Western leftists often explain socialism as an extension of democratic values. Across professional spheres, this belief is propagated by some of the most popular figures in our movement. For instance, the acclaimed academic Noam Chomsky described socialism as “an extension of democracy into the social sphere.” Jacobin, the largest socialist publication in the United States, has published writers who explain the Soviet Union’s shortcomings as a natural byproduct of its “rotten foundations of authoritarianism.” Even the controversial NATO-aligned streamer Vaush claimed that the Soviet Union was not socialist because “[d]emocracy is necessary under socialism.”

But this view leads to misguided conclusions. One of which is the condemnation of all revolutions that do not occur at the ballot box. Under “socialism as democracy,” any societal transformation not voted upon by the majority is undemocratic and therefore not socialist. 

History provides ample reason to doubt this supposition. Indeed, there is a long and illustrious history of progressive coups that all leftists should embrace. And this shows that revolutionaries should be open to a multiplicity of approaches to building socialism in our lifetimes. 

For instance, the legendary pan-African Marxist Thomas Sankara never campaigned to become the president of Burkina Faso. Rather, he seized state power from within the military. Though he was assassinated in a (likely French-backed) counter-coup only four years later, he made immense strides in concretely improving the living standards of the masses in Burkina Faso. Under his direction, Burkina Faso achieved self-sufficiency in food production and vaccinated 2.5 million people (60% percent of the total population), raising the national vaccination rate from 17% to 77%. Literacy rates exploded from just 13% to 73% in less than five years. Additionally, he spearheaded the “One Village, One Grove” policy in Burkina Faso, spurring a grassroots mobilization of tree planting that added 10 million trees to Burkina Faso to combat desertification.

But Sankara’s legacy is not limited to agricultural, medical, educational, and environmental victories. He was also a staunch, outspoken feminist. As a Marxist, Sankara saw clearly how patriarchy was reinforced by the capitalist mode of production, and understood that the liberation of women was an inherent component of destroying capitalism. To that end, he prohibited female genital mutilation and forced marriage, amended the Constitution to guarantee female representation in the Cabinet, and ensured the Ministry of Education would protect women’s access to education. 

Few, if any leaders have achieved a fraction of what Sakara was able to do for Burkina Faso and Africa more broadly. Why should we temper our support for him because he came to power undemocratically? His “authoritarian” seizure of the state is precisely what enabled him to achieve so much in such a short time. Nobody can contest that his government was undoubtedly progressive and, as materialists, we are bound to support progressive developments regardless of how “purely” these developments come to fruition. Our sole obligation is to liberate the working masses, and therefore we must uplift Sankara’s legacy.

Sankara is far from the only progressive leader who improved the lives of the masses through a revolutionary coup. In 1968, General Juan Velasco Alvarado seized power in a bloodless revolution and won substantial gains for the Peruvian proletariat — most notably, his large-scale campaign of industrial nationalization and redistribution of agricultural land to over 300,000 families.

Velasco also sought to free Peru from the extractive influence of Western multinationals by nationalizing a wide array of vital industries including telecommunications, energy (such as the International Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil), fisheries, and even American copper mines. His reforms were planned by the leading socialist intellectuals of the time. 

Velasco’s nationalization policies were among the most radical in Western hemisphere. His expropriation of the landed oligarchy was second only to Cuba’s. Velasco stands as a powerful example of the rapid progress that follows determined socialist leadership.

Across the Atlantic, in 1974, a group of left-leaning Portuguese military officers known as the Armed Forces Movement toppled the fascist Estado Novo regime in a military coup known as the Carnation Revolution, directly leading to the liberation of Portuguese colonies. The Portuguese regime had spent over a decade fighting the unpopular Portuguese Overseas War to maintain their colonial possessions in Africa, sacrificing thousands of their own young men in the process. Only after the Carnation Revolution could the anti-war will of the people be realized. Who can rebuke such a direct improvement in the lives of both the Portuguese and colonized proletarians? Why should we jump to condemn this movement for its “lack” of democratic purity?

One consistent trigger to these progressive coups is a capitalist sociopolitical system that is most capable of subverting revolutionary struggle in the Global South and against hyper-exploited minorities in the imperial core, because it has the full weight of Western capital pitted against the poorest and most oppressed workers. This can leave revolutionaries with almost no practical solutions to advance material conditions outside of a progressive coup.

As Marxists, we should not celebrate the liberal-democratic dogma that our oppressors use to subjugate us. In the American context, the black liberation struggle provides us with a multitude of revolutionaries who clearly articulated this predicament. For instance, both Malcom X and Chairman Fred Hampton realized that capitalist liberal democracies were directly responsible for the invention of racism and held no qualms about using any means necessary to restore dignity for the colored and working masses of the United States.


Malcolm X most clearly indicated his indifference toward liberal morality in his famous speech ‘The Ballot or the Bullet.’ Throughout his delivery, he referred to those who myopically emphasized non-violent tactics as “chumps.” Challenging the legitimacy of the American political system, he exclaimed, “Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the freedom of 22 million Afro-Americans and still has the audacity to call himself the leader of the free world.”

X was widely known for his criticism of establishment civil rights leaders, lambasting them for advocating purely non-violent struggle against an exceedingly violent enemy. He correctly reminds his audience that “liberty or death is what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English.” Here, he implicitly asks the question: Why should we rigidly confine our movement to liberal tactics?

Any listener would ascertain that Malcom firmly believed in the legitimacy of armed struggle if it were to liberate the African American masses. In this speech he positively references the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the Vietnamese anti-colonial revolution as justified reactions to an oppressive system, contrasting them with the impotent yet palatable strategies that have consistently failed to ensure a semblance of material equality to black Americans. 

Chairman Fred Hampton similarly had no issue with waging class struggle outside of democratic norms. In his speech “It’s a Class Struggle, Goddamnit!,” Hampton positively references the non-electoral victories of the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, and the then-ongoing anti-colonial revolutions in Mozambique and Angola. The speech is replete with defenses of armed struggle against capitalist and imperialist forces of reaction. Hampton explicitly reminds his audience that despite one’s “revolutionary” aesthetic preferences,  “political power doesn’t flow from the sleeve of a dashiki… [it] flows from the barrel of a gun.” While direct armed struggle was not the only revolutionary strategy that Hampton advocated for, clearly he and the Black Panther Party scoffed at notions of ideological purity that stood in the way of proletarian victory. They would surely reject the Western socialist notion that proletarian struggle should be confined to the ballot box. While many on the Left love to uplift the Black Panther Party’s illustrious history of revolutionary struggle and associate their own movements with it, apparently few have spent time studying Hampton’s own words. 

These widely lauded revolutionaries provide insights our movement can and should apply to the present. Since 2020, a wave of progressive coups has swept across Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon. Seizing power from compradore governments, revolutionary juntas in the Sahel have deposed “democratic” leaders who have done nothing but facilitate and exacerbate the extractive neo-colonial relations keeping this resource-rich region in a state of destitution. These revolutionary movements realize Africa cannot utilize its vast resources until it neutralizes the influence of western capital, and recognize that liberal democracy often facilitates these interests at the expense of the African proletariat.

In the West, we are told repeatedly that Africa, particularly West Africa, is poor and underdeveloped. While it is true that this region is underdeveloped, it is undeniable that it is also one of the most resource rich regions on the planet. Some of the highest quality uranium in the world is located in Niger, but ironically its largest uranium mine is mostly owned by the French state while 90% of Niger’s population has no access to electricity. In 2010, Niger exported €3.5 billion worth of uranium to France, but only received €459 million in return. Similarly, in Gabon the vast majority of the country’s crude oil is sold abroad. For example, crude oil accounts for 96% of Gabon’s total exports to the United States. This is due to their neocolonial economy having no incentive to build adequate refinery infrastructure, leaving the value of their most profitable export at the whim of Western financial speculators.

Coup leaders like Burkina Faso’s president Ibrahim Traore have recognized that their countries face  “the most barbaric form, the most violent manifestation, of neocolonialism and imperialism”. At the Russia-Africa Summit this past summer, Traore articulated how “African heads of state must stop acting like marionettes who dance each time the imperialists pull on our strings”. When the neocolonial alliance ECOWAS threatened military intervention in Niger to restore deposed president Mohamed Bazoum, the revolutionary juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso jointly declared “Any military intervention against Niger would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali.” A bloc of anti-imperial resistance has clearly blossomed in the Sahel, a movement Thomas Sankara laid the groundwork for. While Western imperialists attempt to destroy Sankara's vision, the popular support for these revolutionary coups demonstrates that the spirit of Sankara is alive and well in West Africa.

The collection of anti-colonial movements across the Sahel are justified and deserve our support. We should not oppose them merely because they defy the dogma that power must change hands electorally. The reality is that, as leftists, we must support any movement seriously dedicated to eradicating extractive neo-colonial systems. And that is the case whether or not it adheres perfectly to Western liberal-democratic ideals, or any other pretentious sense of purity that needlessly prohibits us from supporting anti-imperialist struggles wherever and however they arise.​

​Exactly 75 years ago in 1948, the whole world watched in horror as millions of Palestinians fled their homes due to the Zionist Israeli aggression. According to the United Nations figures, Zionists have carried out massacres, 530 Palestinian villages were wiped off from the world map and 957,000 have lost their homes and become refugees living in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, resulting in a devastating "Nakba" (Arabic word meaning "catastrophe").
 
The inhuman savagery of the Israeli occupying forces against the Palestinian people has come out again and again in successive sessions of the UN. On May 15 this year, the UN for the first time officially commemorated the 75th anniversary of the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" in memory of Palestinian citizens who lost their homes under Israeli occupation.
 
The Second "Nakba" is on the Palestinian people

75 years later, the 1948 "Nakba" has been rekindled in the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. But who is responsible for the ongoing brutal aggression in the Gaza Strip?
​
The answer is America's best friend in the Middle East, Israel, which continues to control everything in Gaza by daily killings of Palestinian children and civilians, and the construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. The U.S. administration has long supported Israel, “the baby child of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East”, fueling its genocidal efforts against the Palestinians, resulting in oppression and persecution.
 
 
Launching "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood"

Since the dawn of October 7, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), founded in 1988, has attacked southern Israel in three ways - air, water and land by breaking through Israel's "Iron Dome" air defense system, launching "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" in reaction to the Zionist regime’s rising tide of violence against Palestinians. Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas military) Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Al-Deif in an audio speech urged all Palestinians to confront Israeli occupation.  Obviously, even if Hamas launched the attack this time, Israel has invaded Palestine thousands of times over the past 75 years.
 
The beginning of "Operation Iron Swords"

Following Hamas' surprise attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a "long and difficult war" on Hamas on October 8  in response to its 9/11 attack, marking the start of "Operation Iron Swords". Since then, Israel has been killing unarmed Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, with UNICEF reporting deaths of at least 2,360 Palestinian children and 5,364 injuries in Gaza in the past 18 days. Unfortunately, the U.S. and the West have given Israel the green signal to continue this genocide. The question is whether the unarmed children were creating any kind of threat to the state of Israel or its citizens?
 
Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza hospital- an unspeakable shame

On October 17, the atrocities committed by the bloodthirsty Israeli occupation forces by carrying out airstrikes on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 600 Palestinian people, including refugees, patients and media personnel, has shocked the civilized world. Undoubtedly, the targeted attack by the Zionist forces on the Baptist Hospital is a war crime and a flagrant act of dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
 
Quite reasonably, Osama Hamdan, the representative of Hamas in Lebanon, affirmed on October 18 that the Gaza hospital massacre was “a heinous fascist crime committed by Israeli forces and sponsored by the U.S. government”, according to a report by Beirut-based media channel, Al Mayadeen. Many peace-loving countries around the world demanded PM Netanyahu should be held accountable for the nefarious Israeli airstrike on the hospital. Unfortunately, the way Israel and its Western backers have attempted to whitewash Israeli bomb and artillery attacks on Palestinians in Gaza or some parts of Lebanon in the name of self-defense is an unspeakable shame. Needless to say, Israel's bombing of civilians in Gaza goes beyond self-defense.
 
The dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza

Following Hamas' attack, Israel's blockade of Gaza is causing a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli army is committing crimes against humanity by cutting off water, gas, electricity, and food supplies to 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip. Israel has threatened a ground attack on Gaza, asking 1.1 million Palestinians to leave northern Gaza. Many countries around the world, including the UN and the World Health Organization, have condemned Israel's actions and warned of “catastrophic consequences” if Israel does not stop its killing machine. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, warning that the region is "on the brink of an abyss".
 
US 'rock solid' support for Israeli atrocities against Palestinians

The ongoing Israel-Hamas war has polarized the world, with the U.S. and its Western allies including India condemning Hamas attacks on Israel and supporting Israel's declaration of war. U.S. President Joe Biden assured ‘rock solid’ support for Israel which continues its blatant atrocities against the Palestinians. During his meeting with PM Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on October 18, Biden reaffirmed that Washington would provide Israel with everything it needed to defend itself. The United States has already deployed warships and aircraft to the Eastern Mediterranean to provide strength and capability to Israel. It is certain that the U.S. is complicit in Israel's crimes against the helpless people of Gaza by sending billions of dollars worth of lethal weapons to the Zionist regime. Quite reasonably, many Arab Americans are upset Biden’s Israel stance before the 2024 election. Biden's push for more than $14 billion in new aid to Israel has angered Arab and Muslim Americans.
 
Modi's unwavering support for Israel sparks debate

The iconic leader of the Indian Independence Movement Mahatma Gandhi himself supported an independent Palestine. “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French,” he wrote in an article on November 26, 1938. But in a significant departure from India's longstanding policy of diplomatic balance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 7 assured his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu of Indian solidarity in order to preserve his government’s geopolitical interests in the Arab World. Describing the entire incident as a 'terrorist attack', he wrote on the X handle, "Deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour".

However, the invasion of “Modi-ally” Netanyahu's forces in Gaza has again created differences in Indian politics. India's opposition parties, including the Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have criticized Prime Minister Modi and extended their support for the oppressed Palestinian people. It is very unfortunate that India, which has always advocated Palestine's demand for independence and sovereignty, now the ruling Modi government is now taking the side of Israel without considering the root cause of the issue
 
Israel’s occupation politics

Hamas, despite being referred to as a terrorist organization by the U.S. administration, is actually politically and socially intertwined with Palestinian society. The reality is that Israel is an occupying state. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its roots in the occupation politics of the Zionist state. In 1948, the State of Israel was created for the Jews to pave the way for American occupation in West Asia. Israel has not accepted UN Resolution 181 on the establishment of the State of Palestine and UN Resolution 194 on the return of Palestinian refugees. The people of Palestine have been besieged by Israeli occupation forces for years.
 
