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11/10/2021 U.S. attacks on Ortega fail to convince Nicaraguan voters. By: Christian GuevaraRead Now A motorcyclist rides past a mural of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, left, and revolutionary hero Cesar Augusto Sandino during general elections in Managua, Nicaragua, Sunday, Nov. 7, 2021. | Andres Nunes / AP People’s World correspondent Christian Guevara is on the scene in Nicaragua to observe the country’s general election with a delegation of the Friends of the ATC, a rural workers’ association in Nicaragua that was central to the land reform policy of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 to distribute land to the peasants. It represents 50,000 workers from the majority of Nicaragua’s 15 departments and organizes primarily in farmer’s unions (coffee, tobacco, banana, sugarcane, and palm). MANAGUA—The United States is waging economic war against Nicaragua and the overwhelmingly popular Sandinista government here as the people of the country head to the polls. Just last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the RENACER Act, a slew of additional deadly sanctions, with huge bipartisan support. The U.S. also continues to make a plethora of attacks on President Daniel Ortega, who is running for a fourth term in office. Washington claims Ortega is a drug trafficker and a dictator, that he imprisoned his political opposition, and even that he has killed his own citizens. The U.S. purports to be a bastion of “freedom” and “democracy,” as a model for Nicaragua, but the opinions of the Nicaraguan people I’ve met the past week differ sharply. Comparing the U.S.’ approach to other countries in the region suggests some clear inconsistencies in the arguments being used to demonize Nicaragua’s leaders and justify the economic warfare that is at the heart of current U.S. policy toward its people. U.S. relations with the Honduran government and its president, Juan Orlando Hernández, are instructive. Following the 2009 U.S.-backed coup against progressive Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, the U.S. proudly supported a succession of right-wing governments there and turned a blind eye to blatant corruption. The brother of Hernández is currently serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a United States prison for trafficking cocaine. The connections between the current president and his drug-trafficking brother are widely known in Honduras, yet the U.S. State Department has never suggested reprimanding the narco-president, much less his country, for his blatant crimes. This is because Hernández is closely aligned with the U.S. economic and political establishment and has no qualms about continuing to allow his people to be exploited by U.S. multinational corporations and eagerly pursues devastating neoliberal policy. The Nicaragua-Honduras comparison is similar to that between Venezuela and its neighbor, Colombia. Despite ruling over a country that produces 75% of the world’s supply of cocaine, the Colombian state receives absolutely zero accusations of criminal activity from the U.S. government. Nor does it earn condemnation for the violent suppression of mass anti-government protests and the mass killing of protesters from military gunship helicopters. This is, again, because the Colombian neoliberal government is aligned with U.S. economic interests. The reason for mentioning these examples—which are widely repeated in the streets of Managua—is not to point fingers and ignore the accusations, but to illustrate the view here that U.S. accusations are hypocritical and ludicrous. The motivation behind the unsubstantiated accusations against their country by Washington is quite obvious to Nicaraguans. President Daniel Ortega does not fall in line with U.S. economic interests—which would still prefer to see Nicaragua be a neo-colony where U.S. companies can exploit low-wage workers and destroy the environment for profit. The U.S. State Department and mainstream corporate media have been in a frenzy over the past year, blowing up accusations of “political prisoners” in Nicaragua—accusations that local Nicaraguans find laughable. The most famous of these “political prisoners” is Cristiana Chamorro, an extravagantly wealthy Nicaraguan oligarch and owner of right-wing news outlet La Prensa. Chamorro has a long history with Ortega’s party, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation Front (FSLN). During the Contra War of the late 1970s and into the ’80s, La Prensa was funded by the CIA and used as a tool for the U.S. government to spread propaganda to undermine Ortega when he was president then. Before that, the U.S. also supported and funded dictator Anastasio Somoza’s terrorist war on the Nicaraguans that killed over 80,000 people. Nowadays, La Prensa is not funded by the CIA, as far as is known. It is, however, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. front group created to destabilize anti-imperialist governments and impose the U.S.’ political will on poor countries. Despite the ridiculous lies of Nicaraguan business and corporate media, Chamorro is not imprisoned for being an “opposition candidate.” Interestingly, she was never even officially running for president—even U.S. news outlets have used the phrase “pre-candidate” to describe her “campaign.” Chamorro’s problems with the legal system long pre-date the current election, however. She was caught laundering money from Nicaraguan non-profits and using the funds (as well as U.S. money) to attempt a coup in 2018 that led to the deaths of over 300 people, the majority of whom were Sandinista supporters. These details seem to have been missed by the U.S. State Department and “accredited” news outlets. As for the accusation that Ortega is a dictator, the charge is a common one made against any leader that doesn’t fall in line with U.S. hegemony, especially those who enjoy mass support from their own people. Despite having the overwhelming support of the Nicaraguan people (estimated to be 60-70% in pre-election polls), Ortega is accused of “cracking down” on the very same democratic institutions that were established by the FSLN in 1984. For the U.S., it may very well seem impossible for a leader to have the kind of support Ortega has in Nicaragua. But just maybe he has that support because he has followed through with his political promises and drastically improved the lives of Nicaraguans, with policies like:
These are the crimes of the FSLN. They are also among the reasons why the United States is trying to destroy the Nicaraguan government by making its people suffer through sanctions. But the FSLN has been through this kind of economic war before, and for years it’s been preparing alternatives for its citizens to live without the need for U.S. trade. Managua campesino, Victorio Potosme, provided the general view among farmers and people here: “No country benefits from sanctions, but despite all the sanctions and struggles, our government has been able to work through it. We have lived for many years under sanctions. During the times of the war, we lived during extremely harsh sanctions. Governments should not get involved in the issues of other countries. We as farmers in Nicaragua don’t get involved in the farmers’ issues in the U.S. We receive guests in Nicaragua with no discrimination. We welcome Americans and their politicians to our country. They can come and visit and do as they please. That is because we do have freedom, not the lie of liberal freedom. But they do not treat us with the same respect. American leaders want the freedom to come to our country, rob our people, and exploit us. That is the “freedom” American politicians want. Our spirit is strong. Stronger than sanctions. We are not worried about sanctions. We will continue to improve, sanctions or no sanctions.” AuthorChristian Guevara is an active member of the D.C. Metro Communist Party USA, Claudia Jones School for Political Education, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). This article was produced by People's World. Archives November 2021 
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11/10/2021 Book Review: The Twilight of American Culture- Morris Berman. Reviewed By: Thomas RigginsRead Now Morris Berman is recognized as a major still active left (bourgeois) American culture critic. He is a prolific author of many books but they are, I fear, very similar to the style of thinking found in The Twilight of American Culture. This “Blast from the Past” is still contemporary, US capitalism is still an existential threat, and the solutions such as as they are in this book, are still typical of those writers who fail to factor in the necessity for revolutionary Marxist approaches According to the dust jacket this book is "brilliant", has "uncommon insight," is "trenchant" and in the words of one writer the author is "one of the most creative and original thinkers of our time." Having read the book, I can only shudder to think this collection of puerile nonsense and ignorant rambling could have been taken seriously by any publisher. That it was published at all is a sure sign that we are indeed in the twilight of our culture. In this book Berman proposes to diagnose what is wrong with our culture (it is too commercial, people only care about money, and big corporations control everything) and to propose a solution by which our cultural heritage can be restored (intellectuals should become monks, stay out of mass movements to avoid "groupthink," and individually try to preserve cultural values so that in one or two hundred years when our current civilization collapses the monkish works of preservation will emerge back into the open). It seems that all his ideas and inspiration come from reading science fiction. He is especially inspired by Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day. I can’t fault Berman’s critique of modern American life. It has been taken over by the large corporations, it is a cultural wasteland in which the poor get poorer and the rich richer (there are no "workers" in Berman’s critique--just "poor" and "rich" and a shrinking middle class) but his historical analysis and solutions are so off the wall as to be comical--as is his knowledge of Marxism. He confuses Marx’s views of history with Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and thinks Lenin had no ideas on how to replace capitalism. He is fond of using examples from Roman history to make comparisons with the US but doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge of the ancient world. He mistakenly thinks classical civilization was deliberately preserved in the monasteries of the middle ages without realizing that the monks also destroyed the classics, washing them off parchments so that Bible stories and lives of the saints could be written over them. In Berman’s own words--the current crises in American culture "began in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, expanded during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and finally climaxed in our own times." This crisis is "corporate hegemony" which will break down "forty or fifty years down the road as of this writing" [good--just in time for the bicentennial of the Communist Manifesto--t.r., reviewer’s comments in brackets]. Berman informs us that "This type of breakdown, which is a recurrent historical phenomenon, is a long-range one [I should think so--we have been waiting since "the end of the Middle Ages"] and internal to the system." That is the extent of the social analysis and it’s a lot shorter than having to read Das Kapital. Berman’s ignorance of his subject matter is so extreme as to defy belief. Here are some samples: "Hegel...saw history as a kind of spiritual journey [New Agers listen up!] in which Geist ("spirit") moved around the globe, generating the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Florence, and sowing the seeds of decay when it subsequently departed." Spirit for Hegel is not a globe-trotting phenomenon sowing seeds of decay--it's a progressive activity that advances, it doesn’t decay, and it's the German Reformation not the Renaissance in which Hegel is particularly interested. Later on he informs us that the "dialectics" of Aristotle and Hegel have much in common--seemingly unaware that Hegel’s dialectical logic is based on the opposite assumptions from those of Aristotle. Berman on Marx: "’Men make their own history,’ he [Marx] wrote, ‘but they do not make it just as they please....’"[Marx means that they are constrained by historical circumstance]. But Berman thinks that Marx is Adam Smith because he, Berman, writes: "They each have individual intentions, he [Marx] says, but the final outcome is something that no particular person expected or planned." The individual calculus is perfectly Smithian--the "invisible hand" and has nothing to do with the class based analysis undertaken by Marx. Berman on Lenin [I note that Lenin is not listed in the index, but Jay Leno is]: "What is to be done?" Berman is referring to the fact that capitalists are responsible for so much misery and environmental destruction. "Lenin’s answer to this question was to kill these jokers in tailored suits who are literally murdering our communities. As they build financial capital, they destroy cultural capital, human capital--the true assets of a nation [India thus has more assets than the US]. The problem--since the dilemma is structural--is that there are plenty of other such entrepreneurs in the wings, ready to replace them." [I can hear Lenin saying "Doh! Why didn’t I think of that?"] "No," says Berman, "something much more long-range is needed at this point." So Berman thinks Lenin had no other plans than just killing bad guys! In another place Berman makes reference to the "fetishism of commodities" another idea from Marx--only Berman thinks it means a desire to accumulate goodies in a shopping mall thus completely missing Marx’s meaning, viz. that the commodity economy created by humans is seen as a natural force to which humans are subject. All this only shows that Berman hasn’t read or hasn’t understood Hegel [he might be forgiven this] or Marx or Lenin. What is the root cause of the recent wars waged by US Imperialism [not Berman’s term]? The answer is cultural "anomie"--"the culture no longer believes in itself, so it typically undertakes phony or misguided wars (Vietnam, or the Gulf War [forget oil] of 1991, for example)...." This is certainly "trenchant." [The wars of the last twenty years as well as MAGA are also all due to misguided cultural anomie it seems.] As for his "monastic option"--forget political struggle or labor unions--Berman thinks our cultural heritage must be saved by special individuals: "Today’s 'monk' is committed to a renewed sense of self, and to the avoidance of groupthink, including anticorporate or anti-consumer culture groupthink.... The more individual the activity is, and the more out of the public eye, the more effective it is likely to be in the long run" [that’s the long run in which we are all dead]. So Berman’s book is a capitulation to the very forces of decay and degeneration that he is ostensibly combating. There is nothing our corporate masters would like better than for the opposition to go into its shell and be individually dedicated to cultural preservation while "globalization" recklessly indulges in "anomie" and wages its mistaken wars. The "groupthink" of the peace movement, civil rights movement or labor movement, to say nothing of the socialist movement, is the last thing it wants to confront. And this may well be why mainstream publishing companies publish books like Berman’s. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives November 2021  11/8/2021 How the Wealthiest Countries Schemed to Avoid Economic Commitments at COP26. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead Now The G20, an exclusive club of mostly wealthy nations, met just before the COP26 in Glasgow and paid little more than lip service to the world’s leading problems, while preserving their own financial dominance. Heads of state from the world’s wealthiest nations gathered for the first time in person since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic at the recent G20 summit meeting in Rome, Italy. The two-day meeting culminated in a grand dinner at the Quirinale Palace, where the evening’s menu featured salmon with dill, pumpkin risotto, sea bass fillets, tomato and celeriac puff pastry, and for dessert, a “delicate” steamed mandarin cream. Guests sat around a large formal dining table in a high-ceilinged palatial room with an impressive crystal chandelier and window dressings of tasseled red drapes. The dinner was the modern-day equivalent of “let them eat cake,” the phrase (inaccurately) attributed to the epitome of frivolous luxury by the ruling class (and the last queen of France before the French Revolution), Marie Antoinette. The leaders of the G20 nations, who had gathered under the banner of “People, Planet, Prosperity,” appear to have disproportionately focused on the third rung of their agenda and limited its scope to the prosperity of elites like them. On the three critical issues of climate change, global corporate taxation, and COVID-19 vaccines, the world’s wealthiest nations looked out for themselves at the expense of the rest of the world. In contrast to the United Nations General Assembly, which represents all the world’s nations, the G20 is a self-selected private club of the top tier of global wealth, only one step below the even-more-exclusive G7 club. Its members are mostly economic powerhouses, with a handful of exceptions of developing nations such as India, China, South Africa, Mexico, and Argentina. Proudly proclaiming that G20 nations “account for more than 80 percent of world GDP” and “75 percent of global trade,” the club sets the rules of global finance. Summit host Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, said the 2021 gathering demonstrated that multilateral decision-making is once more possible, declaring, “We have succeeded, in the sense of keeping our dreams alive,” with no mention of how self-serving the exclusive club really is. Although the 26th meeting of the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) in Glasgow, Scotland, is currently generating more news headlines than this year’s G20 summit, wealthy nations made many of their preliminary decisions on climate change at their club meeting before the global climate gathering. While they came to agreement on a handful of issues, such as cutting off funding to coal plants, and getting to “net-zero” emissions in a few decades, climate advocates slammed the pledges as “the bare minimum.” Draghi admitted, “It’s easy to suggest difficult things. It’s very very difficult to actually execute them.” Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA Network, explained to me in an interview that developing countries are suffering from the fact that “their natural resources were taken during the industrialization period that took place in Europe and the United States in the 1800s and the 1900s, fueling the climate crisis.” Most of these same nations were left out of the recent climate discussions by the G20, as they are too poor to be considered members of the exclusive club. It remains to be seen if these nations will be able to extract greater commitments at the COP26 meeting. LeCompte reflected, “it seems right now that there is a lot of despair among countries in terms of if it’s going to be possible to fulfill” pledges like a $100 billion financing pledge to help poorer nations combat climate change. Indeed, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared on Twitter as the summit ended, “While I welcome the #G20’s recommitment to global solutions, I leave Rome with my hopes unfulfilled.” In addition to their shamefully insufficient climate pledges, G20 leaders congratulated themselves on tackling the issue of corporate tax evasion. The grand agreement they came to was a minimum 15 percent tax rate for wealthy companies. Hailed as a historic deal, the goal was to ensure reliable tax revenues from big corporations that chase tax havens offering lucrative terms. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared that the agreement would “end the damaging race to the bottom on corporate taxation.” LeCompte commented that the 15 percent minimum rate was “certainly progress but falls short of the more ambitious calls of the Biden administration earlier on of 27-28 percent.” And, shockingly, it exempts digital technology corporations largely based in the U.S., like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, from being subject to this bare-bones rate. The U.S. essentially lobbied the G20 on behalf of these major companies to carve out the loophole. LeCompte explained that “this agreement really only supports and helps the wealthy countries.” While the United States would raise an additional $60 billion in revenues if the agreement is actually adopted, developing nations would not see much of an increase in revenues and are particularly impacted by the tax exemptions for digital technology companies. Even the Wall Street Journal admitted that the G20 tax deal “makes rich countries big winners.” The G20 nations are also disproportionate beneficiaries of COVID-19 vaccine technology. Draghi opened the summit’s proceedings by acknowledging that the world’s wealthiest nations have vaccination rates of about 70 percent while only 3 percent of residents in poor nations have been vaccinated. He called such a gap, “morally unacceptable.” Indeed, LeCompte shared that “the crisis in many developing countries is really horrific,” and that “most countries are experiencing economic loss because of not having access to vaccines.” Ahead of the summit, he expected the G20 to offer a concrete plan for financing and distributing vaccines to the world’s poorest nations. And yet, at the summit, “they didn’t do that,” said LeCompte. Instead, he said that “they put forward a process in order to do it.” That process was essentially to create a task force, which, according to a statement signed by G20 leaders, is “aimed at enhancing dialogue and global cooperation on issues relating to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” One advocacy group, Global Citizen, dismissed such demonstrations of lip service, saying, “It’s no longer the time for statements of intentions. Now is the time for our leaders to act.” Among the only pandemic-related achievements at the G20 was a deal that the U.S. arranged for the African Union to buy 33 million doses of the Moderna vaccine originally intended for sale to the U.S.—an embarrassingly low bar for success on vaccine equity. While the G20 leaders and their spouses enjoyed their fine dining experience at the culmination of their two-day meeting, it became clear that the summit was little more than an exercise in grand pontifications of multilateralism. Like the erstwhile top echelons of pre-revolutionary French society, the world’s wealthy nations remain out of touch with reality. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives November 2021   Union stewards are expected to wear many hats. But instead of doing all the work yourself, find ways to spread the work around. That builds union strength—and will pay off in the long run. Photo: Christophe Debelmas, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Union stewards are expected to wear many hats: communicator, advocate, shop floor lawyer, negotiator, mediator. Co-workers rely on good stewards to stand up to management, to know the contract, and to help find solutions even when a workplace problem isn’t covered under the collective bargaining agreement. It can be overwhelming to take on all this work by yourself. Why go it alone when you could think like an organizer? This means instead of doing all the work yourself, you find ways to spread the work around. Your goals are:
Organizing is a mindset. Get in the habit of asking yourself this question constantly, whenever you’re thinking about all the union tasks you have to be doing: “Is this an opportunity to get more people involved?” CONSIDER THIS SCENARIOHere’s a scenario we used recently in an online workshop for stewards: Valerie, a co-worker who’s been on the job for a while but never gotten involved in “union stuff,” comes up to you to say that she worked the holiday during the last pay period but didn’t get the contractual double pay. You (the steward) go to talk to Wilson, the H.R. manager, in her office. Wilson says it was a mistake, and Valerie will get the pay two checks from now. You return to Valerie and share the response. That seems pretty simple. Management presented a solution, and you didn’t even have to file a grievance. Case closed, right? But let’s return to the question: was this an opportunity to get more people involved? We can ask it each step of the way. MISSED CHANCESIf you had been thinking like an organizer when Valerie came to you with the problem, you could have asked, “Do you know if anyone else is having this problem?” Or even better, “Will you help me talk with other people to see if they’re having this problem too? Can we make a plan to talk to everyone in our department over the next two days?” Maybe Valerie would have told you it wasn’t her job. But we miss all the shots we don’t take! One of the problems with many “service-oriented” unions is that they don’t ask enough of their members or give them clear ways to get involved. And when you went to talk to management, what if you had brought Valerie with you? You want her to feel like—and be—a part of the process. The main work of the union shouldn’t happen behind closed doors. This way she would hear management’s response straight from management—and she would see what you do, what it looks like to speak up. Who knows? Maybe Valerie could become a steward herself one day. This would be a good way to get her feet wet. And when you came back to Valerie with the resolution, what then? You could have asked her what she thought about it. If she thought it wasn’t good enough? Now you would have an opportunity to brainstorm together what could be done about it. If she was fine with it? Now you would both have an opportunity to share a small win with co-workers. Ask Valerie to help get the word out! LONG-TERM PAYOFFAdopting an organizing attitude isn’t “one quick trick” to make the steward’s job easier. In fact, this approach often means more work in the beginning. But it’s work that will start to pay off as other members shoulder some of the burden you’ve been carrying, and as the union becomes a more dynamic presence in your workplace. And while avoiding burnout is one good reason to take this approach, there’s an even more important reason: the union gets stronger when more members are involved and the steward isn’t standing alone. By thinking like an organizer in your day-to-day steward work, you’re building union strength—and it will pay off in the long run. AuthorJoe DeManuelle-Hall is a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes. This article was produced by Labor Notes. Archives November 2021  11/8/2021 “I am Lenin” – Remembering the Bolshevik Revolution from India. By: Suryashekhar BiswasRead Now In 1917, the worker-peasant alliance in economically-backward Russia began the formation of the first state in the world that truly belonged to the hardworking masses. The Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin, displayed to the whole world that it was possible for ordinary people to achieve self-determination. With counter-revolutionaries, loyalists, monarchists and revivalists attempting to purge Russia from within and imperialists waging war from outside, the tale the first “Really Existing Socialism” began under circumstances of great challenge. Nonetheless, the red star had begun to shine. Its light extended beyond the borders of the USSR, through Eastern Europe, all the way to the colonised third-world. Mired in the tactics of internationalism and world-socialism, the successful revolution offered its amicable hands to its toiling comrades of the third-world, who were struggling against the excesses of imperialism. Before going further, it is important to note that communism in India had its origins in the material conditions of India, in its process of historical development, and its efforts to resolve the contradictions of British imperialism on the one hand, and feudal landlordism on the other. Communism in India was not a formula implanted into the minds of people by bureaucrats sitting in Moscow, as certain right-wing ideologues claim. That being said, the Bolshevik Revolution and the worker’s state it established, had a profound impact on the Indians grappling with their reality, and also provided them some theoretical frameworks. The national and colonial questions, as they were called, were not peripheral ponderings that arbitrarily occurred in the minds of the Third International revolutionaries. For Lenin, and many others, national liberation and the anti-colonial struggle was central to the process of overthrowing capitalism. This extends from the idea that imperialism was integral for capitalism to function - which was to become Lenin’s core thesis in ‘Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism’. These revolutionaries found it preposterous that many communists of the colonizing countries (read Europe) did not concern themselves with the colonial question. In the second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin stated, “All Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations … and in the colonies.” On this day, celebrating the 104th anniversary of the October Revolution, let us take a look at what this revolution meant to the masses of India, the country where I live. Comintern: National and Colonial Questions The world had changed immensely since the collapse of the First International, and the reformism, anarchism and Eurocentrism of the Second International led many revolutionaries to utter disappointment. The 1905 revolutionary coup in Russia had failed. Lenin had further solidified his understanding of imperialism as an inevitable extension of capitalism, and understood the importance of an international communist organisation that could truly connect with the people of the colonized countries. Overdetermined by these conditions, the Third International (or Comintern) was formed. In the second Congress of the Comintern, held between July and August 1920, there were delegates from across the world, including the colonized countries. M.N Roy, a young communist of Indian origins, was representing the Mexican communist party, which he had helped form during his self-exile from India. Abani Mukherjee represented India. Lenin delivered his draft-thesis on ‘National and Colonial Questions’ which substantiated the need for the communist movement to grapple with the material conditions of colonised country and agree on some strategies and tactics to lead the spread of the revolution in the colonized world. He called for suggestions and criticisms from the delegates of various nationalities, who understood their own reality better. Lenin-Roy DebateAlthough M.N Roy was representing Mexico in the Second Congress of the Comintern, his remarks were almost entirely about the struggle in India. In response to Lenin’s address and call for criticism, M.N Roy put forward the arguments which form the basis the famous Lenin-Roy Debate. The debate can be fragmented into three areas of contention: (a) the economic mode-of-production in the colonies, (b) the role and nature of the national bourgeoisie of the colonized countries, and by obvious extension from the previous two points, (c) the mode of struggle and strategy to be applied in the colonized countries. Lenin had remarked (in the thesis mentioned earlier) that unlike what Marxism had originally anticipated, the colonized world does not go through the subsequent historical stages and their economic mode-of-production remains backward. In the colonized countries, capitalism gets the liberty to be overwhelmingly vicious and ruthless. The character of the national bourgeoisie in those countries is also inversely affected, as the colonizers don’t allow the nationalist bourgeoisie to play the role of developing the productive forces according to its own needs and interests. However, Lenin insisted that there needs to be a strategic support and alliance with the national bourgeoisie of the colonized countries, in the process of overthrowing colonialism. In the USSR, a form of bourgeois-democratic revolution had happened before the socialist revolution could succeed. In the colonized world, the overthrow of colonialism in alliance with the national bourgeoisie would mark a similar step, paving way for socialism. Roy disagreed on the count that the nationalist bourgeoisie of India was mired in reactionary conservatism. He argued that it was due to Lenin’s lack of awareness about the material conditions of India that the latter ascribed a progressive and revolutionary role to the Indian national bourgeoisie. Roy argued that the bourgeois-nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress and Gandhi, was backward looking. If the communists had to align with them, the national bourgeoisie would eventually take over control of the alliance and subvert the movement. People would be led to be satisfied with bourgeois-democratic forms of capitalism and nothing more. For clarity of the Russian comrades, Roy compared Gandhi’s movement with the populist movements that had happened in Russia earlier: these were motivated by religious zeal and cultural revivalism, and were reactionary even if they might have appeared to be progressive. The final resolution of the Congress settled on the following line: “With regard to those states and nationalities where a backward, mainly Initially, the phrase towards the end had assured support to “bourgeois-democratic liberation movements”. But Roy’s intervention had successfully warranted its upgrade to “revolutionary movements of liberation”. The struggle in India was not only the struggle of the INC and Gandhi, argued Roy. The working-class and peasantry had begun to organise. It was a duty of the Communist International to support those movements. The Communist Party of India was formed in Tashkent, sometime between 1920 and 1921, the dates are contestable. It was consolidated in the Communist Conference in Kanpur, on December 1925. Bolshevism in Art Maxim Gorky wrote his iconic novel ‘Mother’, after the failure of the 1905 coup. It tells the story of Mother Nilovna, a working-class woman who slowly turns to the radical path when her son Pavel (aka Pasha) exposes her to the communist movement taking place then. Avtar Singh Sandhu, a militant communist poet from Punjab, read the novel in the 70s and declared his pen name to be ‘Pash’ – named after Pasha. Between the time when the novel was written to lighten up the struggling revolutionaries of Russia, and when it was read and perceived by Pash, came so many events of thrill and solidarity. Pash wrote about Comrade Bhagat Singh: “The awakening of the people of Punjab Among others, Maxim Gorky – a comrade of the revolution and a literary genius, held the idea that the revolutionary Soviet republic should have a revolutionary printing press that actively translated a wide range of texts across different languages. A publishing house for world literature was established in 1919, which survived for five years. A magazine titled ‘Literature of the World Revolution’ was launched in 1931. The most significant was the creation of Publishing Co-operative of Foreign Workers (ITIR), which translated books into foreign languages. Through Comintern connections, ITIR employed mostly migrants from different parts of the world, who brought in their indigenous wisdom. In its first year, it translated to seventeen European languages and five Asian languages. Within two decades, it was translating to various Indian, Arab and African languages. In 1963, ITIR would merge with another organization to give rise to the legendary Progress Publishers. Thousands of books from these publications would come to India, throughout the period of the Soviet Union’s existence. This would bring all kinds of books, from old fairy-tales from across the world, to analyses on political economy. The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on art was manifold. ‘Amar Lenin’, a short film by Ritwik Ghatak portrays a working-man from rural Bengal who comes across a jatra about the Bolsheviks going from village to village, understanding the troubles of the peasants and arming them with theory. (A jatra is a drama form practised primarily in Rural Bengal, characterised by music and theatrics.) This was a part of Ghatak’s cinema of praxis, a concept he held on to, even after his fallout with the communist party. There were several such instances where Bolshevism arose in art and armed the working people with confidence to fight. The vigorous impact of the revolution, may be summed up with a few lines from a poem by Sukanta Bhattacharya: “We sailed across the murderous seas, we reach the safe shore, No revolution without Lenin It is important to note that Marxism came to India through Soviet Russia. For a sufficient period of time, Indian people who were exploring different paths of liberation, found their theory in Lenin’s writings and were thus introduced to Marxism. In the Western world, several factions of Marxist thought, both in the academic arena and the political, tend to skip Lenin. The essence of Western Marxism lies in the rejection of Soviet interpretation of Marx, which is denounced as ‘objectivist’. They go further to say that this form of Marxism was derived from Engel’s misrepresentation of Marx, and has no bearing to the original Marx at all. Other schools of the New Left make it a point to develop “anti-Stalinism” in their politics, to avoid bureaucracy and totalitarian control. Revolutionaries in our world – the colonized world, do not have that luxury. For us, revolution runs through Leninism, which we see as the only path through which we can build socialism. Our party offices and pamphlets, alongside our own indigenous revolutionaries and heroes, have posters of Lenin, Stalin and Engels (and Mao). Not for us the defeatism of Trotsky. Not for us the entitlement of Eurocommunism. It is crucial for us, all the more, to uphold and defend the legacies of the great Bolshevik revolution. Spectre of CommunismThree decades have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The renegades of capitalism have declared the “end of ideology”. The agents of the market who had begun their penetration in the Indian soil with liberalisation in the 80s, are making attempts to seep in further into every nook and corner of the country, their most recent prey being Bhagat Singh’s Punjab. In 2018, a statue of Lenin in the state of Tripura was demolished by the fascist forces, among other