exploited. Even if there were zero profits, there would be insufficient resources to pay the average Northern wage levels globally. This is despite the fact that research indicates that Southern laborers work longer hours and are more productive than their Western counterparts. In other words, imperialism has bought off large parts of the Western working class by sharing the spoils of Southern super-exploitation.
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This is what helps explain the lack of serious anti-imperialist movements in the Global North, as well as its tendencies toward fascism. Indeed, the same imperialist forces that are invading other countries are patrolling the borders of the Global North to create a dead zone for the very refugees that they created (the U.S.-led war on terror alone caused an estimated 38 million refugees). In that sense, far-right politics walk in lock-step with the “mainstream” policy plans of every major army in the Global North, who consider climate and ecological breakdown mere “threat multipliers” that can be handled with violence, suppression, and war.

That is not to say that the Western working class—especially its most exploited sectors; Cope’s calculations were, after all, based on averages—have nothing to gain from an anti-imperialist green revolution. By prioritizing human and ecological needs, rather than corporate profits and consumption lifestyles, it is possible to provide for better and more meaningful lives with lower resource and energy consumption. The capitalist system is notoriously wasteful and inefficient.
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The United States is the most drastic example, where healthy life expectancy (the years someone is expected to live without serious health issues) is substantially lower than in China and Cuba, despite massively higher wages and even more obscene levels of wealth.12 The U.S. privatized health care system is notoriously expensive and ineffective. A basic public health option could improve living standards in the United States while simultaneously lowering economic output. As such, pursuing a path of ecosocialist degrowth in the Global North is the only way to create a meaningful project of solidarity for the global working class.

​It is true that the upper-middle classes within the Global South—many of them collaborators within the imperial system—have adopted an “imperial mode of living” based on high salaries, depoliticization, a sense of entitlement, and consumption-based lifestyles. It is a problem that certainly needs to be addressed. Yet this tendency should not be exaggerated. Based on the U.S. poverty line ($15.70 per day in 2011), the vast majority of the Global South continues to live in poverty, according to World Bank data using purchasing power parities (PPP), corrected for price differences.

The percentage of people below the U.S. poverty line is, in fact, quite shocking for every region: Eastern Europe and Central Asia (56 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean (67 percent), East Asia and the Pacific (74 percent), Middle East and North Africa (87 percent), sub-Saharan Africa (98 percent), and South Asia (98.5 percent).13 Furthermore, for large swaths of the population, their level of poverty are not only degrading, but life-threatening. Nearly half the population in Latin America and Central and Southern Asia and two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to adequate food.

Using the more common European poverty line ($30) shows that the middle class is largely nonexistent outside of high-income countries: Only between 7 and 13 percent of the population rise above the poverty level in the regions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, East Asia, and the Pacific, and less than one percent in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.14 Clearly, blaming the ecological and climate breakdown on a “rising China” or “rising Africa” seems ridiculous, if not obscene.
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Warnings that the world is not able to sustain a Western lifestyle for the entire globe are also misleading, as that lifestyle would not be possible without imperialism in the first place. The Western mode of living simply cannot and will not be globalized. Even in absolute terms, the Global South’s “middle class” barely registers. The vast majority of people living above a European poverty line—a shocking 75 percent—live in high-income countries. In reality, then, we are looking at a deepening of global apartheid with a few pockets of wealthy Southern collaborators and national bourgeoisies.

There has been a lot of criticism of leftist governments in Latin America that continued to extract natural resources, even if the profits were redirected from corporate shareholders to social welfare programs. Yet some context is necessary here. Bolivia, for example, has only used 15 percent of its fair share of the carbon budget and 70 percent of its share of the material footprint budget.15 Despite dramatic improvements in poverty reduction under the anti-imperialist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government since 2006—which slashed the percentage of people living in poverty in half—one third of the population still earns too little to ensure a decent life expectancy.16 In other words, without climate reparations from the Global North, some level of extractivism remains a matter of survival for a large part of the Bolivian population.

And Southern populations are not actually willing to forsake their dignity for the comfortable, green-washed future of the Global North. By the end of this year, chances are that nearly the entire Latin American continent will be swept by electoral victories for the left—most of them resource nationalists, which is surely the strongest showing of the Pink Tide yet.17 The Chinese government (whose per capita emissions and material footprint should definitely be reigned in) still maintains some of the highest approval rates in the world for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

This also applies to Indigenous peoples across Latin America, who are so often tokenized by Western NGOs, academics, media, and governments in order to make their imperial agenda more palatable. The Western focus is regularly on smaller Indigenous groups that have historically been hostile to the left for complicated reasons. The lowland Indigenous peoples of Bolivia, for example, have been firmly on the right since the brutal Hugo Banzer dictatorship initiated a military-peasant alliance to prevent a Cuba-style insurgency.
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Indigenous peoples as a whole, however, have consistently and overwhelmingly voted for leftist resource nationalists in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru. So make no illusions: without climate reparations and a fairer global economy, a “green future” can only be maintained by violent repression, coups, and mass poverty.

There has been much talk about a globalized capitalist class supposedly making Western imperialism irrelevant. Make no mistake, it is certainly true that we have seen inequality rise around the globe at a time where the Washington consensus, the World Bank, and the IMF reign supreme. And it is also undeniably true that the global multimillionaire class needs to be abolished if we want to stand a chance of addressing climate and ecological breakdown. By 2030, the emissions of the richest 10 percent will already have exceeded the boundaries of the Paris climate accords, even if the rest of the world emitted zero, nada, nil.

Yet despite claims to the contrary, the capitalist class remains firmly concentrated within the Global North. More than 75 percent of ultra-high-net-worth individuals ( UHNWI)—each worth more than $30 million—are living within the Western geopolitical bloc.18 As late as 2012, the “urban very rich” in China—the highest Chinese polluters, comprising only 5 percent of the population—still had lower household carbon footprints than the average Japanese or European Union citizen, and nearly twice as low as the average person in the United States.19

Much more important than carbon footprints are those who call the shots on the structure of the global economy. Among the Forbes-ranked top 2,000 global corporations, the Western geopolitical bloc claimed 73 to 83 percent of revenues, profits, assets, and market value in 2021. That is more than sufficient to dominate the terms on the global market. A 2013 study found that eighteen of the twenty-five corporate sectors outlined in the Forbes Global 2000 report were dominated by U.S. firms, one by Japan, and none by China.
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This does not even include foreign ownership: 36 percent of the shares of Gazprom, for example, are U.S.-owned; a little known fact in this cold war catastrophe. Indeed, the international shareholder structure shows a shocking amount of concentrated power. A 2011 study found that the top forty-nine shareholders—most of them in the financial sector—controlled nearly 40 percent of the output of all 43,060 multinational corporations around the world. All of these forty-nine corporations are headquartered in Western Europe, North America, or Japan.20

Only about 15 percent of UHNWI live in countries that could be considered geopolitical competitors, mainly the Collective Security Treaty Organization and China. Ironically, these Russian and Chinese “oligarchs” have much less political power than the so-called entrepreneurs and philanthropists of the Western world, as they are regularly imprisoned and even killed. Most notoriously, the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky—once Russia’s richest man—was imprisoned for ten years and his corporation Yukos, with oil reserves the size of Iraq, was fully nationalized.

Western powers also had a direct role in the creation of the global billionaire class. The post-Soviet oligarchy was a direct result of Western economic shock therapy in the 1990s. The billionaire class in China largely arose through a survival strategy against Western imperial pressure, allowing a controlled inflow of market systems to avoid the crushing sanctions, isolation and invasions that so many other countries suffered. Notably, both the Chinese and Russian governments were favored by the West until the very moment they started reigning in the power of the oligarchs—modestly, I might add—and challenging Western hegemony.
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And this does not begin to cover the role of the IMF and World Bank in creating a global oligarchy in the rest of the Global South. Research indicates that only the top 10 percent of the population benefit from the IMF structural adjustment programs to which most of the Global South was subjected. Furthermore, in Latin America and Southern Africa, the billionaire class is still heavily dominated by white settlers that strongly favor Washington’s agenda. Clearly, using the global billionaire class to argue against the relevance of Western imperialism—the very party most responsible for their existence in the first place—is simply not credible.

It is no secret that Western security services spy on climate movements, arrest and brutalize climate protestors, and lock up anyone engaged in industrial sabotage for a lifetime in prison. After retirement, many of these agents continue their spywork directly on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry. When social movements were stronger, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, anti-imperialist movement leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Fred Hampton were assassinated by the U.S. government. Indeed, the CIA was planning to do the same to Julian Assange.

The very same imperial war machinery driving the exploitation of the Global South turns inward at any sign of serious revolt. Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who proposed a climate target twenty years ahead of Boris Johnson’s and combined his pledge with a fierce anti-imperialism, was preemptively threatened with a coup by the UK military, just in case he might win elections.

It is certainly true that we also see repression within the Global South and Eastern Europe. Yet it is exactly Western imperialism that empowers war hawks and authoritarians in “enemy states,” who can vigorously clamp down on civil liberties using very real imperial threats as justification. However, an ecosocialist revolution within these states would be infinitely more likely without the imperialist pressures from the Global North.

Furthermore, we should not adopt the flawed view that the United States leads a global struggle against authoritarianism. In fact, 74 percent of dictators are supported directly by the United States. The top five countries in which non-violent land and water protectors were assassinated since 2012—Brazil (317), Colombia (290), Philippines (250), Honduras (109), and Mexico (100)—all receive military aid from the U.S. government.
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Clearly, any real alternative will face a massive threat from the imperial war machine, whether in the Global North or in the South. As such, we will need real international solidarity to halt the capitalist juggernaut that is murdering our planet. That is the only way forward.

​Notes:

1. ↩ Those figures do not count international aviation and shipping emissions, which are especially dominated by high-income countries. By allocating emissions through ownership, for example, a recent study found that 84 percent of international shipping emissions are still being caused by high-income countries (author’s calculations based on data from Henrik Selin, Yiqi Zhang, Rebeccan Dunn, Noelle E. Selin, and Alexis K. H. Lau, “Mitigation of CO­2 Emissions from International Shipping through National Allocation,” Environmental Research Letters 16, no. 4 [2021]). Furthermore, military emissions were exempt from climate agreements until the 2015 Paris Accords, and reporting them remains “voluntary” to this day. Neither international transport nor military emissions are normally taken into account, and comprehensive data is simply unavailable. The Lancet study does take into account trade-based consumption emissions, but only from 1970 onward; earlier figures remain unavailable. The figures of Jayaraman and Kanitkar take none of the above figures into account (international transport, military, or traded emissions); neither do the official national figures reported to the UN in line with formal climate targets.
2. ↩ Author’s calculation based on the data found in a 2022 Lancet study. See Jason Hickel, Daniel O’Neill, Andrew Fanning, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, “National responsibility for ecological breakdown: a fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970—2017,” Lancet Planetary Health 6, no. 4 (2022).
3. ↩ Pierre Friedlingstein, Matthew W. Jones, Michael O’Sullivan, Robbie M. Andrew, Dorothee C. E. Bakker, et al., “Global Carbon Budget 2021,” Earth System Science Data 14, no. 4 (2022). Margin of error on global level is plus or minus 50 percent.
4. ↩ For Asia, these calculations used the period from 1850 to 1947; for Africa, from 1850 to 1964.
5. ↩ Between 2001 and 2015, the countries of the Global North within the Group of 20 were responsible for 97,000 square kilomteres of net deforestation. The Global South—including Indonesia and Brazil—were only responsible for 7,000 square kilometers, partially because of massive reforestation programs in China. Author’s calculations based on the data from Nguyen Tien Hoang and Keiichiro Kanemoto, “Mapping the deforestation footprint of nations reveals growing threat to tropical forests,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 5 (2021).
6. ↩ Kerala comes in at number eleven, to be exact.
7. ↩ The current sanctions against Russia—which are intended to replicate the devastating impact of the sanctions against Venezuela and Iran—have largely backfired, as India and China have picked up the slack while global energy prices surged. NATO has inadvertently created the very situation they had tried for so many years to prevent: increasing the oil revenues of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. But they have also been a major boon for the Western fossil fuel industry, which has used the war as an excuse to raise their prices. The industry is now recording record profits and promising increased drillings to replace the Russian supply.
8. ↩ The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Turkey, Israel, the Gulf monarchies, Japan, and the Four Asian Tigers (except for Hong Kong).
9. ↩ Based on GDP PPP 2020 World Bank data. See previous endnote for author’s definition of “Western geopolitical bloc.”
10. ↩ These figures were taken from the evening news shows of ABC, CBS, and NBC, which are collectively the single most important source of news in the United States by viewership.
11. ↩ Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Siberia, and all of Abya Yala; with the exception of independent countries where the majority of the population has dominant or predominant non-European ancestry, which are the Caribbean Community, the Northern Triangle, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
12. ↩ Healthy life expectancy for these countries, according to 2019 WHO data, is as follows: China, 68.5 years; Cuba, 67.8 years; and the United States, 66.1 years. Note that this is before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has certainly increased the disparity.
13. ↩ High-income countries are excluded.
14. ↩ High-income countries are excluded.
15. ↩ Carbon use based on author’s calculations using data found in the Lancet study by Hickel, O’Neill, Fanning, and Zoomkawala, adjusted for 1.5 degrees Celsius (instead of 1 degree) of warming. Material footprint based on author’s calculations using another Lancet study (see Jason Hickel, Daniel O’Neill, Andrew Fanning, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, “National responsibility for ecological breakdown: a fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970—2017,” Lancet Planetary Health 6, no. 4 [2022]), allowing for “undershoot” years to compensate for “overshoot” years. As mentioned, the latter data only starts in 1970, skipping centuries of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
16. ↩ Based on a U.S. $7.40 “ethical” poverty line.
17. ↩ If, as polls suggest, Brazil will see a leftist electoral victory in 2022, countries controlled by leftist governments will represent more than 90 percent of the continent’s economy and population. Admittedly, Boric and Petro in Chile and Colombia (respectively) have, at least rhetorically, tried to distinguish themselves from leftist resource nationalism.
18. ↩ See endnote 8 for countries included in definition.
19. ↩ The World Inequality Database gives a higher estimate for elite Chinese carbon footprints, yet their methodology assumes that all non-household national emissions benefit Chinese consumers. That is a questionable assumption.
20. ↩ You can find the names and countries of the top controlling interests in the appendix.

Cuba’s new Family Code, passed in a referendum with 67% of the vote, expands women’s, children’s, and LGBTQ people’s legal rights

Cuban revolutionary, Raúl Castro, cast his vote in the referendum on the new Family Code on September 25. (Photo: Communist Party of Cuba/Twitter)

The people of Cuba approved a new progressive Family Code with an overwhelming majority in a historic national referendum on September 25. On the morning of September 26, Alina Balseiro, president of the National Electoral Council (CEN), reported that with 94.25% of the votes counted, Cubans decided by a resounding 66.87% of the votes to ratify the implementation of a new Family Code, written in consultation with the general public.