Support for the oppressed Palestinians

Amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas bloody conflict, most of the countries around the world, in particular, Middle East countries like Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Syria and other Arab countries have expressed unequivocal support for the oppressed Palestinians and condemned the brutality of the occupying Israelis against innocent Palestinians.

In “solidarity” with Hamas, the Lebanese Islamic Resistance, Hezbollah, attacked several Israeli-occupied military sites including Lebanese Shebaa Farms with guided missiles and mortar shells. During a mass rally in Beirut on October 13, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem confirmed the Lebanese Resistance's readiness and monitoring the progress of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, according to a report by Al Mayadeen. On October 21, Hezbollah Executive Council Chief Sayyed Hashem Safieddine emphasized the readiness of the Resistance to confront the Israeli occupation on all fronts. “The Future in Gaza is made by the Resistance,” he concluded.
 
China’s position on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict

On the other hand, China’s position on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict needs to be highlighted: On October 15, during his telephonic conversation with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned against a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, urging Israel to avoid collective punishment of the Gaza people. It should be noted here that Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2023. China was one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine, and has all along firmly supported the Palestinian people's just cause of restoring their legitimate national rights, and has worked for a comprehensive, just and durable solution of the Palestinian question at an early date. China first recognized Palestine in 1988, stemming from its support of anti-colonial movements.

While President Biden and other Western leaders have emphasized U.S. support for Israel, President Xi Jinping has reiterated that the establishment of “an independent state of Palestine” through a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly in Beijing on October 19. In a phone conversation with Israel's Foreign Minister Eli Cohen on October 23, Wang Yi firmly said that Israel has a choice between war and peace.
 
Hamas's rebellion echoes the dream of a Palestinian state

While Israel tries to legitimize its genocidal attacks against Palestinians, the reality is that the Hamas uprising is a legitimate, self-defensive, oppressed people's violence against the 75-year-old murderous occupation of apartheid Israel. No matter how much the Western world tries to call Hamas' Al-Aqsa Flood Operation against Israel as a “terror attack”, behind this operation lies the right of the Palestinians to defend their legitimate national rights - the dream of the Palestinian people to live safely in their homeland.
 
Massacring innocent Palestinian people

As a result of the ongoing armed conflict, the loss of innocent civilian lives is increasing day by day. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people around the world wave Palestinian flags to protest Israel's brutal repression of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

It is really unknown how many more innocent Palestinian lives will be lost in Israel's bullet-bomb? By the 17th day of the conflict on October 24, Palestinian casualties had risen to more than 5,800 and 70 percent of the dead were women and children. On October 18, Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi has rightly pointed out that the Zionist regime is only accelerating its downfall by killing innocent Palestinian women and children in besieged Gaza. “Every drop of Palestinian blood brings the Zionists closer to downfall, and the Zionist regime cannot compensate for its defeats with these atrocities,” Raeisi said

On the other hand, during the open debate on the Middle East situation of the UN on October 24, the head of Vietnam’s Mission to the UN, Ambassador Dang Hoang Giang expressed Vietnam’s concern over the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza Strip. He said, “It is necessary to stop activities that incite more violence and hatred between the two sides, stop the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, the destruction of homes and the expulsion of Palestinians, and respect the status quo of holy sites in Jerusalem,” according to a VNA report on October 25, 2023.
 
 
Forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land is unjust and illegal

Although the UN adopted a resolution to establish an “independent State of Palestine" alongside Israel in Arab territory, it is unfortunate that neither the UN, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation nor the 22-member Arab League played any meaningful role in establishing an independent State of Palestine in the last 75 years.

At the Cairo Peace Summit on October 21, Jordan’s King Abdullah II noted in his opening speech that the forced or internal displacement of Palestinians would be a war crime. In his speech Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas emphasized that Palestinians cannot be forcibly removed from their land. “We will never accept relocation, we will remain on our land whatever the challenges,” he said, adding, “We also oppose the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

However, it can be said that the Cairo Summit failed to achieve a solution - to reduce the violence in the Gaza Strip due to the division between the West and the Arab world. Western leaders voiced their support for Israel's military operation in Gaza to eliminate Hamas, while Arab countries sought a strong statement from the West to condemn the heavy casualties among Palestinian civilians caused by Israel's bombardment of Gaza.
 
The way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis

The mountain of violence, racism and brutal genocide that Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians for decades needs to stop immediately. It is expected that the whole world will roar in protest to stop the ongoing aggression and bloodshed committed by the Zionist Israel in the Gaza Strip which has become an open-air prison while insisting on an immediate ceasefire. As on October 24, the UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. "The first step must be an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, saving the lives of civilians through the delivery of prompt and effective humanitarian aid," he said.
 
The international community, especially the UN, should take swift action to stop Israeli brutality in Gaza, and all countries should work together through dialogue and diplomacy to establish a sovereign, independent and viable state for Palestine, living within secure and recognized borders, in peace with Israel that can lead to a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Author

Rabi Sankar Bosu, founder of New Horizon Radio Listeners’ Club, an independent think-tank on global affairs based in West Bengal, India, is an Indian analyst and commentator on global affairs

​The crimes of German fascism are of a magnitude so enormous that they are almost difficult to comprehend. Without question the most heinous in its breadth was the Holocaust, the systematic attempt by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people that ultimately led to the mass murder of around two-thirds of the European Jewish population. It is only correct that today’s German state would see itself as having a historic responsibility towards Jews, both at home and abroad. This point should be indisputable. However, there are divergent positions on what the nature of this responsibility should entail.
​
For the modern German state, being responsible means seeing the State of Israel as the primary representative of the Jewish people. It means muting any serious criticism towards Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Germany refuses to retrospectively assess how the country was established through ethnic cleansing, and certainly doesn’t actively challenge today’s status quo in which an system of occupation and apartheid prevails.

That solidarity with the self-professed Jewish state today goes beyond placing Israeli flags outside of official government buildings, where they have flown in the aftermath of October 7. It also explains why it was inevitable that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would end up in Tel Aviv just over a week later to express his condolences and offer an increase in military support, saying Germany’s place in hard times was “by Israel’s side”. The German state’s notion of “Never Again Ever” means ensuring Israel’s stability and security as a Jewish homeland. It sees expressions of anti-Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic.

Contrary to this view espoused by the German government is that Israel does not necessarily represent the Jewish people. This perspective either holds that Zionism as an ideology is inherently racist and rooted in settler-colonialism, or at the very least that the State of Israel today is an entity that engages in dispossession and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. This view places a distinction between critique of the Israeli state and anti-Semitism.

This position allows Jews themselves a sense of agency in being able to choose to either support Israel’s actions, or to stand firmly against the crimes that are carried out in their name. For those who agree with the latter, it means “Never Again Ever” applies equally to all scenarios that take on genocidal proportions, not merely to those claiming to safeguard the Jewish people.
 
Tough Times Opposing War Crimes in Berlin

These are difficult times in Berlin if standing up for Palestinian liberation – or even simply international law – are on your agenda.

Just after the bombs began being rained down on Gaza, Bernie Sanders visited Berlin to great fanfare. However, not pleased with his presence was the Social Democratic Party’s co-leader Saskia Esken, who cancelled an appearance alongside him. Why? Because he had the nerve to make a simple, humanitarian statement: “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” Apparently, Sanders – perhaps the most famous Jewish political figure in the western world - was displaying anti-Semitism by aligning with the Geneva Convention.

Demonstrations in support of Palestine, or those merely calling for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire, have been banned. In the German mainstream media, these protests have been billed as the work of “Hamas lovers” or “Jew haters.” In some cases, protests are literally banned minutes before they are set to begin, when hundreds have already assembled. When it comes to calling out war crimes, the German state has decided that the right to assembly that is enshrined in the country’s Basic Law can simply be ignored.

A cursory look at these illegal demonstrations over the last two weeks reveals that many Jewish organisations have also endorsed and actively participated in them, among them the Jewish Bund and Juedische Stimme. In fact, police have hauled off Jewish activists and arrested them, because Jews are not granted the agency to espouse their positions.

For those who are Palestinian, the ban on demonstrations by Berlin’s authorities means a complete targeting of their identity. When a German police officer arrests somebody for wearing a kuffiyeh, or schools in the capital ban the Palestinian scarf, they are saying the Palestinian identity is that of a terrorist.  

Palestinians are being threatened with deportation if they are proven to be supporters of Hamas, but also Samidoun - the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network associated with the Palestinian left (both organisations have now been banned). This means the possibility of Palestinians being uprooted not once (from their historic homeland), but twice (now from Germany).
 
The Other Germany and the Palestine Liberation Organisation

Although Germany’s post-war history has been shaped by attempts to deal with the crimes of the Nazi regime, this hasn’t always meant that German state entities have taken the view that the current state does towards Israel. The history of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, offers a very different perspective.

First off, it’s necessary to understand that the GDR was created principally as an anti-fascist state, something that was considered even more important than the construction of socialism. Its top priority was indeed “Never Again Ever,” which is why a much more robust de-Nazification process happened there than it did in the western part of the country.  

The new Federal Republic of Germany set up by the U.S., Britain and France became a country where Nazi ideologues were not only allowed to join the government, but were actively sought out for participation in the Cold War. On the other side, much of East Germany’s leadership knew first-hand what is felt like to be hounded and targeted by the Nazis – we should remember that the first concentration camps, after all, were set up for communists, and that they were accused of being part of the global “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”.

In 1948, the newly created Socialist Unity Party that was operating in the Soviet occupation zone that would become East Germany the next year, backed the creation of Israel, saying "We consider the foundation of a Jewish state an essential contribution enabling thousands of people who suffered greatly under Hitler’s fascism to build a new life".

Once it became clear that the new Israeli state was actually a reactionary entity that refused the right of return for the 700,000 refugees it had created, and enacted martial law against the Palestinians who remained, the SED leadership changed its tune. It reverted to the position long-held by the communist movement in regards to Zionism, which is that it was an expression of a reactionary, bourgeois nationalism that always sought the patronage of colonial and imperialism powers.

In 1973, the GDR set up official relations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation of Yasser Arafar. That same year, it had supplied Syria with weaponry for use in the Yom Kippur War against Israel. In 1975, East Germany voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination.

It is not merely coincidental that the PLO was supported by East Germany at the same time that another crucial liberation movement against minority rule, that of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, was also being given support from East Germany. The battle against apartheid was inextricably linked by the East German leadership to that of opposing settler colonialism in Palestine. This was all happening at the same time that West Germany held deep relations with the racist South African government, branding those who rebelled against this rule as “terrorists” - just as the Palestinians are referred to today. Given the similarities in their struggles, it’s no small wonder why Nelson Mandela once proclaimed upon the end of apartheid that, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

This history of the rival German states that existed for 40 years shows that there was no consensus on the question of whether Zionism could be seen as representing the legitimate aspirations of Jews as a whole.
 
Germany’s Dual Responsibility

It should be evident that today’s Germany has in fact not learned the lessons of history. It’s selective application of “Never Again Ever” is symbolic, but ultimately meaningless. It is complicit in Israeli war crimes, and those who espouse anti-fascist politics have a responsibility to stand against it. To fight against anti-Semitism should also mean fighting against imperialism, colonialism, and all forms of racial discrimination.

As the creation of Israel was agreed to by world powers against the backdrop of Nazi Germany’s attempt at exterminating the Jewish people, this means that the consequences – including the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab masses from what became Israel – should also be laid at Germany’s feet. It means that not only does Germany have a responsibility to the Jewish people – it also has a responsibility towards the Palestinian people. Simply put, Palestinians should not have to suffer for the crimes of Hitlerite fascism, whether at home or here in Germany. 

Driving along the Jordan River Valley in the Occupied Palestine Territory (OPT) of the West Bank is a stunning experience. The road is officially called Highway 90. The arable and irrigated land along this road is held militarily and illegally by Israeli settlers, many of whom are not actually Israeli citizens, but residents from the Jewish diaspora. A United Nations Commission report published in 2022 showed that this settlement activity is a crime against international human rights law (transfer of population into an occupied territory). Israeli settlers and the Israeli military that defend them call Highway 90 Derekh Gandhi or Gandhi’s Road. When I first drove along that road over a decade ago, I was puzzled by Gandhi’s name there. Mahatma Gandhi was a leader of the Indian freedom struggle, and had on many occasions—such as in his 1938 article, “The Jews”—offered his sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people. In fact, the road that slices through the West Bank—a crucial part of a proposed Palestinian state—is named after Rehavam Ze’evi, who was ironically given the nickname Gandhi.
​
Ze’evi led the National Union party, which brought together all the most dangerous currents of Israeli far-right politics. As the leader of this party, and, before that, of Moledet, Ze’evi advocated the removal of Palestinians from what he considered to be Israel’s land (East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank). He supported the creation of Eretz Yisrael that would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In March 2001, Ze’evi—who would later be accused of sexual harassment and of being involved in organized crime--told The Guardian that “it’s not murder to get rid of potential terrorists, or those who have blood on their hands. Each one eliminated is one less terrorist for us to fight.” A few months later, Ze’evi showed that he did not distinguish among Palestinians, calling all of them a “cancer” and saying, “I believe there is no place for two peoples in our country. Palestinians are like lice. You have to take them out like lice.” He was shot to death by fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in October 2001. The name of the road that cuts across the West Bank—promised to a Palestinian state in the Oslo Accords of 1993—still bears Ze’evi’s name.

Ze’evi was assassinated by PFLP fighters because the Israeli army had killed their leader Mustafa Ali Zibri by firing two cruise missiles at his home in Al-Bireh (Palestine). The assassination of Zibri was not an isolated incident. It was part of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to “cause the collapse” of the Palestinian Authority—created to manage the Oslo Accords—and “send them all to hell.” Apart from the murder of civilians on a punctual basis, from July 2001 the Israeli government killed four political leaders (Islamic Jihad leader Salah Darwazeh and Hamas leader Jamal Mansour in July, and then Hamas leader Amer Mansour Habiri and Fatah leader Emad Abu Sneineh in August). After the killing of Zibri, the Israelis assassinated Hamas’s Mahmoud Abu Hanoud in November. “Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation,” wrote military correspondent Alex Fishman in Yediot Ahronot, “knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line [Israel’s pre-1967 borders].”

Hot Violence, Cold Violence

For centuries, Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side-by-side in the lands that would eventually be Israel and the OPT, including along the Jordan River Valley. Since the expulsion of the Palestinian Christians and Muslims and the arrival of European Jews, the legal apparatus—or the “cold violence,” as the writer Teju Cole calls it—worked alongside paramilitary and military violence against the Palestinians to create a fantasy of an ethno-nationalist state project (the Jewish State, as it was then called). The erasure of the non-Jewish Palestinians was key to this project, either by massacres (Deir Yassin in 1948) or the wholesale removal of the Palestinian population from their land (the Nakba of 1948). The massacres and the population transfers came alongside the denial of the reality of Palestine and the Palestinian people. The heir to Ze’evi, current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said this March, “There’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.” This is not an opinion that can be dismissed as a far-right rant. Likud member Ofir Akunis, minister of science and technology, said three years ago, “There’s no place for any formula to establish a Palestinian state in Western Israel.” The phrase “Western Israel” is a chilling statement about the Israeli consensus on full annexation of the West Bank with disregard for international law.