reasons, to drive home the point that communism is dead and done with. Yet, there are communist parties, trade-unions and students unions striving to organize and put forth the demands of the hardworking masses. There are countless people finding solace in the red-flag, as the only genuine alternative to the dominant corporate oligarchy. Surely, one may find a know-it-all bourgeois news-anchor screaming, “The USSR collapsed long ago, so what are you on about!” Across the streets and corners, in ghettoes and slums, in villages and universities, one will also find a steadfast communist, answering, “What if the reactionary forces destroy the Taj Mahal some day? Will we stop falling in love?” Appendix This is a very personal attempt at presenting the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in India. This is not a comprehensive overview. Therefore, I have had to omit certain figures and events, which may have been important. There have been important communist and socialist movements parallel to the CPI, such as the famous HSRA with Bhagat Singh, which I have omitted. I also recognise that in the section on art, my references come from Bengal and North India. I have left out a rich plethora of art from South India, simply because of my lack of knowledge of it. Among the poems mentioned, the poem by Pash was written in Punjabi and the one by Sukanta was written in Bangla. Both have been translated by the present author. References Chowdhuri, S. R. (2007). Leftism in India: 1917-1947. Palgrave. Prashad, V. (2019). The East was read: Socialist culture in the third world. LeftWord. Riddell, J., Prashad, V., & Mollah, N. (2019). Liberate the colonies!: Communism and colonial freedom, 1917-1924. LeftWord Books. (The section on Lenin’s Draft Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions, and M.N Roy’s supplementary thesis on the same. AuthorSuryashekhar Biswas is an undergrad from India, majoring in media studies and English literature. He takes interest in cultural and literary criticism and wishes to contribute to the glorious lineage of third-world Marxism. Archives November 2021  11/7/2021 Teachers Strike against a ‘Heartless’ School Board in Biden’s Hometown. By: Barbara MadeloniRead Now Fired-up Scranton educators sang "Solidarity Forever" as they marched out of the school board meeting Tuesday night, ready to strike the next morning. Photo: Scranton Federation of Teachers It was a long time coming, but when 400 members of the Scranton Federation of Teachers marched out of the school board meeting Tuesday night singing “Solidarity Forever,” they were strike-ready. The school board had just given the go-ahead to cut off educators’ health insurance if they went on strike. This after dozens of teachers and para-educators had spoken about the devastating cuts that students and teachers have endured over the last four years—cuts to PreK education, to the arts, to music, to libraries. And after educators had told the school board about the medical conditions—cancer, multiple sclerosis—that would go untreated or result in monumental bills without health insurance. In the face of the board’s “callous and heartless” decision, as SFT President Rosemary Boland called it, the union’s 900 members did not back down. Yesterday they hit the picket line. Kathleen Beckwith, a middle school English and science teacher and 24-year veteran of the Scranton Public Schools, was exhausted by last night. But, she said, “people are realizing that we need to be strong—that when you come together for a common cause it can be really positive.” A Long Time ComingThe union has been without a contract for four years. In the last two years, they have lost 100 colleagues, either because the positions were cut or because educators have left, fed up with the board’s disinvestment in the schools. The cuts to librarians, related arts classes, and music especially impact the students who need them most, who are least likely to have access to these activities through their families. “We are a very diverse community,” said high school English teacher Adam McCormick. “There is a wide range of socioeconomic levels. The school district has to provide opportunities for students. And they haven’t. Opportunities for students are more and more limited.” Over the four years of stonewalling from the school board, the union has revised its demands three times to try to accommodate the district. But the district won’t budge—even as it has received almost $60 million in federal pandemic relief funds that could be spent increasing salaries for current educators and bringing back educators who can offer students the opportunities that have been taken away. A few specific sticking points: the district is pushing bigger class sizes, a worse health plan, and a longer school day. Members authorized a strike back in the spring, but the union’s executive board decided to wait for schools to reopen in person before calling the strike. ‘We’re Seeing Red’Leading up to the strike, union members met with parents and provided backpacks for returning students. “We wanted everyone to know we wanted to be back in schools,” Beckwith said. “The district has an agenda. Our agenda is to get back to school.” Union members have been speaking at school board meetings and doing informational pickets at schools. They’re using the theme “We are seeing RED” to show their anger at the impact of cuts. A few weeks ago, they draped red shirts on 100 seats in the auditorium where the school board meets. Each red shirt represented an educator who was no longer with the district. Boland says the community is 100 percent behind the striking teachers. Businesses are feeding them, motorists are honking support at picketers, and three union-endorsed candidates won school board seats Tuesday night. Still, without health insurance and pay, it could be a long haul for these educators. McCormick will be picketing with his brother, who is also a teacher in the district. Because they’ve been without a contract and wages are frozen, McCormick’s brother, a 16-year teacher with two children, hasn’t received the step bump that he would have been due this year (it’s a significant increase in pay that comes after 16 years). That means his finances are tighter and he is taking even facing more hardship by going on strike. “It’s humbling to walk the line with men and women who have a lot more on the line and are still willing to do it,” said McCormick. Scranton, it should be noted, is home to Joe Biden. The school board that has been cutting the budget, in a district where 82 percent of people are living below the poverty level, is dominated by Democrats. The strikers never mentioned Biden—but you have to wonder, when McCormick says, “We want to get more eyes on these issues,” whose eyes might make a difference. AuthorBarbara Madeloni is Education Coordinator at Labor Notes and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.[email protected] This article was produced by Labor Notes. Archives November 2021  11/7/2021 Why Socialists Should Learn to Farm: Six Reasons Why Growing our Own Food is A Revolutionary Act. By: The Seeds of RevolutionRead Now Twenty-twenty was a real shit year and a game changer for us all. Some background info. Before 2020 happened, my husband and I were living in a small de-industrialized city and planning to move to a larger financialized city, since those are the only two options here in the Northeast. But then we found ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, economic crash, and what felt like forthcoming societal collapse. Food supply chains were drying up. People were fist fighting over hand sanitizer. Toilet paper was sold-out (very bad news for those of us with gastrointestinal disorders). Gun ammunition was also sold-out. The stock market was in free fall. Companies were laying workers off. Social distancing had become part of our everyday vocabulary. Things were locking down. Borders were shutting down. Donald Trump was president, making our collective shit sandwich even worse. And the one candidate who could have made life a little less miserable for the unwashed masses – Mr. Bernard Sanders – dropped out, leaving us with Joe fucking Biden, the one candidate worse than the corporate war pig they pushed on us with four years earlier. Killary. And this was all on top of an already unfolding climate catastrophe; more than half the country living paycheck-to-paycheck; thirty million people lacking health insurance; an opioid epidemic ravishing the nation, along with a suicide epidemic, growing homelessness epidemic, and a barely discussed missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis; the onslaught of police brutality against Black people; two million people per year locked away in the prison industrial complex; concentration camps at the southern border; an increase in hate crimes against marginalized communities; routine mass shootings; an Orwellian mass surveillance system monitoring our every move; wage stagnation and the gigification of the workforce due to decades of de-industrialization, corporate trade deals, and the decimation of organized labor; an overpriced housing market alongside an overpriced rental market, and gentrification; a nearly two trillion dollar student loan bubble; and last but not least, the decaying empire we call home being at war with eight resource rich global south nations, waging economic warfare on a dozen countries, and orchestrating coups all across the globe. So yeah, 2020 was going to suck just like 2019 sucked, 2018 sucked, 2017 sucked, and every other year before that in the US since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 if you’re part of the white working class, or So, things were looking pretty bad in April of 2020. My husband and I thought maybe moving to a bigger city wasn’t a good idea. We started talking about what we’d do if he lost his job. Thankfully I knew I had job security through my union, but that job was in a hospital (not the place you want to be during a pandemic). It was then we decided to make some serious lifestyle changes. We started talking about minimalism, sustainability, and growing our own food. Over the next year we designed a tiny house, looked for cheap land to put it on, almost moved to a farming cooperative, and ended up in a small house on an acre and half of land in the middle of nowhere, since that’s the only place one finds cheap-ish housing these days. Though that will change soon too thanks to BlackRock and their evil genius plan to turn the US into a nation of renters. Since moving to our house at the start of this year, we’ve planted twenty varieties of vegetables in the backyard, visited a couple eco-villages to learn more about communal living, and just got certified in permaculture design with the plan to turn the backyard into a food forest with some chickens and bees and maybe even a tiny house village someday (all depending on zoning restrictions changing). During this past year and a half, I’ve learned that there’s a whole movement out there of people from city to country seizing the means of food production. Urbanites turning their backyards into mini food forests; old apartments being turned into urban eco-villages, community gardens popping up in cities everywhere, and the very first urban agrihood in Detroit. Suburban wine moms growing produce in their front yards; and the really cool ones are turning their swimming pools into greenhouses. Hipsters and hippies on rural farming communes, sharing all their resources, working collectively, and thriving together. People are doing some pretty amazing things these days! Families living in off-grid Earthships made of recycled tires, rammed dirt, and beer bottles; twenty-somethings traveling, doing work exchanges on organic farms, staying for the season and learning skills in what’s called WWOOFing. There’s a whole movement of people doing this here in the US and around the globe. And as socialists we should be part of this movement. Marxists, anarchists, democratic socialists (who are really just social democrats), however you identify. Hell, even liberals should learn to farm. Though liberals, you have to do the growing yourself. You can’t make your housekeeper grow the vegetables for you. I know, manual labor isn’t your thing. Sorry :-/ Something else I’ve noticed over the past year and a half of researching permaculture, aka a regenerative/wholistic approach to growing food, that most of the content online is homesteading blogs and vlogs coming from the political right; libertarians and social conservatives who want to go off-grid in order to escape the government or secular society. And though I’m happy to see people of most political tendencies growing their own food, let’s keep it real here. The righties don’t believe in climate change. And some of them even think the earth is flat (what the f?). We can’t let them own this shit. This shit is our shit. And here are six reasons why socialists should learn to farm. 1. SustainabilityWe’re living in what scientists refer to as the sixth mass extinction, which is pretty fucking scary sounding. The last mass extinction happened sixty-six million years ago, killed off three quarters of all life on the planet, and was most likely caused by an asteroid. This current one is being caused by capitalism. And we can no longer ignore it. Just this past summer alone we witnessed roads buckle and power lines melt in the Pacific Northwest due to a lethal heat wave and yet another unprecedented wildfire season. The ocean was on fire in the Gulf of Mexico after a pipeline burst. The Southwest is being plagued by a historic mega drought. A condo in Miami crumbled to the ground in the middle of the night in part due to rising sea levels. The Mid-Atlantic states were underwater, Louisiana’s grid crashed, and Massachusetts got hit by a few tornados – not something you expect in New England. India, China, Northern Europe, and Turkey were all horrifically flooded. Madagascar is on the brink of famine. The Amazon rainforest – the lungs of the planet – is now emitting more greenhouse gas than absorbing due to deforestation. Siberia – in the motherfucking Arctic – hit 118 degrees. The Atlantic Ocean current system is on the verge of breaking down, further destabilizing the global climate. We’re in a state of emergency here. Scientists have been discussing the negative impact of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere since 1896. That’s a long ass time. The recent IPCC Report states we’re close to the tipping point before it’s too late and we must radically transform the global economy NOW. And though there is no individual solution to the climate catastrophe – given that its being caused primarily by 100 multinational corporations – there are still steps we can take now in preparation for building the world we need to survive. Growing our own food is one way. Here are some facts on food production and the climate. On average, the food we buy at the grocery store is grown fifteen hundred miles away from where we live, on the other side of the country or in a completely different country all together. Now compare that to the distance between you and your farmers market, community garden, or your backyard/rooftop food forest. Another fact is that over 100 billion pounds of food gets wasted each year in the US all while thirty-five million people here face hunger, ten million being kids. We have the food available to feed everyone, it’s a political choice not to. A third fact is that factory farm meat is really bad for the environment, from cow methane to cleared woodlands. Being a vegetarian is a personal choice (one I’ve made myself) and a luxury many can’t afford around the world. In the future however those who do eat meat will need to eat more sustainably harvested meat: more poultry, less beef; free-range; and, if possible, raising and butchering the animal yourself to ensure it has a more dignified life and death than it would in a slaughterhouse. There are many things we can do to eat more sustainably from local to organic and so on. 2. HealthHealth is very important for us as socialists because we got some serious struggles ahead. Today we need to fight for better wages, tomorrow we’ll need to fight off those evil robot dogs. Have you seen those fuckers? I swear they’re gonna kill us all. Here are some facts about health and food. Black people are twice as likely to be impacted by food insecurity than white people. There are food deserts all across the country where residents are more likely to find fast food, liquor stores, and convenient stores with frozen dinners than they are to find grocery stores with fresh, nutritious food. It’s by design you find Whole Foods in posh suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods and McDonalds in the inner city and towns of rural poverty. The diet of poverty causes obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, scurvy, rickets, and cancer. Here’s another fact. We live in a country that doesn’t have a functioning healthcare system. Thirty million people lack health insurance each year and when you add in the underinsured, its about a third of the country. I’ve gone without insurance myself and its scary not knowing what you’ll do in case of an emergency. Eating healthy won’t spare us the cost of going to the doctor or overpriced pharmaceuticals, but it can help prevent certain medical conditions. Growing food, exercising, giving fresh food to our family, friends, coworkers, communities. These are acts of permaculture which can help our health. 3. CommunalismI know, it sounds like a scary word. People here commune and think cult and Jonestown. First off, no one is asking you to join a cult. Cults are bad. Cult leaders are bad. Sugary drinks like Kool-Aid are bad, extra bad when spiked with cyanide. When I say communalism, what I’m talking about is forming a community, a network, mutual aid, working together democratically, having meaningful relationships with other people. Things that are often missing in modern life. There are many different ways we can grow communally. Joining a community garden and getting to know your neighbors. Living on a farming cooperative and sharing communal space and growing together while living your regular day-to-day life. Living on a farming commune and sharing communal space and growing together, and sharing all your income (it’s not for everyone). Or you could just rent an apartment with friends and grow a container garden in your driveway together. Communalism can help us accomplish large tasks by working together: growing food, tending to livestock, watching each-other’s kids, caring for elders, sharing resources which helps cut back on the cost of living, and deciding things democratically. I just visited two eco-villages where communalism influenced so many different aspects of people’s lives. Communal spaces for things like cooking; worker cooperatives for jobs; bartering for trade; governing through councils and direct democracy; working collectively on projects like building a food forest. And it really got me thinking that communalism may be a solution to many of our immediate socioeconomic and psychosocial problems. The high cost of living, being too overworked to do anything else other than work, not having meaningful relationships and deep connections with other people due to the way capitalism atomizes society (the individual against the world, ethical egoism, and all that Ayn Rand bullshit). Capitalism reduces us to networking and Wingless Eros hookups instead of comradeship and true love. And the alienation so many people feel is expressing itself in the rise of diseases of despair we’re now seeing: drug addiction, gambling, suicide. Living more communally could help change this for the better. To build socialism on the larger scale, let’s build it in our own lives too. Let’s literally grow together. 