74.01%, or 6,251,786 of the total 8,447,467 eligible voters living in and outside Cuba took part in the unprecedented plebiscite. Of the 5,892,705 or 94.25% of the votes counted, 3,936,790 or 66.87% of the votes were for the option “YES”. Meanwhile, option “NO” obtained 1,950,090 or 33.13% of the votes.
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The new Family Code has been described by experts as the most inclusive, progressive and revolutionary code in the world. This new code legalizes equal marriage and equal adoption rights regardless of sexual orientation, recognizes the rights of surrogate mothers, recognizes women’s work in the household, and recognizes the role of grandparents in the family, among many more progressive victories.

Following the announcement of the preliminary results, thousands of Cubans took to social media networks to celebrate the ratification of the code. “Love is already a law,” “love, respect and unity won,” “Cubans voted with whole heart in favor of unity, socialism and revolution,” and similar resonant phrases flooded WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel, celebrating the results in favor of the option “YES”, tweeted, “Approving the new Family Code is doing justice. It is paying off a debt with several generations of Cuban men and women, whose family projects have been waiting for this Law for years. From today we will be a better nation.”

Foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez also welcomed the results. “Our people opted for a revolutionary, uplifting law that drives us to achieve social justice for which we work every day. Today we are a better country, with more rights,” tweeted Rodríguez.

Esteban Lazo, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, stated, “Love, affection, peace, inclusion and social justice triumphed, it’s “YES” for Cuban families.”

Justice Minister Oscar Silvera Martínez also celebrated the results. “Our people, the sovereign protagonist of the referendum, approved the Family Code. From the Ministry of Justice, we congratulate all those who participated in the referendum on a Code of love, respect and equality. We are already working on its implementation and we will do it right,” he tweeted.

The executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), Sacha Llorenti, also congratulated the Cuban government and its people on the results of the historic referendum.
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“We extend our congratulations to President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the government and people of Cuba on successfully concluding the popular referendum on the Family Code. The Revolutionary people have sovereignly built one of the most advanced Codes in the world,” tweeted Llorenti.

The new code enacts sweeping advances in the rights of women, LGBTQ people, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities.

The new code guarantees the right of all people to form a family without discrimination, legalizing same sex marriage and allowing same sex couples to adopt children. Under the new code, parental rights will be shared among extended and non-traditional family structures that could include grandparents, step parents and surrogate mothers. The code also adds novelties such as prenuptial agreements and assisted reproduction.

The Code promotes equal distribution of domestic responsibilities amongst men and women and extends labor rights to those who care full-time for children, the elderly, or people with disabilities. The code establishes the right to a family life free from violence, one that values ​​love, affection, solidarity and responsibility. It codifies domestic violence penalties, and promotes comprehensive policies to address gender-based violence.

The Code also outlaws child marriage and corporal punishment, stating that parents will have “responsibility” instead of “custody” of children, and will be required to be “respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents.” It also asserts that parents should grant maturing offspring more say over their lives.
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The new code also expands the rights of the elderly and people with disabilities. It recognizes the role of grandfathers and grandmothers in the transmission of values, culture, traditions and care.

This article was republished from People's Dispatch. 

Point 1.) The Eurocommunist approach to establishing socialism does not follow the traditional Marxist model: I.e., “it presupposes the long-term coexistence of public and private forms, not property.”  [p.77] It’s a stage on the road to socialism which will also have broken the control by monopoly of the state and the private sector. At the same time we will keep the advanced production forces created by the monopoly capitalist state. This would be a great trick if we could do it peacefully.

Point 2.) Rational and democratic planning will be used. The “new man” [“new person” is PC today] will be formed by our educational system which will intellectually enlighten the proletariat and other sectors of society, it will be free and also apply to “the children of the well to do.” [p. 79] We will educate the children of the “well to do” to have a more collective consciousness. We have at least a two tiered society on Carrillo’s road. How likely are the ‘’well to do’’ to peacefully give up their privileged economic position in the private sector to the creation of socialism Corrillo envisions?

Point 3.) This system still provides for the appropriation of surplus value from the working-class, but we can control it by taxation and interest rates. To be democratic we have to let the capitalists have their own political parties (not the monopoly capitalists). “ This system, which will still be economically mixed, will translate itself into a political regime in which the owners will be able to to organise themselves not only economically but also in a political party or parties representative of their interests; this will be one of the component parts of political and ideological pluralism.”[p.80]  Carrillo thinks that after the socialists come to power (the monopoly capitalists are out of the picture due to socialist educational and cultural work in the broadest sense) the workers and the remaining petty capitalists will still duke it out in elections which will eventually lead to the capitalists throwing in the towel because of their defeats and gradual adoption of the collective mentality. Half a century has passed since  this was proposed, how close does this program even have to get off the ground? Monopoly capitalism is firmly entrenched throughout the world (with the  exception of China and a few small countries) and shows no signs of changing its spots..

In this section Carrillo seeks to show that his peaceful road to socialism is not a rejection  of the Soviet Union, but is an alternative based on the particular historical circumstances of the late 20th century. It is always iffy to base one’s views on predicted future developments while at same time not being beware of the actual factors at work around you.

Point 4.) Corrillo makes the point that we should be thinking of a coming worldwide advance to socialism but we can’t use a one size fits all approach. What is the reality of the 1970s? The reality is that despite its apparent strength and power, imperialism “has been disestablished, first of all by the Great October Socialist Revolution, then by the advance of socialism ….in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and  through the whole process of decolonization.”  [p. 82] In hindsight we see this is not what was going on. The Great October Socialist Revolution was only 15 years away from being reversed and the return of capitalism established throughout the former Soviet Union, the advance of socialism in Europe was reversed and all the European socialist states were overthrown and also reverted to capitalism. In Asia socialism held on in North Korea and China, and won a tremendous victory by the defeat and rout of US imperialism by the Vietnamese masses. In Latin America, Cuba remains the only socialist state that weathered the collapse of the Soviet revolutionary project and its worldwide after effects. Nicaragua and Venezuela are still in the process of experimenting with socialist ideas and we will have to wait and see what results.

If the Soviet Union and the advance of socialism was to be the backdrop which would ensure the peaceful road to socialism in the developed capitalist world, then Eurocommunism was being built on quicksand. Nevertheless, Carrillo makes some valid points in this section which may provide a lifeline for some aspects of the peaceful road to socialism. He refers to two quotes from Khrushchev’s reports to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. This Congress was famous for revealing the many crimes and violations of communist morality committed by the Stalin leadership (of which he was a part) that occurred during the construction of socialism in the USSR. Stalin’s role is still under evaluation today since not only was a socialist state consolidated under his leadership, but the NAZI menace to the world was defeated by Soviet arms (80% of the NAZI army was directed against Russia leaving 20% to fight the US, the UK and the free French. 

The two quotes we are interested in are—1) Khrushchev quoting Lenin:”All nations will arrive at socialism — that is inevitable but not all will do so in exactly the same way, each will contribute something of its own own in one or another form of democracy, one or another form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, one or another rate at which socialist transformations will be effected in the various aspects of social life.” [p.84] And 2) Khrushchev himself said, regarding socialism coming about by parliamentary means: “[T]he present situation [1956] offers the working class in a number of capitalist countries a real opportunity to unite the overwhelming majority of the people under its leadership and to secure the transfer of the basic means of production into the hands of the people.” [p.85] Well, this opportunity was muffed. Eight years later an inter-party coup overthrew Khrushchev and put the Soviet Union on a path that led to stagnation and eventual collapse.

The two quotes sound right even if the opportunities mentioned by Khrushchev are not so clear nowadays (in our country some leftists are fighting the Trump menace by going all out in support of a scion of the worst imperialist power in the world—Joe Biden). Carrillo also admits that the Lenin quote may have been touched up a bit as Communist leaders have a habit of taking his quotes out of context and dressing them up a bit to support their own views. Carrillo remarked that Lenin was well known for having doubts about bourgeois democracy and universal suffrage under capitalism. Be that as it may, as long as the socialists are not being persecuted and can participate in bourgeois elections it seems they should do so and shelve talk about violence, etc. for a rainy day.

In this section Corrillo seeks to clear up some confusions  regarding the concept of “democracy.” He wants to modify Lenin’s concept of democracy. He points out that in times of revolutionary struggle the fierce urgency of now can lead to overstatements and generalizations which need later amendments. 

Point 5.) In the heat of the revolution, Lenin,, at times was  in some of his writings “making one-sided and excessive generalisations [p [p.87] which is done by almost all leaders subject to the pressure of rapidly changing events. Fighting against reformists, who always appeal to “democracy” as the answer to the  impulse that is breaking out in revolutionary violence to overthrow the capitalist state. Lenin, according to Carrillo, identifies “democracy” with “State.” That is, Lenin sees bourgeois democracy as a tool of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to beat down the workers. The revolution will overthrow the state which will eventually wither away along with the idea of ”democracy” which is a form of State with one class exploiting another. This whole discussion rests on different concepts of the state. Carrillo gives examples of the word “democracy” as used in different ways when talking about primitive communism, Athens, Rome, under capitalism, under socialism, etc. 

This misses Lenin’s point, he thinks “democracy”: is a State supported method and under capitalism it is used to support the bourgeoisie— when Lenin says “democracy” will be abolished he means that under socialism the state and its apparatuses, including state sponsored “democracy” will wither away as will class and the people will live in communal self governing organizations. This will not be a “democracy” in the formal institutional sense we have today but a natural spontaneous way of living in a classless society. Carrillo is using the term in its present capitalist sense and he wants to use bourgeois democracy to build a new kind of socialist democracy that is transitional along with his political struggle to flip the institutions of capitalist society to serve socialist ends. It is this type of peaceful new democracy struggle on the road to socialism that Carrillo  thinks Lenin would have doubts about— a non existent people’s democracy that would come into reality by the successes of Eurocommunism and then move on to socialism.

Carrillo points out that traditionally communists have not thought of universal suffrage as part of the main road to socialism This is because communist parties were born out of the Russian Revolution which brought the communists to power without universal suffrage.Also those advanced capitalist countries with large socialist parties and universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy all ended up with the socialists supporting WWI and their own governments. Finally the fascists came to power in Italy and Germany both of which had universal suffrage. [Just to be PC— “universal suffrage” at this time meant “universal male suffrage” Women got the vote in Germany in1918, after WWI, in Italy on the local level in 1925 (Mussolini) and universally in 1945].

Carrillo defends universal suffrage as one of the main means to the road to power. All communists support it but not all communists give it the major importance that Carrillo does.[ Political power grows out of (a.) the barrel of a gun, (b) the ballot box, (c) both (d) it’s complicated.] Carrillo supports it because he favors a peaceful, nonviolent transfer of power via parliamentary democracy in a multi-party State. The failures of universal suffrage were caused not by failures of the vote, but by the failure to unify the working class and the middle strata around the democratic anti-fascist struggle. Carrillo points out that Dimitrov recognized this.

Point 6.) The development of the Popular Front stresses the importance of building unity  between the working class and other progressive forces in the middle strata and petty bourgeoisie. The Eurocommunists and other revisionists go beyond Dimitrov, however, by trying to include elements of the ruling class whose objection to the monopolists is based on their own interests not on an objection to the exploitation and injustices of the capitalist order or to fascism per se as opposed to their exclusion from power themselves. 

Now we come to one of Carrillo’s strongest arguments in favor of the  Eurocommunist peaceful road to power. These arguments are also used by those  parties who reject Eurocommunism from the right. They are based on Engel’s views from the 1890s. They are to be found in his introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.

Carrillo says that Engels admits the experiences of the last 20 or so years (the 1870s-90s)have caused him to completely revise his views on the conduct of the revolutionary forces. From the time of the Communist Manifesto communists envisioned a revolution to be fighting in the streets, barricades, the armed workers taking on the State and over throwing it— one class, the workers, fighting the big bourgeoisie with the other strata and classes looking on to see who won. 

What has changed? The growth of the State and changes in the tactics of the military make it almost impossible for street fighters to confront and overcome the organized military power of the State. The workers can no longer hope to be a lone class fighting the State. They need allies from the other oppressed sectors of the population. Politically what has changed that can make this possible? In Germany universal adult male suffrage was introduced in 1867. This is Engels’ starting point.

Engels calls this “universal suffrage” and by the 1890s the German workers had used it to build up a mass proletarian party with substantial power in the parliament— the Reichstag. By using this power the workers have been able to exercise authority over the other State institutions and apparatuses of the ruling class State. Was Engels an embryonic Eurocommunist or worse, a modern day social democrat? We shall see.

This is how workers use voting according to Engels: “In election agitation it provided us with a means , second to none, of getting in touch with the mass off the people where they still stand aloof from us; of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people; and further , it provided our representatives in the Reichstag with a platform from which they could speak to their opponents in parliament, and to the masses without, with quite another authority  and freedom than in the press or at meetings…(intro  to Marx). A far cry from following the Center or other forms of tailism. Not being in a Reichstag it’s up to our press to do this. 

Engels pointed out that more was done by these legal methods than by illegal methods, rebellions, trying to form uprising, etc. Engels did not foresee WWI or the rise of fascism and the NAZIs but thought, like Carrillo, the working class party would grow and grow, slowing taking over the State institutions and winning over the masses until it came to power. “Until the decisive day.” (Ibid.) This victory will happen if we stick with this democratic road and give up the utopian dream of street  fighting and violence. 

Engels had every reason to think that this was the way to go, considering his historic period in the late 19th century where he could see the advances of German social democracy and compare it to the fate of the Commune. Of course, Engels, as Carrillo, left open the possibility that the ruling class would resort to violence but he too thought the socialist forces would have become strong enough to be unbeatable. The horrors of the 20th century put an end to these optimistic hopes.

After WWII, as hope springs eternal in the human breast, Carrillo has found solace in Engels’ words. In the Europe of half a century ago he opined “The Europe of today the socialist forces can enter the government  and come to power through universal suffrage and they will maintain themselves in a leading position in society if they are able to keep the confidence of the people through periodical elections.” [p.95] We still have leaders today with these hopes and optimistic views. They have a little touch of Santiago in the night. Who is to gainsay them?

Point 7.) “It is a necessity and an obligation to open up a breach, to achieve a real differentiation between those who sincerely cherish the values of democracy and political liberalism and those for whom democracy and liberalism mean only the preservation of the property of State monopoly capital and its economic privileges.” [p. 96] In other words a breach between the phony progressives and the real progressives. The phonies are the liberals, and so called socialists who act progressive as long as the capitalist system is not called into question. When that happens, when capitalism is threatened they turn their coats and “become fascists.”

In the fight we are in now the two groups are mixed up and it is hard to tell the phonies from the real progressives. The same was true in Carrillo’s day. There are critics on the left and right of the former socialist countries, the USSR, and positions taken by the communist parties that they think are wrong. Are they phony or sincere? Carrillo said that serious critics, not slanderers, who are trying to improve the struggle and complain about  “real or supposed mistakes” are not ipso facto being phony. We can all work together as long as we have honest motives. Discussions, critical or not, different viewpoints, and suggestions can lead to better understanding and stronger progressive movements. “The only thing that should be banished from a society that’s profoundly democratic  is terrorism and physical violence  as an instrument of political action, and the use of libel and slander against individuals and groups.’’ [p.98-99] This is always a sign of phoniness in both groups and leaders pretending to be “left.” Bossiness is also a sign of being a phony.