A focus on Gaza is essential. The Israeli “hot violence” is extreme, with the death toll of Palestinians—almost half of them in Gaza of children—over 5,000. The Israeli land invasion has been blocked, for now, by the recognition of high morale among the Palestinian resistance. The latter will fight every Israeli soldier that goes into the ruins of Gaza. Before this Israeli incursion, 450 trucks crossed into Gaza with supplies for the 2.3 million residents; it was taken as a victory when nine United Nations trucks and 11 trucks of the Egyptian Red Crescent crossed into Gaza on October 21. Amnesty International looked at only five bombings of the Israelis and found evidence of war crimes, which should alert the International Criminal Court to re-open its file on Israeli atrocities. This should include the crime of collective punishment by cutting water and electricity to Gaza, and bombing access roads to the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and by bombing the Rafah crossing itself.

Large demonstrations across the world demand a ceasefire (at a minimum) and an end to the occupation. Israel is not interested. Its defense minister Yoav Gallant told parliament that his forces have a three-point plan—to destroy Hamas, to destroy the other Palestinian factions, and to create a new “security regime” in Gaza. The Palestinian people—not just the armed factions—are resolute in their resistance to Israeli occupation. The only way for Gallant’s new “security regime” to work would be to erase this resistance, which means to remove all Palestinians from Gaza either by massacres or by dispossession. The United States is following along with this extermination plan: a U.S. State Department memorandum says that its diplomats must not use phrases such as “de-escalation,” “ceasefire,” “end to violence,” “end to bloodshed,” and “restoring calm.”

​Author 
​
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Since the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance operation “Al Aqsa Storm” on Saturday, mainstream Western media and social media influencers have been aggressively pushing Zionist narratives as part of a murky disinformation campaign against the resistance.

The multi-front information war is designed to control the narrative around anything surrounding the Palestinian issue and the latest military operation that has shaken the foundation of the regime.

Now more than ever, it is becoming clear that Western governments and their ruling class, which have a tight grip on media and information control, are losing the battle of ideas.

Palestinian support in the West is at an all-time high, despite Western leaders coming out in the open in defense of the Zionist regime and its relentless and indiscriminate aggression against Palestinians.
Western leaders came out in unison on Saturday to tow the same false narrative: That the Hamas operation is “unprovoked,” that the Israeli regime is “just” in its decades-long ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and that the Palestinian resistance is “terrorism.” 

However, the world saw past these imperialist lies. Millions of people in the West, from New York to London to Paris, poured into the streets to pledge their support to Palestine and the Palestinian resistance, despite their own governments denouncing the Palestinian cause.

In fact, the rallies themselves began to be denounced by Western officials, who despite their aggressive rhetoric against the Palestinian cause saw no end to the outpouring of support for Al Aqsa Storm.

Now, the West and its media apparatuses have turned to their usual assortment of disinformation campaigns to muddy the line between fact and reality. 

Perhaps the most egregious claim came from Zionist outlet “i24 News.” Nicole Zedeck, a reporter, falsely claimed that “40 Israeli babies” were killed, and that some were “decapitated.” 

Obviously a jarring claim, many netizens pushed back asking for more details or any source that could corroborate this claim, which is part of the disinformation campaign.

Zedeck walked back the claim, saying Zionist soldiers told her this was happening -  but the post, which still has not been deleted - or retracted - has been proven categorically false by media outlets.

The multiple high-profile accounts on X (formerly Twitter) shared Zedeck’s baseless claim, disseminating the proven lie to millions of people across the world.

Perhaps most frustrating of all is that while this claim of Israeli babies being killed was spread with no source or proof, very real footage of martyred Palestinian babies being pulled from the Gaza rubble was also being shared - but without the solidarity of any Western influencer accounts. 

Another similar example was shared of a woman, Shani Louk, allegedly being held hostage by Hamas.

Zionist influencers claimed she was sexually assaulted and murdered. Later, the woman’s own mother confirmed she was safe and that Hamas had taken her to a hospital in the Gaza Strip - the same hospital targeted multiple times by Israeli warplanes.

This is a very intentional strategy of the Zionist regime, and the West - when their narrative is being challenged by reality itself, they will not be above spreading lies and refusing to apologize or issue a real retraction when they are caught.

The claims are instead echoed by official Zionist accounts as reality without citation, leading media outlets in the West to print the story verbatim.

Even the celebrity apparatus of the West plays a significant role in disseminating false claims - and then quietly walking them back after millions of people were exposed to flagrant lies.

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis published a photo on Instagram of terrified children looking at the sky, with a caption expressing solidarity with the Zionist State. When netizens correctly identified the children in the photo as children of Gaza, fleeing from a Zionist airstrike, she quickly deleted the photo. 

The strategy of publishing lies and issuing a whimper of a retraction (if any at all) has been an imperialist strategy for decades.

The US entry into Vietnam was sparked by a false report of an attack on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The US illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was due to a made-up claim of weapons of mass destruction. The invasion of Afghanistan before that was also based on false assumptions.

Iran’s foreign-plotted riots were caused by a categorical lie peddled by accounts known to be on the payroll of the United States intelligence agencies - then were spread using a vast network of online bots and influencer accounts.

Western celebrities and influencers then picked up the story to smear the Islamic Republic, despite multiple witnesses and CCTV footage proving the tragic death of Mahsa Amini was of natural causes. 

More recently, after a 16-year-old Iranian girl Armita Geravand fell unconscious at the Tehran subway, social media accounts and news media in the West jumped on the bandwagon, claiming “torture.”

Western media apparatus and celebrity apparatus are intertwined. They are part of a sophisticated system that is forced into place by the US ruling class and further strengthened by the Zionist lobby.

Any deviation - meaning support for Palestine - is met with categorically false claims of anti-semitism, racism, or outlandish smear campaigns. 

Western outlets will never publish about the true carnage unleashed upon the people of Gaza - the women and children who were martyred. 

They will never publish, for example, the video of Israeli soldiers shutting off the water to Gaza - already contaminated - despite it being a human rights violation and a war crime. The imperialist media will never document reality, because reality would condemn the West for its barbarism.

Furthermore, if the West cannot win a war of information, then it seeks to outright ban inconvenient facts altogether. Take for example the shutdown of Press TV in the United States - or the deplatforming of Russia Today or Sputnik after the February 2022 Russian military operation in Ukraine.

Lebanon’s Al-Maydeen was also briefly banned on Meta platforms for its coverage of Al Aqsa Storm. According to the network, no reason was provided for it, nor was any prior notice given. 

The fact of the matter is the imperialist media does not shy away from playing dirty to ensure only its pro-imperialist outlets and narratives dominate public perception.

It understands it is in a losing battle against the truth and is aggressively conducting widespread disinformation and information stifling in a final bid to control its narratives. 

An age-old saying is that in war, the first casualty is truth. The imperialist West has been imposing war on the entire globe for over a century. The truth has been “killed” in this sense many times - leading to racism, Islamophobia, and more rot within society - but it can also be salvaged. 

As growing contradictions sharpen within our world, the imperialist West will intensify its disinformation campaigns. Based on what we already know about its unethical conduct, the world cannot look to the West for the truth.

The West’s truth is a false reality based on the vision created by the US ruling class and its partners, who are committed to defiling the world for their own greed. 
​
If the West fears the narrative of the Palestinians so much then it must know that the truth is with Palestine - and that Palestine is the truth. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to visit China next week, his assistant, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters on Wednesday, noting that preparations for his trip are now in full swing. 
​
The exact dates of Putin’s visit have not yet been released, but Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noted in a press briefing on Wednesday that these dates have been determined and will be published in “a timely manner.” Before traveling to China, the Russian leader will also visit Kyrgyzstan on October 12-13.
​
Last month, during a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Moscow, Putin confirmed that he would travel to Beijing, on his first foreign trip in 2023. 

​The Russian president said he was “happy to accept the invitation” from his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, who had invited him to attend the Belt and Road Forum held in Beijing on October 17-18.

​According to Hua Chunying, the official representative of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the third international forum will be dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative. President Xi will reportedly participate in the forum’s opening ceremony and deliver a keynote speech, after which he will hold a banquet and bilateral events with forum guests. The event will focus on increasing cooperation between countries within the Belt and Road framework.

Last month, China stated that representatives from some 90 countries, including Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, will attend the event.

The Belt and Road Initiative was first floated by Xi Jinping in 2013, with its goal being to foster infrastructure development and investment in Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere. More than 150 countries and organizations have joined the project.

​In the 1970s, US Army Captain Christopher Pyle blew the lid on government agencies’ domestic spying

In 1970, a US Army captain went rogue after he discovered that the military was conducting surveillance on dissidents across the country, thus sparking the first effort in modern times to tame US intelligence.

In 1968, almost half a century before the world heard the name of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on a US-run global surveillance system, Christopher Pyle, an Army captain who taught law at the Army's intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was about to do something no less memorable.
​
After Pyle had concluded one of his popular lectures on civil disorder, which focused on how the military could better quell riots in those highly volatile times, a military officer directly involved in such operations approached him with the request for a meeting. Several days later, Pyle was escorted into a large warehouse facility that once had been used to assemble railroad engines. In his 2006 book, No Place to Hide, Robert O’Harrow described what happened next.

“Pyle walked into the cage, where an officer showed him books containing mug shots. He looked in the first volume and saw a familiar face. It was Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King's assistant. Officers called the books the ‘black list.’"

And thus was born one of the most consequential whistleblowers of the post-World War II era.

In January 1970, Pyle, now a full-fledged private citizen, penned an article for the Washington Monthly entitled, ‘CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics.’ The explosive opening paragraph said it all: “[t]he U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators … keep track of political protests of all kinds – from Klan rallies in North Carolina to anti-war speeches at Harvard.”

Immediately, some US media swung into action as journalists began hounding the Department of Defense and the US Army to determine the veracity of the claims. Given Pyle’s extreme proximity to the subject matter at hand, however, it soon became clear that Uncle Sam got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.

Pyle’s revelations were enough to prompt Congress, as well as a slew of litigation lawyers, to sit up and take notice. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Samuel James Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, worked together with Pyle to investigate and expose the clandestine domestic spying program.

Pyle and Ervin eventually spent countless hours delivering testimony before various congressional meetings over a span of several years. The first fruit of their labors came with passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on December 31, 1974, the legislation states: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains...” In other words, although the law didn’t actually stop the US Army or intelligence agencies from infiltrating civil action groups and public demonstrations, it did hamper the feds from disclosing the identities of the activists without their foreknowledge.

To this end, Pyle served as a consultant for three Congressional committees: the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on the Judiciary Committee (1971-1974), the Committee on Government Operations (1974), and the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975).

According to Pyle, as a result of those successful investigations, “the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished and all of its files were burned.” For his actions, Pyle ended up on then-President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.”

Given the severity of their overall findings, however, the congressional investigations triggered by the US Army captain did not stop there.
​
1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’  

On January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4, the US Senate created the so-called Church Committee, chaired by Democrat Senator Frank Church, to further examine abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The House carried out its own set of investigations with the Pike Commission and the Rockefeller Commission, thereby prompting the media to label 1975 as the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ and not in a way that was flattering to the intelligence community.

The most impactful discovery made by the Church Committee, however, was that of Project SHAMROCK. Started in 1940 during World War II and running into the 1970s, the NSA was given secret authority to access all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. At the peak of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages were captured and analyzed by NSA personnel in a month. The pertinent information contained in these messages was then forwarded to other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Department of Defense. This formed the basis of the so-called ‘Watch List’ of the 1970s that included thousands of American citizens, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities, academics and antiwar activists.

The findings led Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was "probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken."

Based on the recommendations of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Under FISA, the government is required to obtain warrants to conduct electronic surveillance against individuals from a special court. Such a warrant requires “probable cause to believe” that the surveillance target is a foreign government or organization, or an agent thereof, “engaging in clandestine intelligence activities or international terrorism,” as per a Department of Justice (DOJ) clarification.

Yet, as we shall see, even this minor legislative hurdle would prove too cumbersome for the Bush administration in its war on terror.

Privacy in the age of terrorism

The tireless work of the Church Commission was put to a test in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as US lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle were prepared to sacrifice citizens’ privacy in the name of national security. Thus, less than one week after three hijacked aircraft toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people in the process, one of the most comprehensive plans for conducting surveillance on American civilians and individuals worldwide – the USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’) – was already being disseminated to members of Congress.

Arguably the most controversial part of the Patriot Act is contained in Section 215 of the 342-page document, which calls for sweeping government powers against private and public enterprises, individuals, and personal privacy. Most crucially, Section 215 did away with the requirement that the target of the records search be a non-US citizen and "an agent of a foreign power." American citizens were now legitimate targets as well.

In the Senate, the Patriot Act passed in a 99 – 1 vote. The only senator to vote against it was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. "There is no doubt," he declared on the Senate floor before the historic vote, "that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists...But that would not be a country in which we would want to live."
​
Even with this widening of surveillance powers, then-US President George W. Bush, as part of the global ‘War on Terror’ that he declared following the events of 9/11, ordered the NSA to tap the communications of an untold number of people in the US, including citizens, without the warrants demanded by the FISA court – despite the fact that between 1979 and 2005, only four out of over 15,000 warrant requests were rejected by the FISA court.

Christopher Pyle, who was still committed to his cause over 30 years after he chose to become a whistleblower, labeled Bush “a criminal” for violating the FISA law and suggested that he should be impeached.
​
“The Constitution says he must take care that all laws be faithfully executed, not just the ones he likes,” Pyle said during an interview with Democracy Now in 2005. “The statute says … that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive law governing these international intercepts, and he violated it anyway. And the law also says that any person who violates that law is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. By the plain meaning of the law, the President is a criminal.”

More recently, Christopher Pyle, 83, who now works as Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, spoke out on behalf of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who revealed a massive global intelligence program run by the so-called Five Eyes, a once-secretive intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
​
“He’s just an ordinary American,” Pyle explained in 2013. “He’s trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that and taken at face value and we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money and politics.”

At a minimum hundreds of Israelis and even more Palestinians have already been killed in violence now marked by constant barbaric air raids Israel has unleashed on the territory of Gaza, a small enclave near the southern tip of Israel that is literally an outdoor prison for its 2 million Palestinian inhabitants.
​
People in Gaza cannot leave there and have no recognized papers that allow them to travel anywhere in the world. The tiny “prison” enclave might work for 40,000 people but not for 2 million. The close proximity of the population to one another makes Israeli attacks even more deadly than they might otherwise be.