4. Anti-Imperialism One of the main differences between homesteading and permaculture is that the first romanticizes settler colonialism while the second opposes colonialism and all other forms of imperialism. It might seem like a stretch linking imperialism to food, but imperialism is in fact what’s for dinner. It’s also what we’re dressed in, drive, decorate our homes with, and a bunch of other shit including what we’re using to read this blog post. It’s easy for those of us living on colonized land in the imperial core to ignore this reality as we benefit from the crumbs of the superprofit. And while many think of imperialism as war, it goes beyond that and is defined as an economic system of expansion, extraction, and exploitation on the global level. Imperialism expresses itself in the form of corporate trade deals, sweatshop labor, intergovernmental alliances, and financial institutions. Militarism is simply the glue that keeps the entire system together. Here are some facts about imperialism, settler colonialism, and food. Entire nations have been destroyed over sugar, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico. And so many of our consumer goods made here in America are not made in American factories by union workers but rather in American prisons by the largest prison population in the world. Like all settler colonies, Amerika was built from chattel slavery, and mass incarceration was born from those very vestiges. Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, was overthrown in a CIA backed coup in 1954 over wanting to enact land reforms to help his people. Up until then, most of the land in Guatemala had been gobbled up by Western corporations like the United Fruit Company (aka Chiquita Banana). It just so happened that the Secretary of State, the director of the CIA, and four other members of the Eisenhower administration had ties to the United Fruit Company and in order to protect their financial interests, staged a coup which resulted in a military dictatorship, a fifty-year civil war, and the genocide of tens of thousands of the indigenous Maya population. All over fucking bananas. Anti-imperialism is the main reason why I’m personally invested in growing my own food. In my late-twenties and early thirties, I was lucky to be able to do a lot of international travel and got to visit so many wonderful places: South Africa, Palestine, Peru, India, Nicaragua, Panama, Greenland, Northern Ireland, Bosnia. And during these travels, I learned so much about the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism on the global south; it’s for this reason why I am dedicated to breaking away from systems of global exploitation. As a millennial, I love avocado. But I don’t want to buy it if it’s being grown by exploited workers under the threat of the cartel. I also love quinoa but its rise in global popularity has made it too expensive for people in Peru and Bolivia, where it was once a staple diet. Growing our own food is one way to break away from these systems of global exploitation. Other options include buying from worker owned cooperatives abroad or buying food which is regionally grown in your own area. 5. Anti-CapitalismEveryone hates capitalism these days, not just socialists. It’s an economic system which offshores union jobs, sets a poverty minimum wage, denies us affordable healthcare, housing, and education, makes us live paycheck to paycheck, gets millions of people hooked on pain killers, sets draconian laws in order to fill the prisons with slave labor while letting banksters and war criminals off, creates a dysfunctional political system in which souless opportunists like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi rise to power, ushers in a dictatorship of the rich, and blows up the market every ten years or so, leaving millions of workers at risk of poverty and laying down the material conditions for fascism. Blaming capitalism for everything is a favorite pastime for millennials and zoomers. Until I got married, I even blamed being single on it. But last year, I learned something new about capitalism. I learned that capitalist supply chains can’t be depended on to even produce the basic goods we need but can’t afford under the best of circumstances. Capitalist supply chains can and will explode without warning and cause scarcity, price gouging, and social unrest. And they haven’t stabilized since 2020. The neoliberal ruling class offshored manufacturing in order to financialize the economy, make a few very rich, half the country broke, and left us unprepared for times of crisis. Now there is no way to break away from capitalism as we live in a capitalist society and are all subject to capitalist market forces. But we can strive to learn ways to protect ourselves and each other from some of the harshest elements of capitalism and find ways to avoid exploitation of workers in the global south in our personal lives as we organize to end these systems collectively. Permaculture is one way to do so. Becoming community-sufficient is another way. Supporting and utilizing mutual aid networks. Growing our own food, collecting our own seeds, making our own compost; all of these actions can help us protect ourselves and our communities from the volatility of market forces. 6. Revolution, or Some Real Bad ShitYeah, I went there with that word. Revolution. I know, it’s a little overwhelming the first time you hear it. Just breathe. The reality is we have no idea what the future holds. But it doesn’t look too good for the most part. Some people think we’re heading toward a revolution in which the workers will seize power through a general strike. Many people think we’re heading toward civilizational collapse due to climate change; that or the American Empire is going to fall with the death of the petrodollar system and the rise of a multipolar world, which will be great for the global south but will probably result in a massive economic depression for those of us living here (under capitalism that is, which is why we need a revolution). There are also some who think we’re heading toward eco-fascism in which the authoritarian state, along with fascist mobs, will terrorize climate refugees and marginalized communities within our militarized borders; that or the US will become a neo-feudal dystopian hellscape where we’ll all be serfs toiling away 16 hours a day for a glass of water, working in the kingdoms of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and whichever one of the Kock brothers didn’t crock who will govern us from their underground multimillion dollar bunkers. And then there are those who think AOC will win the nomination and general election in 2024, turn the Democratic Party into a workers’ party, get the Green New Deal passed, and everything will be just dandy. So yeah, like I said, we don’t know what the future holds, but we’re probably fucked. It could be helpful to prepare for multiple crises. Learning to grow our onw food in case there’s a revolution and all the stores run out while workers are on strike. Learning to raise and harvest livestock in case the climate catastrophe causes mass crop failure and disruption in global food supply chains. Learning self-defense in case fascist mobs start roaming the streets. Learning to build our own shelter in case we have to flee for the woods to escape becoming serfs under neo-feudalism. All these skills can be applicable for whatever hellscape we end up in within the next several decades. And that is the goal of this project, The Seeds of Revolution: to learn how to survive and build a community of people to work with when shit REALLY falls apart. And for shits and giggles, we might even dream up what an eco-socialist world could look like. AuthorThe Seeds of Revolution A socialist farming blog where we talk growing food, raising livestock, DIY, self-defense, prepping, natural building, and the hopeful collapse of the capitalist imperialist order. This article was produced by The Seeds of Revolution. Archives November 2021  11/7/2021 The Struggle for Socialism in Nicaragua and Honduras: Interview with Ramiro Sebastián FúnezRead Now Sunday November 7th Midwestern Marx editorial board members Carlos L. Garrido, Calla Winchell, and Edward Liger Smith sat down with Honduran communist journalist and producer Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez to discuss the Nicaraguan election, the continuation of the Sandinista revolution, and the immense pressures and plethora of tactics used by the American empire and internal reactionary forces to overthrow the popular revolution. Specifically, we discussed mainstream and social media’s fabrications and censorship mechanisms used to promote the 2018 violent US backed color revolution attempt, as well as how some of these tactics are being reapplied in this year’s election. Additionally, we discussed the upcoming November 28 elections in Honduras, where the socialist Libre party candidate Xiomara Castro is leading in the polls. This discussion was contextualized in the history of the short (2006-2009) but progressive period where socialist Manuel Zelaya (Castro’s husband) governed before being ousted by a US and Drug Cartel backed coup. Having lost on a stolen election in 2013, will Xiomara and the socialist electoral struggle in Honduras suffer the same fate this time around? ParticipantsInterviewee: Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez is a Honduran communist content creator based in Los Angeles, California. He is the producer and director of Nicaragua Against Empire, a documentary series highlighting Nicaraguan resistance to Western imperialism. Archives November 2021 11/6/2021 COP26: Will Humanity’s ‘Last and Best Chance’ to Save Earth’s Climate Succeed? By: Reynard LokiRead Now There is a chance we can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but world leaders must hold businesses accountable and listen to Indigenous communities. It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot riding on COP26, the international climate talks currently being held in Glasgow, Scotland. Officially, the gathering marks the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the third meeting of the parties to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, preferably limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Since 1995, the countries that have signed onto the UNFCCC have met every single year (except in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), attempting to come up with an action plan to stem the climate crisis. But still, every year, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions keep going up. And for a fortnight that started on October 31, world leaders will try to come up with an action plan yet again. More than 100 heads of government and some 30,000 delegates are now gathered and deliberating in Glasgow in the most recent international attempt to implement the Paris agreement goals. CNBC called the summit “humanity’s last and best chance to secure a livable future amid dramatic climate change.” “We face a stark choice: Either we stop it or it stops us,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the start of the World Leaders Summit of the COP26. “It’s time to say ‘enough.’ Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves… We need maximum ambition from all countries on all fronts to make Glasgow a success.” The summit comes just a few months after the August release of a grim report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity, and that within two decades, rising temperatures will cause the planet to reach a significant turning point in global warming. The report’s authors—a group of the world’s top climate scientists convened by the United Nations—predict that by 2040, average global temperatures will be warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, causing more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. Guterres called the bleak findings a “code red for humanity.” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the summit, likened the race to stop climate change to a spy thriller, warning that “a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.” He added, “The tragedy is this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.” The dire assessment of the state of the planet’s climate was not lost on U.S. President Joe Biden, who called on world leaders to take aggressive action immediately to stave off the climate crisis in his remarks at the summit’s opening day. “There’s no more time to hang back or sit on the fence or argue amongst ourselves,” he said. “This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes, the existential threat to human existence as we know it. And every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases.” But despite all the troubling data and dire warnings, the summit has had a fairly inauspicious start. On October 30, the day before COP26 opened, leaders of the G20 nations—19 countries and the European Union, which together are responsible for 80 percent of the world’s emissions—sought to bolster international leadership on climate change as they concluded their own meeting in Rome just before the summit in Glasgow. But their deliberations ended with a whimper: a mere reaffirmation of the Paris agreement goals. During the G20 summit, Johnson said that all the world leaders’ pledges without action were “starting to sound hollow,” and he criticized the commitments as “drops in a rapidly warming ocean.” Adding to the disappointment was the fact that the summit was not attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as both Russia and China “are among the world’s biggest polluters”: Russia and China are respectively responsible for 5 percent and 28 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, respectively. Those two nations have pushed the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 ahead to 2060. A failure in Glasgow could have grave, cascading consequences. On October 26, the UN Environment Program released a worrying report warning that with “climate change intensifying… humanity is running out of time” due to the climate promises that have been made but have not yet been delivered. Failure to stem the climate crisis “would mean less food, so probably a crisis in food security. It would leave a lot more people vulnerable to terrible situations, terrorist groups and violent groups,” said UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa. “It would mean a lot of sources of instability… [t]he catastrophic scenario would indicate that we would have massive flows of displaced people.” “We’re really talking about preserving the stability of countries, preserving the institutions that we have built over so many years, preserving the best goals that our countries have put together,” said Espinosa, who took on the UN climate role in 2016. A former minister of foreign affairs of Mexico, Espinosa shares responsibility for the talks with UK cabinet minister Alok Sharma, who serves as the COP26 president. “What we need to get at Glasgow are messages from leaders that they are determined to drive this transformation, to make these changes, to look at ways of increasing their ambition,” Espinosa said. In a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology, a group of international scientists found that if the world continues “business-as-usual” emissions, the impacts of the climate crisis could triple across 45 different “life zones”—distinct regions representing broad ecosystem types—across the planet. “The likely future changes in the world’s life zones is likely to have a substantial impact on [people’s] livelihoods and biodiversity,” said Dr. Paul Elsen, a climate adaptation scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and lead author of the study. “Large areas of the world are getting hotter and drier and this is already impacting the earth’s life zones,” added Elsen. The researchers predict that more than 42 percent of the planet’s land area will ultimately be affected if emissions are not significantly reduced. Dr. Hedley Grantham, director of conservation planning at WCS and a co-author of the study, said, “COP26 is our best chance of countries committing to reducing emissions and putting us on a better future pathway for climate change and its impacts.” There have, however, been a few bright spots in the early days of the summit. On November 2, world leaders announced new plans to reduce the emissions of methane, a powerful global warming gas that “has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.” President Biden welcomed the methane agreement, calling it a “game-changing commitment,” while also announcing that for the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was going to enforce limits on the methane “released by existing oil and gas rigs across the United States.” The Biden administration said that the government’s vast spending bill would mark the “largest effort to combat climate change in American history.” But with this critical climate legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, Biden’s aggressive target of reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by about half of its 2005 levels by the end of this decade will likely have to be pursued through executive actions such as regulations. And on November 2, more than 100 nations, which together are responsible for about 85 percent of the world’s forests, agreed to a landmark $19 billion plan to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Prime Minister Johnson said that it is critical for the success of COP26 “that we act now and we end the role of humanity as nature’s conqueror, and instead become nature’s custodian,” adding that “[w]e have to stop the devastating loss of our forests, these great teeming ecosystems—three-trillion-pillared cathedrals of nature—that are the lungs of our planet.” In other welcome news, 14 nations including the United States, working on the sidelines of COP26, backed a Denmark-led initiative to reduce global maritime emissions to zero by 2050. “With around 90 percent of world trade transported by sea, global shipping accounts for nearly 3 percent of global CO2 emissions,” according to Reuters. Indeed, non-state actors, i.e., businesses, are key participants in the world’s climate goals. UN chief Guterres said that the private sector has a critical role to play in this fight—and the UN will judge the performance of businesses’ pledges to achieve net-zero emissions. “I will establish a group of experts to propose clear standards to measure and analyze net-zero commitments from non-state actors,” which will go beyond mechanisms that have been established by the Paris climate accord, he said. In the U.S., businesses are trying to influence Biden’s massive spending plan. “Across industries, business groups successfully pushed lawmakers to make significant changes to key sections of the original $3.5 trillion bill. Their lobbying efforts revolved around Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who ultimately sided with the business community on several issues… The White House plan does not raise tax rates on corporations—keeping a central