12/20/2021 Deng Xiaoping and Marxism as a proletarian statecraft. By: Sebastián León-Translated By: Valeria BacaRead Now“It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” When we think of modernity we tend to think of capitalism and the legal-political institutions that often accompany it. This can lead us to conceptualize modernity as a mostly negative event, due to the series of bloody historical events that have accompanied and to this day accompany the expansion of capitalism and liberal democracy[1]. For this reason, we tend to forget its “subjective,” “cultural” or, more precisely, “normative” face: the fact that, initially, for the main intellectual and political representatives of the incipient bourgeois culture, modernity was thought of fundamentally as a political project of Platonic roots, whose purpose was the rational organization of society in favor of individual well-being and general prosperity. Nowadays, we tend to think of liberalism as a political ideology that defends "individual freedom" (thought of, in purely abstract and negative terms, as the lack of constraints), but the father of liberal political theory, John Locke, understood his philosophical-political proposal as the defense of a new "statecraft[2]", according to which the best way for a State to become rich, prosperous and powerful was, on the one hand, the increase of arable land in its territory, and on the other, guaranteeing the right of individuals to use them to increase their value (and, of course, the availability of labor ready to work)[3]. The freedom defended by this first version of liberalism did not imply so much the freedom of individuals in the full meaning of the term as the possibility for them to freely dispose of their property[4] and to participate in a series of economic transactions based on the principle of free trade[5]. Locke was not so much a democrat as the defender of an elite government whose legitimacy rested on the possession of knowledge about the correct way to govern (that is: to organize society); what differentiated this enlightened liberal elite from the old Platonic aristocracy is that their wisdom linked the prosperity of the State inextricably to the right of the individual to seek their own well-being (even in the restricted dimension of the economic)[6]. Eventually, with the overcoming of the feudal mode of production and the development of the market economy, this novel art of liberal government would evolve into the first properly modern science: political economy. The Scottish Adam Smith, father of this new science, would perfectly understand the relationship between markets and government, insisting in his famous work The Wealth of Nations (which he defined as a treatise on government) that the latter was not only the one in charge of creating the moral, legal and institutional conditions[7] that made the existence of markets possible, but that it had to use them to create a balance between the antagonistic forces of the different social classes that made up the political community. For Smith, a good ruler had to rise above the short-term interests of businessmen and workers, establishing conditions that would lead them to increase the productivity of social work and generate a degree of wealth that would conduct the nation towards general opulence[8]. The German philosopher Georg Hegel, whom Marx considered his teacher, would go a step further than Smith, explaining what to him was the fundamental principle of the modern nation State: “The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being.”[9] Unlike liberal thinkers, Hegel (who besides being influenced by Smith’s economic ideas, was also heavily influenced by French republicanism[10]) considered that modern individuals would not be satisfied with the mere pursuit of the economic interest: the modern idea of individual well-being (tied, as we have mentioned, to the idea of peace and collective prosperity) evolved in such a way that no individual was capable of conceiving their own well-being as something independent of the highest possible degree of individual freedom. Hence, to Hegel, a society that did not guarantee both freedom and material well-being to every single one of its citizens (no longer merely subjects), was a society inevitably condemned to destroy itself from within, corroded by the struggle between those who could enjoy this right and those who could not. Thus, to Hegel, the historical crucible from which bourgeois society emerges, results in the fact that for the first time in history, freedom, along with the material well-being that allows it to be enjoyed, becomes an ethical obligation of society to every single one of its members, which if not satisfied would lead to a crisis of legitimacy of the institutions and to social chaos. In short, the German author recognized that if society did not live up to its obligations towards its members, the latter had no greater reason to respect or preserve it. The paradox of bourgeois society, of which Hegel was already aware, is that the same market mechanism that would have allowed it to produce more wealth than at any other time in human history - that is, the imperative of capital accumulation - at the same time would have given rise to the most inhuman misery that has ever existed, increasing the lines of the dispossessed at the same rate as the wealth produced being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands[11]. This reality meant that a growing sector of society could not benefit from the material and cultural wealth being produced, and that, as a consequence of this precariousness, it was impossible for them to live freely (becoming a permanent risk for bourgeois society). However, although Hegel came to glimpse the problem and proposed a series of corrections to keep society cohesive, Marx will be the first to understand that it is a structural failure of the capitalist system, a necessary law of its operation that cannot be overcome from the coordinates of the same: <<The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital also develop the labor power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labor. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.>> [12] For this reason, Marx would no longer propose palliatives, but rather directly attack the structural root of the problem: the bourgeois institution of private property, the ultimate foundation of capitalist control of the means of production and of all capitalist social relations, as well as the efficient cause of the insurmountable asymmetry of social power between workers and capitalists. Only by abolishing private property of the means of production and transcending capitalism will it be possible to achieve in the material world that harmony between the universal interest of society and the freedom and well-being of each particular individual which Hegel considered the "essence" of the modern State. Paradoxically, making this ideal a reality will imply abandoning any abstract conception of the State as a "neutral" entity, situated above the antagonism between social classes (that is, any ahistorical conception of it). Thus, as it consolidates as the ideology of the labor movement, Marxism will defend a revolutionary political praxis that demands, as a crucial first step for the restructuring of social relations and the radical transformation of society, the seizure of state power by the