NBC correspondent Richard Engel made note of this on Sunday when he said the attack on Israel, was not, as many in the media were saying, a “surprise.” He expected it, he said, based on the suffering of the Palestinian people. Almost immediately the editor of the Jerusalem Post was put on so he could counter what Engel had said. He claimed that setting up Gaza as an “open air prison” was the result of Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis. When truth makes it through to corporate media it often is quickly extinguished.

Claims by the entire corporate media in the West that “Israel was caught off guard” by the Hamas attacks late last week lack even a shred of credibility.

For millions of Palestinians that “war” or the “long war,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims it will be, didn’t begin on Saturday. Recent actions by Israel in its cruel occupation of Palestinian land and refusal of the West, led by the United States, to do anything to curb those actions, are responsible for the slaughter underway now in Gaza – a slaughter that could well expand in the region and result in many thousands of deaths.

The violence results from the more extreme assaults on Palestinians in the recent period. The infamous Nation-State Law of 2018 formalized the subordinate status of the one-fifth of its citizens who make up the “Israeli Arabs” (a term which is itself used because Israel refuses to recognize Palestine as a nation or Palestinians as a people). Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch agree that Israel is an apartheid state.

Yet not only has Israel operated such a system for years, it got radically worse this year. Hundreds of Palestinians had been killed in 2023 before Hamas launched its assault on Saturday; The United Nations already deemed it the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2006.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bid to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and give an increasingly far-right Knesset the ability to overrule the Supreme Court was done not just to keep himself in power but to speed up the colonization and occupation of Palestinian land.

Planning a new “national guard”

His racist Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been promised a new “national guard” to command that will terrorize Palestinian communities. In the last month alone there have been 700 brutal attacks by West Bank Israeli settlers against innocent Palestinian civilians.
​
It is this savage regime that the West, led by the United States, is supporting.

Talk of a “peace process” that the U.S. claims it supports is a very sad and deadly falsehood as Israel has recently only stepped up its campaign to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem and imprison or kill Palestinians on a daily basis.

The Communist Party USA has strongly condemned the Israeli attacks on Palestinians and U.S. support for the policies of the apartheid state:

“We join with the Communist Party of Israel, the Democratic Front for Equality and Peace (Hadash), our fraternal parties in Palestine, and other democratic and progressive forces around the world in placing full responsibility on Israel’s government for this weekend’s rapid escalation of military confrontation between Hamas and Israeli forces.

The CPUSA joins the CPI and Hadash in decrying civilian deaths. The CPI and Hadash write “Even in difficult days like this, we repeat and voice our unequivocal condemnation of any harm to innocent civilians and call for their removal from the bloodshed. We send our condolences to all the victims of the occupation, Arabs and Jews alike.”

‘The U.S. government is the main contributor to Israel’s military budget to the tune of $3.3 billion this year alone and also bears responsibility for the escalation. Adding to the danger and the region’s instability, the U.S. continues to broker unprincipled alliances and economic agreements between Israel’s reactionary anti-democratic apartheid-like state on one side, and the right-wing Arab monarchies on the other. The repressive political regimes of these two sets of states mirror one another. ‘Their machinations undercut the Palestinian struggle for human rights and political sovereignty while bolstering U.S. political, economic, and military supremacy in the region.”

In a joint statement, the CP of Israel and Hadash cite provocations – not reported in mainstream U.S. news sites – during the week leading up to the Hamas attack on Israeli territory.

Settlers, they report, were allowed to run amok throughout the occupied territories under the auspices of the Israeli government. “They desecrated the Al-Aqsa Mosque and carried out another pogrom in Huwara,” they wrote.

A mob of hundreds of Israeli settlers marched on the town of Huwara torching cars and homes while the Israeli army stood by. The attacks by Hamas were the result, not the cause of this week’s escalation. “This escalation endangers the entire region in a regional and dangerous war – which the right-wing government has been fueling since its first day,” says the Israeli CP.

Demand Biden act now to end war

‘The CPUSA demands the Biden Administration act now to end the war and help bring about a political solution that upholds the rights of the Palestinian people. This must include ending military support to Israel. We call on the people of our country to make their feelings known in every way possible including protests.

The full statement of the CPUSA appears separately on this page.

All we get from U.S. news outlets are reports of civilian Israeli deaths, bombed Israeli buildings, burnt-out cars, and military and civilian hostages taken.

The New York Times regurgitates statements from the Biden administration. They report statements from the Biden administration that have empowered Israel’s attacks on Palestinians yet they ignore the Israeli military and settler murders of many hundreds of Palestinians, including children, this year alone.

What is missing from The New York Times is that recent Israeli governments, including the current one, have explicitly stated that Palestinians shall have no rights.

All this violence against Palestinians and destruction of their lives and culture has taken place with active approval of Israel’s allies, mainly the United States.

Also not mentioned in Western media is that the Biden administration is trying to arrange for “peace” and diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. What underlies this effort is an important thing the U.S. wants in return – an increase in oil production by Saudi Arabia to offset the damage the U.S. has done to the world economy with its war policy in Ukraine. U.S. Sanctions against Russia, China, Venezuela, and other countries have cut the supply of oil, driving up prices in Europe and elsewhere. Deals between apartheid Israel and right-wing Arab governments like Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration hopes, will increase the oil supply and prevent countries from coming out against U.S. sanctioning of Russia and other countries.

Oil prices soared after the Russian invasion of Ukraine because the U.S. blockaded the purchase of Russian fossil fuel supplies by its European allies and because the U.S. and some of those allies criminally blew up the NordStream pipelines, further cutting the potential for those supplies.

One U.S. administration after another has mouthed slogans that support Palestinian rights while actively working to prevent any progress that might ensure them. The U.S. Congress has repeatedly welcomed and celebrated one Israeli Prime Minister after another, including Netanyahu, all of them war criminals.

Inside Israel, Netanyahu is using the conflict to solidify support behind his apartheid regime. Yair Lapid, for example, a so-called centrist politician is entering the right-wing Netanyahu coalition so that Netanyahu will have a “broader” group to rely on for whatever he wants to do.

Another minister in the Netanyahu government, the right-wing security minister, Ben Gvir, has used the conflict to call for stepping up the attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinian civilians and he is using the conflict to call for quick approval of 5,000 new settlements in that occupied territory.
​
The war we see unfolding now in the Mideast is the inevitable result of preventing justice in the Middle East. it is both the creation of widening fascism and racism in apartheid Israel and the fueling of burning – and now exploding – anger among Palestinians against it.

​A decade of BRI development transforms the region into a core area of the Silk Road Economic Belt

On Sunday morning, workers were harvesting grapes on farmland in Yining county in Kazak Autonomous Prefecture of Ili, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The freshly-picked fruit was then uploaded onto a truck, headed to Kazakhstan via highway, and within six hours, it would be delivered to the Kazakhstani market and sold to the local consumers.

"It used to take two to three days to ship goods from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, but the time has been reduced to only half a day since the development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), under which connectivity has been facilitated and the efficiency of customs clearance has been largely improved," Yu Chengzhong, chairman of Horgos Jinyi International Trade Co, told the Global Times.

Yu's company is growing quickly thanks to fruit exports from Xinjiang, including apples, nectarines, grapes, peppers, tomatoes, prunes and cucumbers to markets in Central Asia, Russia, and Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam. It is expected that the company's export value to Central Asia could climb up to $1.2 billion this year, almost doubling from $683 million recorded last year.

As business expands, the company is now constructing a 500,000-square-meter overseas warehouse in Alma-Ata in southern Kazakhstan, and it is scheduled to be put into use in October 2024. "It will be built into a distribution center covering other Central Asian countries and Russia. We will also set up an exhibition area for China-produced vehicles, as those autos have been gaining popularity in those markets," Yu added

Yu's company is one among the thousands of firms in Xinjiang whose businesses have been taking off under the BRI. 

As the China-proposed BRI being materialized over the past decade, Xinjiang - which sits at China's westernmost frontier bordering  eight countries including Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - has been transformed from a relatively closed inland region to a frontier of opening-up. ​

​Who knows how many Palestinian civilians will be killed by the time this report is published? Among the bodies that cannot be taken to a hospital or a morgue, because there will be no petrol or electricity, will be large numbers of children. They will have hidden in their homes, listening to the sound of the Israeli F-16 bombers coming closer and closer, the explosions advancing toward them like a swarm of red ants on the chase. They will have covered their ears with their hands, crouched with their parents in their darkened living rooms, waiting, waiting for the inevitable bomb to strike their home. By the time the rescue workers get to them under the mountains of rubble, their bodies would have become unrecognizable, their families weeping as familiar clothing or household goods are excavated. Such is the torment of the Palestinians who live in Gaza.
​
A friend of mine in Gaza who has a 17-year-old child told me on the first night of this recent spell of Israeli bombing that his child has lived through at least ten major Israeli assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza. As we spoke, we made a list of some of the wars we could remember (because these are Israel’s wars, we are using the Israeli army names for their attacks on Gaza):

• Operation Summer Rains (June 2006)
• Operation Autumn Clouds (October-November 2006)
• Operation Hot Winter (February-March 2008)
• Operation Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009)
• Operation Running Echo (March 2012)
• Operation Pillar of Cloud (November 2012)
• Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014)
• Operation Black Belt (November 2019)
• Operation Breaking Dawn (August 2022)
• Operation Shield and Arrow (May 2023)

Each of these attacks pulverizes the minimal infrastructure that remains intact in Gaza and hits the Palestinian civilians very hard. Civilian deaths and casualties are recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza but disregarded by the Israelis and their Western enablers. As the current bombing intensified, journalist Muhammad Smiry said, “We might not survive this time.” Smiry’s worry is not isolated. Each time Israel sends in its fighter jets and missiles, the death and destruction are of an unimaginable proportion. This time, with a full-scale invasion, the destruction will be at a scale not previously witnessed.

The Ruin of Gaza

Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s horrific 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the United Nations reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.

In 2004, Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland said that Gaza is a “huge concentration camp.” This “huge concentration camp” was erected in 1948 when the newly created Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing policy removed Palestinians into refugee camps, including in Gaza. Two years later, Israeli intelligence reported that the refugees in Gaza had been “condemned to utter extinction.” That judgment has not altered in the intervening 73 years. Despite the formal withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops in 2005, Israel remains the occupying power over the region by sealing off the land and sea borders of the Gaza Strip. Israel decides what enters Gaza and uses that power to throttle the people periodically.

Politicide

When the Palestinians in Gaza tried to elect their own leadership in January 2006, Hamas—formed in the first Intifada (Uprising) of 1987 in Gaza—won the election. The victory of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election results. Operation Summer Rains and Operation Autumn Clouds introduced the Palestinians to a new dynamic: punctual bombardment as collective punishment for electing Hamas in the legislative elections. Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact, never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people. Israel has tried with force to eradicate Gaza’s political life and to force the people into a situation where the armed conflict becomes permanent. When the Palestinians conducted a non-violent Great March of Return in 2019, the Israeli army responded with brute force that killed two hundred people. When a non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms.

As this conflict takes on the air of permanency, the frustration of Palestinian politics moves away from the impossibility of negotiations to the necessity of armed violence. No other avenue is left open. Palestine’s political leadership has been either tethered by the European Union and the United States and so been removed from popular aspirations or—if it continues to mirror those aspirations—it has been sent to one of Israel’s many, harsh prisons (four of 10 Palestinian men are in or have been in prison, while the leaders of most of the left parties spend long periods there under “administrative detention” orders). Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has argued that the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians has resulted in “politicide,” the deliberate destruction of Palestinian political processes. The only road left open is armed struggle.

Indeed, by international law, armed struggle against an occupying power is not illegal. There are many international conventions and United Nations resolutions that affirm the right of self-determination: these include, Additional Protocol 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (1974), and UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (1982). The 1982 resolution “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” You could not have a stronger statement that provides legal sanction for armed struggle against an illegal occupation.

Why does Hamas attack Israel? Because a political grammar has been imposed on the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis by the nature of the Israeli occupation. Indeed, any time there is a modest development for talks—often brokered by Qatar—between Hamas and the Israeli government, those talks are silenced by the sound of Israeli fighter jets.

War Crimes

Each time these Israeli fighter jets hammer Gaza, leaders of Western countries line up metronomically to announce that they “stand with Israel” and that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” This last statement—about Israel having the right to defend itself—is legally erroneous. In 1967, Israeli forces crossed the 1948 Israeli “green lines” and seized East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 sought the “withdrawal of [Israeli] armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The use of the term “occupied” is not innocent. Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907) states that a “territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” The Fourth Geneva Convention obliges the occupying power to be responsible for the welfare of those who have been occupied, most of the obligations violated by the Israeli government.

In fact, as far as Gaza has been concerned since 2005, Israeli high officials have not used the language of self-defense. They have spoken in the language of collective punishment. In the lead-up to the ongoing bombing, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We have decided to halt electricity, fuel, and goods transfer to Gaza.” His Defense Minister Yoav Gallant followed up, saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Then, Israel’s Energy Minister Israel Katz said, “I instructed that the water supply from Israel to Gaza be cut off immediately.” Having followed up on these threats, they have sealed Gaza—including by bombing the Rafah crossing to Egypt—and closed down the lives of two million people. In the language of the Geneva Conventions, this is “collective punishment,” which constitutes a war crime. The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but was not able to move forward even to collect information.

The children huddle in their rooms waiting for the bombs sit in the dark because there is no electricity and wait—with parched throats and hungry bellies—for the end. After the 2014 Israeli bombardment, Umm Amjad Shalah spoke of her 10-year-old son Salman. The boy would not let his mother go, being in terror of the noise of the explosions and the death around him. “Sometimes he screams so loudly,” she says. “It almost sounds like he’s laughing loudly.”

​Author

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

 This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Naomi Klein’s article “Why are some of the left celebrating the killings of Israeli Jews?” is a ragbag of liberal rhetoric. Some unspecified leftists are criticized for celebrating the anti-Jew violence of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. By minimizing the massacre of Israeli civilians, these leftists are said to be fueling the sense of insecurity among Jews that drives Zionist settler-colonialism. Klein desires for “[a]n international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.” She calls this position “moral consistency,” in contrast to “moral equivalency”. While the latter erases the difference between the occupier and the occupied, the former preserves such a material distinction even as it holds onto universal moral standards.
​
The reporter responsible for popularizing the news that Hamas has beheaded 40 children has herself revealed its baselessness. In fact, various field commanders have insisted on not killing the elderly and children. Apart from Klein’s willingness to believe in atrocity propaganda, what stands out is her lip-service to condemning the occupation. Once you have acknowledged the existence of settler-colonialism, you can’t go on talking about abstractions called “child” and “gun”. In Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza strip, violence needs to be examined as a product of historical circumstances, not as violations of a pre-existing moral standard.