If we are going to be able to capture the capitalist state apparatuses by means of democratic advances we must make sure we don’t end up working with the phony elements who will, in a crisis, side with the enemy against us. This is why in our time we have to be very careful with who we work and want in a Popular Front. It would appear that we don't want elements from the phony left, let alone the phony center, who will turn to reaction when the time comes to turn towards socialism. We can work on some issues with these people but not uncritically. 

The Biden administration, for example, is a major part of the capitalist-imperialist system destroying the planet and preparing for a major world war in the future if the US domination of the international arena looks to be ending, even if by peaceful means of economic development. It is a major enemy of the American and world working-class and only phony liberals and leftists pretend otherwise. Yet it has potentially progressive elements within it that can be won over to the progressive side and we must try and do that by means of constructive criticism of the weakness and faults of the administration which can be improved and worked with, and also by pointing out its deadly over all nature. Eurocommunism would try working with like minded other strata along with the proletariat to form a movement “the unifies the interests and ideas of the broadest sections.” [p. 99]

Point 8.) “The new ideas about the road to socialism in the developed countries allow certain diversifications  with regard to the role and function of the Communist Party.” What are these Eurocommunist innovations? The Party will no longer view itself as the only representative of the working people. It will agree that other working class parties, even with different philosophical perspectives, can represent the working class and the struggle for socialism. Carrillo said must earn the status of vanguard by our actions. Carrillo thought the Communists could work together with other such parties in a multi-party state. We would still be, however, the vanguard party. “It continues to be the vanguard party, in as much as it truly embodies a creative Marxist attitude” [p.100].

But to be a vanguard others must also see us that way. Since other parties don’t have our advanced outlook they tend to participate in bourgeois politics as usual [nothing has changed in the 50 years since this was written!] We can’t do this, according to Carrillo.

Point 9.) “If they’re to keep their vanguard role, the communist parties must strictly carry out a concrete analysis of concrete reality , which at times means not only refraining from going with the stream, but swimming against it….Either we turn our role as a vanguard into a reality in that way, or else that role is reduced to an ideological fantasy which may serve to console us from time to time for our ineffectiveness.” [p.100]. Well, those leftists in the US who uncritically support Biden’s domestic policies and the Democrats as the best way to defeat the ultra-right (swimming with the stream) cannot be accused of being Eurocommunists.

Point 10.) This is a major revision point aimed at the heart of traditional Marxist theory. “The party recognizes that,outside collective political tasks, each member is master of his fate [or her-tr] as regards everything  affecting his preferences, intellectual or artistic inclinations, and his personal relations.” [p.101] While  it remains private and not public. So, this proposition is not earth shattering, but the next is, at least for Marxists, this is the real essence of point 10.  When it comes to different scientific  theories of reality, and views in the humanities on art and literature and philosophy, all sorts of different schools of thought should be allowed in Party publications. “The parry as such does not pass judgement except on questions of revolutionary strategy and political tactics.” [Ibid.] In other words, Marxism is a purely pragmatic and utilitarian political philosophy.

This has never been the view of any real Marxist. Marxism has, from the beginning, been a philosophical worldview based on the merger of Hegelian/Marxian dialectical logic and a materialist scientific world view which we call Dialectical Materialism— it is an all encompassing philosophy which includes the humanities and the natural and social sciences, especially history (historical materialism). We do not believe the class struggle is confined to politics, it is in fact based on economics of which politics is a reflection. We believe the class struggle is manifested in all aspects of culture and especially today in bourgeois capitalist culture.

We do pass judgement on scientific and cultural schools of thought. We would not permit creationism, for example, to be taught along with, or in place of, Darwinism in the educational system. We also take a stand on so-called scientific theories that promote racism and the superiority of one “race” or “ethnic” group over another. We also recognize that cultural creations in art and literature, theatre, movies, etc reflect the class struggle and can promote reactionary anti working class ideologies which act at the expense of the humanistic values of equality and basic rights for all that Marxism stands to promote now and after the abolition of the bourgeois political order. Carrillo’s point 10 is anathema to the worldview of Marxism-Leninism (AKA scientific socialism).

Point 10, however, is a foundation stone to what Carrillo called the new political foundation which he hoped Eurocommunism would bring about. This was a hodgepodge of all the political parties, different class forces, and organizations, which have broken with monopoly capitalism and will all work together in peace and harmony with each other for the greater good of all. Only this never came about because, besides having contradictions with monopoly capital, they had different goals and values to preserve which contradicted those of the other members of the hodgepodge and none of them thought the Communists were the vanguard as each thought they had the best positions. The hodgepodge couldn’t work. 

Take an example from our own country. No socialists, especially Marxists, want to see the racist, crypto-fascist Republicans elected to office. The monopoly capitalist Democratic Party doesn’t want them elected either.The Democratic Party also hates all forms of socialism and especially Marxism. You would have to be nuts to think you could form a new political foundation based on a coalition which included the progressive forces of the socialist and Marxist left and the imperialist Democratic Party. The first ones to laugh us out of court would be the Democratic leadership. Eurocommunism was a dream that could never have come to fruition.  Some aspects, as we have noted, of their thought may still be relevant, but the basic foundation of their new political reality was smoke and mirrors.

The difference between Eurocommunism and Social Democracy is that the SDs have abandoned the goal of replacing capitalism with socialism. Communists seek to eliminate state monopoly capitalism and replace it with socialism. SDs seek reforms of the capitalist system and seek not to overthrow the capitalist state but to administer it. Nevertheless the Communists seek to dialogue with the SD and socialist parties the same way they dialogue with Christians.

Point 11.) Eurocommunism can work with the Social Democrats because the Communists seek to win all the progressive groups over to the convergence of the new political reality that will replace monopoly capitalism. Carrillo saw this as a process illuminated by  “the evolution which has led France to the Union of the Left.”  [p.104] 

This left union turned out to be a disaster for the French Party, it teamed up with the Socialists as a minor party in a Socialist government.The Socialists undertook to shore up the capitalist system, the French party bled membership, quit the “union” and never regained the political strength they had in the past. To this day they still form left fronts with other parties in attempts to regain their former place. They did not really turn towards Eurocommunist ideas until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 15 years after Carrillo’s book, this despite the fact that they, along with the Italian Party and the Spanish Party under Carrillo, are considered to be one of the three founding parties of the movement. They have recently dropped the hammer and sickle as the symbol on their membership cards.  Eurocommunism hasn’t done them much good.

Anyway, despite what Carrillo said about the Social Democrats, after the breakup of the Soviet Union most Communist Parties split, or dissolved, and the Eurocommunists basically became social democrats in practice. About a third of the Communist Party in the United States split off to form the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism which does not practice democratic centralism and has Marxists and social democrats as members. After the death of long serving leader Gus Hall in 2000 the  Communist Party veered to the right under Sam Webb and his successors having disbanded the YCL and suppressed its theoretical journal, Political Affairs. Efforts have recently begun to reconstitute the YCL. The future of the party is uncertain as it appears to have abandoned an independent Marxist-Leninist analysis of the class struggle and is following the lead of centrist elements affiliated with the Democratic Party. Only time will tell if this analysis is correct.

Eurocommunism aims to make whichever country it is in independent of both the USSR and the USA as the two dominant military blocks.  Well, there is no more USSR and capitalist Russia and socialist China appear to be substituting for the enemies of the USA/NATO block. There is now only the USA military block. The context described by Carrillo is really moot. The whole point of Eurocommunism was for Communists to be able to develop outside the Soviet orbit within advanced capitalism and to ally with other progressive forces and evolve peacefully into socialism. With no more USSR there is no need for “Eurocommunism” although many of its ideas have been taken over by communists in the advanced capitalist states — especially the idea of peaceful evolution (refurbished Bernstein revisionism).

But how would Eurocommunism have brought about a peaceful evolution? Three conditions are needed: 1) the left forces need a common strategy (just that of the communists alone won’t do) 2) the left forces must make common cause with the Third World esp. progressive democratic countries pursuing anti-imperialist goals. 3.)  The left forces must strengthen economic relations  with the European and Asian socialist states. Since there are no more European socialist states this means basically with China, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea (DPRK). We can add Cuba to this mix. What this really means is China as it has replaced the USSR as the #2 superpower. This is the post-Eurocommunist world context. None of the post-Eurocommunist parties have fulfilled all three of these conditions. While some communist parties are  anti-NATO in doctrina they support and work with governments or organizations that are de facto pro-NATO.

There is one other idea left over from Eurocommunism. That is a European defense arrangement independent of the USA and USSR. Today that means an independent EU military independent of NATO. The US is opposed to that idea — it considers it redundant  and it doesn’t want a large military force independent of its control. Europe is to remain a satellite continent.

Next is Chapter 5, “The Historical Roots of Eurocommunism’’

Madame President,
​
Colleagues,

Ladies and gentlemen,

We are meeting at a both challenging and dramatic moment. Crisis situations are growing, and the international security situation is deteriorating rapidly.

Instead of engaging in honest dialogue and searching for compromises, we must deal with misinformation, as well as coarsely staged incidents and provocations. The policy line adopted by the West undermines trust in international institutions, which are tasked with coordinating various interests and international law as a guarantee of fairness to protect the weak from arbitrary rule. We are witnessing these negative trends in their quintessential form here in the United Nations, which rose from the rubble of German fascism and Japanese militarism and was established to promote friendly relations among its members and to prevent conflict among them.

The future world order is being decided today, as any unbiased observer can clearly see. The question is whether this world order will have a single hegemon that forces everyone else to live by its infamous rules, which only benefit this hegemon and no one else. Or whether this will be a democratic and just world free from blackmail and intimidation against the unwanted, as well as free from neo-Nazism and neo-colonialism. Russia firmly opts for the second option. Together with our allies, partners, and like-minded countries, we call for efforts to make this a reality.

The unipolar global development model, which served the golden billion who for centuries had been fuelling its excessive consumption by relying on Asian, African, and Latin American resources, is receding into the past. Today, with the emergence of sovereign states that are ready to stand up for their national interests, an equal, socially-minded and sustainable multipolar architecture is taking shape. However, Washington and the ruling elites in Western countries that have fully submitted themselves to this rule have been viewing these objective geopolitical processes as a threat to their dominance.

The United States and its allies want to stop the flywheel of history. Having declared itself victorious in the Cold War at some point in the past, Washington elevated itself almost to the rank of the messenger of the Lord God on Earth, endowed with no obligations, but only sacred rights to act with impunity wherever it wants. Any state can become the next target for such actions, especially if this state displeases the self-proclaimed masters of the world in some manner. Everyone remembers how wars of aggression were unleashed under far-fetched pretexts against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, in which hundreds of thousands of deaths were claimed among civilians. Were the West’s legitimate interests at stake in any one of these countries? Have they banned English or languages of other NATO member states, or Western media, or culture? Have they labelled Anglo-Saxons as subhuman or used heavy weapons against them? What were the outcomes of the reckless undertaking by the United States in the Middle East? Have they helped improve the human rights situation or promote the rule of law? Have they helped stabilise the socioeconomic situation or improve the people’s livelihoods? Name a country where life has changed for the better following Washington’s forceful intervention.

In its attempts to revive the unipolar model under the label of a rules-based order, the West has been imposing dividing lines everywhere, following the logic a of bloc-based confrontation where you either with us or against us. There is no third option available or compromises. The United States persisted with its irrational policy to expand NATO to the east and bring its military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders. Now the US wants to subjugate Asia. At the June NATO Summit in Madrid this self-proclaimed defensive alliance, announced the indivisibility of security for the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific region. Closed frameworks are being created as part of the Indo-Pacific strategies, which undermine ASEAN’s open and inclusive regional architecture that has taken shape over decades. Building on all these developments, they decided to play with fire regarding Taiwan, even promising it military support.

Clearly, the notorious Monroe Doctrine is becoming global in scope. Washington is trying to turn the entire globe into its own backyard while it uses illegal unilateral sanctions as a tool for coercing those who disagree. For many years now, these unilateral sanctions have been imposed in violation of the UN Charter and used as a tool for political blackmail. The cynicism of this practice is obvious. The restrictions take a toll on ordinary people, preventing them from accessing basic goods, including medicines, vaccines, and food. The blockade imposed by the United States on Cuba for more than 60 years now is one such egregious example. For quite some time now, the UN General Assembly by an overwhelming majority has been demanding with great resolve that this blockade be immediately lifted. The Secretary-General, whose duties include facilitating the implementation of the General Assembly resolutions, must pay special attention to this problem. He also has a special role to play when it comes to mobilising efforts to overcome the food and energy crises that have resulted from uncontrolled money printing in the United States and the EU during the pandemic, as well as the European Union’s irresponsible and unprofessional actions on hydrocarbon markets. Defying the most basic common sense, Washington and Brussels compounded the situation by declaring an economic war against Russia. This resulted in higher global prices of food, fertiliser, oil, and gas. We welcome efforts by the Secretary-General, who helped broker the July 22, 2022, Istanbul Agreements. However, these agreements must be carried out. So far, most of the ships carrying Ukrainian grain have not been directed to the poorest countries, while the United States and the EU have yet to fully remove the financial and logistical obstacles that prevent Russia from exporting its grain and fertiliser. We have been saying for several weeks that 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser have been held up at European ports and have been proposing to ship them free of charge to the African countries that need them, but the European Union has not responded.

Official Russophobia has taken on unprecedented and grotesque dimensions in the West. They do not have the scruples anymore to declare their intention to not only defeat our country militarily, but also to destroy and fracture Russia. In other words, they want a geopolitical entity that is too independent to disappear from the world’s political map.

How have Russia’s actions over the past decades actually infringed upon the interests of its opponents? Could it be that they cannot forgive us because it is the position of our country that made the military and strategic detente possible in the 1980s and 1990s? Or that we voluntarily dissolved the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, depriving NATO of its raison d’etre? Or that we supported Germany’s reunification without any conditions and contrary to the positions of London and Paris? That we withdrew our armed forces from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and recognised the independence of the former Soviet republics? That we believed the promises by the Western leaders that they would not expand NATO to the east by a single inch, and when this process started, we agreed to basically legitimise it by signing the Russia-NATO Founding Act? Could it be that we infringed on the West’s interests when we warned it that bringing its military infrastructure closer to our border would be unacceptable to us?

With the end of the Cold War, Western arrogance and American exceptionalism have taken on an especially destructive nature. Back in 1991, US Under Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz frankly acknowledged during a conversation with NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark that after the end of the Cold War they could use their military as they pleased… and that they have five or maybe ten years to clear out surrogate Soviet regimes like Iraq and Syria before a new superpower emerges to challenge them. I am certain that one day we will learn from someone’s memoires how the United States built its Ukraine policy. However, Washington’s plans are already obvious.

Could it be that they cannot forgive us for supporting, at the request of the United States and the European Union, the agreement reached between then President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich and the opposition to resolve the February 2014 crisis? Germany, France, and Poland guaranteed these agreements, but the next morning the leaders of the government coup trampled upon them, humiliating the European mediators. The West simply shrugged and looked on in silence as the putschists started bombing eastern Ukraine where people refused to accept the government coup. They looked on when those behind the coup elevated Nazi accomplices involved in atrocious ethnic cleansings against Russians, Poles, and Jews during World War II to the rank of national heroes. Did we have to sit idly in the face of Kiev’s policy to impose a total ban on the Russian language, education, the Russian media and culture, its insistence that Russians be expelled from Crimea, and when it declared war against Donbass? The authorities in Kiev back then, as well as the current leadership, have designated these people as creatures, not people – this is what we hear from the country’s most senior official. How could we tolerate this?