proletariat and the consolidation of a dictatorship of the proletariat, which inaugurates the road to socialism[13] with the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Socialists must leave behind, as a matter of principle, all flirtation with the ideal of an understanding between producing classes and owning classes[14]. For many years, Marxism (dialectical materialism and its application to the social world as historical materialism), would be a theory of revolutionary tactics and strategy, systematization of the experience of struggle of the working class with hopes of a political revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat[15]. But when the first successful socialist revolutions came, Marxism had to rise to the new circumstances: the revolutionaries who had come to power had to become statesmen. Revolutionary theory had to become a different statecraft from that of the bourgeoisie. A proletarian statecraft was necessary, which would help organize society according to the interests of the working class (and the other popular classes). The fundamental difference between both ways of understanding government is probably found in the method of Marxism, which differentiates it from bourgeois political economy: Marxism has a dialectical and materialistic approach, which presupposes that in the material universe that modern sciences reveal to us there is nothing static, that change and movement always rule in it and that what is in the present in a certain way, under certain conditions, can be transformed into its opposite. For this reason, Marxism does not accept universally valid abstract formulas, and, applying dialectical understanding to society, discovers the field of history (in contrast to bourgeois science, which often ignores the historicity of its objects of study and does not come to understand adequately the internal dynamics of society). Thus, the main characteristic of a governmental apparatus guided by Marxist theory will be its ability to adapt and respond adequately to the crises and problems that arise in the long process during which it seeks to create the material conditions that make possible the elimination of private property, the overcoming of capitalist social relations and the definitive abolition of social classes (in hopes of making an effective reality the modern promise of autonomy and material well-being). Among all the great revolutionaries who have emerged from the ranks of Marxism, perhaps the one who best embodied the ideal of the proletarian statesman has been Deng Xiaoping. This is a controversial claim, not only because there have been so many other great politicians in the history of international communism[16], but especially because of Deng's reputation among some socialist circles, especially among the so-called "Maoists," of having "betrayed" his predecessor Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution, and for having led the People's Republic of China "back to capitalism." This accusation, of course, refers to the famous policy of "reform and opening-up" initiated by the Chinese leader in the early 1980s, which finds its theoretical justification in what the Chinese Communist Party calls the "Deng Xiaoping Theory.” I would like to briefly defend that it is precisely in the reform and opening-up and in the Deng Xiaoping Theory that we can identify the perfection to which Deng led Marxism, understood as a statecraft. First, it is necessary to ask, where did the accusations against Deng derive? The answer is simple: they derive, mainly, from the identification of socialism with the collectivization of property, based on the model established in the USSR by Stalin at the beginning of the 1930s, and which, with more or less differences, most socialist countries would adopt during the second half of the 20th century. However, this identification forgets, in the first place, the economic history of the USSR: the first socialist country in the world, had at least three different economic models, the first of which was called “War Communism” (basically, the rationing of resources, the distribution of scarcity to survive the period of wars); the second would be Lenin's so-called “New Economic Policy,” whose main objective was to use private investment and entrepreneurship to rebuild and develop Soviet production. Lenin would have stated on at least one occasion that his intention was for the NEP to be applied for a long time[17]; be that as it may, the imminence of war would lead Stalin to initiate the process of collectivization that would make possible the accelerated industrialization of the USSR, under the leadership of the State. Thus, both the processes of change in the organization of the USSR’s economy, as well as the concrete events that in each case would lead the Soviet State to carry out said changes, tend to be forgotten. Second, the economic history of the People's Republic is often forgotten: while the CCP did not come to seize control of the entire mainland China until 1949, several regions had been under its rule for at least twenty years before; in these regions, the Party experimented with different forms of property organization: both “state” property, under the Party's command, and private property and cooperatives. In other words, it was a “mixed” organization of production[18]; in 1940, on New Democracy, Mao defended this "peculiar" character of the Chinese Revolution, its refusal to completely expropriate private owners, due to the backwardness of the Chinese economy[19]. For the father of the People's Republic of China, the revolution in countries like his had to go through two stages, or through a revolution in two parts: a moment of political revolution (of the creation of a "democratic" and sovereign institutionality, in the sense that it should be directed by the popular classes, that is, by the alliance between workers and peasants, led by the Chinese Communist Party, differentiating itself from the formal democracy of the West and adapting to the particular needs of the Chinese people, putting the development of productive forces at the service of national interests) and one of social revolution (during which the fruits of production could be used to progressively transform social relations into post-capitalist relations, definitively abolishing private property and the State as a form of class domination, leading to a complete socialization of the means of production)[20]. In the first stage, the private property of the bourgeoisie would not be completely expropriated, but it would be subjected to a political expropriation[21]. It would not be until 1958, largely as a consequence of the Sino-Soviet split and the withdrawal of economic aid from the USSR (in addition to the permanent threat of US imperialism), that the collectivization of the Chinese economy would be opted for. As is known, this attempt at economic collectivization (between 1958 and 1976) did not have good results, and it would be abandoned shortly after Mao's death[22]. Coming to power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping would initiate a radical process of change in the People's Republic. The situation in the country at that point, economically and socially, was quite critical, as a consequence of the serious mistakes made in the previous two decades. On the basis of what could be rescued from the previous period (advances in education, health and