Klein says that “we all have to figure out how to make it [Israeli war crimes] stop.” Palestinians and their supporters did try to figure it out. They started the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which was criminalized by the US and its European partners as “anti-Semitic”. Thus, it failed to have any sizeable impact upon government and corporate policies. Nonviolent demonstrations and gatherings at the Israeli separation barrier, which were organized by young protesters in the beginning of 2023 and were previously referred to as the “Great March of Return” in 2018-19, have been brutally suppressed by Israeli forces.

The strategy of peacefully appealing to the Jewish support base of Zionism has failed. Hebh Jamal writes: “There has not been success in changing the perception of the Israeli public – to actually see us as humans and to accept we will not live in a cage. Whenever Israelis have an election, we brace ourselves because we know the only way you get polling numbers is by bombing, raiding, or arresting us senseless. Usually, when they bang the war drums, public support comes running. I am unsure how the colonized mind will decolonize itself to give us our freedom. It has not happened, and I don’t think it ever will.”

By panicking over the violence of the Palestinian Resistance, Klein is asking Palestinians to keep trying to persuade a ruthless colonial master. For Israel, Palestinians are not a subject to be rationally argued with but a dehumanized object to be dominated. Operation Al-Aqsa flood reversed this structural hierarchy as Palestinians took the first step in dismantling colonialism. In the words of Haider Eid: “Instead of waiting for Israel’s “generosity” when it decides, through mediators, to open one of the seven gates of the largest open-air prisons on earth, the inmates – having learned from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – decided to bring it down themselves.”

Does the above mean that no moral standards apply in the war of national liberation? Quite the opposite. For Palestine, violence is a strict historical necessity imposed upon them by the extreme circumstances of Zionist settler-colonialism. For Israel, violence is an innate structuring principle necessary for oiling the mechanisms of apartheid. This is the moral standard that is present before our eyes. Klein is trying to peddle liberal sensibilities in a situation that demands the moral exactitude of unconditional decolonization. 

The US “socialist” left currently playing the bothsides-ism game with Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the name of some bullshit notion of ‘nuance,’ must remember the words of Howard Zinn: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

Nothing is accomplished with an abstract support of Palestine when it’s convenient. It is when the empire’s ideological apparatuses are pumping out atrocity propaganda to dehumanize Palestinian anti-colonial resistance that support for Palestinian freedom struggles count.

The recent events have shown who is willing to stand for Palestine in the concrete, when the people grab arms to throw off their occupying force. “Decolonization,” as the great Frantz Fanon noted, “is always a violent phenomenon.”

If your purity fetish requests a bloodless anti-colonial revolution, you’ll be doomed to always condemning freedom movements of colonized peoples. You’ll be chained to playing the role of the defenders of empire from the ‘left’. Your ‘siding’ with the oppressed will always be conditioned by their being oppressed; you’ll be with them only insofar as they’re the victim, but never when they fight back and become an emancipatory force. 

The Western left’s treatment of violence, like everything else, is abstract. It is unable to distinguish between particular forms of violence, between the ever-present violence of the oppressor, and the emancipatory violence of the oppressed. As Maximillien Robespierre noted, to equate the violence of the people’s struggle for freedom to the violence of their exploitative and oppressive rulers is as folly and empty as saying that “the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed.” 

The key issue here is violence by whom, against whom, and towards what ends. The Palestinian uprising is a legitimate, self-defensive, violence of a people against an apartheid occupational state. It is the violence of the colonized, against the colonizers, for freedom. It is a violence that has been taken up as the last resort in a long struggle against Zionist colonialism. It is the only route the colonizers have left for Palestinians to fight for their freedom. Violence, as Fidel Castro noted, is the route the oppressors force on the people, it is taken up when all other means of struggle have been exhausted. We must remember the words of Paulo Frieri, “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.”

But their struggle for freedom is not limited to Palestinians. A defeat of Israel, the US empire’s outpost in the so-called Middle East - the “baby child of imperialism in the Middle East” as Kwame Ture said - would be a victory for all of humanity. 

A defeat of empire in any corner of the earth, as Che Guevara noted, must be celebrated cheerfully by every communist, every person driven by a deep love of humanity. The imperialists hate humanity; their capitalist system undermines, as Marx had noted, the “original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” The Palestinian struggle against the racist Israeli colonial US-outpost is a struggle for humanity - for the exploited and oppressed across the earth. It is a struggle for life, a struggle against the Israeli imperialist death machine.

Paradoxically, a Palestinian victory would be the conditions for the possibility of current Israeli settlers experiencing real freedom. As the Peruvian indigenous politician Dionisio Yupanqui says in his 1810 speech to the Cortes de Cádiz, “a people that oppresses another cannot be free.” The Israeli settlers cannot be free, cannot experience genuine human autonomy, insofar as their existence necessitates the oppression and extermination of Palestinian people. In their oppression of the Palestinian they stifle their capacity to live fully human lives. As Plato had long ago noted, injustice against an other corrupts the soul; the worst evil we can be inflicted with is that which we do to ourselves when we harm others. A society predicated on such disdain and obliteration of its “other” destroys itself from within. Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Israel’s sins against the Palestinians are making a monstrosity out of the soul of its people.

Palestinian freedom must be acquired, in the words of Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.” A victorious Palestinian struggle is in the interests of all of humanity - of all working and oppressed peoples of the world.

US socialists must stand, as some comrades have been doing, with the Palestinian struggle for freedom. We must push back against Zionist genocidal efforts, and those echoed by our morally hollow capitalist politicians. 

It is difficult to imagine that Israeli intelligence was truly caught by surprise. It is plausible to suspect that they have allowing events to play out so that they may intensify their genocidal war against Palestine while using atrocity propaganda to legitimize their efforts.

This does not change, however, the fact that Palestinians are up in arms fighting for their freedom. Neither does it change the fact that, like all hubris-filled Goliaths, this apartheid-colonial state – as we currently know it – may fall.

Humanity sees itself in the struggle of the Palestinians.

Because this great humanity has said: Enough! and has started walking. And their march of giants will no longer stop until they achieve true independence, for which they have already died more than once in vain. Now, in any case, those who will die, will die like those of Cuba, those of Playa Girón, will die for their only, true, inalienable independence! – Che Guevara
​

FIFTY years back, Pinochet's coup destroyed Allende's government and the structure of liberal democracy in Chile. Allende died with a machine gun in his hands, defending his attempt to build socialism in Chile against the combined power of the US and the forces of reaction in Chile, including the military. For people of my generation, this story is well-known, as along with liberation struggles in Vietnam and Africa, Chile was very much what brought us to the streets in solidarity. What is less known, except in more scholarly or tech circles, is the attempt by Allende and his government to use technology, specifically information from factories which Allende had nationalised, and use this information for real-time planning and interventions in the economy. This project – Cybersyn – resonates in the tech community for its vision of marrying technology to social needs, including direct feedback from workers on the factory floor. Cybersyn's control room is iconic and a precursor to what develops later as an intuitive graphic user interface, differentiating companies such as Apple from the more clunky user interfaces of Microsoft and others.
​
Eden Medina and Evgeny Morozov are two authors who have explored the project Cybersyn for more than two decades. Medina's 2011 book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, remains the most important one in bringing together the context and the constraints of both technology and politics in Chile at that time. Evgeny, who has been researching Chile and the project Cybersyn for a long time, has recently done a series of podcasts (nine of them, to be exact) called The Santiago Boys. These podcasts give us not only an overview of the project Cybersyn but also the unequal struggle of a set of young technocrats, engineers and economists (The Santiago Boys) along with Stafford Beer, a British information technologist, against the might of the US forces – ITT and other US MNCs, CIA, the Chilean Armed Forces and economists (The Chicago Boys led by the economist Milton Friedman). He also locates the much larger context within which we must see Cybersyn, not simply as how to manage or control the economy but how to develop knowledge that underlies technology and production for the future.

Information, in this larger sense, is creating new knowledge and, therefore, the fight over the patent system is a fight over knowledge. The Indian patent system had undergone a huge break with its earlier colonial version of the 1911 Indian Patent Act in the 1971 Patent Act. Evgeny brings out the vision of the Santiago Boys/School, similar to what we in India had regarding self-reliance. It is not enough to do import substitution. Breaking out of dependence means creating new knowledge. That means you have to marry advances in knowledge, both scientific and technological, to industry. Patent systems reform can create conditions with which we can create knowledge, but bringing it into industry means marrying different forms of knowledge in a way that can lead to manufacturing products: simple products that go into other products to complex ones that need to integrate a very large number of such parts.

I am not going into the details of what Evgeny has covered in his podcasts or other writings. I will pick out one example of what might have been if Chile had pursued its path to self-reliance. He writes of how the Allende-era Corfo launched the National Electronics Company, tasked with building a semiconductor plant in the country's north. This would have allowed Chile – once a mere exporter of nitrates and copper – to become a technologically sophisticated economy capable of meeting its development needs. Those who have followed these columns will remember how India built the semiconductor complex in Mohali, which within a few years had brought Indian chip-building capabilities within one or two generations of what then were the cutting-edge chips. And how, after its mysterious burning down in 1989, it was never rebuilt. This led us to go out in the world offering huge "incentives" to set up, not chip manufacturing, but chip packaging plants. In the Chilean case, the US-inspired coup brought down the Allende government and the abandonment of self-reliance – or technological independence – as a goal. In India, a self-goal by the neoliberal forces across a spectrum of political parties, from the Congress to the BJP, led to the abandonment of self-reliance. 

Evgeny also brings out the eery similarities in the information network of Project Cybersyn and the information and control infrastructure of Operation Condor, the infamous CIA project to sabotage and assassinate Left forces and governments in Latin America. Both were informed and limited by the technology of their times, using telex as the primary means of communicating data and information. It is a cautionary tale for those who believe in techno-utopias and how technological advances will automatically solve all the world's problems. Advances in technology and science have the potential to create enough for our human needs, now and for the future. But it comes up against the simple question of who owns such advances. Or, more correctly, the knowledge embedded in the artefacts we produce as a society? Who owns the means of production, not simply the physical infrastructure producing these goods but also the infrastructure producing knowledge? This is where we confront the reality of class struggle, both national and international. Allende's overthrow by the CIA, ITT (read US capital) and its feudal-military elite remind us of the nature of this class struggle, both national and international. 

The other part of the story is that of information technology, still in its infancy during the Allende era. A number of people had naively believed that new digital technologies could liberate all of us: free software and the internet would by itself introduce socialism, democratising technology and, therefore, society. Norbert Weiner, the father of Cybernetics, had warned us in his books Cybernetics (1948) and Human Use of Human Beings (1950) that information in the typical American world is destined for a special future: it will turn into a commodity to be bought, sold and bargained over. This will inevitably be in conflict with human values of promoting the common good. "Just as technology opens up new opportunities, so does it impose new limitations." Miron Amit writes about Weiner's vision of this conflict and how transforming information into a commodity enables its private appropriation and harms life itself. Even though the information network has changed enormously with the emergence of the internet, the politics of information and technology remain the conflict between people and capital.

On Sunday morning, workers were harvesting grapes on farmland in Yining county in Kazak Autonomous Prefecture of Ili, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The freshly-picked fruit was then uploaded onto a truck, headed to Kazakhstan via highway, and within six hours, it would be delivered to the Kazakhstani market and sold to the local consumers.

"It used to take two to three days to ship goods from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, but the time has been reduced to only half a day since the development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), under which connectivity has been facilitated and the efficiency of customs clearance has been largely improved," Yu Chengzhong, chairman of Horgos Jinyi International Trade Co, told the Global Times.

Yu's company is growing quickly thanks to fruit exports from Xinjiang, including apples, nectarines, grapes, peppers, tomatoes, prunes and cucumbers to markets in Central Asia, Russia, and Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam. It is expected that the company's export value to Central Asia could climb up to $1.2 billion this year, almost doubling from $683 million recorded last year.

As business expands, the company is now constructing a 500,000-square-meter overseas warehouse in Alma-Ata in southern Kazakhstan, and it is scheduled to be put into use in October 2024. "It will be built into a distribution center covering other Central Asian countries and Russia. We will also set up an exhibition area for China-produced vehicles, as those autos have been gaining popularity in those markets," Yu added

Yu's company is one among the thousands of firms in Xinjiang whose businesses have been taking off under the BRI. 

As the China-proposed BRI being materialized over the past decade, Xinjiang - which sits at China's westernmost frontier bordering  eight countries including Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - has been transformed from a relatively closed inland region to a frontier of opening-up. ​

The stakes of the imperialist West’s New Cold War against China are as great as they can get. This means that the Western left’s role as controlled counter-hegemony and left-wing delegitimizers of socialist states – a role ideologically grounded in their purity fetish outlook – is as dangerous as it can get. In our current geopolitical climate, all progressive forces in the West should unite against the US and NATO’s anti-China rhetoric and actions. Unfortunately, what we find from large portions of this Western left is parroting of state-department narratives on China with radical-sounding language. Leading ‘socialist’ outlets in the US often echo baseless ruling class propaganda such as the ‘Uyghur genocide,’ Zero Covid authoritarianism, Belt and Road imperialism, debt trapping, and other similar fabrications.[1] Far from a concrete-dialectical study of China, in many of these spaces the claims of the ruling class are just assumed to be true, and anyone who dares to question them – and henceforth, bring the real truth to light – is labeled a puppet of Xi Jinping and the ‘CCP’ (which, like the Western bourgeoisie, is continuously labeled by these ‘socialists’ as CCP and not CPC in order to play on CCCP fears from the last cold war).[2]

Most of these tactics center on age-old claims of communist ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ and all other such words used to equate fascism with communism and judge ‘democracy’ according to Western liberal-bourgeois standards. These assumptions and purity fetish engagements with Chinese socialist governance blind the Western Marxist from seeing China’s de facto geopolitical role as a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle, in the Covid struggle, in the struggle for environmental sustainability, and in the struggle to develop with the darker nations which have been kept poor by centuries of colonialist and imperialist looting, debt traps, and superexploitation.[3]

The unquestioned, purity fetish grounded, and Sinophobic assumption of Chinese ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘lack of democracy’ also prevents the Western Marxist from learning how the Chinese socialist civilization has been able to creatively embed its socialist democracy in “seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.”[4] It has withheld them from seeing how a comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has arrived at: namely, that “China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.” This is a position echoed by John Ross (and many other scholars of China), who argues that the “real situation shows that China’s framework and delivery on human rights and democracy is far superior to the West’s.”[5]

​The purity fetish Marxists of the West love to think about democracy in the abstract, and hold up as the pure ideal a notion of democracy which is only quantitatively different from the bourgeois notion. Then, this ideal notion of bourgeois democracy is measured up against the atrocity propaganda riddled caricature of socialist states which their ruling classes paint – and they unquestioningly accept. When the caricature of reality fails to measure up to the ideal, reality – which they have yet to engage with – is condemned. What the Western Marxist forgets – thanks to the purity fetish and their social chauvinism – is that in societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did – “democracy for which class?”[6] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes’ democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (dēmos).