Or maybe Russia interfered with Western interests when it played a key role in stopping the hostilities unleashed by Kiev neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine, and then insisted that the Minsk Package of Measures be implemented, as approved unanimously by the UN Security Council in February 2015, but then buried by Kiev with the direct involvement of the United States and the European Union?

For many years, we have been repeatedly offering to agree on the rules for co-existence in Europe based on the principles of equal and indivisible security as set forth at the highest level in the OSCE documents. Under this principle, no one can seek to reinforce one’s security at the expense of the security of others. The last time we came forward with a proposal to work out legally binding agreements to this effect was in December 2021, but all we got in response was an arrogant refusal.

Considering the inability of the Western countries to engage in talks, and the fact that the Kiev regime was continuing the war against its own people, we were left with no choice but to recognise the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and launch a special military operation to protect Russians and other people in Donbass, while also removing threats to our own security, which NATO has been consistently creating on Ukrainian territory, and which is de facto right on our border. This operation is being carried out in execution of the treaties of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance reached between Russia and these republics under Article 51 of the UN Charter. I am certain that in this situation any sovereign, self-respecting state that realises the responsibility it has to its own people would do the same.

The West is now in a temper tantrum over the referendums in Ukraine’s Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions. However, people there are simply reacting to the advice from the head of the Kiev regime, Vladimir Zelensky. In one of his interviews in August 2021, he advised all those who consider themselves Russians to leave for Russia for the benefit of their children and grandchildren. This is what people living in the regions I have mentioned are doing, taking the land where their ancestors had lived for centuries with them.

It is obvious to any unbiased observer that for the Anglo-Saxons who have completely subjugated Europe, Ukraine is merely an expendable material in their fight against Russia. NATO declared that our country poses an immediate threat to the United States in its quest for total dominance, while designating the People’s Republic of China as a long-term strategic challenge. At the same time, the collective West, led by Washington, is sending intimidating signals to all other countries without exception: anyone who disobeys can be the next in line.

One of the consequences of the crusade declared by the West against unwanted regimes is that multilateral institutions are declining at an ever-increasing pace. The United States and its allies use these institutions as tools for achieving their selfish interests. This is the approach they have been sticking to in the United Nations, its Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and other multilateral associations. The OPCW has been de facto privatised. There are fierce attempts to undermine efforts to set up a mechanism as part of the Biological Weapons Convention to ensure the transparency of hundreds of military biological programmes the Pentagon has around the world, including along Russian borders and across Eurasia. Irrefutable evidence discovered on Ukrainian territory demonstrates that these programmes are far from innocuous.

We are witnessing an assertive push to privatise the UN Secretariat and imbue its work with a neo-liberal discourse, which ignores the cultural and civilisational diversity in today’s world. In this connection, we call for paying attention to ensure equitable geographical representation, as required by the UN Charter, of member states within the Secretariat so that no one single group of countries dominates it.

There is an intolerable situation with the failure by Washington to perform its obligations under the agreement between the UN Secretariat and the US Government regarding the headquarters of the United Nations in terms of ensuring normal conditions that enable all member states to take part in UN’s work. The Secretary-General has his own obligations under this agreement. Inactivity is unacceptable here.

Efforts by certain countries to undermine the Security Council prerogatives are of course a matter of concern. Clearly, the Council, and the UN in general, must adapt to today’s reality. We see opportunities for injecting more democracy into the work of the Security Council but only – I would like to make special emphasis on this – through broader representation of African, Asian, and Latin American countries. This applies in particular to India and Brazil as key international actors and worthy candidates for becoming permanent Council members, subject to enhancing Africa’s standing at the same time.

Today, it is essential like never before that all member states reaffirm their clearly stated commitment to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter without any reservations. This would be the first and necessary step to restoring their collective responsibility for the human destinies.

This was precisely the purpose of establishing the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations. Co-founded by Russia, it already includes about two dozen countries. The group strives to ensure strict compliance with the universal norms of international law as a counterweight to pernicious unilateral approaches. We call on everyone who shares this position to join in. In this context, we believe that the Non-Aligned Movement, BRICS, the SCO, and ASEAN have considerable positive potential.

By aggressively imposing their vision of democracy on all countries as a social model, our Western colleagues categorically refuse to follow the norms of democracy in international affairs. The situation with Ukraine is the most recent example. Russia has gone to great lengths to justify its position and has been doing this for several years now. But the West announced that it disagreed. One would think that it would be up to the other members of the international community to decide on their position: to support one side, or the other, or remain neutral. Is this not the way this is done in democracies when politicians competing against one another make their case and try to win popular support? However, the United States and its allies are denying others the freedom of choice. They are threatening and twisting the arms of anyone who dares to think independently. They use threats to force others to join in sanctioning Russia. They have not been very good at it, but it is obvious that actions of this kind by the United States and its satellites are a far cry from democracy. In fact, it amounts to dictatorship, pure and simple, or at least an attempt to impose it.

One gets the firm impression that Washington, as well as Europe, which is subjugated to Washington’s rule, use only prohibited methods to retain their vanishing hegemony. Time and again, they have used illegal sanctions instead of diplomatic methods against strong competitors, be it in economics, sports, information space, cultural exchanges, or overall in people-to-people contacts. Take, for example, the visa issue for delegates to international events in New York, Geneva, Vienna, and Paris. These are also attempts to remove competitors and insulate multilateral discussions from any alternative points of view.

I strongly believe in the need to defend the United Nations and to rid it of anything confrontational or superficial so that it re-emerges as a platform for honest discussions to balance the interests of all member states. It is this approach that guides us in our efforts to promote our national initiatives within the United Nations.

It is a matter of principle that we achieve a universal ban on the deployment of weapons in outer space, which is the purpose of the draft international treaty prepared by Russia and China. The UN Conference on Disarmament is reviewing it.

Defending cyberspace deserves special attention, including efforts to agree on ways to ensure international informational security within the General Assembly Open-Ended Working Group, as well as drafting a universal convention on countering the use of ICTs for criminal purpose within the Special Committee.

We will continue supporting the Office of Counter-Terrorism and other counter-terrorist entities within the United Nations.

We also remain committed to promoting closer ties between the UN and the CSTO, the CIS, and the EAEU in order to coordinate and unite our efforts across Greater Eurasia.

Russia calls for the stepping up of efforts to settle regional conflicts. We believe that priority objectives include overcoming an impasse in establishing an independent Palestinian state, restoring statehood in Iraq and Libya after they were ruined by NATO’s aggression, neutralising threats to Syria’s sovereignty, putting national reconciliation on a stable footing in Yemen, and overcoming NATO’s devastating legacy in Afghanistan. We are working to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear programme in its original form, and to bring about a fair and comprehensive resolution of the problems the Korean Peninsula faces. The multiple conflicts in Africa require that we resist the temptation to play a zero-sum game there and instead consolidate external actors to support the African Union’s initiatives. The situation in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina causes concern, where the United States and the EU are stubbornly seeking to break apart the international legal framework as set forth in UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and the Dayton Peace Agreement.

Madame President,

In times of change, people tend to rely on and find solace in the wisdom of their predecessors who went through hardships that were just as challenging. Former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who remembered the horrors of World War II, aptly noted: “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” These words have never been more relevant. This means that we must all recognise our individual and collective responsibility for creating conditions that would facilitate development for future generations in safety and harmony. For this, everyone will have to demonstrate political will.

We are ready to work in good faith and strongly believe that the only way to ensure the world order’s stability is to go back to the roots of UN diplomacy, which are based on the respect for sovereign equality of states as the key statutory principle for a genuine democracy.

​Marxism Leninism arose as an organic creation of capitalist society as it entered a new, higher stage of development. The process of capitalist accumulation and expansion that had begun during the industrial revolution led to monopolization, centralization of capital, and the creation of what Lenin called “finance capital”, or the merging of bank and industrial capital. The old era of competition in industry gave way to new developments, owing to the way the system itself functioned. If there’s a competition, somebody has to win.
           
And the winners became financiers.
           
Basically. It’s a lot more complicated than that, obviously, but that’s the general gist of it. Capital centralizes in fewer and fewer hands, and this ends up creating monopoly cartels. Those cartels sit at the top of the capitalist pyramid like hood ornaments, subjugating lesser capital to them, and owning part of everything along the process of production and distribution. Only, these hood ornaments don’t denote the brand of a car, but the many brands under their ownership and control. Also, car’s hood ornaments don’t generally put millions of people into destitution. So, you know. Not exactly the same.
           
The era of imperialism, of the change from progressive capitalism into moribund capitalism, the advent of finance capital, monopoly cartels, syndicates, and trusts began a long time ago. In Marxism, we tend to use the thought device of “stages” to describe the process of society actualizing, or becoming itself, and this stage was dubbed Imperialism by the Bolsheviks. A perfect term. The ruling cartels become an empire unto themselves, and use their power and concentrated capital to spread out over the world.
           
During the era of imperialism, Marxism Leninism clarifies three main contradictions. The first contradiction is the main contradiction of society, between labor and capital. The one that other contradictions arise out of. In the earlier or primary stage of imperialism (yes, we can even split stages up into stages, if we’d like, and I would very much like, as the fact that imperialism itself has reached a new stage will be central to this series), you have the development of monopolies/cartels achieving power, wherein their dominance over the economies of various nations began to subordinate entrepreneurial capital to them, which took labor right along with it, of course, as labor is the source of value creation within entrepreneurial capital. This unproductive capital added a new layer of super-exploitation to the extraction of value from the economy. For workers, it meant that we could while away our days having the value our labor creates extracted by multiple enemies, or we could organize and fight back. Millions upon millions chose to fight back.
 
Lenin lived during the beginning of this process, and the October Revolution the first major victory of the working class. Since his time, imperialism has, of course, continued and developed, as all things do. In 1972, Gus Hall released the massively underrated and sadly hard-to-get-your-hands-on “Imperialism Today”, marking how imperialism itself had developed since its advent in the early 20th century. His analysis of the situation, of the conditions of both global and American society, and how imperialism had changed over time are essential for understanding where we are now, heading into 2022.

And where are we now, in 2022? As imperialism developed, it brought us to the era of the computer revolution, debt economy, and monopoly brand marketing economy, along with the modernization of a new anti-imperialist bloc led by Communist China, and the deterioration of the petro-dollar and Bretton Woods system of global political economy. This is the groundwork for today’s imperialism, having developed over the decades and now in the process of un-developing, having reached its upper limits of sustainability. Just as imperialism is the un-development of capitalism, or what Lenin called “moribund capitalism”, we seem to now be entering a moribund imperialism.
           
But moribund is a little oldy timey and jargony. What does it mean? Why did Lenin use such a term? Well, similar to a lot of terms like this, it comes from Latin. Officially, it means “being in the process of dying”. Lenin used it because imperialism is the stage of capitalism at which its contradictions reach an extreme point and must be resolved, beyond which (according to our dialectical materialist methodology), revolution happens. Or, the process in which capitalism dies.
           
Pretty cool, huh?
           
Anyway, the contradictions of capitalism reach their extreme point, and this is imperialism. Imperialism itself has its own contradictions internal to its development, which go through the same process on another level, also reaching an extreme point, and taking different forms according to the material basis Marxism teaches us lays the foundation for them. Or, basically: modern American imperialism is not the same as French or German imperialism from the early 20th century. It did not arise in the way French or German imperialism did, and has not changed over time in the same way they did. The characteristics each of these forms of imperialism take on are created by the unique contradictions and history of the society that gave rise to it. In the late 20th century, the more ruthless American version of imperialism has taken a hegemonic position in the contradiction between competing imperialist powers, creating what is often referred to as a unipolar world. We understand this from the dialectical perspective, that it is precisely that apparent domination that means the stage of imperialism itself has fully developed, and is now in its moribund stage.

It is often postulated these days that because the USA is the unipolar power, the center of world imperialism, revolution here is impossible. This seems to me a problem of one of two types. A: a simple confusion in terminology, using the surface-level understanding of the word imperialism largely taught by our ruling class. In this less thorough analysis, imperialism can simply be one big power somehow forcing a smaller power to do what it wants, and by this definition, imperialism is immortal and eternal, reducing us to an ideological mistake, forgetting the primary mode of matter: motion. In this instance, imperialism is understood as having set-in-stone characteristics (or a mistaking of form for content) that Lenin (or someone else, in other instances) laid down, almost as if he were Moses coming down from the mountaintops. “Lo and behold, my children. I present to you the things that will be imperialism! Go forth and agitate against!” But this isn’t really what Lenin was doing. Lenin was describing phenomena in society as they arose, and understanding it from the Marxist perspective, in its motion, forms, and change–in the inter-penetration of the opposing forces that propels that change. Or B: A mistake borne of a lack of class analysis. In this instance, imperialism is somehow overcoming the very contradictions of capitalism itself, and posits a different surface-level understanding of this intricate system, wherein one country’s bourgeoisie come to represent the entire country, and “take resources” from another, therefore “buying off” the entire mass of people of that country. It takes more misunderstandings of terminology, such as “super profits” (which it takes to mean, simply, “a lot of profits”), and uses this to assume that, rather than the extractions of finance capital being used to create a new, higher strata of the organized proletariat (and professional classes) whose interests are then tied to the bourgeoisie, it suggests a left-wing version of Reaganite trickle-down economics, where workers are paid far more than the minimum required to reproduce the societal “way of life” and access to things like refrigerators becomes symbolic of a lack of revolutionary potential rather than part of this societal reproduction, and a reason to disregard the entirety of the laws of development discovered by Marxism.
 
In Marxism, we obviously have Lenin’s masterpiece Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Gus Hall’s addition to guide us, but more importantly, we couple these things with our basic Marxist understanding of how society works, according to general laws, in order to genuinely understand where we are at, and therefore where to go from here. Option B denies those general laws Marxism discovered, which set it apart from the old utopian socialism in the first place.

This author finds it perfectly reasonable that such notions have come from the institutions of the capitalist class; most notably, the academy and  think tank/NGO industrial complex, which has become the capitalists’ primary weapon in class warfare against us in recent decades. It stands to reason that as agitation in the working class increases in eras of acute crises such as this, the ways the capitalist class tries to prevent that also increase. The tactics of distortion, division, confusion, and redirection of revolutionary energy into safe, controlled opposition have been a favorite of the capitalist class for decades now. There will always be some reason our class enemy will tell us revolution is not possible or unnecessary. This same content takes different forms, depending on the specific forces telling us, but the essence and results are the same. It is precisely this phenomenon that creates the need for Marxism Leninism to heighten its agitation against these distortions at periods such as this, and not fall into tailism or reformism.

But we’re going off on a tangent here. Let’s reign it in a little, shall we?