life expectancy), Deng initiated a series of reforms that would begin in the countryside (gradually transforming the communal property regime into one of family property that would allow peasants to manage their land and grow and sell their products on the market[23]), which would lead to the progressive opening of China to the international market. Already at this moment it was evident, for more than a decade, that the productivity of the USSR and the other socialist countries had begun to stagnate, and that they were entering a serious recession; it was becoming clear that the heroic incentive of the workers (their patriotic and revolutionary impetus, their need to carry on production in the name of the nation and the revolution), which had served Lenin's homeland so well during the first decades of its existence had begun to run out during the period of “peaceful coexistence.” Therefore, the market, with its material incentive, would have to be used as a tool to increase the productivity of the Asian giant. Deng would justify this recourse to the market: The proportion of planning to market forces is not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too. Planning and market forces are both means of controlling economic activity. [24] The complete nationalization of banks and tough antitrust legislation would allow the CCP to condition capital investments in China, and opening up to foreign capital would allow for the first time a socialist country to overcome the harsh technological blockade imposed by the US. Likewise, the State would retain control of a series of key industries (including heavy industry), putting the production of consumer goods in the hands of the market (in which adequate production and distribution the main limitations of the planning were presented). In this way, the market could be used to increase productivity (that is, to generate value) rather than to generate profits (mere exchange value) without benefiting the rest of society. This shed light on that infamous mantra of the Reform and Opening-up period, traditionally attributed to Deng: "To get rich is glorious." In an interview, when asked what this phrase could have to do with communism or socialism, Deng would answer: According to Marxism, communist society is based on material abundance. Only when there is material abundance can the principle of a communist society - that is, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' be applied. Socialism is the first stage of communism. Of course, it covers a very long historical period. The main task in the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces, keep increasing the material wealth[25] of society, steadily improve the life of the people and create material conditions for the advent of a communist society. There can be no communism with pauperism, or socialism with pauperism. So to get rich is no sin. However, what we mean by getting rich is different from what you mean. Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people. To get rich in a socialist society means prosperity for the entire people. The principles of socialism are: first, development of production and second, common prosperity. We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster. That is why our policy will not lead to polarization, to a situation where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.[26] Thus, under the leadership of the CCP, on the one hand, the investment had to be used to create infrastructure, security and jobs where they were needed[27]; likewise, the guarantee of competition[28] should encourage technological innovation and increased productivity. Finally, with the arrival of foreign capital, the Chinese people would learn little by little to produce the technology that had become key to consolidate themselves as an economic power (freeing themselves in the process of economic dependence on the capitalist powers and reconfiguring the international correlation of forces). However, for Deng none of this would be possible if the institutionality created by the CCP during the previous years were not maintained: the future of China was married to the implementation of democratic centralism and the iron leadership of the Communists. Only by maintaining its own form of government, different from the liberal parliamentarianism of the West, could the so-called “Four Modernizations” (agriculture (1), industry (2), defense (3) and science and technology (4))[29] become a reality. As can be seen, this idea of Deng fits perfectly in the line established by Mao four decades earlier on New Democracy. So far we have seen the first pillar of the Deng Xiaoping Theory: the need for the Communist Party government to make use of the market to create wealth for all of society, disciplining entrepreneurs through competition and the use of subsidies to develop the productive forces[30]. We see here that the reform and economic opening-up become a principle of government, a tool to govern in the modern way; it is this first pillar of his theory that Deng Xiaoping called "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The second pillar of the Deng Xiaoping Theory would have to do with his reinterpretation of Mao Zedong's thought: Deng would highlight the importance of recognizing the debt of Chinese society with Mao, and the importance of his teachings as a revolutionary and theorist of Marxism-Leninism, but he was not to be elevated to the status of a deity. Mao had been capable of making mistakes (some quite gross); the fundamental of his thought was in his defense of the scientificity of Marxism, in his call to “seek truth from facts” (the crucial recognition of practice as the only criterion of truth). To make Mao Zedong's thinking dogmatic was to move away from Mao's teachings, it was to refine his scientific thinking. This would not only allow Deng to legitimize himself before the cadres and before Chinese society, establishing the continuity between him and Mao, but also to epistemologically base his theory: the need for the Reform and Opening-up in socialism with Chinese characteristics was based on experience, in the confrontation of reality with practice and the consequent learning. In this sense, the Deng Xiaoping Theory can be conceived as an innovation within Mao Zedong's Thought. To conclude this long essay, we can see to what extent Deng picks up on Mao's idea that socialism is a long process of transition between capitalism and communism as a post-capitalist classless society, and not a clearly defined mode of production. What allows us to get from one point to another would be the leadership of the Communist Party, which must create the material conditions to break with capitalist social relations and their harmful consequences. For this, the Party can employ various resources, such as planning or the market economy, as required by objective conditions; the fundamental thing about this proletarian statecraft would be that, unlike the bourgeois statecraft, it recognizes (1) that the interests of the capitalist class, directly linked to profit, prevent a healthy development of society [31], (2) so they must be removed from political power and state institutions; (3) also, that this can only be achieved by putting the proletariat, the peasantry, and the popular classes in general in political power. Finally, (4) the State and its institutions must have the capacity to adapt