To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians and lapdog media, and their controlled counter-hegemonic ‘socialists’ do – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality.[7] If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime that stands in the way of this ‘freedom.’ If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs – that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for – then it would be indisputable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

However, the object of this text is not to address and ‘debunk’ all the assertions made about China (or any other socialist country) from the Western left – specifically the Trotskyites and the Democratic Socialists. That would, for one, require a much more expansive project, and two, is a task that has already been done many times before. Projects like Friends of Socialist China and Qiao Collective consistently engage in the practice of debunking the propaganda on China proliferated by the Western ruling class and the ‘left.’ The objective of this text is different; it seeks not only to point out falsities in the Western left’s positions, but to understand the worldview which consistently reproduces these. I have called this worldview the purity fetish. In it we can find the ideological roots for the Western Marxist positions on China.

In the Western Marxist’s purity fetish assessment of China, it is held that because China doesn’t measure up to the pure socialist Ideal in their heads, because China does not have, as Samir Amin notes, “the communism of the twenty-third century,” – it is not actually socialism.[8] The question of democracy and authoritarianism has already been assessed in previous chapters – it is a classic of the Western Marxist condemnation toolbox. My focus in this chapter will be on those who claim China is ‘capitalist’ because it developed private ownership and markets with the period of Reform and Opening Up in 1978. This form of the purity fetish centers on their inability to understand, in a dialectical manner, how markets and private property function within China’s socialism. China, according to these Western Marxists, took the ‘capitalist road’ in 1978. As Roland Boer has shown in his article “Not Some Other -ism”—On Some Western Marxist Misrepresentations of Chinese Socialism,” there are four major ‘sub-forms’ through which this first form of condemnation occurs: 1) capitalist socialism; 2) neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics; 3) bureaucratic capitalism; and 4) state capitalism. Often, variations of these can be found within the same critic, as none are the result of a rigorous, principled analysis.

As US and Western imperialist powers ramp up the New Cold War against China, Western Marxism’s erroneous purity fetish view of Chinese socialism requires closer examination.
 
The Purity Fetish and The Capitalist Road Thesis 

From the moment that the Communist Party of China, spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping, embarked on the process of Reform and Opening Up in 1978, the Western world – both the hegemonic forces and the ‘socialist’ critics – held that China had taken the ‘capitalist road’ and betrayed the revolution. Opening up to foreign capital to develop the productive forces and modernize was considered a betrayal of socialism and the cause of the working class and peasantry. While it is understandable how, from the perspective of an outsider, this might have seemed to be the case, this judgment  nonetheless reflects a deep ignorance of the debates shaping Reform and Opening Up, of the role that lessons from past socialist experiments played in crafting it (e.g., Lenin’s New Economic Policy, Chinese New Democracy, and Yugoslavian Socialist Market economics), and of the poverty of dialectical thinking present in their purity fetish outlook. 

Reform and Opening Up did not come out of a void; Deng did not just wake up one day and voluntaristicly say, “let’s do this!” Instead, there were objective forces which made Reform and Opening Up the most viable route for the Chinese revolution to embark on. “Thirty-five years ago,” as Yi Wen writes, “China's per capita income was only one-third of that of sub-Saharan Africa.”[9] Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, writes that “an estimated 30 percent of rural residents, about 250 million [people], lived below the poverty line, relying on small loans for production and state grants for food.”[10] In a 1979 speech Deng notes that
 
China is still one of the world’s poor countries. Our scientific and technological forces are far from adequate. Generally speaking, we are 20 to 30 years behind the advanced countries in the development of science and technology.[11]
 
China was, in short, still a very poor country, and one excluded from the developments of the rest of the world by the forces of imperialism. As Carlos Martinez notes, “China in 1978 remained backwards in many ways … the bulk of the population lived in a very precarious existence, many without access to modern energy and safe water … China’s per capita income was $210, [and] food production, and consequently average food consumption, was insufficient.”[12]
 
The Importance Marxism Lays on the Development of the Productive Forces 

These conditions made the construction of socialism increasingly difficult, and, if allowed to continue, could have created fertile ground for national discontent in the revolutionary process. If the people’s living standards continued to drag in comparison to the rest of the world, the Chinese – as many Russians did in the late 1980s and early 1990s – could lose trust in their party and in socialist construction. It was clear that a change was needed to remove the fetters preventing the development of the forces of production. The Marxist tradition has always understood that only in the development of the forces of production can socialism flourish. In Capital Vol. I, for instance, Marx writes that:
 
The development of society's productive forces… [create the]… material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.[13]
 
It is the development of “the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” which “ripens,” in the capitalist mode of life, “both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.”[14] As with other modes of life, Marxist have long understood that capitalist relations of production, while at one point being “forms of development [for] the productive forces,” have in time “turn[ed] into their fetters.”[15] Socialist relations of production have always been understood to have the capacity of breaking through these fetters and helping unleash the forces of production. As Marx famously writes in Capital Vol. I.,
 
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[16]
 
A similar argument is made by Engels in his celebrated Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:
 
The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself.[17]
 
In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” while elaborating on some general characteristics and preconditions for the highest phase of communist society, Marx would say that,
 
In the highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs![18]
 
Capitalist relations of production in time become a barrier for human progress – both in the forces of production, i.e., the economic base of society, but also in culture, politics, arts, philosophy i.e., the superstructure of society. While more progressive than the feudal orders which preceded it in Europe, capitalism produces an enormous waste. It wastes labor, human potential, nature, and everything in between. As British socialist William Morris eloquently stated, “The truth is that our system of Society is essentially a system of waste.”[19] Not only would socialist relations of production remove the artificial fetters created by a society wherein production is aimed at profit, but also the extreme wastefulness in labor, life, and things created by such anarchic production for-profit. As Engels argues,
 
The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production [i.e., capitalist fetters], but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products… It sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. [This affords] the possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties.[20]
 
The emphasis on the development of the forces of production has led critics of Marxism to argue that socialism would reproduce the same ‘productivism’ as capitalist society. This depicts a fundamental poverty of dialectical thinking. Yes, socialism seeks to unleash the productive forces and create the sort of abundance wherein the human community can “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”[21] However, this growth is people-centered, not capital-centered. The aim of the development of the forces of production is not the accumulation of endless profit in a small group of hands. Far from this capitalist telos, which grows without regard for nature and human life, socialist growth is centered on creating conditions for the greatest amount of human flourishing – something which necessarily implies de-alienating humans from nature and overcoming the metabolic rifts capitalist production unquestionably creates.[22]

Instead of carrying out production in environmentally unsustainable ways – as capitalism does – socialist production allows for both developments in the productive forces and – because of its efficiency and momentum towards the elimination of superfluous waste – for this development to be carried out in a metabolic harmony with nature. As Marx argues in Capital Vol. III., communist production would
 
Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.[23]
 
This harmonious metabolism, or balance, can be seen most clearly in China’s efforts to build a socialist ecological civilization – a task it embarked on at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2007. As it reads in the latest update to the CPC’s constitution, following the 20th National Congress of the CPC in 2022, the Party must “work to balance … relations between humankind and nature.”[24] “Harmony between humankind and nature,” as the constitution argues, is a fundamental component “in building a socialist ecological civilization” capable of creating “a positive path to development that ensures increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems.”[25] This dialectic of sustainable development, central to Marx and Engels’s understanding of socialism, finds its highest concrete form to date in China’s efforts to construct a socialist ecological civilization. As John Bellamy Foster, who has spearheaded the movement towards emphasizing the ecological dimensions of Marx and Engels’s thought, has argued: China’s “developments reflect the recognition of a dialectic in this area that has long been part of Marxist theory.”[26] In so doing, Foster argues, “China’s role in promoting ecological civilization as a stage in the development of socialism can be seen as its greatest gift to the world at present in terms of environmental governance.”[27]
 
Deng and Reform and Opening Up 

Although the cultural revolution had come to halt in 1976, similar forms of dogmatism and book worshiping remained for some time. Hua Guofeng’s two whatevers (“We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave”), for instance, perpetuated the sort of book worshiping which not only sucked the living spirit out of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, but proved futile in dealing with the problems China faced.[28]

“The emancipation of minds,” as Deng eloquently noted, was indispensable; historical conditions had developed such that many cadres, especially many leading cadres, remained fettered by rigid thinking and book worshiping.[29] Under the justification of following Mao, they would participate in the same form of book worshiping Mao urged to overcome.[30] The needs of the time, therefore, were elaborated by Deng in the following manner:
 
Only if we emancipate our minds, seek truth from facts, proceed from reality in everything and integrate theory with practice, can we carry out our socialist modernization programme smoothly, and only then can our Party further develop Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.[31]
 
The process of Reform and Opening Up required the liberation of thought from the dogmatism that wanted to perpetuate more of the same. To achieve the four modernizations Zhou Enlai enumerated (initially theorized as the second stage of the third five-year plan), namely, “the comprehensive modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology before the end of the century, so that our national economy will be advancing in the front ranks of the world,” the emancipation of the mind from book worshiping and dogmatism was necessary.[32] To be able to understand the world dialectically, to seek truth from facts, the Chinese needed to emancipate the mind. With the mind emancipated, the inflexible rigidity which rejected Reform and Opening Up could be destroyed, and a new phase of development in the Chinese revolution emerge.
​
It must be noted that, regardless of the pre-’78 flaws Reform and Opening Up sought to overcome, it marked a new phase in the development of the Chinese revolution, not a ‘break’ with the pre-’78 era. There are, as Carlos Martinez notes, ‘no great walls,’
 
In each stage of its existence, the CPC has sought to creatively apply and develop Marxism according to the prevailing concrete circumstances; always seeking to safeguard China’s sovereignty, maintain peace, and build prosperity for the masses of the people. Through many twists and turns, this has been a constant of a hundred years of Chinese Revolution.[33]
 
Regardless of certain failures and excesses of the pre-’78 era (most notably found in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution), it was successful in many areas, and without both its successes and failures, Reform and Opening Up could not have occurred. As Cheng Enfu has argued, “the historical period after reform and opening-up cannot be used to negate the historical period before reform and opening-up, and vice versa.”[34] The successes of Reform and Opening Up, as Samir Amin notes, “would not have been possible without the economic, political, and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.”[35] Hu Angang writes that “China succeeded in feeding one-fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s arable land and 6.5 percent of its water … China’s pre-1978 social and economic development cannot be underestimated.”[36] “In 1949,” for instance, “the country’s population was 80 percent illiterate,” by 1978, this was “reduced to 16.4 percent in urban areas and 34.7 percent in rural areas.”[37] In the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, “the enrolment of school-age children increased from 20 to 90 percent; and the number of hospitals tripled.”[38]

The successes of the pre-1978 era can be lucidly seen when compared to India. As Carlos Martinez notes, “following independence from the British Empire in 1947, [India] was in a similarly parlous state, with a life expectancy of 32 … At the end of the pre-reform period in China, i.e., 1978, India’s life expectancy had increased to 55, while China’s had increased to 67.”[39] John Ross observes that “this sharply growing difference was not because India had a bad record – as an increase of 22 years in life expectancy over a 31-year period graphically shows … it is simply that China’s performance was sensational – life expectancy increased by 32 years in a 29-year chronological period - an annual average increase of 2.3%.”[40] This was a world-historical success, as Ross writes, “China's rate of increase of life expectancy in the three decades after 1949 was the fastest ever recorded in a major country in human history.”[41] Therefore, the post-1978 successes cannot be isolated from the role the pre-1978 successes played in laying the ground for the following phase of the revolution. “The early decades of socialist construction,” as the Tricontinental Institute’s report on China’s poverty alleviation shows, “laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up period.”[42]

For all its successes, 1978 China was still very poor and well-behind the Western powers. It was clearly observable by the late ‘70s “that China’s economy required an infusion of technology and capital, and that it needed to break its isolation from the world market.”[43] China was beginning to suffer in ways similar to the Soviet Union in its last years. As Domenico Losurdo notes,
 
the China that arose from the Cultural Revolution resembled the Soviet Union to an extraordinary degree in its last years of existence: the socialist principle of compensation based on the amount and quality of work delivered was substantially liquidated, and disaffection, disengagement, absenteeism and anarchy reigned in the workplace.[44]
 
The overreliance on “voluntarism and ‘moral incentives’ to raise production” began to “suffer from diminishing returns.”[45] Like in the USSR, reforms became necessary to not lose the people.

While there are some superficial similarities between Perestroika and Reform and Opening Up, there are fundamental differences upon which the difference of outcomes is grounded. As Carlos Martinez has written, the reforms in the USSR were top-down, rushed, delegitimizing for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the socialist experiment’s history (i.e., embedded in denigrating the party and its history – the latter of which the Chinese have labeled ‘historical nihilism’); economically, privatization and marketization were carried out recklessly; key industries the state should have sustained under its control were privatized, and the state grew less capable of commanding the economy towards the pathways which would develop, and not enervate, the revolution.[46] As Martinez notes, “given that the project was presented as a form of ‘democratization,’ it’s ironic that it was carried out in a profoundly undemocratic manner… the leadership didn’t mobilize the existing, proven structures of society (the soviets and the Communist Party) but sought to bypass and weaken them.”[47]

On the other hand, the Chinese reforms were carried out in a pragmatic, grassroots, and incremental fashion – the party was never denigrated, historical nihilism was combated, key industries remained under the control of the CPC and the market activity which developed was commanded by the party to serve the ends of socialism. “Practice,” as Deng said, was “the sole criterion for testing truth.”[48] What succeeded in advancing the cause of socialism at the time was sustained, and what failed was abandoned. “The whole process” of Reform and Opening Up “was carried out under the tight control of the government and took place within the context of a planned economy.”[49]

As Arthur Kroeber has noted, “the government will pursue reforms that increase the role of the market in setting prices, but will avoid reforms that permit the market to transfer control of assets from the state to the private sector.”[50] To use a metaphor often brought up by Xi Jinping, the development of the invisible hand (the market) was not to the detriment of, but to the enhancement of, the visible hand (the state).[51] A similar phenomenon is observable with public and private ownership. As Cheng Enfu argues in China’s Economic Dialectic, “in order to improve the ownership structure of the whole society in which public ownership is dominant and private ownership is auxiliary, it is essential to enhance the symbiosis and complementarity of the two ownerships under market competition and state orientation.”[52] “The result was,” as Martinez writes, “a far more effective programme of economic reform than that which took place in the Soviet Union from 1985-1991 or in post-Soviet Russia from 1991 onwards.”[53]

The importance of not allowing economic liberalization in China to turn into political liberalization cannot be emphasized enough. In the USSR, as Cheng Enfu and Liu Zixu argue, there were three distinct categories of cause behind the fall of Soviet socialism: ideological, organizational, and political.
 