part of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts intact—in a stunning win for business interests,” stated an article in the Hill. “This growing call for action can’t be underestimated,” writes EFL contributor Patti Lynn, executive director of Corporate Accountability, a consumer advocacy group, in Truthout, referring to the surge in climate activism across the world in recent years. But she also offered a caveat: “We need great social and economic change to fully and justly solve the climate crisis, and no change on this scale happens without public engagement fueling the political will to create such changes. But we also must be clear-eyed about what stands in the way of achieving such transformative change.” She added that for the world to move “from visions to actual policies that are just and effective, we must address the largest obstacle that lies between today’s status quo and a livable future for all: the influence of the fossil fuel industry on climate policy.” Rainforest Action Network, a nonprofit environmental group, also trained their sights on the private sector, tweeting, “World leaders… must meet the climate crisis by holding brands and banks accountable to end fossil fuel expansion and deforestation.” But the COP26 homepage suggests a different story: Unilever, Scottish Power, Sainsbury’s, National Grid, Microsoft, Hitachi and GSK are some of the many corporations that COP26 thanks as “principal partners.” And while many private firms, including several of the COP26 partners, have made significant climate commitments, they are often met with criticisms of “greenwashing”—appearing that they are climate-friendly when in fact, the promises are often not regulated by governments and actually not making a dent. “Businesses are the big polluters,” said Kristian Ronn, CEO and co-founder of Normative, a Swedish startup that has launched a carbon emissions tracker that he says can help end corporate greenwashing. The private sector is “responsible for two-thirds of the total emissions,” he said. “So they need to account for the footprint and mitigate that footprint, because essentially what gets measured gets managed.” He added, “There are no mechanisms in place to ensure the completeness of the information.” COP26 partner Microsoft, for example, has formed Transform to Net Zero, a new initiative with several other companies, including Nike and Starbucks, to help the private sector achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But as Emily Pontecorvo reports in Grist, “There’s one gaping hole that persists in Microsoft’s climate action, one that the company has been repeatedly criticized for: How can it expect to pull more carbon out of the air than it puts in if it’s actively helping fossil fuel companies find and pull more oil and gas out of the ground?” As world leaders attempt to hammer out a path to achieve the Paris climate accord goals, they would do well to listen to the world’s Indigenous people, who have been successful caretakers of their ecosystems for many generations—including 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, though they represent just 5 percent of the global population—but who are suffering on the front lines of the climate fights, from deforestation to rising seas. Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance, and an EFL contributor, wrote an open letter to world leaders in 2020 that is even more important today. “When you say that the oil companies have marvelous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills,” writes Nenquimo, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. “When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago. When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land.” AuthorReynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, CounterPunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives November 2021  11/6/2021 Blaming China for the climate crisis is shameful and hypocritical. By: Carlos MartinezRead Now The West has followed a Cold War agenda of demonising the world’s most populous country, when in fact China’s per-capita greenhouse gas emissions are less than half those of the US; meanwhile China leads the way in renewable energy, reforestation and electric vehicles. This article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez first appeared in the Morning Star on 5 November 2021. In the run-up to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference, currently taking place in Glasgow, politicians and media in the West conducted a coordinated and insistent campaign to shift responsibility for the climate crisis on to China. US President Joe Biden claimed in his closing statement to the G20 Summit, the day before the start of COP26, that China “basically didn’t show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change.” He further stated that meaningful progress on climate change negotiations is “going to require us to continue to focus on what China’s not doing.” Biden specifically criticised Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for not attending the G20 Summit in person, although he failed to mention that they did attend via video link. Several commentators on social media have noted that attending a climate change conference via Zoom produces significantly less emissions than arriving in a private jet and travelling round Glasgow in an 85-car motorcade, which is what Biden did. Blaming China is nothing new, of course, and feeds in to the New Cold War that the US and its allies are cultivating, with a view to protecting and expanding the US-led imperialist system. China is an enemy, a “strategic competitor”; it must not be allowed to “win the 21st century”. When it comes to the global struggle to prevent climate catastrophe, pushing responsibility towards China has a further benefit beyond old-fashioned demonisation; it means shifting the responsibility away from the advanced capitalist countries which might otherwise be expected to fix a problem largely of their making. The “it’s all China’s fault” narrative rests on two key themes: first, that China has for the last few years been the world’s largest emitter (in absolute terms) of greenhouse gases; second, that China has committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, whereas the US and Britain have said they will bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Such a narrative is flawed in five obvious ways: First, China is the world’s most populous country, with a population of 1.4 billion Measured on a per capita basis, China’s emissions are very ordinary – around the same level as Bulgaria and New Zealand. To understand the relevance of the per capita calculation, just imagine China is split into four different countries – that is, the wildest fantasies of the imperialist nations have been realised! Each one would have under half the emissions of the US. Second, the comparison of current annual emissions distorts the overall picture. Greenhouse gases don’t suddenly disappear from the atmosphere; carbon dioxide hangs around for hundreds of years. In terms of cumulative emissions – the quantity of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere right now – the US is responsible for 25 percent, although it contains just four percent of the world’s population. China meanwhile is responsible for 13 percent of cumulative emissions, in spite of having 18 percent of the world’s population. Over the course of two hundred years, Europe, North America and Japan have become modern industrialised countries, burning enormous quantities of assorted fossil fuels and creating an environmental crisis. Now they want to both shift the blame onto others and pull up the ladder of development. Any reasonable person will agree that this is outright moral bankruptcy. Third, the reason China’s emissions have gone up in recent decades while the West’s emissions have gone down has essentially nothing to do with people in the rich countries compromising on their lifestyles or governments making impressive progress on decarbonisation; rather, it’s that the advanced capitalist countries have exported their emissions to the developing world. China as the “workshop of the world” means that products consumed in the West are very often produced in China. Chinese emissions are primarily caused by manufacturing and infrastructure development, not by luxury consumption. In fact, average household energy consumption in the US and Canada is eight times higher than in China. Fourth, and related, is the fact that China is a developing country. The leading capitalist countries of Europe, North America and Japan reached peak greenhouse gas emissions in the 1980s, after nearly two centuries of industrialisation. If they succeed in achieving net zero emissions by 2050, their journey from peak carbon to net zero will have taken six or seven decades. Before the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China’s economy was based overwhelmingly on small-scale agriculture. There was very little industry, very little transport infrastructure; only a tiny fraction of the population had access to modern energy. Since then, China’s use of fossil fuels has steadily increased as it has industrialised. If it meets its targets of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and zero carbon by 2060, both achievements will have taken less than half the time they took in the West. Fifth, China is already making extraordinary progress towards tackling climate change. It is unquestionably the world leader in renewable energy, with a total capacity greater than the US, the EU, Japan and Britain combined. For the last two decades, it has been making a concerted effort to reduce its reliance on coal, which currently makes up 56 percent of its power mix, down from over 80 percent. China’s forest coverage has increased from 12 percent in the early 1980s to 23 percent today. It has established national parks covering 230,000 square kilometres. Meanwhile it also leads the world in the production and use of electric cars, trains and buses. Around 99 percent of the world’s electric buses are in China, along with 70 percent of the world’s high-speed rail. Even leading US politicians have recognised China’s progress. Back in December 2019, setting out his vision for the US to accelerate its decarbonisation, John Kerry observed in an article for the New York Times that “China is becoming an energy superpower”, that “China surpassed us for the lead in renewable energy technology.” He commented: “China is doing things we are afraid to do. They offer citizens large subsidies for purchasing electric vehicles from state-owned companies.” Of course, the world needs China – as the largest current emitter – to take serious action to reduce emissions. Indeed there is a clear consensus at all levels of Chinese government on tackling climate change, biodiversity and pollution. China is taking the project of constructing an “ecological civilisation” very seriously, but it is hypocritical and nonsensical for the West to play the blame game and to push responsibility onto China. As it stands, the US and its allies are more committed to their New Cold War than they are to a safe future for humanity. This is exemplified by US import bans on Chinese solar panels, based on the unproven and libellous accusation that this industry makes use of slave labour in Xinjiang. Environmental catastrophe is knocking at the door. We need to get serious. The West must drop its policy of demonising and threatening China; it must adopt an approach of multilateralism and cooperation. The US, Europe, China and others should be collaborating on research and development for climate change adaptation and mitigation; on renewable energy systems; on artificial intelligence systems for monitoring weather patterns; on providing urgently-needed support to the least developing countries. China has been abundantly clear that it wants a close, collaborative relationship with the other major powers around environmental issues. The ball is in our court. Those of us in the West should be demanding our governments to stop shirking their responsibilities, to build mutual trust with China, and to do everything possible to keep Earth habitable for humanity. AuthorCarlos Martinez is the author of The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse, co-founder of No Cold War and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. He also runs the blog Invent the Future. This article was produced by Socialist China. Archives November 2021  11/6/2021 Book Review: Hegel: A Biography by Terry Pinkard (2000). Reviewed By: Thomas RigginsRead Now Terry Pinkard’s Hegel is one of the best introductions available to the philosophy of Hegel. We often hear that Hegel is the éminence grise standing behind Karl Marx and that the Hegelian dialectic is the basis on which Marx and Engels developed materialist dialectics. Lenin even says that it is impossible to understand Capital without reading and understanding Hegel’s Logic. The problem with Hegel is his forbidding style which drives many readers to distraction. He seems to be incomprehensible. Pinkard's book overcomes this difficulty. It is clearly written in an enjoyable style and covers both Hegel's life and philosophical development as well as providing easily digestible summaries of all the works--especially The Phenomenology of Mind, The Logic, The Encyclopedia of The Philosophical Sciences, and The Philosophy of Right. For those who want to know what all the fuss is about, this is a highly recommended first book on Hegel from which one can graduate to the original works. Hegel's politics were progressive and humanistic. Pinkard points out that he supported the American and French revolutions and rejected as "degrading" the type of newly developing capitalist division of labor touted by Adam Smith. Hegel thought that modern individualism [i.e., entrepreneurial capitalism] must be harmonized with the interests of the people [people before profits]. Pinkard suggests that his philosophy was based on three components. The three component parts of Hegelianism being 1) a blend of representative government with "Germanic" freedom; 2) Scottish commercial society; 3) French revolutionary politics. This may remind readers of Lenin's Three Component Parts of Marxism -- namely British economic theory, French socialism, and German philosophy. Perhaps one of the most trenchant points Pinkard makes in his chapter on The Phenomenology is the following on the French Revolution (The Phenomenology discusses the development of human consciousness from its origins up to Hegel's time): “The Revolution, under Rousseau's influence, had culminated in a vision of ‘absolute freedom’ as determined by a ‘general will,’ which in the development of the Revolution became identified with the ‘nation.’ Kant saw that what was required had to be a self-determined whole that made room for the individual agent and neither swallowed him in abstractions such as ‘utility' nor reduced him to moral insignificance as merely a cog in the machine of the ‘nation’." Replace "nation" with "class", "general will" with "the party", "absolute freedom" with "socialism" and "Rousseau" with "the cult of the personality" and maybe we can begin to see why Hegel and Kant are still relevant. The following Hegelian observations are still meaningful (properly updated): the first with respect to how communist and workers parties were sometimes perceived to have operated, the second on the role of the press. “Without an anchoring in social practice, in the self-identity of the people in the reformed communities, the reforms could have no authority;[Reference is to German communities in Hegel's day that progressive government ministers were trying to liberalize] they would only appear, indeed would only be, the imposition of one group's (the reformers) preferences and ideals on another. Without the transformation of local Sittlichkeit [ethical life] of collective self-identity, the reformers could only be the "masters" and the populace could only be the ‘vassals.’”’ Pinkard continues: “In their reforms there was no ‘dialogue’, there was instead only administrative fiat in which, even in those cases where the ‘right’ thing was being decreed, the self-undetermining nature of decrees that seem to come from ‘on high’ was evident. The press plays its proper role when it serves as a mediator for the formation of such public opinion; when the press serves to mediate things in the right way, it thereby serves to underwrite the process of reform.” In studying Hegel it has often been the rule to start with The Phenomenology of Mind, but Pinkard points out that Hegel, late in life, did not consider that work, interesting as it may be, a proper introduction to his system. One should begin with reading the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. I think we should note that there has been a dialectical reversal in modern life from the times of Hegel. Pinkard notes: “The problem of modern life [ in Hegel's time] was that its rationality was not immediately apparent to its participants; for that one required a set of reflective practices that could display and demonstrate the rationality of modern life, namely, those involved in modern art, modern religion, and, most importantly, modern philosophy.” However, now it is, I think, just the opposite. The irrationality of our world system is what is not immediately apparent. As it was the task of Hegelianism at the beginning of the nineteenth century to demonstrate the rationality of the world, especially the world resulting from the French Revolution, so the task today is to show, by means of Marxism, the irrationality of the new world order. This is another way of saying that whatever progressive role the bourgeoisie played in Hegel's day is long over. Rationality now requires socialism. Pinkard's discussion of The Philosophy of Right is also important. It centers on Hegel's "core idea" that "what counts as 'right' in general is what is necessary for the realization of freedom." How much Hegel's views on freedom can be adjusted to Marxism is a matter of debate. This problem is too complicated to go into in a review, but a hint to its solution may be found in Hegel's view that the opposite of freedom is "to act in terms of something one cannot rationally endorse for oneself, that is, ultimately to be pushed around by considerations that are not really one's own but come from or belong to something else (for example, brute desires, or social conventions." Or. I might add, an economic system based not on humanistic (working class) socialist principles but on the drive for profits whatever the human cost. An economic system that controls us instead of being controlled by us makes a mockery of all bourgeois claims to "freedom." The following observations by Hegel-- on religion and the state-- are relevant not only to our own situation (Fundamentalist dogmatic religious position pushed by Republicans, as well as Zionism and political Islam). Again, summarizing Hegel's views, Pinkard writes: ” Letting religious matters into state affairs only leads to fanaticism; when religion becomes political, the result can only be ‘folly, outrage, and the destruction of all ethical relations,’ since the piety of religious conviction when confronted with the manifold claims of the modern political world too easily passes over into ‘a sense of grievance and hence also of self-conceit’ and a sense that the truly faithful can find in their ‘own godliness all that is required in order to see through the nature of the Laws and of political institutions, to pass judgment on them, and to lay down what their character should and must be.’” Although there is no space here for the attempt, Hegel's philosophy may also be useful in trying to explain the collapse of European socialism. His doctrine that "world history is the world court" has much to recommend itself for a hard nosed analysis. I also pass over the chapters on The Logic with reverential silence. This book is a work of important philosophical as well as historical analysis. The Hegel described by Peter Gay ("a disembodied spirit who oracularly pronounces on deep matters") becomes a living and easily comprehended human being in Pinkard's handling of him. Anyone who wants to know what Hegel had to say, and why it is still important, could do no better than begin with this biography. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives November 2021   “For “academics” I have here substituted “up lifters”, i.e., believers in law-abiding progress without a political struggle, progress under the autocracy. Such up lifters are to be found in all sections of Russian society, and everywhere, like the student “academics”, they confine themselves to the narrow range of professional interests, the improvement of their particular branches of the national economy or of state and local administration; everywhere they fearfully shun “politics”, making no distinction (as the academics make none) between the “politically minded” of different trends, and implying by the term politics everything that concerns the form of government.” - Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Revolutionary Youth” Material Context We live in difficult times. The class struggle persists, but with preponderant power in the hands of the ruling class. The socialist revolution appears to be postponed indefinitely. The imperial agents of free-markets and economic liberalism have gripped our world and seem to hold power with an iron fist. Trade unions have been made illegal, obsolete or overwhelmingly weak across the world. In India, the country where I live, the old trade unions are struggling to find newer ways to organise and newer ones are finding space to breathe. In the USA, the AFL-CIO has long abandoned any element of class struggle, with all the socialist and communist factions within it being purged away. In India, the BJP (i.e., the electoral party faction of the fascist outfit RSS) has its own trade union. The fascists have made their way into working-class ghettoes, tea-plantation mills, urban industrial areas and everywhere else the socialists were supposed to have gained strength. They drive a Hindu revivalist agenda, or a Brahmanical agenda, depending on the context of the people and make it increasingly harder for socialist trade unions to organise. The BJP won its first term in 2014, with the popular consensus being critical of the previously elected neo-liberal elite government of INC. Narendra Modi assured the people that the country will be freed from the corrupt INC rule. He assured the Hindu majority that their pride will be restored. In other words, Make India Great Again. The BJP won. Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of the country that prides itself to be the world’s largest democracy. Modi’s first term as the Prime Minister involved several cases of lynching of Muslims (mostly from the working class) in the name of protecting the holy cow. It involved a prolonged delay in the release of data on farmer suicides, a phenomenon that has been rising since the 90s when the Indian government took the neo-liberal route. Among other atrocious realities, the neo-fascist rule involved a fundamentally McCarthyist attack on intellectualism in general, with fairly liberal historians such as Romila Thapar and economists such as Amartya Sen, being remarked as Marxists and therefore “anti-national”. This manifested in a protracted war on students across the country through cancellation of fellowships that were essential for financially and socially backward students. A legitimising ideology was created by propagating the idea that students are a waste of public money, that students pursue research in topics that are irrelevant to India’s glory and that they are conspiring with terrorists to undermine Indian sovereignty. Corporate media, television, and more crucially, state-sponsored en-masse WhatsApp forwards played a huge role in legitimising this ideology. Students across the country struck the streets into a protest termed as the Occupy UGC movement (UGC being the University Grants Commission.) (1) Rohit Vemula, a young student from Hyderabad was a part of this movement. He belonged to a marginalised caste. He was witch-hunted by the authorities and compelled to commit suicide. His death followed another media propaganda campaign to wash down the caste angle. His death sparked the fire of revolt and protest across the country. His suicide note has the chilling effect that is bound to radicalise anybody with an iota of humanity. (2) The Individual The protests of the Occupy UGC movement and those demanding justice for Rohit Vemula, caused the surfacing of student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, the erstwhile student union president of Jawaharlal Nehru University and a member of AISF, the student-wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Certain allegations were made about anti-national slogans being raised in the university on 9 February, 2016. Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested, along with a few other students. After his release from a brief period in jail, Kanhaiya Kumar found himself declared a traitor in the national ideology. He was vilified, but also popularised. The speech he gave right after his release went viral in the internet and secular liberals as well as leftists saw a hero in him. His excellent oratory skills coupled with leftist rhetoric gained him abundant charm. (3) The CPI leadership saw great potential in Kanhaiya and was quick to promote him into the party’s highest policy-decision board. The quickness of his rise within the party is unimaginable in the history of communist movement in India. His subsequent standing in the elections struck enough fear in the BJP candidate Giriraj Singh who was to stand in the same constituency. Kanhaiya crowd-funded his election campaign. Several liberal celebrities and comedians supported his campaign. Kanhaiya Kumar lost the elections, but became a celebrity championing the cause of dissent. (4) Kanhaiya Kumar, in his radical speeches made as a student leader in the campus, made serious criticism of the INC, which he correctly identified as a representative of the ruling class. This was pre-2016. Recently, Kanhaiya Kumar has addressed the media and confirmed that he has joined the INC. In his announcement, he stated a bunch of reasons, which boil down to the idea that INC is the oldest national party in India that upholds secularism and democracy, and thus the only way to battle the influence of BJP would be to align with the INC. CPIML-L politburo member Kavita Krishnan has written an article pointing out the fallacies in Kanhaiya’s argument, and exposing his opportunism. (5) The liberals that upheld him, had a gleeful reaction to see him dissociate from the communist movement. D Raja, the General Secretary of CPI, made a statement condemning him. “It shows that he has no ideological and political commitment other than his personal ambitions,” read the official statement by the party. Shubham Banerjee, another important member of the CPI and a leader of its student wing said that he had observed opportunistic tendencies in Kanhaiya for quite some time, but didn’t have any reason to think that he would join a bourgeois electoral party. (6) It is certainly true that Kanhaiya’s speeches criticised the style of governance that Modi pursued, condemning the communalism and intolerance. However, these were at best liberal. The speeches never mentioned communism or even the communist party he was representing. Kanhaiya’s campaigns in his home district of Begusarai, were done under the banner of ‘Team Kanhaiya’, and not that of his party, CPI. His radicalism from student days has long dried out. He is now a steadfast politician, who knows the rules of the game. This article is not about Kanhaiya Kumar, or any individual for that matter. However, this case of opportunism strikes me personally because the initial arrest of young Kanhaiya Kumar and the spectacle that was made of it, played a huge role in my turn towards radical politics. I am aware that this was the case for many young people across the country, at least those from a petty-bourgeois class background. When I was still in junior-high, I binge-watched every Kanhaiya Kumar speech and conference that I could get my hands on. I had also read his PhD thesis on African decolonisation and his personal memoir called “From Bihar to Tihar”. Kanhaiya pursuing opportunism did not surprise me one bit, the turn he was to take had become fairly obvious. There was an expectation in the CPI that Kanhaiya would translate his massive popularity into mass mobilisation and energy for class struggle. That expectation was let down. The Communist A couple of decades ago, in the same campus of JNU stood another young communist leader: Chandrashekhar Prasad, endearingly called ‘Chandu’. Chandu was a member of AISA, the student-wing of the Communist Party of India Marxist Leninist Liberation (CPIML-L). Chandu had begun his tryst with student politics in AISF (the same organisation that Kanhaiya was a part of). However, soon he made his shift to AISA, having become disillusioned by the revisionist tendencies of his previous organisation. AISA was then in its formative years, since its parent party (CPIML-L) had only began to make its shift from underground politics to broad mass-based organising. (7) Chandu is known to have been a charismatic leader and a brilliant student, who could present his arguments pertinently in the intellectual arena, as well as connect mirthfully with the working-class. He was pursuing his post-doctoral research thesis on forms of popular folk theatre of Bihar, the state where he was from. He wished to return to Bihar right after the completion of his education and struggle to improve the political scenario of the state, which was then dominated by government cronies and goons. In 1997, while planning a general strike in Bihar, Chandu was shot dead, along with one of his comrades, Shyam Narayan Yadav. This was nothing new in the Laloo Yadav-led Bihar state, where political assassinations and cronyism was manifold. Chandu’s death sparked protests across the country, especially among students. The protests were faced with violent police repression but succeeded to gain so much ground that a dialogue had to be arranged between the students and the nation’s then Prime Minister I.K Gujral. Gujral dismissed the students demands for justice as “impractical”. The protests did succeed in forcing a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation, however, the crony parliamentarian Shahabuddin, who had ordered the political assassination, was not arrested due to lack of evidence. (8) Chandu’s inspiration leads forwards young revolutionaries across the country, and his efforts at organising the initial years of AISA, bloom flowers today, with thousands of members across the country – the author of this article included. What is to be done? I do not intend to present a hagiography of Chandu, there is quite an amount of that available: the corporate Hindi film industry even displayed the desire to produce a commercial biopic of him, but was met with strong opposition from the party which Chandu had been loyal to in his life. Neither do I wish to present a contrast between two student leaders who grew out of similar circumstances and conditions of repression, but went in radically different directions. That contrast should be fairly obvious and not much is to be made of it. What is important for us, is to recognise the concrete elements of Chandu’s politics that could lead young student radicals closer to the revolutionary cause, and away from petty opportunism. Certain words from Lenin form the epigraph of this article. What one needs to understand is that students (and I mean students pursuing higher-education) do not automatically constitute an inherently progressive strata. A very tiny minority of a country’s population even comes close to higher education, and an even tinier portion of that minority comes from marginalised backgrounds. Higher-education spaces are an arena of the elite. Even those that enter universities are often victims of the dominant ideology, which leads them to be negligent to politics – let alone working-class politics. For these reasons, various communist party documents go ahead with the implicit assumption that students are generally petty-bourgeois. Thus, even when the liberal intelligentsia leads us to see an amount of glory in student protests and dissent, we must recognise its limitations. Lenin’s words echo this sentiment. That being said, no sensible person will deny that students form an important part of society and have a role to play in political transformation. From the young Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the hundreds of déclassé students in Naxalbari uprising in India, there is no denying of the role students play. The catch being that: in these uprisings and others, students were required to uproot themselves from the elite setting of the academia and form new roots in the ghettoes, slums, villages and dwellings of the workers and peasants. They were required to engage with the exploited classes and understand their needs, and fight alongside them for revolutionary change. They were required to transform their abstract political understanding into materially feasible programs, by engaging with the exploited class. In our times, the Chandus are less in number and the Kanhaiyas are ever expanding. In the context of the U.S, the same has been pointed out by many including the Marxist sociologist Vivek Chibber. The individuals are shaped and designed by the political domains of their time. In our domain of performative woke politics and postmodernist identity-politics, the broader left has lost touch with the working-class. Leftist students, being a subset, have met the same fate. There has been a broad acceptance of theories of intersectionality that focus on upward mobility and individualise the collective experiences of oppression. At its extreme, this shift causes the working-class to be incorrectly portrayed as a regressive reactionary class that isn’t well versed with politically correct diction and hence needs to be rebuild after the sanctimonious images of these woke students and the intelligentsia. (9) To bring alive the struggle against fascism, neoliberalism and the bourgeois-landlord alliance, to lead the struggle for revolutionary change, the left will have to relocate itself along the lines of Naxalbari, along the lines of the Cultural Revolution, along the lines of Chandu. The student left will have to stop obsessing over its own self and stand in alliance with the workers and peasants who have little to lose but their chains. References 1. Pisharoty, Sangeeta Barooah. What Lies Behind the 'Occupy UGC' Protest. The Wire, India. [Online] November 24, 2015. https://thewire.in/education/what-lies-behind-the-occupy-ugc-protest. 2. The Wire Staff. My Birth is My Fatal Accident: Rohith Vemula's Searing Letter. The Wire, India. [Online] January 17, 2019. https://thewire.in/caste/rohith-vemula-letter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices. 3. HT Correspondant. Kanhaiya Kumar released from jail, says will write his story now. Hindustan Times. [Online] March 3, 2016. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/jnu-students-union-leader-kanhaiya-kumar-released-from-jail/story-EMqrXflBIlkyhat12crKUP.html. 4. Kumar, Manish. Elections 2019: Why Giriraj Singh Won't Take His Rival Kanhaiya Kumar's Name. NDTV. [Online] April 24, 2019. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lok-sabha-elections-2019-why-giriraj-singh-wont-take-his-rival-kanhaiya-kumars-name-2028063. 5. Krishnan, Kavita. How To Not Fight Fascism. Liberation. [Online] November 2021. https://liberation.org.in/liberation-2021-november/how-not-fight-fascism. 6. Host, Swarup Katha Channel. CPI & AISF Leader Shuvam Banerjee on Kanhaiya Kumar. YouTube. [Online] September 29, 2021. https://youtu.be/JqxWuTfQh7s. 7. Banerjee, Sumanta. In the Wake of Naxalbari. Kolkara : A. P. Printers, 2014. 978-81-7955-116-5. 8. Kant, Krishna. The Gun That Killed JNU's Chandrashekhar 20 Years Ago Was 'Secular'. The Wire, India. [Online] April 1, 2017. https://thewire.in/politics/gun-killed-jnus-chandrashekhar-secular. 9. Chibber, Vivek. Whatever Happened To Class? Himal South Asian. [Online] November 21, 2017. https://www.himalmag.com/whatever-happened-to-class/. AuthorSuryashekhar Biswas is an undergrad from India, majoring in media studies and English literature. He takes interest in cultural and literary criticism and wishes to contribute to the glorious lineage of third-world Marxism. Archives November 2021  11/4/2021 Meet the Nicaraguans Facebook Falsely Branded Bots and Censored Days Before Elections. By: Ben NortonRead Now Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter suspended hundreds of influential pro-Sandinista journalists and activists days before Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, falsely claiming they were government trolls. The Grayzone interviewed them to reveal the truth. (Puede leer este informe en español aquí.) MANAGUA, NICARAGUA – Just days before Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, top social media platforms censored top Nicaraguan news outlets and hundreds of journalists and activists who support their country’s leftist Sandinista government. The politically motivated campaign of Silicon Valley censorship amounted to a massive purge of Sandinista supporters one week before the vote. It followed US government attacks on the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections, and Washington’s insistence that it will refuse to recognize the results. The United States sponsored a sadistically violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, which resulted in hundreds of deaths in a desperate effort to overthrow the democratically elected government of President Daniel Ortega. Since the putsch failed, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations have imposed several rounds of devastating sanctions on Nicaragua. The US Congress plans to levy new heavy-handed sanctions against Nicaragua following the November 7 elections. Silicon Valley’s crackdown on pro-Sandinista journalists and activists was part and parcel of the US government’s political assault on Nicaragua. Facebook and Instagram – both of which are owned by the newly rebranded Big Tech giant Meta – suspended 1,300 Nicaragua-based accounts run by pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists in a large-scale crackdown on October 31. Days before, Twitter did the same, purging many prominent pro-Sandinista journalists and influencers. On November 1, Sandinista activists whose accounts were suspended by Facebook and Instagram responded by posting videos on Twitter, showing the world that they are indeed real people. But Twitter suspended their accounts as well, seeking to erase all evidence demonstrating that these Nicaraguans are not government bots or part of a coordinated inauthentic operation. Twitter’s follow-up censorship was effectively a double-tap strike on the freedom of speech of Nicaraguans, whose apparent misdeed is expressing political views that challenge Washington’s objectives.   