quickly to circumstances, to recognize and correct errors, and to restructure their policies accordingly[32]. Only in this way can the degree of material wealth that can make the normative principle of modern government come true, according to which the basis of government is to guarantee the well-being of each member of society and to maximize their freedom. Only the recognition of the importance of class struggles and of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat can ultimately lead us to the "general opulence" of which Adam Smith spoke, and which is nothing other than the overcoming of capitalism and the realization of communism. Deng Xiaoping stands on the shoulders of giants, certainly, but he was the first to understand this with all clarity, as the results of his governmental practice demonstrate. Notes: [1] And that those of us that live in the postcolonial periphery know so well. [2] The Anglo-Saxon term would be "statescraft." Here the word "craft" does not refer so much to an aesthetic production (that is, artistic) as to the root of the term "craftsman," which refers to the ability to do or produce something methodically, that is, by applying a series of rules or precepts; it would be a matter of "practical knowledge" rather than theoretical knowledge. Another word that is close to its meaning in Spanish could be "technique". In the West, the tradition of statecraft and the problem of the education of rulers has its roots in the philosophy of Ancient Greece (specifically, in the philosophy of Plato); however, it would have come to Greece from Asia, finding precedents in the traditions of Persia, India, China, etc. [3] See Locke, J., Second Treatise of Government. [4] Including among the properties, particularly in the case of the poor, the body itself understood as labor power. [5] The root of the term "liberal" would not be "freedom", but rather "liberality", a synonym for "generosity" that the modern Anglo-Saxon intelligentsia (from Thomas Hobbes to David Hume) considered as the virtue par excellence of the aristocracy: the modern ideal of the ruling class was that of a liberal, generous class, since in the long run its policies should bring a degree of bonanza that could eventually be enjoyed by even the poorest of the State's subjects. Here we find the historical precedent for the famous "trickle-down effect" of neoclassical economic theory. [6] Of course, other important aspects of Locke's political theory are omitted here, such as his inhuman defense of the institution of slavery. For Locke, the space of economic freedom guaranteed by the liberal government was perfectly compatible with the deprivation of all rights to those individuals who, for one reason or another, did not hold the status of subject of the State nor, as a consequence, the privilege of participating in that space (these plagued people included both those who were considered a threat to property rights and those who were considered racially inferior because of their 'primitive' culture - at certain periods in English history the dividing line between these two subsets became more or less diffuse; see D. Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History). [7] And, of course, also military. [8] See Smith, A., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. [9] See Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right. [10] It would be in the context of the French Revolution and the multiple revolutions that followed that, little by little, a people’s statecraft would begin to emerge (as opposed to the bourgeois statecraft). We will return to this idea later. [11] In Das Kapital Marx finishes developing this idea, explaining how the imperative to lower production costs to maximize profits leads, on the one hand, to replace human labor with technology (increasing the numbers of the "industrial reserve army", which have lost the "privilege” of being exploited and become a threat to the working conditions of those who are still employed), and on the other, to an aggressive competition between capitalists, in which the smallest capitals are eventually taken out of the competition and engulfed by the largest capitals. [12] See, Marx, K., Das Kapital. [13] The transitional period between capitalism and a post-capitalist, classless society (which we agree to call, with Marx and Engels, communism). [14] Lenin, V., State and Revolution. Lenin will denounce the opium dream of harmony between social classes that periodically resurfaces within the socialist movement as a symptom of the corruption of a more privileged sector of the European working class by the capitalists (benefiting from better working conditions, guaranteed by extracting surplus value from the colonial periphery). Thus, for example, the turn of the Social Democracy towards reformism during the time of the Second International was largely explained by the “gentrification” of the workers' leaders in Western Europe. [15] Lenin would say that Marxism should be understood as "the concrete analysis of the concrete situation" (in contrast to social democratic revisionism, which supported a metaphysics of history, in which all backward societies had to necessarily develop as a reflection of European history, going through one by one a fixed series of "historical stages" before reaching bourgeois society and eventually socialism). In the conditions of imperialism, Lenin would bet on the support of the working classes for the national liberation struggles of the colonial and semi-colonial countries; in the national conditions of Russia, by a popular alliance with the peasantry. In the particular conditions of Peru, Mariátegui would bet on a socialism in which the indigenous people occupy a leading place, and in those of China, Mao Zedong would propose the strategic line of a revolution that would go "from the countryside to the city," with the peasantry as the main political actor. [16] It is important to mention that, during his years as the head of the People’s Republic of China, Deng and his fellow compatriots could enjoy a very high level of social peace and stability compared to what other socialist leaders and their respective countries came to know. The strategic alliance and trade agreements that Mao Zedong forged with the US after the unfortunate Sino-Soviet split freed the People's Republic of much of the pressure that US imperialism has historically exerted on socialist countries. Also important was the abandonment of the political line that had been inaugurated during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. [17] “In earnest and for a long time” the founder of the USSR would say during the closing of the Tenth Russian Conference of the Russian Communist Party in 1921. The fact that Deng Xiaoping lived in the USSR during the implementation period of the NEP is not a secondary fact. During the 1980s, several years after China's economic opening began, Deng would say that perhaps the NEP model in the USSR was the most correct model to achieve socialism. [18] See Losurdo, D. [19] Some of Mao followers forget this fact; others consider that Mao was at the time in the wrong position. Marxists who despise the Chinese Revolution and the People's Republic, for their part, consider these positions to be evidence that China was "revisionist" since the time of Mao. I consider that, in effect, there is a certain continuity between Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping here, although I do not think that either of the two revolutionaries was a "revisionist" (unless revisionism implies heterodoxy; however, Stalin and Lenin themselves would have been heterodox at their time, and would have opposed Bolshevism to the “dogmatic Marxism” of Social Democracy). [20] See, Mao, Z., On New Democracy. [21] The idea is in Mao, but the precedent is in Lenin's NEP (a capitalist class that the ruling proletarian class allows to enrich itself in the name of national interests). Capitalist exploitation partially persists, but for the first time in history it is the exploited class that possesses political power. [22] Chinese collectivization would have important differences with the one carried out in the USSR. Mao's intention would be to rely less on cadres for planning and more on direct deliberation by the masses. Hua Guofeng, Mao's immediate successor before Deng's consolidation, would seek to adopt a policy more similar to that followed by the USSR during the previous decade. His lack of ability as a ruler would lead him to depend more and more on Deng, who would eventually assume power, never officially holding the positions of head of government or of the CCP. [23] Giovanni Arrighi, in his book Adam Smith in Beijing, insists on the importance of these reforms in the countryside: in Arrighi's opinion, it would be the livelihood that the bulk of Chinese workers (of peasant origin) can obtain independently from work in the cities, and the establishment of cooperatives in their places of origin, one of the great differentials of the PRC with respect to capitalist countries. [24] Deng, X., Excerpts from Talks given in Wuhan, Shenzhen and Shanghai. [25] Italics are mine. [26] Interview to Mike Wallace. [27] It is important to mention here the Special Economic Zones, where capitalist social relations are tolerated. [28] Which Adam Smith already recognized was always at risk because it was contrary to the interests of businessmen, and had to be guaranteed by government intervention. See Wealth of Nations, Book I. [29] The Four Modernizations, pillar of socialism with Chinese characteristics, would be enumerated for the first time in 1963 by the then Premier of the PRC, Zhou Enlai. [30] One could think of the use of capitalists as “fuel” for Chinese modernization. [31] For reasons of space this idea has not been developed sufficiently, but it also gives rise to the dependent relationship of the Third World with respect to the First, neocolonialism, and the international class struggle that us Marxists call imperialism. [32] Which implies, needless to say, an immense capacity to gather and manage resources according to the need of each context. Author Sebastián León is a philosophy teacher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where he received his MA in philosophy (2018). His main subject of interest is the history of modernity, understood as a series of cultural, economic, institutional and subjective processes, in which the impetus for emancipation and rational social organization are imbricated with new and sophisticated forms of power and social control. He is a socialist militant, and has collaborated with lectures and workshops for different grassroots organizations. Translated By Valeria Baca is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. She hopes to help bridge the gap between Spanish and English marxist content by translating articles. This article was originally published in spanish by Instituto Marx Engel of Peru. Archives December 2021
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Even before 1917, the year of both the Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution, Zionism and Marxism had already had a long and complex relationship. While the two movements had been competing for many years for membership among Europe’s Jewish population, particularly its intellectuals, many prominent Zionist leaders and theoreticians considered themselves socialists. While this feud had largely been confined to Europe, it would have major implications for Palestine. With the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, Zionist interests dovetailed with the anti-communist crusade of the British empire. The anti-communist utility of Zionism formed a major part of the ideological justification for the Balfour Declaration and helped shape British policy during its mandate over Palestine. In this essay, I will explore this relationship and the role it played in Britain’s decision to support Zionism and its governance over Palestine in the early 1920s. Prior to 1917, Zionism and Marxism were two of the most popular political ideologies among European Jewish intellectuals. So much so that many, like Nahman Syrkin, had attempted to synthesize Marxism and Zionism into a coherent Socialist-Zionist ideology.[1] On the other hand, most Marxists denounced Zionism, particularly the liberal strain of Theodore Herzl, as reactionary and nationalistic.[2] Marx himself contended that the solution to “the Jewish problem” would not come through national emancipation but with change in the material basis of society. Through Christian discrimination against Jews in manual labor, they had been pushed into bourgeois economic activity, such as moneylending. Through the emancipation of people from capitalist economic structures, Jewish people would also be freed from the bourgeois economic activities they had been forced to adopt and become equal members of a socialist society.[3] This would remain the basis for much of the proceeding 19th century Marxist thought on Jewish issues and hardly corresponded with Zionist visions of a Jewish state in Palestine. The year 1917 brought major milestones for both movements that would bring them to an impasse and intimately connect Zionists, the Soviet Union, and Palestine for the rest of the century. A significant Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, which made the region an important location for Zionist activities.[4] Under the late-Tsarist government, Russian Zionists hatched a deal that gave them semi-legal status in exchange for diverting Russian Jews away from revolutionary parties.[5] The destruction of the Russian monarchy and the emergence of an anti-Zionist Bolshevik government with its own solution to the emancipation of Jewish people ended this cozy situation and created a new challenge for Zionist leaders that would reappear throughout the 20th century. However, it also created a convenient boogeyman with which Zionist leaders could frighten imperial powers they courted as patrons for a colony in Palestine. *Political cartoon, 1919 Few governments reviled and feared communists as much as the British Empire. While British officials disliked communism for many of their own reasons, a common one among them had to do with their feelings towards Jewish people. While attitudes varied among British people and officials, a common belief was that Jewish people or “global Jewry” wielded disproportionate global influence through control of financial and media institutions and coordination among its globally dispersed population.[6] For instance, some in the British press and government maintained the Jews and “crypto-Jews” played a major role in promoting the 1911 Young Turk Revolution in Turkey through their control of the press and secret societies.