The addition of “Leninism” is the only way to keep with Marxist science in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to the dialectical materialist world outlook, all phenomena in the universe go through development and undevelopment, periods of nascence and progress, and then periods of decline, stagnation, and being moribund, leading to “negation of the negation”, and a new thing arising, sublating the old and built on the material reality of the old as its premise. This includes knowledge itself. As the enlightenment ran up against its own limits of thought culminating in Hegel’s system, Marxism created a revolution in thought that allowed us a deeper insight, a new, higher level of development. As the Marxists of the 2nd International ran up against stagnation, dogmatism, and opportunism, Leninism was added to update our thinking for the new developments of society (such as imperialism and finance capital) and continue us moving forward.

So where do we go from Marxism Leninism? In this new era of nascent multi-polarity, we see brilliant Marxist Leninist science coming from strongholds of the working class like China and Cuba, who have developed their own unique ways of doing things. But what about us here in the USA? What are we to do, in order to overcome the dogmas and stagnation that began in the “new left” era and boldly move forward into the era of technology, de-industrialization, and the social revolution this causes?

This series is an argument for our own, unique approach to Marxism Leninism, a modern approach that can overcome the liberalism instilled in “the left” by our enemies in the capitalist class, to avoid eclecticism, deviations, and dogmatism, and genuinely rally the entire working class for the struggles coming our way, to create a sort of “Marxism Leninism Fill-in-the-blankism” of the USA that people can embrace as our own in order to progress, even after a lifetime of bourgeois ideology being thrown at us from every direction we can think of, and then more that we didn’t even know existed.

I’m no crack dialectician. I struggled through Hegel, and had four failed attempts at picking up Capital before I slogged through it all (as well as multiple readings where I went back and understood it better, after learning that Marx wrote the entire thing from the dialectical materialist perspective and I had been reading it with my own liberal baggage), but I hope I can at least do some justice to the heroic figures who have paved the way for our movement today, and not be a complete embarrassment.

​Thank you for your time and energy in going over this series. This is only the first, introductory part, and will continue on until the ideas within are, hopefully, fleshed out and developed.
In love and solidarity,
​
-Noah

To extend a population’s life expectancy at birth (LEB) requires capabilities that are scarce in the United States. The U.S. LEB has fallen in the recent period, quite abruptly. Meanwhile, life expectancy in China and Cuba continues its long-term rise. To understand why we should explore nations’ varying capabilities to achieve social change and promote social gains.

Medical and sociological causes of death that relate to life expectancy and are specific to the United States will not be explored here. A subsequent report will cover that ground.
​
The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics on Aug. 31 set U.S. LEB for 2021 at 76.1 years, the same figure as in 1996. The decline from 77.0 years in 2020 and from 78.8 in 2019 was the greatest continuous U.S. fall in LEB in 100 years. Life expectancy for men in 2021, 73.2 years, represented an unprecedented male-female gap of almost six years (increased male mortality is routine).

Policies put in place following the two countries’ socialist revolutions led to wide-ranging social initiatives that are protective of all people’s lives and, incidentally, crucial for long life expectancy. Capitalist governments, less oriented to social change, are prone to tolerating gaps in social development.

The two socialist countries pursued particular objectives to achieve social gains. Specifically, they have endeavored to establish working-class political power, promote decent and healthy lives for all working people, eradicate major economic inequalities, and build unity.

Some capitalist countries have also attempted to fulfill a few of these objectives when under left-wing governance, with mixed success. A look at how well they may have succeeded, and at some of the consequences when they have not, may shed light on the failings of capitalist states to support the lives of their people, particularly the U.S.’ failure to sustain a LEB that in 2020 was already lower than that of 53 other countries.

The subject of providing social support is, of course, vast. On that account, the discussion here pays more attention to health care and less to other areas. It draws on the insights of Vicente Navarro, professor of public health and public policy at universities in Baltimore and Barcelona.

As regards working-class political power, Navarro maintains that “countries with strong labor movements, with social democratic and socialist parties…have developed stronger redistribution policies and inequality-reducing measures…. These worker-friendly countries consequently have better health indicators [including LEB] than those countries where labor movements are very weak, as is the case in the United States.”

Navarro blames the lack of universal health care in the United States, unique among industrialized nations, on the lack there of a strong labor movement and/or a labor or socialist party. Political power exerted by the organized working class in industrialized nations may vary, but it almost always exceeds workers’ power in the United States, where statistical markers of health outcome are decidedly less favorable.

The political weakness of the organized workers’ movement in the United States is clear. “The working class,” Navarro writes in 2021, does not appear anywhere in the Cabinet nor the Senate, and only appears in the House with an extremely limited representation of 1.3 percent.” Most “members of these institutions belong to the corporate class, closely followed by upper-middle class.” He condemns the “privatization of the electoral process,” in which “there is no limit to how much money can go to the Democratic or Republican party or their candidates.”

Decent and healthy lives are far from routine in capitalist countries, where poor health is associated with low social-economic status. Navarro reports that, in the United States, the “blue-collar worker has a mortality rate from heart conditions double that of the professional class. Mortality differentials by social class are much larger in the United States than in Western Europe.”

He notes that “top level British civil servants live considerably longer than do lower level ones,” and that “members of the [Spanish] bourgeoisie…live an average of two years longer than the petit bourgeoisie…who live two years longer than the middle class, who live two years longer than the skilled working class, who live two years longer than members of the unskilled working class, who live two years longer than the unskilled [and unemployed] working class.”

Alienation under capitalism exacerbates health problems. According to Navarro, “the distance among social groups and individuals and the lack of social cohesion that this distance creates is bad for people’s health and quality of life.” The social isolation he describes adds to challenges faced by social support systems and detracts from the usefulness of interventions.

Attempts by capitalist countries to remove wealth inequalities, especially in the health care arena, show mixed success. As commercialization of healthcare advances, difficulties mount. As the result of profit-taking in that sector, society-wide inequalities are aggravated, and working people lose equal access to quality care.

And yet some form of public overview of, or support for, health care sectors is more or less routine in the various capitalist countries. In many, public authorities operate and pay for hospitals, nursing homes, staffing, drugs, equipment, and training. But the infiltration of market prerogatives and privatization in the health care systems of richer countries now threatens long established goals of accessible health care for all.

In Europe, austerity campaigns under neoliberal auspices have led to cutbacks in publicly provided care. Privatization inroads blunted the institutional response in Europe to the COVID-19 pandemic. Investor groups have been eyeing the hospital and nursing home sectors as profit-making opportunities. According to the Lancet medical journal, privatization within the British National Health Service contributed to an increase in preventable deaths from all causes between 2013 and 2020.

The United States is the poster child of war in defense of privilege. There are stories, from health care:

In 2020 salary and benefits for William J. Caron, Jr., CEO of MaineHealth, a major care provider in the author’s locality, were $1,992,044; for Richard W. Petersen, Maine Medical Center CEO, they were $1,822,185. A commentator notes that “Hospital CEOs are compensated primarily for the volume of patients that pass through their doors—so-called “heads in beds.” Average annual income for U.S. primary care physicians was $260,000 in 2021; for specialists, $368,000.

According to bain.com, “Medtech companies are among the most profitable in the healthcare industry, with margins averaging 22%…profit pools [will] grow to $72 billion in 2024.” And “HME (home medical equipment) retail companies average 45 percent gross profit margin (GPM).”

Researchers found that between 2000 and 2018, the “median annual gross profit margin” (gross profit is revenue minus costs) of 35 pharmaceutical companies was 39.1% higher than that of 357 non-pharmaceutical companies. The CEOs of three major pharmaceutical companies” increased their wealth by “a total of $90 million” in 2018. As for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers: “Moderna’s and BioNTech’s 2021 net profit margins reached 66% and 54%, respectively.”

The matter of creating unity to establish socialism and arrange for the common good needs little comment. Unity within society is a near impossibility under capitalism, inasmuch as divisions there are inherent to a world of greed and individualism. Meanwhile, China, opting in favor of life, put on a magnificent display of socialist unity as its people grappled with the pandemic.

The government imposed strong preventative measures and accepted the inevitability of economic disruption and loss. China’s COVID-19 mortality rate is 1.07 deaths per 100,000 persons. Its U.S. counterpart never seemed to choose and, that way protected economic growth. The U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate is 319.59 deaths per 100,000 persons.

It is important, finally, to lay to rest any suggestion that the riches of the United States and other capitalist nations automatically enable them to offer long life expectancies. Individualized entitlement to wealth is basic to how they operate, and that’s a contradiction and an obstacle.

A society aiming to pursue social initiatives that are comprehensive and directed to all population groups equally is a society that has to redistribute wealth. Wealth redistribution is the necessary adjunct to the objectives already discussed. The message here is that capitalist-inspired measures don’t make the grade and that socialist programs, as in Cuba and China, do work and do offer the promise of decent and secure lives to entire populations.
​
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.

The works of art in this dossier belong to Casa de las Américas’ Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America (Nuestra América) collection. Since its founding, Casa de las Américas has established close ties with a significant number of internationally renowned contemporary artists who have set visual arts trends in the region. Casa’s galleries have hosted temporary exhibitions including different artistic genres, expressions, and techniques by several generations of mainly Latin American and Caribbean artists. Many of these works, initially exhibited in Casa’s galleries, awarded prizes in its contests, and donated by the artists, have become part of the Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America collection, representing an exceptional artistic heritage.

The Cuban Revolution came about in a country subordinated to the US from all points of view. Although we had the façade of a republic, we were a perfect colony, exemplary in economic, commercial, diplomatic, and political terms, and almost in cultural terms.

Our bourgeoisie was constantly looking towards the North: from there, they imported dreams, hopes, fetishes, models of life. They sent their children to study in the North, hoping that they would assimilate the admirable competitive spirit of the Yankee ‘winners’, their style, their unique and superior way of settling in this world and subjugating the ‘losers’.

This ‘vice-bourgeoisie’, as Roberto Fernández Retamar baptised them, were not limited to avidly consuming whatever product of the US cultural industry fell into their hands. Not only that – at the same time, they collaborated in disseminating the ‘American way of life’ in the Ibero-American sphere and kept part of the profits for themselves. Cuba was an effective cultural laboratory at the service of the Empire, conceived to multiply the exaltation of the Chosen Nation and its world domination. Cuban actresses and actors dubbed the most popular American television series into Spanish, which would later flood the continent. In fact, we were among the first countries in the region to have television in 1950. It seemed like a leap forward, towards so-called ‘progress’, but it turned out to be poisoned. Very commercial Cuban television programming functioned as a replica of the ‘made in the USA’ pseudo-culture, with soap operas, Major League and National League baseball games, competition and participation programmes copied from American reality shows, and constant advertising. In 1940, the magazine Selections of the Reader’s Digest, published by a company of the same name, began to appear in Spanish in Havana with all of its poison. This symbol of the idealisation of the Yankee model and the demonisation of the USSR and of any idea close to emancipation was translated and printed on the island and distributed from here to all of Latin America and Spain.

The very image of Cuba that was spread internationally was reduced to a tropical ‘paradise’ manufactured by the Yankee mafia and its Cuban accomplices. Drugs, gambling, and prostitution were all put at the service of VIP tourism from the North. Remember that the Las Vegas project had been designed for our country and failed because of the revolution.
​
Fanon spoke of the sad role of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – already formally independent from colonialism – before the elites of the old metropolis, ‘who happen to be tour­ists enamoured of exoticism, hunting, and casinos’. He added:

Our bourgeoisie, submissive ‘party organisers’ of the Yankees, did everything possible for Cuba to be culturally absorbed by their masters during the neocolonial republic. However, there were three factors that slowed down this process: the work of intellectual minorities that defended, against all odds, the memory and values of the nation; the sowing of Martí’s principles and patriotism among teachers in Cuban public schools; and the resistance of our powerful, mestizo, haughty, and ungovernable popular culture, nurtured by the rich spiritual heritage of African origin.
​
In his speech ‘History Will Absolve Me’, Fidel listed the six main problems facing Cuba. Among them, he highlighted ‘the problem of education’ and referred to ‘comprehensive education reform’ as one of the most urgent missions that the future liberated republic would have to undertake.2 Hence, the educational and cultural revolution began practically from the triumph of 1 January 1959. On the 29th of that same month, summoned by Fidel, a first detachment of three hundred teachers alongside one hundred doctors and other professionals left for the Sierra Maestra to bring education and health to the most remote areas. Around those same days, Camilo and Che launched a campaign to eradicate illiteracy among the Rebel Army troops since more than 80% of the combatants were illiterate.

On 14 September, the former Columbia Military Camp was handed over to the Ministry of Education so that it could build a large school complex there. The promise of turning barracks into schools was beginning to be fulfilled, and sixty-nine military fortresses became educational centres. On 18 September, Law No. 561 was enacted, creating ten thousand classrooms and accrediting four thousand new teachers. The same year, cultural institutions of great importance were created: the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), the National Publishing House, the Casa de las Américas, and the National Theatre of Cuba, which has a department of folklore and an unprejudiced and anti-racist vision unprecedented in the country. All of these new revolutionary institutions were oriented towards a decolonised understanding of Cuban and universal culture.

But 1961 was the key year in which a profound educational and cultural revolution began in Cuba. This was the year when Eisenhower ruptured diplomatic relations with our country. This was the year when our foreign minister, Raúl Roa, condemned ‘the policy of harassment, retaliation, aggression, subversion, isolation, and imminent attack by the US against the Cuban government and people’ at the UN.3 This was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the relentless fight against the armed gangs financed by the CIA. This was the year when the US government, with Kennedy already at the helm, intensified its offensive to suffocate Cuba economically and isolate it from Nuestra América – Our America – and from the entire Western world.4 1961 was also the year when Fidel proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution on 16 April, the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, as Roa exposed the plan that was set to play out the following day. This is something that – considering the influence of the Cold War climate and the McCarthyite, anti-Soviet, and anti-communist crusade on the island – showed that the young revolutionary process had been shaping, at incredible speed, cultural hegemony around anti-imperialism, sovereignty, social justice, and the struggle to build a radically different country. But it was also the year of the epic of the literacy campaign; of the creation of the National School of Art Instructors; of Fidel’s meetings with intellectuals and his founding speech on our cultural policy, ‘Words to the Intellectuals’; of the birth of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the National Institute of Ethnology and Folklore.5

In 1999 in Venezuela – almost four decades later – Fidel summed up his thinking regarding the cultural and educational component in any true revolutionary process: ‘A revolution can only be the child of culture and ideas’.6 Even if it makes radical changes, even if it hands over land to the peasants and eliminates large estates, even if it builds houses for those who survive in unhealthy neighbourhoods, even if it puts public health at the service of all, even if it nationalises the country’s resources and defends its sovereignty, a revolution will never be complete or lasting if it does not give a decisive role to education and culture. It is necessary to change human beings’ conditions of material life, and it is necessary to simultaneously change the human being, their conscience, paradigms, and values.

For Fidel, culture was never something ornamental or a propaganda tool – a mistake commonly made throughout history by leaders of the left. Rather, he saw culture as a transformative energy of exceptional scope, which is intimately linked to conduct, to ethics, and is capable of decisively contributing to the ‘human improvement’ in which Martí had so much faith. But Fidel saw culture, above all, as the only imaginable way to achieve the full emancipation of the people: it is what offers them the possibility of defending their freedom, their memory, their origins, and of undoing the vast web of manipulations that limit the steps they take every day. The educated and free citizen who is at the centre of Martí’s and Fidel’s utopia must be prepared to fully understand the national and international environment and to decipher and circumvent the traps of the machinery of cultural domination.