Ideological Causes: “Amid the rigid theorizing inside and outside of the CPSU, and given the lack of democratic and effective education and ideological work, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the strategy of peaceful evolution followed by the West created long-term ideological chaos, which constituted the theoretical foundation and ideational precursor.”

Organizational Causes: “The large number of non-Marxist cadres that the CPSU promoted and placed in important positions led to a serious malfunctioning of systems and mechanisms that could not be put right in an effective and timely manner. The unfair and undemocratic procedures used to select members of the CPSU’s leading group gradually allowed non-Marxist cadres to take over leading positions within the CPSU… Over a few years, in the name of promoting young cadres and of reform, [they] replaced large number of party, political and military leaders with anti-CPSU and anti-socialist cadres or cadres with ambivalent positions. This practice laid the foundations, in organizational and cadre selection terms, for the political ‘shift of direction.’”

Political Causes: “The CPSU leadership betrayed Marxism and socialism, a betrayal that could not be overcome using the traditional political system and its corresponding mechanisms, which were highly centralized and imposed no restrictions… In short, the group headed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin exploited the highly centralized and insufficiently regulated political system and its mechanisms in order to betray Marxism, socialism and the fundamental interests of the vast majority of the people. Here are to be found the political roots and direct cause of the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe.” [54]
 
At the core of the differences in reforms between China and the USSR, and of the Soviet degeneration going back to Khrushchev, is the lack of awareness of the fundamental distinction between economic and political capital drawn out by Mao. In his 1957 speech given to the Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committee, Mao would say that by having bought over the capitalist, the revolution has “deprived them of their political capital.”[55] Here is a very important distinction between political and economic capital. Mao would say that “we must deprive them of every bit of their political capital and continue to do so until not one jot is left to them.”[56] The development of capital, controlled under the people’s democratic dictatorship, “serves the purpose” of developing the productive forces and “of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism.”[57] As Domenico Losurdo has eloquently noted,
 
It is, therefore, a matter of distinguishing between the economic expropriation and the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Only the latter should be carried out to the end, while the former, if not contained within clear limits, risks undermining the development of the productive forces. Unlike ‘political capital,’ the bourgeoisie’s economic capital should not be subject to total expropriation, at least as long as it serves the development of the national economy and thus, indirectly, the cause of socialism.[58]
 
Whereas the leadership of the CPSU betrayed “socialism, the party and the people” and put capital in the driver’s seat, the CPC used (and uses) capital to enhance and develop socialism, the party, and the people.[59] Reform and Opening Up has not undone the expropriation of political capital from the capitalists. Regardless of how developed capital has become in China, it has been restricted from political capital. In China, political capital is monopolized in the hands of the Party and the people. It is a people’s democratic dictatorship which uses capital to serve its needs, not the other way around. By sustaining the dictatorship of the proletariat (people’s democratic dictatorship), China has not only secured itself from the crumbling fate of the USSR, but has been able to develop into the global beacon of socialism leading the modern world against US/NATO unipolar hegemony.

This distinction was well understood by Deng, who argued that “if China allowed bourgeois liberalization, there would inevitably be turmoil … we would accomplish nothing, and our principles, policies, line and three-stage development strategy would all be doomed to failure.”[60] All throughout Reform and Opening Up, even in the most difficult of times (e.g., the ‘Wild 90s’) the four cardinal principles have been upheld:  1) We must keep to the socialist road; 2) We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party; 4) We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.[61]

Reform and Opening Up developed as a necessary phase in the Chinese revolutionary process, wherein an overly centralized economy, combined with imperialist-forced isolation from the world, stifled development and necessitated reforms which would allow China to develop its productive forces, absorb the developments taking place in science and technology from the West, and ultimately, protect its revolution. Far from being a ‘betrayal of socialism,’ as the Western Marxist holds, Reform and Opening Up saved socialism. Not just in China, but – as China’s current geopolitical role makes clear – in the world.
 
What Western Marxists Fail to Understand Thanks to the Purity Fetish 

At the height of the carnage of the first imperialist World War, Karl Kautsky, the representative of social democracy and the Second International, would sophistically blabber about how the present war was not “purely imperialist” because, in part, it contained “national” aspirations from the working masses, especially those in Serbia. By emphasizing the lack of a “pure imperialism,” and by seeing the Serbian national bourgeois struggle in a reified manner, isolated from the context of the imperialist war, Kautsky was setting the grounds for his social chauvinist and right opportunist support for the war. Lenin would magnificently reply to this by saying that,
 
In the present war the national element is represented only by Serbia’s war against Austria. It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, ‘the masses of the people,’ a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a ‘continuation.’ If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie as this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war.

However, Marxist dialectics, as the last word in the scientific-evolutionary method, excludes any isolated examination of an object, i.e., one that is one-sided and monstrously distorted.[62]
 
The absence of dialectical thinking in Kautsky is apparent in his reified assessment of the Serbian national struggle. Because this national struggle, in his eyes, desecrates the purity of the imperialist war, the ground is set for supporting imperialism under the guise of supporting national liberation. The reality, of course, is that the first imperialist war was a conflict between the great imperialist powers for the division of the world. Far from being a national liberation war, it was a war amongst empires fighting to colonize greater and greater parts of the world. The absence of dialectical thought in Kautsky, embedded within his social chauvinism and right opportunism, leads him to support the imperialist war for reasons completely contrary to what the war actually represented. Enslavement is dressed up by Kautsky’s sophistry in the garbs of emancipation.

By expecting a ‘pure’ imperialism, the ‘impurity’ Kautsky observes opens the door for supporting imperialism. But for a dialectician, to expect purity out of any phenomenon in life is to resign oneself to falsity, to misunderstanding the world. As Lenin would eloquently respond,
 
There are no ‘pure’ phenomena, nor can there be, either in Nature or in society—that is what Marxist dialectics teaches us, for dialectics shows that the very concept of purity indicates a certain narrowness, a one-sidedness of human cognition, which cannot embrace an object in all its totality and complexity. There is no ‘pure’ capitalism in the world, nor can there be; what we always find is admixtures either of feudalism, philistinism, or of something else.[63]
 
Like all phenomena in nature and human thought, every historically constituted mode of production is heterogeneous, that is, it is never purely one – the dominant – mode of production, but always contains auxiliary forms of production inherited from the past and transformed in light of the new conditions. This is a position very clear in Marx’s writings, which holds not only true for the mode of production (i.e., the economic base), but also for the juridical, philosophical, and political superstructures. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “in all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others.”[64] Marx also observes this at play in the difference interest bearing capital in capitalism has with usurer’s capital in pre-capitalist production:
 
What distinguishes interest-bearing capital – in so far as it is an essential element of the capitalist mode of production – from usurer's capital is by no means the nature or character of this capital itself. It is merely the altered conditions under which it operates, and consequently also the totally transformed character of the borrower who confronts the money-lender.[65]
 
A similar activity, once it is embedded in a different, more developed social totality, functions in accordance with the new totality of social relations it is in. This is nothing new, it is simply a law of dialectics, and hence, of the movement and interconnection of all things. This law is called the negation of the negation (or sublation, and in German, aufhebung), and it describes the processes wherein the old is simultaneously canceled and preserved while being elevated into something new. Usurer’s capital, for instance, is the universal which is reconcretized in a sublated form as interest bearing capital in the particular, i.e., in the capitalist mode of production. Without a proper understanding of dialectics, in other words, without a concrete understanding of the world, the important differences created by a change in context is obscured and treated one-sidedly.

Whereas Kautsky would use the ‘impurity’ of imperialism to support it, today’s Western Marxists use the ‘impurity’ of socialism in China to condemn it. China’s economy is not purely dominated by public ownership and distribution is not purely controlled by state central planning; private ownership plays an auxiliary role and state central planning is dialectically enmeshed with the socialist market economy. These ‘impurities’ are used by the Western Marxist to condemn China for not being actually socialist, i.e., not living up to their purity fetish mediated idea of what socialism entails. In both cases, the expectation of purity is fundamental for positions which ultimately side with imperialism. In other words, in both cases the purity fetish is a fundamental ideological component for ‘Marxists’ turning their backs on emancipatory movements in the global south and siding with the imperialist core.

Holding purity as the standard in judgment, as we learn from Lenin and Marx, is fundamentally mistaken – it divorces one from truth and often, thanks to a one-sided and topsy-turvy interpretation of world affairs, leads one to side with the exploiters against the exploited. The Western Marxists, genealogically rooted in the eclecticism, right opportunism, and purity fetish thought of the Second International, make the same (and worse) mistakes in their assessments of China today. In prominent thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, David Harvey, Maurice Meisner and many others, post-’78 China is described through a dualist paradigm which reduces its economy to being ‘capitalist’ (because of the auxiliary role of private ownership and the market) and its state to being ‘authoritarian’ (because of the failure to live up to the standard of ‘democracy’ in the liberal West). Out of this framework a plethora of terminological conjunctures, such as  capitalist socialism, bureaucratic capitalism, neoliberalism “with Chinese characteristics,” and state capitalism, have arisen to re-classify and condemn China.[66] Bureaucratic capitalism and state capitalism, of course, are not new – these have a long history of being used by Trotskyites and others in the compatible left to condemn the USSR.

What is common to all of these descriptions is a failure of dialectical thought – an inability to observe China’s construction of socialism as an ongoing process which will contain – as all things in the world do – internal contradictions which drive its development. In short, what is common in these descriptions (and others) is the purity fetish outlook with which China is examined. If their pure standard of what a socialist economy is supposed to be (absolutely everything under public ownership and central planning – something not even the Soviet Union had) is not met, and if the paradigm of liberal democracy is rejected in favor of a democratic people’s dictatorship, then reality must be condemned for the sake of the pure ideal; that is, China must not actually be socialist because it does not measure up to my Western Marxist standards and biases. Contrary to this purity fetish outlook, “a dialectical approach to modes of production,” would see that “different modes of production … can be included within a dominant mode that is far from being uniform or global.”[67]

The purity fetish ‘Marxists’ must remember what Engels said of definitions.
 
From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten.[68]
 
In the purity fetish Marxists, Marxism, that is, scientific socialism, loses its scientific character. Things are no longer seen in their movement and interconnections, but treated abstractly and in a reified manner. Socialism becomes a rigid definition, with a series of characteristics reality must meet in order to be labeled as ‘socialist.’ Scientific socialism is killed with the purity fetish – for socialism is not, as Marx and Engels wrote, “a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” socialism is instead “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”[69] For Marx and Engels, as dialectical materialists, primacy was in the real movement of society, not in the abstract ideal (which is, nonetheless, not rejected as a goal to strive towards).
 
Socialist Markets? 

In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of Logic’ he states that,
 
It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![70]
 
The central message in Lenin’s (rather audacious) statement is this: without a proper understanding of dialectics, Marxism is bound to be misunderstood. A century later and still, Western Marxists struggle to understand Marx, and hence, to understand the world through the Marxist worldview. This is lucidly seen in their treatment of China’s usage of markets, where they dogmatically accept Ludwig von Mises’ stale binary which states  – “the alternative is still either Socialism or a market economy.”[71]
​
As Roland Boer highlights, already in Capital Vol 3 (specifically chapter 36 on “Pre-Capitalist Relations”) Marx shows how markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Were the markets in each of these historical periods the same? Were they commensurable to how markets exist under capitalism? No. As Roland Boer states in his book Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, “market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.”[72] As Boer points out, Chinese scholars, following the analysis of Marx’s Capital Vol 3, understand that “market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies.”[73] If markets, then, predate the capitalist mode of production, why would a socialist mode of production not be able to utilize them?

The essential components of a market economy must be understood in the larger socio-economic relations in which they are embedded. While the forms in which market economies show up in Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages appear as the historical preconditions for the capitalist mode of production, these cannot be called ‘capitalist.’ In so far as these market economies existed outside of the capitalist mode of production, they can be ‘de-linked,’ from capitalism – and hence, their potential to be used in a socialist mode of production (especially one in its lowest stages) is completely possible. The problem is that the Western Marxist’s purity fetish considers, as Von Mises did, capitalism to be synonymous with ‘markets,’ and socialism to be synonymous with ‘planning.’ In reality, the institutional form of markets exists usually along with the institutional form of planning within capitalism itself – especially in its monopoly stage. To take this institutional form and reduce it to being a uniquely capitalist phenomenon is to participate in what Roland Boer and Chinese Marxists have called economics imperialism.[74]

As Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski argue in The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, “Walmart is a prime example” of “centrally planned enterprises” whose scale allows them to function as “centrally planned economies.”[75] In fact, “almost all countries are mixed economies that include various combinations of markets and planning.”[76] Does this mean that Walmart is socialist? Only a fool would say yes. What it does show is that both planning and market institutional forms are conditioned by the socio-economic systems they are embedded in. Walmart’s planned economy is planned by capitalists to secure profits for the owners and shareholders of the enterprise. China’s socialist market economy is embedded within a larger socialist socio-economic system which conditions the market towards the common good, not just towards the profits of a few.

Chinese Marxism, following upon the tradition of Eastern European socialism (Lenin’s New Economic Policy, Yugoslavia’s socialist market economy, etc.), and the CPC’s tradition of mixed ownership and combined market and planning institutional forms (which can be traced back from the liberated areas in the 1920s to the late 1940s), was able to ‘de-link’ markets from capitalism and utilize them as a method (fangfa) and means (shouduan) to serve (fuwu) the ends of socialism, that is, to liberate the forces of production and guarantee collective flourishing.[77] If the last four decades – wherein China has drastically raised its population’s living standards and lifted 800 million people out of poverty – has taught us anything, it is that China’s usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works.

Considering the plethora of advances China has been able to make for its population and the global movement for socialism, why have Western Marxist continuously insisted that China’s market reforms are a betrayal of socialism and a deviation down the ‘capitalist road’? Unlike some of the other Western misunderstandings of China, this one isn’t merely a case of yixi jiezhong, of “using Western frameworks or categories to understand China,”[78] for, if the dialectical framework and categories the Marxist tradition inherits from Hegel were properly applied, there would be no misunderstanding at all. Instead, it is precisely the absence of this dialectical framework which leads to the categorical mistakes.