[7] Illustrating British views of “global Jewry”, a London Times article called on “The enlightened and humanitarian Jews” of England and similar countries to exert pressure on Turkish Jews to correct their behavior.[8] This was by no means a fringe opinion. David Lloyd George, UK Prime Minister from 1916-1922, was himself a committed Zionist. And, while Lloyd George had his own Christian theological reasons for supporting Zionism, a major point of consideration for him was his belief in the influence of the “Jewish race”. In secret remarks made before the 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine, Lloyd George made this belief plain stating, “[Jewish people] could either hinder us or help us very materially, because they have communities all over the world and they are a dangerous people to quarrel with, but they are a very helpful people if you can get them on your side.”[9] British officials like Lloyd George believed that this global influence could be decisive in their battle with Germany during World War I, as the British feared the Central Powers may beat them to the punch.[10] As the London Times lamented, “Do our statesmen not see how valuable to the Allied cause would be the hearty sympathy of the Jews throughout the world which an unequivocal declaration of British policy might win?”[11] The Times also warned, “Germany has been quick to perceive the danger to her schemes and to her propaganda that would be involved in the association of the Allies with Jewish national hopes, and she has not been idle in attempting to forestall us.”[12] One of these methods, supposedly, was German propaganda encouraging pacifist tendencies among the Russian population, which British media linked to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. The London Times reported that Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks were funded by the German government and proclaimed the Revolution was “Organized and financed by Germany.”[13] Consequently, the Bolshevik Revolution had “naturally been directed towards the goal desired by Germany: the conclusion of a separate peace, involving complete surrender of Russia’s independence, politically and economically.”[14] Additionally, many in the British government and media feared American public opinion turning against the war, and they believed American Jews could impact this through their supposed control of American media and financial institutions.[15] Thus, it is no surprise that Lloyd George declared to the Peel Commission, “we had every reason at that time to believe that in both countries the friendliness or hostility of the Jewish race might make a considerable difference.”[16] For their part, Zionist leaders encouraged this belief in Jewish influence and sought to associate Zionism with the world’s Jewish population generally. Chaim Weizmann, who was a prominent Zionist leader with connections to British officials, worked to give off this impression. Frequently, in international private correspondence which he undoubtedly knew would be read by the British censor, Weizmann wrote as if directing the machinations of a global network capable of exerting significant influence in both America and Russia.[17] This had the double effect of confirming British assumptions of Jewish global influence as well as Zionist affirmations that Jewish people constituted a nation despite being dispersed across the globe. Further, it appeared to show Zionists composed most of that nation. In response to a letter written opposing the Balfour Declaration printed by the London Times, Zionist benefactor, Lord Rothschild, claimed the authors represented “a mere fraction of Jewish opinion of the world” and sought to “interfere in the wishes and aspirations of by far the larger mass of the Jewish people.”[18] This did have a great affect on British decision making to approve the Balfour Declaration. As historian Tom Segev points out, “Weizmann’s principal achievement was to create among British leaders an identity between the Zionist movement and ‘world Jewry’… Yet none of it was true… Most Jews did not support Zionism; the movement was highly fragmented, with activists working independently in different European capitals. Weizmann had absolutely no way of affecting the outcome of the war. But Britain’s belief in the mystical power of ‘the Jews’ overrode reality.”[19] *Chaim Weizmann with Lord Balfour in Palestine, 1925 This belief in global Jewish influence was taken even further by other members of the British government, public, and media who proposed a link between the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a global Jewish conspiracy to overthrow the Christian world. This theory arose as a result of Christian theological traditions associating Jews with the antichrist and the millenarian reaction of British Christians to the carnage of the first world war and the Russian Revolution.[20] This was also fueled by a widely held association between Bolshevism and Judaism among British people. The connection between Communism and Judaism in the British mind resulted from the prominence of Jewish Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky and links drawn between the Bolshevik Revolution and theories about international Jewish conspiracies such as those proposed in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion- a document forged by Tsarist intelligence.[21] This view was promoted by Winston Churchill in a 1920 article entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People” In it Churchill praised Jewish people as the “most formidable and most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world” and credited them with the creation of a “system of ethics” which was the basis of the modern Christian world. However, he also claimed Jewish people might be “in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.”[22] *Anti-Bolshevik poster, 1918 Even many of those who were less inclined to see a theological angle to the Bolshevik Revolution were still attracted to the idea that the Russian Revolution was part of a global Jewish conspiracy. A 1920 article in the London Times discussed a book by a Russian author- Professor S. Nilus- called “The Jewish Peril”, which was published in 1905 and incorporated the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. While casting doubt on the veracity of the Protocols and other assertions in the book, the Times’s correspondent could not help but see something “uncanny” in its predictions given that “15 years later, a government [was] established in Russia of which a high percentage of the leaders are Jews, whose modus operandi follows the principles quoted.”[23] With this ominous specter supposedly arising in the Jewish people, a different ideology was required to combat it. Thus, many settled on Zionism to counteract communist influence among Jewish people. As Churchill put it in his essay, “Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system… The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”[24] This helps demonstrate that a crucial aspect of Zionism and its relationship with the British was its leaders’ ideological identification with the west. Zionism not only represented a surrogate of “Western Civilization”, it also helped create the ideological justification for British colonization in West Asia. Both the British and Zionists were met with a similar dilemma: an indigenous population that did not want them there. For Zionists it was indigenous Palestinians who feared losing their land. For the British it was the inhabitants of its broader empire, but particularly those in the areas of the former-Ottoman Empire which it had just been granted by the League of Nations.