In 1998, at the 6th Congress of the UNEAC, Fidel focused on the topic ‘related to globalisation and culture’. So-called ‘neoliberal globalisation’, he said, is ‘the greatest threat to culture – not only ours, but the world’s’. He explained how we must defend our traditions, our heritage, our creation, against ‘imperialism’s most powerful instrument of domination’. And, he concluded, ‘everything is at stake here: national identity, homeland, social justice, revolution, everything is at stake. These are the battles we have to fight now’.7 This is, of course, about ‘battles’ against cultural colonisation, against what Frei Betto calls ‘globo-colonisation’, against a wave that can liquidate our identity and the revolution itself.

Fidel was already convinced that, in education, in culture, in ideology, there are advances and setbacks. No conquest can be considered definitive. That is why he returns to the subject of culture in his shocking speech on 17 November 2005 at the University of Havana.8 The media machinery, together with incessant commercial propaganda, Fidel warns us, come to generate ‘conditioned responses’. ‘The lie’, he says, ‘affects one’s knowledge’, but ‘the conditioned response affects the ability to think’.9 In this way, Fidel continued, if the Empire says ‘Cuba is bad’, then ‘all the exploited people around the world, all the illiterate people, and all those who don’t receive medical care or education or have any guarantee of a job or of anything’ repeat that ‘the Cuban Revolution is bad’.10 Hence, the diabolical sum of ignorance and manipulation engenders a pathetic creature: the poor right-winger, that unhappy person who gives his opinion and votes and supports his exploiters.
​
‘Without culture’, Fidel repeated, ‘no freedom is possible’.11 We revolutionaries, according to him, are obliged to study, to inform ourselves, to nurture our critical thinking day by day. This cultural education, together with essential ethical values, will allow us to liberate ourselves definitively in a world where the enslavement of minds and consciences predominates. His call to ‘emancipat[e] ourselves by ourselves and with our own efforts’ is equivalent to saying that we must decolonise ourselves with our own efforts.12 And culture is, of course, the main instrument of that decolonising process of self-learning and self-emancipation.

In Cuba, we are currently more contaminated by the symbols and fetishes of ‘globo-colonisation’ than we have been at other times in our revolutionary history. We must combat the tendency to underestimate these processes, and we must work in two fundamental directions: intentionally promoting genuine cultural options and fostering a critical view of the products of the hegemonic entertainment industry. It is essential to strengthen the effective coordination of institutions and organisations, communicators, teachers, instructors, intellectuals, artists, and other actors who contribute directly or indirectly to the cultural education of our people. All revolutionary forces of culture must work together more coherently. We must turn the meaning of anti-colonial into an instinct.

In 1959, the Cuban revolutionary leader Haydee Santamaría (1923–1980) arrived at a cultural centre in the heart of Havana. This building, the revolutionaries decided, would be committed to promoting Latin American art and culture, eventually becoming a beacon for the progressive transformation of the hemisphere’s cultural world. Renamed Casa de las Américas (‘Home of the Americas’), it would become the heartbeat of cultural developments from Chile to Mexico. Art saturates the walls of the house, and in an adjacent building sits the massive archive of correspondence and drafts from the most significant writers of the past century. The art from Casa adorns this dossier. The current director of Casa, Abel Prieto – whose words open this dossier – is a novelist, a cultural critic, and a former minister of culture. His mandate is to stimulate discussion and debate in the country.

Over the course of the past decade, Cuba’s intellectuals have been gripped by the debate over decolonisation and culture. Since 1959, the Cuban revolutionary process has – at great cost – established the island’s political sovereignty and has struggled against centuries of poverty to cement its economic sovereignty. From 1959 onwards, under the leadership of the revolutionary forces, Cuba has sought to generate a cultural process that allows the island’s eleven million people to break with the cultural suffocation which is the legacy of both Spanish and US imperialism. Is Cuba, six decades since 1959, able to say that it is sovereign in cultural terms? The balance sheet suggests that the answer is complex since the onslaught of US cultural and intellectual production continues to hit the island like its annual hurricanes.

To that end, Casa de las Américas has been holding a series of encounters on the issue of decolonisation. In July 2022, Vijay Prashad, the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, delivered a lecture there that built upon the work being produced by the institute. Dossier no. 56, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, draws from and expands upon the themes of that talk.

Thesis One: The End of History. The collapse of the USSR and the communist state system in Eastern Europe in 1991 came alongside a terrible debt crisis in the Global South that began with Mexico’s default in 1982. These two events – the demise of the USSR and the weakness of the Third World Project – were met with the onslaught of US imperialism and a US-driven globalisation project in the 1990s. For the left, this was a decade of weakness as our left-wing traditions and organisations experienced self-doubt and could not easily advance our clarities around the world. History had ended, said the ideologues of US imperialism, with the only possibility forward being the advance of the US project. The penalty inflicted upon the left by the surrender of Soviet leadership was heavy and led not only to the shutting down of many left parties, but also to the weakened confidence of millions of people with the clarities of Marxist thought.
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Thesis Two: The Battle of Ideas. During the 1990s, Cuban President Fidel Castro called upon his fellow Cubans to engage in a ‘battle of ideas’, a phrase borrowed from The German Ideology (1846) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.1 What Castro meant by this phrase is that people of the left must not cower before the rising tide of neoliberal ideology but must confidently engage with the fact that neoliberalism is incapable of solving the basic dilemmas of humanity. For instance, neoliberalism has no answer to the obstinate fact of hunger: 7.9 billion people live on a planet with food enough for 15 billion, and yet roughly 3 billion people struggle to eat. This fact can only be addressed by socialism and not by the charity industry.2 The Battle of Ideas refers to the struggle to prevent the conundrums of our time – and the solutions put forth to address them – from being defined by the bourgeoisie. Instead, the political forces for socialism must seek to offer an assessment and solutions far more realistic and credible. For instance, Castro spoke at the United Nations in 1979 with great feeling about the ideas of ‘human rights’ and ‘humanity’:

When Castro returned to the Battle of Ideas in the 1990s, the left was confronted by two related tendencies that continue to create ideological problems in our time:
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1. Post-Marxism. An idea flourished that Marxism was too focused on ‘grand narratives’ (such as the importance of transcending capitalism for socialism) and that fragmentary stories would be more precise for understanding the world. The struggles of the working class and peasantry to gain power in society and over state institutions were seen as just another false ‘grand narrative’, whereas the fragmented politics of the non-governmental organisations were seen as more feasible. The retreat from power into service delivery and into a politics of reform was made in the name of going beyond Marx. But this argument – to go beyond Marx – was really, as the late Aijaz Ahmad pointed out, an argument to return to the period before Marx, to neglect the facts of historical materialism and the zig-zag possibility of building socialism as the historical negation of capitalist brutality and decadence. Post-Marxism was a return to idealism and to perfectionism.
2.  Post-colonialism. Sections of the left began to argue that the impact of colonialism was so great that no amount of transformation would be possible, and that the only answer to what could come after colonialism was a return to the past. They treated the past, as the Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued in 1928 about the idea of indigenism, as a destination and not as a resource. Several strands of post-colonial theory developed, some of them offering genuine insights often drawn from the best texts of patriotic intellectuals of the new post-colonial nations and of the national liberation revolutionary tradition (anchored by writers such as Frantz Fanon). By the 1990s, the post-colonial tradition, which had previously been committed to revolutionary change in the Third World, was now swept up in North Atlantic university currents that favoured revolutionary impossibility. Afro-pessimism, one part of this new tradition, suggested – in its most extreme version – a desolate landscape of ‘social death’ for people of African descent, with no possibility of change. Decolonial thought or decolonialidad trapped itself by European thought, accepting the claim that many human concepts – such as democracy – are defined by the colonial ‘matrix of power’ or ‘matrix of modernity’. The texts of decolonial thought returned again and again to European thought, unable to produce a tradition that was rooted in the anti-colonial struggles of our time. The necessity of change was suspended in these variants of post-colonialism.

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The only real decolonisation is anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. You cannot decolonise your mind unless you also decolonise the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality. Post-Marxism ignores the fact of social production as well as the need to build social wealth that must be socialised. Afro-pessimism suggests that such a task cannot be accomplished because of permanent racism. Decolonial thought goes beyond Afro-pessimism but cannot go beyond post-Marxism, failing to see the necessity of decolonising the conditions of social production.

Thesis Three: A Failure of Imagination. In the period from 1991 to the early 2000s, the broad tradition of national liberation Marxism felt flattened, unable to answer the doubts sown by post-Marxism and post-colonial theory. This tradition of Marxism no longer had the kind of institutional support provided in an earlier period, when revolutionary movements and Third World governments assisted each other and when even the United Nations’ institutions worked to advance some of these ideas. Platforms that developed to germinate left forms of internationalism – such as the World Social Forum – seemed to be unwilling to be clear about the intentions of peoples’ movements. The slogan of the World Social Forum, for instance, was ‘another world is possible’, which is a weak statement, since that other world could just as well be defined by fascism. There was little appetite to advance a slogan of precision, such as ‘socialism is necessary’.

One of the great maladies of post-Marxist thought – which derived much of its ammunition from forms of anarchism – has been the purist anxiety about state power. Instead of using the limitations of state power to argue for better management of the state, post-Marxist thought has argued against any attempt to secure power over the state. This is an argument made from privilege by those who do not have to suffer the obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy, who claim that small-scale forms of mutual aid or charity are not ‘authoritarian’, like state projects to eradicate hunger. This is an argument of purity that ends up renouncing any possibility of abolishing the obstinate facts of hunger and other assaults on human dignity and well-being. In the poorer countries, where small-scale forms of charity and mutual aid have a negligible impact on the enormous challenges before society, nothing less than the seizure of state power and the use of that power to fundamentally eradicate the obstinate facts of inequality and wretchedness is warranted.

To approach the question of socialism requires close consideration of the political forces that must be amassed in order to contest the bourgeoisie for ideological hegemony and for control over the state. These forces experienced a pivotal setback when neoliberal globalisation reorganised production along a global assembly line beginning in the 1970s, fragmenting industrial production across the globe. This weakened trade unions in the most important, high-density sectors and invalidated nationalisation as a possible strategy to build proletarian power. Disorganised, without unions, and with long commute times and workdays, the entire international working class found itself in a situation of precariousness.4 The International Labour Organisation refers to this sector as the precariat – the precarious proletariat. Disorganised forces of the working class and the peasantry, of the unemployed and the barely employed, find it virtually impossible to build the kind of theory and confidence out of their struggles needed to directly confront the forces of capital.
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One of the key lessons for working-class and peasant movements comes from the struggles being incubated in India. For the past decade, there have been general strikes that have included up to 300 million workers annually. In 2020–2021, millions of farmers went on a year-long strike that forced the government to retreat from its new laws to uberise agricultural work. How were the farmers’ movement and the trade union movement able to do this in a context in which there is very low union density and over 90% of the workers are in the informal sector?5 Because of the fights led by informal workers – primarily women workers in the care sector – trade unions began to take up the issues of informal workers – again, mainly women workers – as issues of the entire trade union movement over the course of the past two decades. Fights for permanency of tenure, proper wage contracts, dignity for women workers, and so on produced a strong unity between all the different fractions of workers. The main struggles that we have seen in India are led by these informal workers, whose militancy is now channelled through the organised power of the trade union structures. More than half of the global workforce is made up of women – women who do not see issues that pertain to them as women’s issues, but as issues that all workers must fight for and win. This is much the same for issues pertaining to workers’ dignity along the lines of race, caste, and other social distinctions. Furthermore, unions have been taking up issues that impact social life and community welfare outside of the workplace, arguing for the right to water, sewage connections, education for children, and to be free from intolerance of all kinds. These ‘community’ struggles are an integral part of workers’ and peasants’ lives; by entering them, unions are rooting themselves in the project of rescuing collective life, building the social fabric necessary for the advance towards socialism.

Thesis Four: Return to the Source. It is time to recover and return to the best of the national liberation Marxist tradition. This tradition has its origins in Marxism-Leninism, one that was always widened and deepened by the struggles of hundreds of millions of workers and peasants in the poorer nations. The theories of these struggles were elaborated by people such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Ho Chi Minh, EMS Namboodiripad, Claudia Jones, and Fidel Castro. There are two core aspects to this tradition:

1. From the words ‘national liberation’, we get the key concept of sovereignty. The territory of a nation or a region must be sovereign against imperialist domination.
2. From the tradition of Marxism, we get the key concept of dignity. The fight for dignity implies a fight against the degradation of the wage system and against the old, wretched, inherited social hierarchies (including along the lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on).

Thesis Five: ‘Slightly Stretched’ Marxism. Marxism entered the anti-colonial struggles not through Marx directly, but more accurately through the important developments that Vladimir Lenin and the Communist International made to the Marxist tradition. When Fanon said that Marxism was ‘slightly stretched’ when it went out of its European context, it was this stretching that he had in mind.6 Five key elements define the character of this ‘slightly stretched’ Marxism across a broad range of political forces:

1. It was clear to the early Marxists that liberalism would not solve the dilemmas of humanity, the obstinate facts of life under capitalism (such as hunger and ill-health). Not one capitalist state project put the solution to these dilemmas at the heart of its work, leaving it instead to the charity industry. The capitalist state projects pushed the idea of ‘human rights’ to abstraction; Marxists, on the other hand, recognised that only if these dilemmas are transcended can human rights be established in the world.
2. The modern form of industrial production is the precondition for this transcendence because only it can generate sufficient social wealth that can be socialised. Colonialism did not permit the development of productive forces in the colonised world, thereby making it impossible to create sufficient social wealth in the colonies to transcend these dilemmas.
3. The socialist project in the colonies had to fight against colonialism (and, therefore, for sovereignty) as well as capitalism and its social hierarchies (and, therefore, for dignity). These remain the two key aspects of national liberation Marxism.
4. Due to the lack of development of industrial capitalism in the colonies, and therefore of a large enough number of industrial workers (the proletariat), the peasantry and agricultural workers had to be a key part of the historical bloc of socialism.
5. It is important to register that socialist revolutions took place in the poorer parts of the world – Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba – and not in the richer parts, where the productive forces had been better developed. The dual task of the revolutionary forces in poorer states that had won independence and instituted left governments was to build the productive forces and to socialise the means of production. The governments in these countries, shaped and supported by public action, had a historical mission far more complex than anything envisaged by the first generation of Marxists. A new, boundless Marxism emerged from these places, where an experimental attitude towards socialist construction emerged. However, many of these developments in socialist construction were not elaborated into theory, which meant that the theoretical tradition of national liberation Marxism was not fully available to contest both the post-Marxist and post-colonial assault on socialist praxis in the Third World.