In both Hegel and in the dialectical materialist tradition, universals are understood to be empty if not concretized through the particular. To separate the role the particular plays for the realization of the universal is to treat the universal abstractly – to disconnect it from the developments and interconnections which allow it to be actual. Since markets have existed throughout various modes of production, within the dialectic of universal and particular, markets stand as the universal term. There is no such thing as a ‘market in general,’ markets necessarily exist through a determinate – historically conditioned – form. The form the market takes is determined by the mode of production the market exists in. As an institutional form within the ‘moment of exchange,’ markets are determined by – and hence, reciprocally influence – the mode of production.

Markets, Boer argues, as a “specific building block or component of a larger system” are a “universal institutional form” (tizhi), which can only be brought into concrete existence via a particular socio-economic system (zhidu).[79] Since the particular zhidu through which the universal institutional form of a market comes into existence is a “basic socialist system” (shehuizhuyi jiben zhidu), the fundamental nature of how the tizhi functions will be different to how that tizhi functioned under the particular zhidu of slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. As Huang Nansen said, “there is no market economy institutional form that is independent of the basic economic system of society.”[80]

As was the case with the planned institutional form in the first few decades of the revolution, the market institutional form has been able to play its part in liberating the productive forces and drastically raising the living standards of the Chinese people. However, because 1) China took this creative leap of grounding the market institutional form in socialism, and because 2) Western Marxists retain an anti-dialectical purity fetish for the planned institutional form, 3) the usage of markets in China is taken as a desecration of their Western Marxist pseudo-Platonic socialist ideal. It is ultimately a categorical mistake to see the usage of markets as ‘taking the capitalist road’ or as a ‘betrayal of the revolution.’ It is, in essence, a bemusing of the universal for the particular, of the institutional form for the socio-economic system. As Boer asserts, “to confuse a market economy with a capitalist system entails a confusion between commonality and particularity.”[81]
 
The Importance of Supporting China 

Today China stands as the main global force countering US/NATO led imperialism. Its rise signifies much more than the end of US unipolarity – it marks the end of the Columbian era of European global dominance that began in 1492. Today, the rise of China goes hand-in-hand with the rise of Africa, Latin-America, and other Asiatic civilizations. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and other programs, China’s development has mutually developed its international trading partners – especially those in the global South. Africa, a continent with a plethora of resources and potential, has been pillaged by the West for five centuries. It has been kept poor while its resources and people’s labor made the West rich. China’s rise and win-win relations with Africa has, on the contrary, helped develop African infrastructure and elevate the living standards of the African peoples.[82] While Western pundits have a frenzy over the potential of Africa taking the Chinese route, more and more African leaders are starting to see China not only as a trading partner and ally, but as a model which can help them develop and break their enslavement to Western imperialism.[83] The same is true with Latin America, the Middle-East, and the other parts of the world which European leaders see as ‘the jungle.’[84]

The World Bank reports that
 
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below US $1.90 per day—the international poverty line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty—has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has accounted for almost 75 percent of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. In 2021, China declared that it has eradicated extreme poverty according to the national poverty threshold, lifting 770 million people out of poverty since 1978, and that it has built a ‘moderately prosperous society in all respects.’[85]
 
China is emerging in every category imaginable as the forefront civilization advancing humanity into a new historical stage. It has “the longest and most extensively used high-speed rail (HSR) network in the world;” it has developed, with maglev technology, the fastest train in the world; it has been, over the last 40 years, by far the fastest growing economy in the world – doing so at a speed never before seen in world-history (defying Western economist’s decades-long repeated predictions of slowdowns and collapses); in building its ecological civilization, it has indubitably been the vanguard in the fight against climate change; it has pushed back, over the last few years, against US led imperialist attacks on Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, Russia, Iran, and others; in short, it has developed as the beacon of freedom, socialism, and progress for the new world we are entering into.[86]
​
Is it perfect? No. This is something they publicly recognize. As proficient dialecticians in governance – which they call ‘contradiction analysis’ over there – they understand that such perfection – such purity – is impossible. There are always contradictions to be resolved, and which, when overcome, give way to new contradictions. This is a basic law of the movement in all things in the world. But, it cannot be denied that while the American civilization train has been stopped in its tracks for decades, experiencing degeneration as the only form of change – the Chinese civilization train races towards the future at an unprecedented speed. It represents not only the advance of China and socialism – but of humanity at large. Any rational human being – let alone one who claims to adhere to Marxism – should see clearly why this is a project we must protect from the imperialist claws that seek to destroy it; the same claws that exploit and oppress us at home.

While the US encircles China with military bases and new imperialist alliances like AUKUS; while its Sinophobic politicians and media fabricate atrocity propaganda – from the ‘Chinavirus’ to ‘Uyghur Genocide’ and ‘Chinese Spy Balloons’ – in order to manufacture consent for a war with China which they predict taking place by 2025; it becomes the utmost duty of American socialists and communists to defend China, to expose the atrocity propaganda as just that –  propaganda – designed to, as Michael Parenti wrote, “invent another reality.”[87]

The defense of China from imperialist attacks is not a task which is disconnected from the struggles of the working class in the imperial core. On the contrary, there are a few reasons why both of these struggles should be seen as interrelated: 1) it is the tax dollars of American working people which are being used to fight wars abroad, while back at the ranch the American people’s lives keep getting worse; 2) sooner or later, it will be American workers which will be sent out to fight in wars to defend a hegemonic order that keeps them poor, and systematically sends them out to die, lose limbs, and acquire PTSD fighting against people whom they have more in common with than those who sent them to war; 3) China’s success is not just China’s, it is the success of socialism – and this success must be used to debunk the American myth that ‘socialism has always failed,’ and to show our working class what socialism can achieve, even while under the boot of imperialist hybrid warfare.

If American socialists genuinely want to bring the working masses of their nation to power, they must be fierce anti-imperialists and ardent defenders of China. Overcoming the purity fetish outlook, which functions as the ideological soil these erroneous views and positions grow out of, is an absolute precondition for this struggle.

​
Notes


[1] See, for instance: David Palumbo-Liu, “The Ongoing Persecution of China’s Uyghurs,” Jacobin (June 2019): https://jacobin.com/2019/06/china-uyghur-persecution-concentration-camps ; Ryan Zickgraf, “A Mask Off Moment for the Left,” Sublation Media (May 2022): https://www.sublationmag.com/post/a-mask-off-moment-for-the-left ; Ho Fung-Hong, “The US-China Rivalry Is About Capitalist Competition,” Jacobin (July 2020): https://jacobin.com/2020/07/us-china-competition-capitalism-rivalry ; Vincent Kolo, “Biden and Xi escalate U.S.-China conflict,” Socialist Alternative (May 2022): https://www.socialistalternative.org/2021/05/08/biden-and-xi-escalate-us-china-conflict/

[2] In “John Ross: from Trotskyism to power-worship” from the Trotskyite website Workers Liberty, economist John Ross and historian Carlos Martinez are smeared as ‘power-worshippers’ and admirers of authoritarianism for their support of China: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2021-06-15/john-ross-trotskyism-power-worship

[3] Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York: The New Press, 2008).

[4] Roland Boer, “We need to talk more about China’s socialist democracy,” Friends of Socialist China (September 2021): https://socialistchina.org/2021/09/26/roland-boer-we-need-to-talk-more-about-chinas-socialist-democracy/

[5] John Ross, “Democracy and policies in China far greater than the west,” China Daily (December 2021): https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202112/09/WS61b169e6a310cdd39bc7a4f6.html

[6] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 249.

[7]Nectar Gan and Steve George, “China claims its authoritarian one-party system is a democracy – and one that works better than the US,” CNN (December 2021): https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/08/china/china-us-democracy-summit-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

[8] Amin, Only People Make Their Own History, 110.

[9] Yi Wen, “China's Rapid Rise: From Backward Agrarian Society to Industrial Powerhouse in Just 35 Years,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (April 11, 2016): https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/april-2016/chinas-rapid-rise-from-backward-agrarian-society-to-industrial-powerhouse-in-just-35-years#authorbox

[10] Justin Lifu Yin, Demystifying the Chinese Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6.

[11] Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles (1979),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/uphold-the-four-cardinal-principles/

[12] Carlos Martinez, No Great Wall: On the Continuities of the Chinese Revolution (Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press), 25.

[13] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I., (London: Penguin, 1982), 739.

[14] Marx, Capital Vol I., 635.

[15] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 21.

[16] Marx, Capital Vol. I., 929.

[17] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Revolutionary Classics, 1993), 109.

[18] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 24, 87.

[19] William Morris, “As to Bribing Excellence,” William Morris Archive: http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/items/show/2322. 

[20] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 109.

[21] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 110.

[22] Capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (London: Penguin, 1991), 949. For more see John Bellamy Foster’s work, especially Marx’s Capital and The Return of Nature, and Ian Agnus’s work, especially Facing the Anthropocene and The War against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism.

[23] Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, 958-9.

[24] “CONSTITUTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA (Revised and adopted at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 22, 2022),” Qiushi (October 2022): http://en.qstheory.cn/2022-10/27/c_824864.htm 8.

[25] “Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” 10.

[26] John Bellamy Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?,” Monthly Review (October 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/10/01/why-is-the-great-project-of-ecological-civilization-specific-to-china/

[27] Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?”

[28] “Resolution on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,” Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm

[29] Deng Xiaoping, “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth From Facts and Unite As One In Looking to the Future (1978),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/emancipate-the-mind-seek-truth-from-facts-and-unite-as-one-in-looking-to-the-future/

[30] Mao Tse-Tung, “Oppose Book Worship (1930),” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung  Vol. 6 (India: Kranti Publications, 1990).

[31] Xiaoping, “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth From Facts and Unite As One In Looking to the Future.”

[32] Zhou Enlai, “Report on the Work of the Government (1975),” Zhou Enlai Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zhou-enlai/1975/01/13.htm

[33] Martinez, No Great Wall, 33.

[34] Cheng Enfu and Jun Zhang, “Five Hundred Years of World Socialism and Its Prospect: Interview with Professor Enfu Cheng,” International Critical Thought 11(1) (2021): https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.1895508 , 17.

[35] Samir Amin, Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the prospects for a Multipolar World (UK: Zed Books, 2013), 23.

[36] Hu Angang, China in 2020: A New Type of Superpower (US: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), 27.

[37] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (July 2021): https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/

[38] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.”

[39] Martinez, No Great Wall, 32.

[40] John Ross, China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practice (New York: Praxis Press, 2021), 17.

[41] Ross, China’s Great Road, 17.

[42] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.”

[43] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.”

[44] Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” International Critical Thought 7(1) (2017), 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2017.1287585

[45] Martinez, No Great Wall, 46.

[46] See Carlos Martinez’s chapter “Will China Suffer the Same Fate as the Soviet Union?” in No Great Wall.

[47] Martinez, No Great Wall, 47.

[48] Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts From Talks Given In Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai (1992),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/excerpts-from-talks-given-in-wuchang-shenzhen-zhuhai-and-shanghai/

[49] Martinez, No Great Wall, 48.

[50] Arthur R. Kroeber, China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016,), 225.

[51] Xi Jinping, The Governance of China Vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2014), 128-130.

[52] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 46.

[53] Martinez, No Great Wall, 49.

[54] Cheng Enfu and Liu Zixu, “The Historical Contribution of the October Revolution to the Economic and Social Development of the Soviet Union—Analysis of the Soviet Economic Model and the Causes of Its Dramatic End,” International Critical Thought 7(3) (2017): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2017.1355143 , 304- 306. For more on Cheng Enfu’s views on the subject of the Soviet collapse see: Cheng Enfu and Jun Zhang, “Five Hundred Years of World Socialism and Its Prospect: Interview with Professor Enfu Cheng,” International Critical Thought 11(1) (2021): https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.1895508

[55] Mao Tse-Tung, “Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committees,” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 357.

[56] Mao, Selected Works Vol. 5, 357.

[57] Mao, Selected Works Vol. 5, 357.

[58] Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism?, 18-19.

[59] Enfu and Zixu, “The Historical Contribution of the October Revolution,” 306.

[60] Deng Xiaoping, “We Must Adhere To Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism (1989),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/we-must-adhere-to-socialism-and-prevent-peaceful-evolution-towards-capitalism/

[61] Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold Four Cardinal Principals (1979),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/uphold-the-four-cardinal-principles/

[62] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 21, 235.

[63] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 21., 236.

[64] Marx, Grundrisse, 106-107.

[65] Marx, Capital Vol. III, 600

[66] For a more detailed account, see Roland Boer “Not Some Other Ism.”

[67] Boer, “Not Some Other Ism,” 9.

[68] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 81.

[69] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 5, 49.

[70] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 180.

[71] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 142.

[72] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 119.

[73] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 119. It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, (New York: Beacon Press, 1957). 269-277.

[74] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 120.

[75] Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart (London: Verso Books, 2019), 16.

[76] Phillips and Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, 14.

[77] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 118.

[78] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 13.

[79] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 122-3.

[80] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.

[81] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 124.

[82]  Ehizuelen Michael M.O., “China Helps Africa Realize its Potential,” China Daily  (July 2022): https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202208/19/WS62fec07da310fd2b29e730f0.html

[83] Wade Shepard, “Why China’s Development Model Won’t Work In Africa,” Forbes (October 2019): https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2019/10/31/why-chinas-development-model-wont-work-in-africa/?sh=3df527057afd

[84] Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief, said in October 2022 that "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden." https://www.opindia.com/2022/10/eu-foreign-policy-chief-says-europe-is-a-garden-rest-all-is-a-jungle/#:~:text=On%2013th%20October%202022%2C%20European%20Union%E2%80%99s%20foreign%20policy,go%20to%20the%20jungle%20to%20protect%20the%20garden.

[85] “Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China,” World Bank (2022) https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/37727/9781464818776.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y xiii

[86] Vivi, “China High-Speed Rail Network,” China Travel (March 2022): https://www.chinatravel.com/china-trains/china-high-speed-rail-network#:~:text=China%20has%20the%20longest%20and%20most%20extensively%20used,two-thirds%20of%20the%20world%27s%20total%20high-speed%20railway%20networks. ; Theo Wayt, “China unveils 373-mph ‘levitating’ train, fastest ground vehicle in the world,” NY Post (July 2021): https://nypost.com/2021/07/20/china-unveils-373-mph-levitating-train-fastest-in-the-world/ ; “Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China,” World Bank 17 ; Carlos Martinez, “China is building an ecological civilization,” Friends of Socialist China (November 2022): https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/23/china-is-building-an-ecological-civilisation/

[87] Courtney Kube and Mosheh Gains, “Air Force general predicts war with China in 2025, tells officers to prep by firing 'a clip' at a target, and 'aim for the head,'” NBC News (January 2023):  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-force-general-predicts-war-china-2025-memo-rcna67967   Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media (New York: St. Martens Press, 1986), 208.