* While the British already had a long history of studying how to rule subject peoples, these new subjects were former members of an empire which relied on local institutions for administration and had been expecting to be granted independence after the Arab Revolt.[25] Thus, Zionists served a special ideological function for he British in West Asia. Building on previous British orientalism, Zionists produced ways of understanding Britain’s Arab subjects in a sort of ideological parallel construction which helped to justify each other’s colonial projects. According to Edward Said, Zionists generally ignored the Arab but “when it was necessary to deal with him, they made him intelligible, they represented him to the West as something that could be understood and managed in specific ways.”[26] Both the British and Zionists believed in the inherent superiority of “Western Civilization” and viewed Zionism as an extension of that civilization into the orient. As Said put it, “Between Zionism and the West there was and still is a community of language and of ideology; so far as the Arab was concerned, he was not part of this community.”[27] To the British and Zionists, the Arabs were an undifferentiated, backwards mass without national loyalties- Arabs in Palestine were interchangeable with Arabs in Syria who were interchangeable with Arabs in Iraq, etc.[28] According to Zionists, the people of Palestine were composed of the hopelessly backwards fellah (peasant) who labored for the benefit of his greedy, deceitful effendi (large landlord). The Zionists claimed this was hardly a group which could compose a nation. As Chaim Weizmann wrote to Lord Balfour in 1918, “The present state of affairs would necessarily tend towards the creation of an Arab Palestine, if there were an Arab people in Palestine. It will not in fact produce that result because the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times, and the effendi (who, by the way, is the real gainer from the present system) is dishonest, uneducated, greedy, and as unpatriotic as he is inefficient.”[29] In contrast, Zionists portrayed themselves and the British as bearers of progress, liberal democracy, and “Western Civilization” which would transform Palestine into a national home for a marginalized people and solve the “Jewish Question”.[30] How could the objections of such indigenous inhabitants stand in the way of this benevolent project? When Zionists were not attempting to erase or delegitimize the indigenous presence in Palestine, they were arguing Zionism would be beneficial to Palestinians who would gain from the progress brought by “Western Civilization” and the economic stimulation from capital and immigrants entering the country. According to Zionists, particularly Labor Zionists who fancied themselves socialist, the only people in Palestine who could oppose the Zionist mission were effendis who feared losing their grip over the peasantry as anticipated economic prosperity would increase employment opportunities for rural Palestinians.[31] As one of the founders of the Labor Zionist party Ahdut Ha’avoda (“Unity of Labor”), Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, put it, “[the peasant] does not suffer from Jewish immigration, but from the pressure of his effendi and from exploitation by the city dweller, who is of the same race and religion and mediates between him and the effendi… The peasant is also interested in the expansion of employment and industry in the country and the improvement of the workers’ lot, which of necessity results from Jewish settlement and immigration. Thus, the peasant is not opposed to immigration.”[32] Therefore, with Zionist and peasant interests aligned, the only explanation for anti-Zionist disturbances in Palestine was the lies and machinations of the pseudo-nationalist effendis or “outside agitators”, particularly communists. *Anti-Zionist demonstration at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, March 8, 1920 In coming to this conclusion, Zionists drew on existing colonial discourses which represented colonized people as irrational, submissive, and incapable of intelligent thought.[33] While Europeans thought this justified the subjugation of colonized people, they also feared it hid a latent danger. While the colonized were generally docile, their simple nature also made them gullible and easily manipulated by agitators exploiting them for their own interests. One US pastor put it rather succinctly in an interview after visiting Palestine in which he claimed, “But for the Arab agitators, the rank and file of the Jews and the natives would live in harmony and happiness. The Arab needs the push and pluck of the Jews. The Jew in turn needs the Arab. As soon as the agitators drop their tomfoolery no doubt these two forces will begin to co-operate and make Palestine a delightful land.”[34] To the British, an important source of this agitation was communist activists attempting to undermine British rule.[35] While this helped the Zionists in some ways given the communists’ anti-Zionism, it was a double-edged sword as many British officials failed to recognize the difference between communists and Zionists, particularly the avowedly socialist variety.[36] Zionists recognized it could threaten continued Jewish immigration to Palestine if British officials viewed all immigrants as potential Bolsheviks. For instance, in a speech to the Overseas Club in 1921 explorer Rosita Forbes reportedly claimed there had been 30,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine in the previous year and 29,999 of them were Bolsheviks.[37] Zionists faced this dilemma by downplaying the numerical significance of Jewish communists in Palestine while maintaining the communist threat. In a letter responding to a letter by Lord Eustace Percy published in the London Times which warned of communist influence in Palestine, T. Radler-Feldman of the Mizrashi Organization in Jerusalem insisted it was unlikely there were a dozen communists in all of Palestine. On the other hand, “The organized attacks on the farmers in several Jewish colonies show clearly that this Arab movement has nothing to do with fighting against Bolshevism, but is, on the contrary, in the blind destroying of capitalist property, itself Bolshevism.”[38] In a reply, Lord Percy summarized an ideological synthesis that seemed to solve this problem when he wrote, “it is the influence exerted by these small groups upon the fears and prejudices of other members of their race who do not share their views that the chief danger of the present situation lies… Not only in Palestine, but in all parts of the world to-day, the hope of peace depends more upon active efforts to counteract such influences than upon the mere excommunication of a few extremists.”[39] While Percy was criticizing the Zionists, this line of reasoning was actually advantageous to Zionists. It allowed them to discount fears over Jewish immigration and use British resources to repress communists, particularly after they took a more hardline anti-Zionist position. A major point of contention under the mandate regarded Jewish immigration to Palestine. Given that at the beginning of the mandate Jews composed a miniscule fraction of the population of Palestine, large-scale Jewish immigration was necessary to achieve Zionist aspirations of a Jewish state.