Thesis Six: Dilemmas of Humanity. Reports come regularly about the terrible situation facing the world, from hunger and illiteracy to the ever more frequent outcomes of the climate catastrophe. Social wealth that could be spent to address these deep dilemmas of humanity is squandered on weapons and tax havens. The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end hunger and promote peace would require an infusion of $4.2 trillion per year, but, as it stands, an infinitesimal fraction of this amount is spent to address these goals.7 With the pandemic and galloping inflation, even less money will go towards SDGs, and benchmarks measuring human well-being, sovereignty, and dignity will slip further and further away. Hunger, the greatest dilemma of humanity, is no longer within sight of being eradicated (except in China, where absolute poverty was ended in 2021).8 It is estimated that around 3 billion people now struggle with various forms of daily hunger.9
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Take the case of Zambia and the fourth SDG to eradicate illiteracy, for example. Approximately 60% of the children in classes 1 to 4 in the Copperbelt cannot read.10 This is a region that produces much of the world’s copper, which is essential to our electronics. The parents of these children bring the copper to the world market, but their children cannot read. Neither post-Marxism nor post-colonialism addresses the fact of illiteracy or these parents’ determination for their children to be able to read. The theory of national liberation Marxism, rooted in sovereignty and dignity, however, does address these questions: it demands that Zambia control copper production and receive higher royalty payments (sovereignty), and it demands that the Zambian working class take a greater share of the surplus value (dignity). Greater sovereignty and dignity are pathways to address the dilemmas facing humanity. But rather than spend social wealth on these elementary advances, those who own property and exercise privilege and power spend over $2 trillion per year on weapons and many trillions on security forces (from the military to the police).11

Thesis Seven: The Rationality of Racism and Patriarchy. It is important to note that, under the conditions of capitalism, the structures of racism and patriarchy remain rational. Why is this the case? In Capital (1867), Marx detailed two forms for the extraction of surplus value and hinted at a third form. The first two forms (absolute surplus value and relative surplus value) were described and analysed in detail, pointing out how the theft of time over the course of the working day extracts absolute surplus value from the waged worker and how productivity gains both shorten the time needed for workers to produce their wages and increase the amount of surplus produced by them (relative surplus value). Marx also suggested a third form of extraction, writing that, in some situations, workers are paid less than would be justified by any civilised understanding of wages at that historical juncture. He noted that capitalists try to push ‘the wage of the worker down below the value of his labour power’, but he did not discuss this form further because of the importance for his analysis that labour power must be bought and sold at full value.12
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This third consideration, which we call super-exploitation, is not immaterial for our analysis since it is central to the discussion of imperialism. How are the suppression of wages and the refusal to increase royalty payments for raw material extraction justified? By a colonial argument that, in certain parts of the world, people have lower expectations for life and therefore their social development can be neglected. This colonial argument applies equally to the theft of wages from women who perform care work, which is either unpaid or grossly underpaid on the grounds that it is ‘women’s work’.13 A socialist project is not trapped by the structures of racism and patriarchy since it does not require these structures to increase the capitalist’s share of surplus value. However, the existence of these structures over centuries, deepened by the capitalist system, has created habits that are difficult to overturn merely by legislation. For that reason, a political, cultural, and ideological struggle must be waged against the structures of racism and patriarchy and must be treated with as much importance as the class struggle.

Thesis Eight: Rescue Collective Life. Neoliberal globalisation vanquished the sense of collective life and deepened the despair of atomisation through two connected processes:

1. by weakening the trade union movement and the socialistic possibilities that come within the public action and workplace struggle rooted in trade unionism.
2. by substituting the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer – in other words, the idea that human beings are principally consumers of goods and services, and that human subjectivity can be best appreciated through a desire for things.

The breakdown of social collectivity and the rise of consumerism harden despair, which morphs into various kinds of retreat. Two examples of this are: a) a retreat into family networks that cannot sustain the pressures placed upon them by the withdrawal of social services, the increasing burden of care work on the family, and ever longer commute times and workdays; b) a move towards forms of social toxicity through avenues such as religion or xenophobia. Though these avenues provide opportunities to organise collective life, they are organised not for human advancement, but for the narrowing of social possibility.

How does one rescue collective life? Forms of public action rooted in social relief and cultural joy are an essential antidote to this bleakness. Imagine days of public action rooted in left traditions taking place each week and each month, drawing more and more people to carry out activities together that rescue collective life. One such activity is Red Books Day, which was inaugurated on 21 February 2020 by the International Union of Left Publishers, the same day that Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In 2020, the first Red Books Day, a few hundred thousand people around the world went into public places and read the manifesto in their different languages, from Korean to Spanish. In 2021, due to the pandemic, most of the events went online and we cannot really say how many people participated in Red Books Day, but, in 2022, nearly three-quarters of a million people joined in the various activities.
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Part of rescuing collective life was vividly displayed during the pandemic when trade unions, youth organisations, women’s organisations, and student unions took to the public domain in Kerala (India) to build sinks, sew masks, establish community kitchens, deliver food, and conduct house-to-house surveys so that each person’s needs could be taken into account.14

Thesis Nine: The Battle of Emotions. Fidel Castro provoked a debate in the 1990s around the concept of the Battle of Ideas, the class struggle in thought against the banalities of neoliberal conceptions of human life. A key part of Fidel’s speeches from this period was not just what he said but how he said it, each word suffused with the great compassion of a man committed to the liberation of humanity from the tentacles of property, privilege, and power. In fact, the Battle of Ideas was not merely about the ideas themselves, but also about a ‘battle of emotions’, an attempt to shift the palate of emotions from a fixation on greed to considerations of empathy and hope.

One of the true challenges of our time is the bourgeoisie’s use of the culture industries and the institutions of education and faith to divert attention away from any substantial discussion about real problems – and about finding common solutions to social dilemmas – and towards an obsession with fantasy problems. In 1935, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called this the ‘swindle of fulfilment’, the seeding of a range of fantasies to mask their impossible realisation. The benefit of social production, Bloch wrote, ‘is reaped by the big capitalist upper stratum, which employs gothic dreams against proletarian realities’.15 The entertainment industry erodes proletarian culture with the acid of aspirations that cannot be fulfilled under the capitalist system. But these aspirations are enough to weaken any working-class project.

A degraded society under capitalism produces a social life that is suffused with atomisation and alienation, desolation and fear, anger and hate, resentment and failure. These are ugly emotions that are shaped and promoted by the culture industries (‘you can have it too!’), educational establishments (‘greed is the prime mover’), and neo-fascists (‘hate immigrants, sexual minorities, and anyone else who denies you your dreams’). The grip of these emotions on society is almost absolute, and the rise of neo-fascists is premised upon this fact. Meaning feels emptied, perhaps the result of a society of spectacles that has now run its course.

From a Marxist perspective, culture is not seen as an isolated and timeless aspect of human reality, nor are emotions seen as a world of their own or as being outside of the developments of history. Since human experiences are defined by the conditions of material life, ideas of fate will linger on as long as poverty is a feature of human life. If poverty is transcended, then fatalism will have a less secure ideological foundation, but it does not automatically get displaced. Cultures are contradictory, bringing together a range of elements in uneven ways out of the social fabric of an unequal society that oscillates between reproducing class hierarchy and resisting elements of social hierarchy. Dominant ideologies suffuse culture through the tentacles of ideological apparatuses like a tidal wave, overwhelming the actual experiences of the working class and the peasantry. It is, after all, through class struggle and through the new social formations created by socialist projects that new cultures will be created – not merely by wishful thinking.

It is important to recall that, in the early years of each of the revolutionary processes – from Russia in 1917 to Cuba in 1959 – cultural efflorescence was saturated with the emotions of joy and possibility, of intense creativity and experimentation. It is this sensibility that offers a window into something other than the ghoulish emotions of greed and hatred.

Thesis Ten: Dare to Imagine the Future. One of the enduring myths of the post-Soviet era is that there is no possibility of a post-capitalist future. This myth came to us from within the triumphalist US intellectual class, whose ‘end of history’ sensibility helped to strengthen orthodoxy in such fields as economics and political theory, preventing open discussions about post-capitalism. Even when orthodox economics could not explain the prevalence of crises, including the total economic collapse in 2007–08, the field itself retained its legitimacy. These myths were made popular by Hollywood films and television shows, where disaster and dystopian films suggested planetary destruction rather than socialist transformation. It is easier to imagine the end of the earth than a socialist world.

During the economic collapse, the phrase ‘too big to fail’ settled on the public consciousness, reinforcing the eternal nature of capitalism and the dangers of even trying to shake its foundations. The system stood at a standstill. Austerity growled at the precarious. Small businesses crumpled for lack of credit. And yet, there was no mass consideration of going beyond capitalism. World revolution was not seen on the immediate horizon. This partial reality suffocated so much hope in the possibility of going beyond this system, a system – too big to fail – that now seems eternal. Our traditions argue against pessimism, making the point that hope must structure our interventions from start to finish. But what is the material basis for this hope? This basis can be found on three levels:

1. The obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy, houselessness and indignity, cannot be made invisible. Neither will those who are denied their basic rights be silenced, nor will their material conditions disappear if these obstinate facts are not addressed. Desolation and anger are the products of this denial.
2. Massive advances in global production – both in agriculture and industry as well as in the service sector – have enabled us to imagine a world that transcends necessity and opens the door to freedom. One cannot be free simply by a legal edict. Freedom requires that the obstinate facts of life under capitalism be transcended. For decades, we have lived in a world with the capacity to meet the needs of humanity.
3. These massive advances in global production took place not only because of improvements in science and technology, but decisively because of the socialisation of labour. What is known as globalisation sees the entire process from the standpoint of capital and increased returns to scale. What it does not acknowledge is that these massive advances in global production took place because workers now labour with each other across oceans and that this socialisation of labour demonstrates the integration of the international working class. This socialisation of labour runs against the narrow, suffocating boundaries of private property, which hold back further advances for its own petty gains. The clash between the socialisation of labour and private property deepens the struggles to socialise property – the basis for modern socialism – as Marx predicted.

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Capitalism has already failed. It cannot address the basic questions of our times, these obstinate facts – such as hunger and illiteracy – that stare us in the face. It is not enough to be alive. One must be able to live and to flourish. That is the mood that demands a revolutionary transformation.

​We need to recover our tradition of national liberation Marxism but also elaborate the theory of our tradition from the work of our movements. We need to draw more attention to the theories of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, EMS Namboodiripad and Claudia Jones. They did not only do, but they also produced innovative theories. These theories need to be developed and tested in our own contemporary reality, building our Marxism not out of the classics alone – which are useful – but out of the facts of our present. Lenin’s ‘concrete analysis of the concrete conditions’ requires close attention to the concrete, the real, the historical facts. We need more factual assessments of our times, a closer rendition of contemporary imperialism that is imposing its military and political might to prevent the necessity of a socialist world. This is precisely the agenda of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, of the almost thirty research institutes with which we work closely through the Network of Research Institute, and of the more than 200 political movements whose mass lines inform the development of Tricontinental’s research agenda through the International Peoples’ Assembly.
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Certainly, socialism is not going to appear magically. It must be fought for and built, our struggles deepened, our social connections tightened, our cultures enriched. Now is the time for a united front, to bring together the working class and the peasantry as well as allied classes, to increase the confidence of workers, and to clarify our theory. To unite the working class and the peasantry as well as allied classes requires the unity of all left and progressive forces. Our divides in this time of great danger must not be central; our unity is essential. Humanity demands it.

​Foreword
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 101.2 Fidel Castro, La historia me absolverá [History Will Absolve Me] (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2007).3 Raúl Roa, ‘Fundamentos, cargos y pruebas de la denuncia de Cuba’, In Raúl Roa: Canciller de la dignidad (La Habana: Ediciones Políticas, 1986 [1961]).
4 Translator’s note: Nuestra América is a concept stemming from Cuban national hero Jose Martí’s 1891 essay on Latin American nationalism calling for unity among nations to foment a Pan-Latin American identity opposed to the cultural values of Europe and the United States.
5 Fidel Castro, ‘Word to the Intellectuals’, Speech at the conclusion of meetings with Cuban intellectuals held at the National Library on 16, 23, and 30 June 1961, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/audio/palabras-los-intelectuales.
6 Fidel Castro, A Revolution Can Only Be the Child of Culture and Ideas (Havana: Editora Política, 1999), http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/libros/revolution-can-only-be-child-culture-and-ideas.
7 Abel Prieto, ‘Sin cultura no hay libertad posible’. Notas sobre las ideas de Fidel en torno a la cultura’ [‘Without Culture There Is No Possible Freedom’: Notes on Fidel’s Ideas About Culture], La Ventana, 12 August 2021, http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/index.php/2022/08/12/sin-cultura-no-hay-libertad-posible-notas-sobre-las-ideas-de-fidel-en-torno-a-la-cultura/.
8 Fidel Castro, Speech delivered at the Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of his admission to University of Havana, Aula Magna, University of Havana, 17 November 2005, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-delivered-commemoration-60th-anniversary-his-admission-university-havana-aula-magna.
9 Today, with the use of social networks in electoral campaigns and in subversive projects, this very acute observation by Fidel about ‘conditioned responses’ carries significant weight.
10 Castro, Speech at the Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of his admission to University of Havana.
11 Fidel Castro, ‘Without Culture There Is No Freedom Possible’, Key address at the opening ceremony of the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival, 19 October 2002, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/fragmento-portada/october-19-2002-0.
12 Fidel Castro, ‘Concept of Revolution’, Speech at the mass rally on International Workers’ Day at Revolution Square, 1 May 2000, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2000/ing/f010500i.html.

​Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 38.2 Food and Agriculture Organisation, Building a Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Principles and Approaches (Rome: FAO, 2014); FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022: Repurposing Food and Agricultural Policies To Make Healthy Diets More Affordable (Rome: FAO, 2022), vi.3 Fidel Castro, Statement at the UN General Assembly, in capacity of NAM President, 12 October 1979, https://misiones.cubaminrex.cu/en/articulo/fidel-castro-human-rights-statement-un-general-assembly-capacity-nam-president-12-october.
4 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, In the Ruins of the Present, working document no. 1, 1 March 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/working-document-1/.
5 Govindan Raveendran and Joann Vanek, ‘Informal Workers in India: A Statistical Profile’, Statistical Brief 24 (Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising, August 2020), 1; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, dossier 41, 14 June 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-41-india-agriculture/.
6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 5.
7 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development 2021’, 9 November 2020, https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/covid-19-crisis-threatens-sustainable-development-goals-financing.htm.
8 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.
9 FAO et al., The State of Food Security, vi.
10 Lusaka Times, ‘Over 60% Copperbelt Province Lower Primary Pupils Can’t Read and Write – PEO’, Lusaka Times, 18 January 2018, https://www.lusakatimes.com/2018/01/27/60-copperbelt-province-lower-primary-pupils-cant-read-write-peo/.
11 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘World Military Expenditure Passes $2 Trillion for First Time’, SIPRI, 25 April 2022, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2022/world-military-expenditure-passes-2-trillion-first-time.
12 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 670.
13 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, dossier no. 38, 7 March 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-38-carework/.
14 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock and Socialism, CoronaShock no. 3, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200701_Coronashock-3_EN_Web.pdf.
15 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 103.

he fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite.
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The global oligarchs are not sure the next generation of royal sock puppets – mediocrities that include a pedophile prince and his brother, a cranky and eccentric king who accepted suitcases and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash from the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and who has millions stashed in offshore accounts – are up to the job. Let’s hope they are right.