The thousands of accounts censored by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter collectively had hundreds of thousands of followers, and represented some of the biggest and most influential media outlets and organizations in Nicaragua, a relatively small country of 6.5 million people. US Big Tech companies suspending all of these accounts mere days before elections could have a significant, tangible impact on Nicaragua’s electoral results. The purges exclusively targeted supporters of the socialist, anti-imperialist Sandinista Front party. Zero right-wing opposition supporters in Nicaragua were impacted. Facebook published a report on November 1 claiming the Sandinistas it censored were part of a “troll farm run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party” that had engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” This is demonstrably false. In reality, what Facebook/Instagram did is purge most high-profile Sandinista supporters on the platforms, then try to justify it by claiming that average Sandinista activists are actually government-run bots. Facebook implicitly admitted this fact by conceding in the report that there were “authentic accounts” purged in the massive social media crackdown. But Facebook refused to differentiate between the authentic accounts and the alleged “inauthentic” accounts, naming none and instead lumping them all together in order to justify erasing their digital existence.  Unlike Facebook’s investigators, this reporter, Ben Norton, is based in Nicaragua and personally knows dozens of the Nicaraguans whose accounts were censored, and can confirm that they are indeed real people organically expressing their authentic opinions – not trolls, bots, or fake accounts. I interviewed more than two dozen Sandinista activists whose personal accounts were suspended, and published videos of some of them below, to prove that Facebook’s claims are categorically false. Facebook’s security team is run by former high-level US government officials The Facebook report falsely depicting average Sandinista activists as government trolls was co-authored by Ben Nimmo, the leader of Meta’s “Threat Intelligence Team.” The Grayzone has exposed Nimmo as a former press officer for the US-led NATO military alliance and paid consultant to an actual covert troll farm: the Integrity Initiative, which was established in secret by British military officers to run anti-Russian influence operations through Western media. Nimmo has served as head of investigations at Graphika, another information warfare initiative that was set up with funding from the US Defense Department’s Minerva Institute, and operates with support from the Pentagon’s top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  From Graphika’s website Nimmo, who is also a senior fellow at the Western government-funded Atlantic Council, meddled in Britain’s 2020 election by smearing leftist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as the vessel for a supposed Russian active measures operation. The latest Nimmo-engineered pseudo-scandal highlights Facebook’s role as an imperial information weapon whose security team has been essentially farmed out of the US government. The head of security policy at Facebook, Nathaniel Gleicher, promoted Nimmo’s report, echoing his false claims. Before moving to Facebook, Gleicher was director for cybersecurity policy at the White House National Security Council. He also worked at the US Department of Justice. Gleicher clarified that when Facebook accused Nicaragua of running a supposed “troll farm,” it “means that the op is relying on fake accounts to manipulate & deceive their audience.” According to this definition, Facebook’s report is completely wrong. Many of the accounts it suspended were run by everyday Nicaraguans, and The Grayzone has interviewed them and posted videos below.  Facebook’s “director of threat disruption,” David Agranovich, also shared Nimmo’s false report. Like Gleicher, Agranovich worked at the US government before moving to Facebook, serving as director of intelligence for the White House National Security Council.  Both of these US National Security Council veterans actively promoted Facebook’s coordinated purge of pro-Sandinista Nicaraguans.  The Grayzone contacted Facebook with a request for comment. The head of security communications, Margarita Z. Franklin, replied without any comment, simply linking to Nimmo’s report. When The Grayzone followed up and asked Franklin about Facebook suspending many real-life Nicaraguans who support their government but are very much not bots, she did not respond. Meet the Nicaraguans censored by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter The Grayzone spoke with more than two dozen living, breathing Sandinista activists, whom this reporter knows and has met in person, and who were purged in the social media crackdown. Many said this was the second or third time their accounts had been censored. Several had their Facebook and Twitter accounts removed during a violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in 2018. Multiple activists said they are afraid Washington will sponsor another coup attempt or destabilization operations following Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, and because they were banned on social media, the Sandinista supporters will be unable to inform the outside world about what is actually happening in their country. Ligia Sevilla  Sandinista influencer Ligia Sevilla, who had more than 5,500 followers on her personal Instagram account, which was suspended along with her Facebook profile, proclaimed, “I’m not a bot; I’m not a troll. And my social media accounts were censored. Maybe Facebook doesn’t allow us to be Sandinistas?” After Sevilla shared this video to verify her authenticity, Twitter suspended her account as well – a sign of a coordinated censorship campaign targeting Sandinistas on social media. Franklin Ruiz   Sandinista activist Franklin Ruiz, whose personal Facebook page was suspended, published a video message as well: “I want to tell you that we are human beings; we are people who, on Facebook, are defending our revolution, defending our country. We are not bots, as Facebook says, or programmed trolls.” After Ruiz shared this video on Twitter, the platform purged him too. Hayler Gaitán  Hayler Gaitán, another Sandinista activist censored by Facebook, published a video explaining, “”I am a young communicator. I am not a troll, as Facebook says, or a bot.” “I am a young communicator who shares information about the good progress in Nicaragua,” he continued. “We enjoy free healthcare, free education, and other programs that benefit the Nicaraguan people, and that we have been building throughout our history. And they have wanted to take that from us, but they will never be able to.” After Gaitán posted this video on Twitter, it suspended his account as well. Darling Huete   Darling Huete is a Nicaraguan journalist whose personal Facebook account was also censored. “I’m here to tell you that Facebook censored my account, according to it because my account is a troll account or fake account, something that is not true. My account has been active for more than seven years,” she said in a video she posted on Twitter. “This is clearly political censorship,because I support the government of Nicaragua, so they have decided that my opinion, or my way of thinking, is not appropriate according to the absurd policies of Facebook,” Huete lamented. After Huete shared this video, Twitter deleted her account, too. Huete told The Grayzone this is the second time her Facebook and Twitter accounts were suspended. The first time was during the violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. Daniela Cienfuegos   Daniela Cienfuegos, an activist with the pro-Sandinista Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores (Network of Youth Communicators), posted a video on Twitter saying, “I wanted to tell you that, no, we are not trolls. We are people who dedicate ourselves to communicate from the trenches, to inform the Nicaraguan people, and on the international stage.” After Cienfuegos published this, Twitter deleted her account as well. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter censor top pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan journalists and media outlets The above are just a small sample of Nicaraguans who were falsely smeared as “government-run trolls” by Facebook and erased from social media. But it wasn’t just individual Nicaraguans who were censored. Major Nicaraguan media outlets that provide a pro-Sandinista perspective were also removed. On the night of October 31, Facebook removed 140 pages and 24 groups, 100% of which were pro-Sandinista. Among those deleted were: • official Sandinista newspaper Barricada, which had more than 65,000 followers • popular youth-run left-wing media outlet Redvolución, which had more than 81,000 followers • the Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, or Young Communicators Network, which brings together journalists and media activists from the Sandinista Youth social movement, and which had more than 71,000 followers • and the individual profiles of dozens of Nicaraguan journalists, activists, and influencers. At the exact same time as the Facebook purge, its sister platform Instagram took down many of the same pages: • Barricada, which had more than 9,500 followers • Redvolución, which had more than 22,700 followers, • Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, which had more than 12,600 followers • and, once again, the personal pages of dozens of Nicaraguan journalists, activists, and influencers. Instagram also suspended the account of the fashion organization Nicaragua Diseña, which is very popular in Nicaragua, and had more than 42,700 followers. Unlike the other purged accounts, Nicaragua Diseña is decidedly not a political organization. It is run by Camila Ortega, a daughter of the president, but Nicaragua Diseña intentionally goes out of its way to avoid politics, trying to bring together opposition supporters and Sandinistas in apolitical cultural events. Just a few days before the coordinated Facebook-Instagram purge, Twitter also removed the accounts of the most prominent pro-Sandinista journalists and influencers on the platform. On October 28, Twitter suspended the accounts of media activists @ElCuervoNica, @FloryCantoX, @TPU19J, @Jay_Clandestino, and numerous others. Together, these pro-Sandinista communicators had tens of thousands of followers. Many of them, such as @CuervoNica and @FloryCantoR, had been censored before. This was the second or third account they had created, only to be censored for their political views.  Silicon Valley’s censorship of Nicaragua always goes in one direction: It is leftist, anti-imperialist supporters of the Sandinista government who are censored, while right-wing opposition activists, many of whom are funded by the US government, are verified and promoted by the social media monopolies. Numerous Nicaraguan journalists whose individual social media accounts were suspended told The Grayzone they were upset and angry, as they had spent countless hours of work over years building their pages, doing journalism, and sharing information. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter deleted all of that labor in mere seconds. Some said they fear this censorship will also harm them financially, as they had relied on their social media accounts as a source of income. In addition to clearly infringing on their rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression, the latest wave of Silicon Valley censorship has done concrete economic damage to working-class Nicaraguans who had relied on Facebook and Instagram to run small businesses. Several of those affected told The Grayzone they are now locked out of the Facebook and Instagram pages they had used to sell products like food, clothing, or homemade jewelry. This Silicon Valley censorship thus not only greatly hinders these working-class Nicaraguans’ ability to do their work as journalists, given social media is an integral part of contemporary journalism, but also deprived them of extra sources of income they had relied on to support their families. Given the US government’s hyperbolic claims of Russian meddling in its 2016 presidential election, the social media purge it has inspired in Nicaragua is stained with irony. After years of investigations, and billions of dollars spent, the only ostensible evidence Washington found of Russian interference was some Facebook posts, including absurd humorous memes. If these alleged Russian Facebook memes constitute a Pearl Harbor-style attack on North American democracy, as top US government officials have claimed, then what does it mean for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to censor highly influential pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists mere days before Nicaragua’s elections?  Besides meddling in foreign elections, North American social media monopolies have systematically and repeatedly censored journalists, politicians, and activists in numerous countries targeted by Washington for regime change, such as Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China. On numerous occasions, these Silicon Valley companies have admitted such purges were carried out at the request of the US government. The Grayzone has documented the many ways in which these Big Tech giants collaborate with Western governments, while promoting US state media and silencing people in countries that Washington has deemed its adversaries. For their part, the Nicaraguans censored by Facebook and Twitter have vowed to continue their work. Redvolución wrote that it will keep struggling in the “digital trenches” to “defend the revolution.” Quenri Madrigal, a prominent Sandinista activist and social media influencer, commented, “We have already witnessed the forms of online censorship targeting other countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. There is a tyranny of transnational technology and social media corporations. They are instruments that don’t belong to the peoples.” Featured image: File Photo (The Grayzone) by Ben Norton AuthorBen Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton. This article was published by Orinoco Tribune. Archives November 2021  11/4/2021 Electoral Contras: US Plotting to Sabotage Nicaraguan Democracy yet Again. By: Nan McCurdyRead Now But Nicaraguans Will Not Let the Evil Empire Dictate Who They Vote for, with Sandinista Revolutionary Leader Daniel Ortega Poised to Win The Sandinista party won with 62% of the vote in the 2011 elections and with 72.5% in 2016. Polls show the Sandinista Party winning as much as 70% of the vote in the November 7 election, when more than three million people will vote for President and Vice President, 90 National Assembly Deputies and 20 Central American Parliament Deputies. The likely reason for such a high vote for the Sandinista party is that people want the advances their families have experienced since 2007, like universal free health care and education to continue. Nicaragua has made the greatest investment in infrastructure with the newest health facilities and the best roads in the region.  New Departmental Hospital in Chinandega, one of 22 built since 2007. [Source: el19digital.com] Since 2007 poverty has been cut in half, maternal mortality has dropped by 70%, infant mortality by 61% with a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children 6 to 12 years old. With a high percentage of small and medium-scale farmers and much government investment in training and loans, they have achieved 90% food sufficiency. In the last 14 years potable water access has risen from 65% to 92%; electricity coverage has increased from 54% to 99%; and 80% of the energy is produced from renewables. In fact Nicaragua is number three in the world in renewable energy. In gender equality Nicaragua has gone from 62nd to 5th in the world and it holds first place in the world for women’s health and survival, women’s educational attainment and women cabinet ministers.  Panoramic view of the city of Managua, which has boomed under Sandinista rule. [Source: qcostarica.com] The satisfaction of the population with public services, Nicaragua’s transparency, lack of corruption and good project execution is even recognized by international banks. U.S. Strategy The U.S. strategy in the 2021 elections is to denounce them as illegitimate before they even take place. The U.S. has intervened in every election since Nicaragua’s first free and fair election which took place in 1984. That year, the U.S. used the Contra War and the U.S. economic blockade to twist the arms of the population. But when polls showed the Sandinista Party winning by a large margin, they told “their” candidate, Arturo Cruz, to drop out and say he was not participating because the elections were not going to be free and fair.  Arturo Cruz with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. [Source: elpais.com]  Daniel Ortega casts vote in 1984 election in Nicaragua which he won fairly. [Source: news.bbc.co.uk] RAIN: a CIA Regime-Change Plan A United States Agency for International Development (USAID) regime change document was leaked to independent Nicaraguan journalist William Grigsby in July of 2020 from the U.S. embassy. RAIN--Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua, RFTOP No: 72052420R00004—is a Terms of Reference contract for hiring a company to oversee what it refers to as “transition”—a word used more than 30 times in the document. It was written in the spring of 2020 and much of the U.S. destabilization activity to try to get the Sandinistas out of power has likely been under this plan. “The purpose of this activity is to provide rapid responsive…assistance to create the conditions for, and support, a peaceful transition to democracy in Nicaragua [regime change].” “RAIN will contribute to the Mission’s…objective of enabling the environment for Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.” “…targeted short-term…activities during Nicaragua’s transition that require rapid-response programming support until other funds, mechanisms and actors can be mobilized.” “Rain will pursue these activities against a variety of scenarios… 1.- Free, fair and transparent elections lead to an orderly transition [the U.S.-backed party wins]. 2.- A sudden political transition occurs following a crisis [including a health crisis] leads to a new government [a coup d’état]. 3.- Transition does not happen in an orderly and timely manner. In the case that a transition does not happen and the regime is able to hold onto power…by winning fairly, then RAIN…will relate to bridging to…longer-term activities…” “…Any national election could yield a result accepted by Nicaraguans and the International community [recognition that the Sandinistas could win in free and fair elections].” “If the regime remains resilient RAIN…will have the ability to respond…outside of other USAID programming [covertly], to…needs to maintain civil society on track…” “A delayed transition may require greater emphasis on…civil society leadership, with discreet technical assistance types of activities…” “In the case of a coup, RAIN [the U.S., the CIA] takes actions to show the new government is legitimate [like U.S. recognition of the new government]. In the case of a Sudden Transition [coup], RAIN will likely require more use of Rapid Response Funds…with attention to potential for conflict, legitimacy of new government actors and setting up the transition for success.” U.S. Actions to Isolate Nicaragua On September 24 at the United Nations, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the presidents of Mexico and all Central American countries except for Nicaragua and gave them the order to isolate Nicaragua. It is very unlikely that this will happen, despite all of these countries behaving in a relatively subservient way to the U.S.  Antony Blinken giving speech before the UN on September 24 after meeting with Mexican and Central American ministers with the exception of Nicaragua. [Source: breakingbelizenews.com] The economic relations between the Central American countries are very powerful and the commerce between them is strong. They buy and sell many products from one another. The transportation would be very difficult to stop given that Central America is an isthmus and Nicaragua is right in the middle. And each of the counties already has lots of problems; they likely do not want a problem with Nicaragua. They have good relations with Nicaragua—Nicaragua is very respectful of them. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) has always wanted to achieve the integration of Central America. Sanctions: Another Form of War