“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories,” Patrick Freyne wrote last year in The Irish Times. “More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as “gaffes.” He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told British students: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”

The cries of the millions of victims of empire; the thousands killed, tortured, raped and imprisoned during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civilians gunned down in “Bloody Sunday;” the more than 4,100 First Nations children who died or went missing in Canada’s residential schools, government-sponsored institutions established to “assimilate” indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for royal processions and the sacral aura an obsequious press weaves around the aristocracy. The coverage of the queen’s death is so mind-numbingly vapid — the BBC sent out a news alert on Saturday when Prince Harry and Prince William, accompanied by their wives, surveyed the floral tributes to their grandmother displayed outside Windsor Castle — that the press might as well turn over the coverage to the mythmakers and publicists employed by the royal family.

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the U.K. saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain. 

Royals, to the ruling class, are worth the expense. They are effective tools of subjugation. British postal and rail workers canceled planned strikes over pay and working conditions after the queen’s death. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) postponed its congress. Labour Party members poured out heartfelt tributes. Even Extinction Rebellion, which should know better, indefinitely canceled its planned “Festival of Resistance.” The BBC’s Clive Myrie dismissed Britain’s energy crisis — caused by the war in Ukraine — that has thrown millions of people into severe financial distress as “insignificant” compared with concerns over the queen’s health. The climate emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of the U.S. and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, the rise of neo-fascist movements and deepening social inequality will be ignored as the press spews florid encomiums to class rule. There will be 10 days of official mourning.

In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. Her Majesty’s Government inherited staggering wealth from the $ 45 trillion Great Britain looted from India, wealth accumulated by violently crushing a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine. Following a protracted lawsuit, the British government agreed to pay nearly £20 million in damages to over 5,000 victims of British abuse during war in Kenya, and in 2019 another payout was made to survivors of torture from the conflict in Cyprus. The British state attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming from its colonial history. Its settlements are a tiny fraction of the compensation paid to British slave owners in 1835, once it — at least formally — abolished slavery. 

During her 70-year reign, the queen never offered an apology or called for reparations.

The point of social hierarchy and aristocracy is to sustain a class system that makes the rest of us feel inferior. Those at the top of the social hierarchy hand out tokens for loyal service, including the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The monarchy is the bedrock of hereditary rule and inherited wealth. This caste system filters down from the Nazi-loving House of Windsor to the organs of state security and the military. It regiments society and keeps people, especially the poor and the working class, in their “proper” place.

The British ruling class clings to the mystique of royalty and fading cultural icons as James Bond, the Beatles and the BBC, along with television shows such as “Downton Abbey” — where in the 2019 film version the aristocrats and servants are convulsed in fevered anticipation when King George V and Queen Mary schedule a visit — to project a global presence. Winston Churchill’s bust remains on loan to the White House. These myth machines sustain Great Britain’s “special” relationship with the United States. Watch the satirical film “In the Loop” to get a sense of what this “special” relationship looks like on the inside. 

It was not until the 1960s that “coloured immigrants or foreigners” were permitted to work in clerical roles in the royal household, although they had been hired as domestic servants. The royal household and its heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls “an apartheid system benefitting the Royal Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race and who contemplated suicide during her time as a working royal, said that an unnamed royal expressed concern about the skin color of her unborn son.

I got a taste of this suffocating snobbery in 2014 when I participated in an Oxford Union debate asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor. I went a day early to be prepped for the debate by Julian Assange, then seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. At a lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding the event, I sat next to a former MP who asked me two questions I had never been asked before in succession. “When did your family come to America?” he said, followed by “What schools did you attend?” My ancestors, on both sides of my family, arrived from England in the 1630s. My graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had failed to meet his litmus test, he would have acted as if I did not exist. 

Those who took part in the debate – my side arguing that Snowden was a hero narrowly won – signed a leather-bound guest book. Taking the pen, I scrawled in large letters that filled an entire page: “Never Forget that your greatest political philosopher, Thomas Paine, never went to Oxford or Cambridge.”

Paine, the author of the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Common Sense, blasted the monarchy as a con. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as King of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original…The plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into,” he wrote of William the Conqueror. He ridiculed hereditary rule. “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” He went on: “One of the strangest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving  mankind an ass for a lion.” He called the monarch “the royal brute of England.”

When the British ruling class tried to arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the National Convention set up after the French Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. When he returned to America from France, he condemned slavery and the wealth and privilege accumulated by the new ruling class, including George Washington, who had become the richest man in the country. Even though Paine had done more than any single figure to rouse the country to overthrow the British monarchy, he was turned into a pariah, especially by the press, and forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were Black.
You can watch my talk with Cornel West and Richard Wolff on Thomas Paine here.

There is a pathetic yearning among many in the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some tangential way to royalty. White British friends often have stories about ancestors that tie them to some obscure aristocrat. Donald Trump, who fashioned his own heraldic coat of arms, was obsessed with obtaining a state visit with the queen. This desire to be part of the club, or validated by the club, is a potent force the ruling class has no intention of giving up, even if hapless King Charles III, who along with his family treated his first wife Diana with contempt, makes a mess of it.

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Point 1.) Carrillo approves of the following quote from the French Communist Party philosopher Louis Althusser “So far as we know, no class can maintain state power in a lasting form without exercising at the same time its hegemony over and within the state ideological apparatuses.”  [p.49] 

We will see below how Carrillo thinks the CP can flip these apparatuses from the bourgeois state to the support for socialism. A problem that never occurred to Carrillo when he wrote his book, and one we will not discuss, is how. without having a bourgeoisie, the Eastern European socialist states and the Soviet  Union had the state apparatuses under their hegemonic control flipped over to capitalism.

Point 2.) The Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution were responses to the horrors inflicted by World War I. The Eastern European Socialist states were born out of the rubble of World War II (the defeat of the NAZIs).  Wars were also the background for North Korea and China (defeat of Japanese imperialism) and Vietnam and Laos (defeat of Japanese, French, and American imperialism). This does not seem possible with respect to the developed capitalist world today as a road to socialism. A major world war today would involve nuclear weapons and the potential destruction of all the parties involved. Different roads are needed.

“They have to be roads in which democratic mass action is combined with action by the representative democratic institutions; that is to say, by the use in the service of socialism of the representative democratic instruments which today basically serve capitalism.” [p.51]

Eurocommunism has, of course, failed to capture the capitalist state institutions anywhere and establish a socialist state. Nevertheless , in the developed capitalist world this is still the subtext of most all the CPs,  including those which claim to reject Eurocommunism. We will now look at how Carrillo thinks we can flip the apparatuses of state monopoly capitalism to serve socialism.

Fifty years ago Carrillo detected the beginnings of a movement in the masses that would allow for the democratic takeover of the state apparatus. Social democrats were getting elected, the Dutch troops in NATO were being unionized, and the French uprising in1968 raised the consciousness of the masses and opened  the way for a socialist road to transform the capitalist state by flipping some of the capitalist state apparatuses. Centered in Paris in May 1968  seven weeks of nationwide protests convulsed France. President de Gaulle fled to West Germany, the government was paralyzed, the police refused to intervene when the students and workers marched through Paris. 50,00 marchers were expected, 500,000 turned up. The French Communists turned out in support of demands for radical change, the army was put on alert as revolutionary ideas did not penetrate the officer corps but the troops were of the same age as the students and young workers. The Communists were thought to be about to seize government buildings and a revolution would break out: de Gaulle broadcast to the nation that a new election would be held for the National Assembly —violence should be avoided. The Communists believed in a peaceful democratic revolution and agreed to de Gaulle’s  plans— the workers returned to their factories, the revolt was over. 

Point 3.) “This is a process which is only beginning, is therefore only incipient, and could still be diverted and manipulated by the ruling classes. It is an open question that has not been solved. It is a possible road for proceeding to the democratisation of the state apparatuses as the first step towards its transformation and conversion into one capable of serving a democratic and socialist society.” [p.54]

Half a century has passed and no uprising such as 1968 Paris has occurred in any of the developed capitalist countries. The ruling capitalist class is as strong and powerful as ever. Perhaps Carrillo’s question about capturing the capitalist state’s apparatuses by peaceful democratic means is no longer open and has been solved.

To go down this road to socialism we will have to change our attitudes about the state apparatuses. Heretofore Marxists have seen the different arms of the state as hostile class forces, especially the police and the military, but also the prison system, education system, churches, etc. They were all tools of the class enemy that must be fought, overcome, and replaced with new proletarian versions. Instead of treating them as hostile enemies the revolution must try to democratize them and win them over to the proletarian world view. Workers in these sectors also have problems and are abused by the ruling class even as they are mobilized against the interests of the people. We must work with them, recognize their special problems, and win them over to the revolution. Instead of defunding the police we should advocate redirection of the funds towards better training and working with the people and demand the police not be used to break up strikes or to harass working people, immigrants, etc. We will find allies within these organizations and must struggle to flip them from subservience to the ruling class to a pro people democratic front with them. The Police Benevolent Society and Black Lives Matter marching together! Eurocommunists have their tasks cut out for them. 

Point 4.) “It is a difficult change to make [“the man in blue is a friend to me and you” and not “a gun toting racist pig”- tr]. But it must be made, starting from the principle that in a democratic socialist society it will still be necessary to have functionaries who are specialists in the pursuit of crime, and in safeguarding the security of the population.” [p. 57]

Point 5.) “The army is, without doubt, the most important of the coercive instruments of the state.” [p. 57]

Carrillo discusses the role of the army throughout history as a force used to protect the ruling classes, the nobility and later the new bourgeois class after it came to power. Through two world wars it was associated with national defense (or aggression) and people thought of their army as primarily a national army  defending them from foreign attacks. Most Americans still  feel that way, I think, about the US Army ( the armed forces in general) and so did most Europeans after WWII. But something has changed, at least in Europe, and that is the development of an international force by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, I.e., NATO. NATO was created to deter a Soviet Attack. There was never a Soviet attack. The Soviets created the Warsaw Pact to deter NATO. The Warsaw Pact was also used to prevent any of its members from deviating too far from Soviet policies. In Carrillo’s day these two military blocks faced off in Europe.  NATO was actually an international armed force run by the Americans. Most Europeans, he said, no longer looked on ”their” national army in primarily nationalistic terms. This gives the revolutionaries an opportunity to win over the NATO officers to a peaceful socialist transition as they now have an international outlook rather than a narrow national one. The implication for Spain was that the Spanish army would not intervene to defend a ruling class that lost an election to the revolutionary forces. This would also be the case in other NATO countries.

But this view of Carrillo’s is contradicted by Point 6.) “In the last resort [NATO] remains above all an instrument of American political, economic and military control over Europe.” [p.60] 

The Americans would use NATO to intervene in any European country so unwise as to elect a communist government. What has happened in the 50 years since Carrillo wrote about NATO? The Soviet Union collapsed, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, communist Russia became capitalist Russia and NATO expanded and gobbled up the former Warsaw Pact states and pushed itself to the Russian border (having told the Russians they would not do that if they disbanded the Warsaw Pact). Point 6 remains valid and is the real source of the military strife going on in Ukraine at the time of this writing. The rest of the discussion on flipping the military is, while interesting, basically out of date as it is predicated on the ideals of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union  and a new world order based on this. This is, for Carrillo, still very iffy as the balance of power keeping the peace is also resting on nuclear weapons. This remains true today and the US is fostering international tensions over Russia, Korea, and China, as well as several countries in Latin America and with Cuba. NATO interventions at the behest of the US in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq have been lugubrious.

NATO remains the main enemy of the peace and socialist movements. The question today is, if CPs take ministerial roles in countries who are members of NATO are they undermining Marxism-Leninism and becoming revisionist in the Menshevik sense and/or the Bernstein/Kautsky sense? The same question applies to the US with regard to de facto support for the Democrats in an uncritical manner and with the notion of not making vanguard demands that might upset the Center which supports the racist imperialist practices of the Democratic Party. These are crucial questions of principle which Marxist-Leninists must continually debate and reassess as the revolutionary struggle progresses.

There are a few more pages in this chapter on Carrillo’s views on how to win over the Army to tolerate a peaceful socialist electoral victory, they are based on the ideas that in the near future European countries will be uniting for mutual defense in a world which has brought about general disarmament — not the world we actually live in which has increased military spending and armaments. Nevertheless, the question still remains, is a peaceful transition possible as long as the Army is controlled by the ruling class? How would the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol have turned out if the Joint Chiefs of Staff  in the Pentagon had been Trump supporters? Fortunately, the ruling class is fairly united in not supporting Trump at this time and even had the Democratic Party supporting Trump Republicans against “moderate” Republicans in the primaries, confident that Trump Republicans could not beat Democrats in the general election. We shall soon see if this was a good tactic or not.

Finally, in order to build a democratic coalition to lead to a socialist election victory the CPs practicing Eurocommunism (that is only the CPs in advanced developed capitalist states) must abandon out of date old Communist outlooks.

Point 7.) The struggle for a democratic state “presupposes the renunciation of the idea, in its traditional form, of a worker’s and peasants’s State.” [p. 76] This turns out to be a gratuitous point anyway as no advanced capitalist State has a peasantry. This point is a lead into the real point Carrillo wants to make.

Point 8.) “This [democratic] conception of the State also means giving up the ideas of a State apparatus that is a party apparatus, a State apparatus controlled by a party apparatus ; it is a question of creating a State apparatus which at every moment faithfully obeys the people’s elected representatives and which cannot be manipulated against the will of the people. [p.76] 

This is a can of worms best left unopened. We are giving up Lenin for Rousseau. The will of the  people is the general will in a socialist state it is simple (let socialism be constructed) but in Carrillo’s democratic state with CP does not have the leading role but is at best only primer inter pares and there will be a particular will associated with each and every other democratic party in the state including non-proletarian parties representing petty bourgeois interests even after the grand bourgeoisie has been eliminated.  Carrillo’s subtext here is that the whole of Marxist theory must be dumped because it holds that the working class controls the state by means of the working class party, the Communists, the creators of all wealth (except that of nature) and surplus value by which all live. This is the exploited class on which all others live and when it takes power there is no lower class under it which it exploits, exploitation ends and there is no need for parties anymore (political parties are representative of different classes). There is no sense for the socialists to democratically take over the State of the ruling class just to maintain it. The CP has to play the central and leading role in the revolution and the State because, while all the other parties are expressions of their particular wills, the proletarians are the bearers of the general will —  the will to end exploitation and suffering, the will to socialism.

Carrillo ends his chapter on a realistic note as he knows the ruling class is unlikely to roll over and play dead after it loses an election to the socialists. Faced with a victory by Carrillo’s new political grouping of forces the victory may not “be won solely through political action and democratic government measures; it can happen that at a given moment it may be necessary to reduce  by force resistance by force; that is to say that the qualitative transformation of this apparatus may not be entirely peaceful and a democratic government may find it self confronted by an attempted coup.” [p.76] So, the barricades are back. Our last point will be:

Point 9.) Go ahead and take on the opposition, but keep your powder dry.

Next up Chapter Four: “The Model of Democratic Socialism”