 Donald Trump signs the draconian NICA Act on December 20, 2018. The bill passed the House in a 435-0 vote, meaning that even progressive darlings in “the squad” supported it. [Source: confidencial.com] The Nica Act was to punish Nicaragua for not being a subservient colony; it is not based on any wrong-doing. For example the multilateral lenders only praise Nicaragua for its transparency and efficiency in project execution, going so far as to specifically say it is not corrupt.  Protest outside the Capitol against U.S. sanctions on Nicaragua. [Source: afgj.org] The NICA Act reduced multilateral loans, hurting development, and impacted health care during a pandemic. Due to the pandemic and two strong hurricanes in November 2020, some of the institutions have provided loans but primarily Covid-19 related. A number of members of the government have been sanctioned as individuals, like Paul Oquist, Minister for National Policies, who has since died. Oquist was an internationally recognized expert on climate change and co-chair of the Green Climate Fund in 2018. Born in the U.S., he gave up his U.S. citizenship in the 1980s in protest of the Contra War.  Paul Oquist at the UN. [Source: climatechangenews.com] On October 16, 2021 the Pope tweeted this about sanctions:  In order to punish Nicaragua further for having a growing economy, outrunning the other Central American nations in health care, education, infrastructure, and all statistics related to poverty, and for having the lowest Covid death rate in the region, Congress is now on the verge of passing further sanctions called the RENACER Act.  [Source: peoplesworld.org] Activists lobbying against this bill learned from congressional aides that members of Congress have received great pressure from the U.S. government through USAID, Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and others. The RENACER (Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform) Act is a form of coercion to try to get Nicaraguans to vote against the Sandinista government. Nicaraguans know what sanctions mean for their economy. RENACER would make development financing even more difficult to get and could possibly make the economy scream.  [Source: afgj.org] The bill has passed the Senate and will likely go to the floor of the House soon. The bill would already have passed without a formal vote, like the NICA Act, if it were not for impressive lobbying efforts by constituent friends of Nicaragua. The RENACER Act applies targeted sanctions to card-carrying Sandinista members, some 2.1 million people, a third of the population. U.S. Funding of Propaganda USAID provided U.S. $234,062,569 to Nicaraguan civil society from 2015 to 2021; and with the NED, IRI (International Republican Institute), NDI (National Republican Institute) and others, the U.S. openly gave more than $300 million to their Nicaraguan operatives and the non-governmental organizations they manage.  [Source: ned.org] Below is some of the funding for media outlets that stirred up anti-Sandinista hatred and distrust of the government, in favor of the 2018 U.S.-directed coup. The media created and/or funded slick websites, online magazines, social media, radio, tv and syndicated shows and the only newspaper that existed at the time, rabidly anti-Sandinista. U.S. Funds for Anti-Sandinista Propaganda Outlets
 USAID Funding to Influence the November 2021 Elections. [Source: radiolaprimerisima.com] After Nicaragua passed laws to keep foreign money out of Nicaraguan politics in the fall of 2020, Chamorro shut down the Foundation in early 2021 in order not to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires nonprofits to provide information on foreign funds received and evidence of how the funds were used. According to Nicaraguan journalist William Grigsby and former Contra leader turned news analyst, Enrique Quiñones, Chamorro transferred some $7 million to her personal accounts.  Cristiana Chamorro [Source: fourstateshomepage.com] Chamorro has been under house arrest since June 2 and, along with about nine others associated with the Foundation, including her brother Pedro Joaquin, is being investigated for money laundering and other crimes. The newspaper La Prensa and a number of its executives are also being investigated for fraud and money laundering.  Pedro Joaquin Chamorro [Source: today.in-24.com] t is interesting to note that important USAID partners like the VBCF used to be listed on the USAID website; just in the last year that information has been redacted. The Nicaraguan Public Ministry has accused or is investigating more than 30 people for crimes like fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and treason. Many of those accused of conspiracy, treason and other crimes were involved in the 2018 coup attempt.  Demonstrators’ fire homemade mortars during coup attempt against Daniel Ortega in May 2018. [Source: theatlantic.com] They are not being investigated for that because, in June 2019, the government gave amnesty to everyone involved in the coup. The current accusations are for requesting sanctions and other forms of war from a foreign country and for taking part in a new coup attempt. Since these investigations began in June, the U.S. media have fallen into line accusing Nicaragua of wrongdoing. Their headlines stated that Nicaragua was jailing presidential pre-candidates to ensure that the Sandinistas would win.  Propaganda—featured in this case in The Economist—depicting Daniel Ortega as a red devil and dictator who has destroyed the rule of law in Nicaragua. [Source: economist.com] First of all, the polls show the Sandinistas winning with anywhere from 63% to 75% of the vote. Secondly, the five people the media say were pre-candidates were not even members of a party. Under Nicaragua’s Electoral Law, parties do not officially pick candidates until August and there is no such thing as a pre-candidate. In any case, along with an Alliance that includes the FSLN and eight other officially recognized parties, six more parties are running, many more than in any election in the U.S. The government provides campaign funds to the parties. All but one of the parties with representatives in the National Assembly are running. And the party that won second place in 2016, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC) is running.  Nicaragua’s former President Arnoldo Alemán, center, embraces a supporter at the Liberal Constitutionalism Party (PLC) convention in Managua on Sunday, July 11, 2010. The party is fielding candidates in the election again in 2021. [Source: sandiegotribune.com] Influencing Nicaraguan Voters Through Covid-19 Scare Tactics The U.S.-directed media in Nicaragua—and its echo chamber in the international press that have carried out health terrorism since Covid-19—began asserting that many more people are sick and dying than is the case. This is part of the media distortion described above. Unfortunately due to these lies, as Covid-19 was beginning, some people did not go to the hospital for fear of getting sicker like the U.S.-backed media purported. And some of these people died. Nicaragua spends one-fifth of its budget on health care and has invested many millions in new infrastructure and equipment, including 22 new hospitals. Nicaragua has had far fewer cases of Covid-19 per capita than any country in the Americas: The IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation), which calculates excess deaths worldwide, shows 268 deaths for Nicaragua, 7,521 for Costa Rica and 10,760 for Honduras.  Man receiving Covid-19 vaccine. [Source: el19digital.com] According to a study conducted by the Spanish travel agency Planyts, Nicaragua is one of the ten safest countries for travel during the pandemic, and the only country listed in the Americas. The study used data from Oxford University and the World Health Organization. Despite this, the U.S. embassy lists Nicaragua as a level 4—do not travel—country, whereas Honduras, much more dangerous for Covid-19 or simply for murder and violence, is listed as Level 3. The U.S. also practices vaccine diplomacy: It has given vaccines to all of the Central American nations—except Nicaragua. Although Nicaragua has been vaccinating since March, only in October did it get larger quantities of vaccines from Spain, Russia, India and the COVAX Mechanism. With more than 1,000 vaccination posts around the country everyone can get vaccinated and already more than 2.3 million people have been vaccinated. The U.S.-backed Media Say People are Fleeing Political Persecution This is another lie the U.S. has ramped up for the elections. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the yearly average number of Nicaraguans apprehended at the border between 2015 and 2018 was 2,292, very small compared to 63,741 Hondurans. The U.S. Border Patrol has encountered more Nicaraguans in 2021 (33,000), but still low compared to Honduras (218,000) and El Salvador (73,000). Tom Ricker of the Quixote Center says the push factorsinclude Covid-affected economies for all the migrants, wrecked tourism, which provided a lot of employment in Nicaragua; destruction of crops by two major hurricanes in 2020 affecting Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua; 2018 sanctions (NICA Act) and the threat of more sanctions; prior to Covid-19 there were seasonal jobs in Costa Rica, but now there are more people returning to Nicaragua. Meta/Facebook Subversion On October 31, the United States launched a new anti-democratic campaign days before the election. It did this through Meta (Facebook) which censored about 1,000 accounts and pages of activists, communicators and digital platforms in Nicaragua, simply because they expressed their support for the Sandinista Revolution. Facebook executives claimed that these were “trolls” (fake accounts), which is totally false. I know many of them. They are real people who share the truth and show the world the progress that Nicaragua has made in the last 14 years of the Sandinista government. In 2018 it was shown that the U.S. financed actual bot farms outside of Nicaragua, call centers in El Salvador as well as Miami were bringing in online traffic in an attempt to destabilize the country and push a coup attempt through social media—these were completely fake accounts spreading violence and fake news against the Sandinista government. The U.S. is an expert at this. The bot farms continue to this day and Facebook does nothing to stop them, because they are spreading the disinformation the U.S. wants. These fake opposition accounts are easy to spot because they have absolutely no personal information or photos on their profiles, usually only a generic opposition image as their profile picture, and repeating the same messages (comments) over and over to push the U.S. narrative. Honduras and U.S. Double Standards Honduras will also have elections in November, but the U.S. is not trying to oust the government even though its president, Juan Orlando Hernández, blatantly rigged elections, stole from Honduran social services, and has been accused of protecting drug traffickers and helping to flood the U.S. with cocaine.  Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother was convicted in a U.S. court on narco-trafficking charges and has presided over deteriorating economic conditions in Honduras, has been treated far more kindly in the U.S. media than Ortega. [Source: covertactionmagazine.com]  Protesters call Hernández a narco-dictator. [Source: covertactionmagazine.com] W.T. Whitney, Jr., wrote in People’s World: Honduras’s poverty rate is 70%…Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narcotraffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished. According to insightcrime.org, Honduras was Latin America’s third most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third highest murder rate…Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration to wherever between 1990 and 2020… What Will the Impact Be on Nicaragua’s Elections? The U.S. government has been extremely successful in terms of getting the U.S. press, in chorus, to denigrate Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for being a “dictatorship.” It has been even more successful at keeping all the good news of Nicaragua’s amazing social and economic advances out of the press. The government of Nicaragua reaffirmed at the United Nations General Assembly that, in the November 7 election, it is not the U.S. Empire that will choose but the Nicaraguan people. During his UN speech, Foreign Minister Denis Moncada ratified Nicaragua’s commitment to continue working for peace, security and tranquility of individuals, families and communities. Statistically, every aspect of life has improved under the Sandinistas and the intention to vote Sandinista has increased monthly in the polls.  Denis Moncada [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]  FSLN remains the most popular party in Nicaragua. [Source: alborada.net] It appears that U.S. sanctions, coercion, and disinformation will have little effect on how Nicaraguans vote. Featured image: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega (R) and his wife, Vice-President Rosario Murillo (L), flash the V sign during the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution at “La Fe” square in Managua on July 19, 2019. [Source: gettyimages.com] (ConvertAction Magazine) AuthorNan McCurdy is a United Methodist missionary with the General Board of This article was produced by Orinoco Tribune. Archives November 2021  11/4/2021 Facebook Censors Sandinistas in Nicaragua Days Before Presidential Elections. By: Daniela JimenezRead Now Social media corporation Facebook, now called Meta, reported that it eliminated an alleged network of trolling accounts aimed at national audiences in Nicaragua. However, activists and supporters of Daniel Ortega’s government allege that their accounts were closed without prior notice and clarified that they are not trolls. This was stated by Sandinista activist Ligia Sevilla, who reported that she was censored by the social media platform due to content she posted in support of the government of Daniel Ortega, and against the interests of the right-wing opposition in the Central American country, but above all in favor and in defense of the rights won during the Revolution. In the video, similar to several posted by Sandinista media activists and journalists, Sevilla states: “My name is Ligia Sevilla. I’m not a bot, I’m not a troll, and my social media accounts were censored. Maybe Facebook doesn’t allow us to be Sandinistas?” The video was posted by The Grayzone journalist with extensive experience in the field in Nicaragua, Ben Norton. This happened just days before Nicaragua’s presidential elections scheduled for November 7. President Daniel Ortega is heading for a new victory, while right-wing opposition elements are boycotting the elections.  Meta said that the action of these alleged trolls was a national operation, with links to multiple government institutions and the FSLN party. “We see no evidence of foreign actors behind this campaign,” the corporation reported. It also mentioned that it eliminated 937 false accounts on its platform. It also deleted 140 pages, 24 groups and 363 Instagram accounts, all of them belonging to the same network. Mainstream media outlets widely reported that Facebook eliminated or dismantled a network of trolls or a “troll farm,” and reported that the network was linked to the government of Daniel Ortega. Considering the decision within the context of general elections to be held in less than week, and according to right-wing leaders, the objective of the “network” was to flood the community with messages in favor of the government and against the opposition. Facebook is politics The Central American country has achieved significant progress in the guarantees of human rights under the Ortega government, even in the midst of economic and media aggressions by the United States and the European Union and their complicit and subservient forces within the Central American country. The Meta company’s decision to block hundreds of supporters of the Sandinista government, when the elections are this Sunday, November 7, does not seem accidental. In many countries, Facebook participates as the main political actor on the internet. In 2011, for example, at Israel’s request Facebook censored user accounts calling for an uprising in the Palestinian territories. In an opinion piece, Thierry Meissan highlighted that in 2015, Facebook decided that the Lebanese political party Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Republic are “terrorist organizations.” Then it closed the accounts of television stations such as the Lebanese news outlet Al-Mayadeen, two Syrian broadcasters Sama TV and Ad Dunia, and private Syrian channel Al Ikhbariya. On the other hand, the company puts various “trainers” at the disposal of jihadists trying to overthrow the Syrian government. The same columnist and researcher recalled that in 2020, Facebook was involved in colonialist politics with its 2Africa project to install an underwater cable around the entire continent. In this way he concludes that Facebook also functions as a political actor. Featured image: Facebook corporation is known for censoring content by left activists and organizations. In the sketch the hands of Facebook are blocking the mouth and eyes of a stylized face. Image: Adhocnews (Italy). Featured image: Facebook corporation is known for censoring content by left activists and organizations. In the sketch the hands of Facebook are blocking the mouth and eyes of a stylized face. Image: Adhocnews (Italy). (RedRadioVE) by Daniela Jiménez, with Orinoco Tribune content Translation: Orinoco Tribune OT/JRE/SL AuthorDaniela Jimenez This article was produced by Orinoco Tribune. Archives November 2021  |
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