[40] However, consistent immigration was not always easy to secure given the hostility of indigenous Palestinians and British fears of Bolshevik Jews infiltrating the country.[41] The British administration implemented a quota system, which, as stipulated in the Mandate charter, was to be determined by Palestine’s economic “absorptive capacity”.[42] The charter also specified British immigration policy must prioritize Jewish immigration and be directed towards establishing a Jewish national home, which could be hampered by too much competing non-Jewish immigration.[43] Thus, the British established a permit system to govern immigration to Palestine, which it largely left under the control of the Zionist movement. Indeed, while permits formally came from the British, who received a permit was determined by Zionist leaders.[44] However, the British still needed to ensure “undesirable elements” would not be able to enter the country, so they established a strict documentary system of passports and visas, which allowed officials to track potential undesirables.[45] While officials took many factors into consideration, such as wealth, occupation, and physical ability, an important concern was to screen for individuals who may attempt to undermine British rule in Palestine.[46] One of the first groups of immigrants to be targeted for this were Eastern European, particularly Russian, Jews, who the British associated with the Bolsheviks. The administration formed the Inter-departmental Committee on Immigration from Russia specifically to establish rules meant to prevent the entry of potentially subversive Jewish immigrants from Russia.[47] Further, the establishment of frontier checkpoints to enforce this system had the added benefit of limiting the fluidity of travel in and out of Palestine thus restricting the mobility of subversive populations. This was particularly targeted towards those travelling to the Soviet Union, who the British feared may be cooperating with the Bolsheviks and the Communist International (Comintern).[48] *British security forces searching Palestinian civilians, April 1920. Obviously, this vigilance did not stop at the border. The British administration sought to crush communist activity wherever it appeared and many of the repressive institutions established under the British mandate were created, at least in part, as a response to the communist threat.[49] Following allied occupation of Palestine at the end of 1917, the British established military rule and created a police force consisting mostly of locally recruited men. The demographic composition of this police force was meant to be roughly proportional to each religious group’s representation in the general population- 70% Muslim, 20% Christian, and 10% Jewish.[50] In the first few months of 1920, several anti-British demonstrations and violent attacks in Jerusalem during the religious celebration of al-Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses), which killed five Jews, led to the end of military rule in Palestine.[51] The military, which Zionists accused of mishandling the riots and having pro-Arab, anti-Jewish sentiments, was replaced by a civilian administration headed by a high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, a staunch Zionist.[52] The new civilian administration sought to reform the police to make them more effective and more friendly to Zionism. The establishment of a Zionist friendly police force drew upon British police practices in other colonies and was facilitated by a mutual British-Zionist interest in anti-communism. *Al-Nabi Musa procession, April 4, 1920. The first important communist party in Palestine was the Mifleget Poalim Sozialistit (Socialist Workers Party), which was the result of a split between left and right factions in the broader Labor Zionist party, Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion). The much larger right-wing joined with other independent groups to form the party Ahdut ha-Avodah (Unity of Labor).[53] While the MPS still considered itself a Zionist party, it called for dialogue with Palestinian workers and denounced Ahdut ha-Avodah’s willingness to collaborate with the Zionist bourgeoisie.[54] The MPS had already appeared on the British administration’s radar in 1920 after the party’s celebration for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution when police arrested party members and closed its clubs.[55] Communist activity became a center of attention after the Jaffa riots in 1921, which revolved around a May Day celebration. The night before May 1, the MPS sent out boys to distribute pamphlets calling for revolution against British imperialism and the creation of a Soviet Union of Palestine.[56] The next day the party organized a May Day parade in Tel Aviv. When the communist demonstration ran into the official Labor Zionist May Day demonstration organized by Ahdut ha-Avodah, it led to a violent skirmish between the two demonstrations. The police soon began driving the communist demonstration out of Tel Aviv towards Jaffa. On their way, the communist demonstration ran into Palestinians who were not any more friendly towards a Zionist Soviet Union of Palestine.[57] Next, Palestinians would unleash a wave of mass violence against Jewish residents of Jaffa, killing men, women, and children. When news of the attacks reached a military camp where soldiers who served in the British Jewish Battalion during WWI were billeted, they quickly prepared to retaliate, and the next morning released their own wave of violence against Palestinians in Jaffa.[58] By May 3, the British had declared martial law. All told, 47 Jews and 48 Palestinians were killed, while 146 Jews and 73 Palestinians were injured.[59] The British administration quickly capitalized on the violence as an opportunity to scapegoat and target communists. On May 4 the London Times ran an article headlined “The Jaffa Riots: Communist Jews Start New Trouble”[60], and, on the same day, the New York Times reported, “Jews emigrating from Russia to Palestine appear to have included a number of Bolshevist agents, who have succeeded in stirring up serious trouble, leading to bloody fights involving emigres, natives and British soldiers charged with maintaining order.”[61] Even the government’s commission of inquiry blamed the MPS for antagonizing Palestinians, although it did discount their actual numbers and influence.[62] While the riots were still ongoing, British high commissioner, Herbert Samuel, issued an order to arrest and deport the communist leaders and track their underground activities.[63] The riots also provided a fresh impetus for the police reform the civilian administration had been planning. Instead of making any significant changes to the existing police force, the administration chose to supplement it with two gendarmeries- one Palestinian and one British. The Palestinian gendarmerie was to be composed of both Palestinians and Jews and commanded by British officers.[64] A major responsibility for this unit was to assist in the defense of frontier Jewish settlements, which had been targeted by Palestinians during the Jaffa riots.[65] For further protection, the mandate administration provided each Jewish colony with a sealed armory for its defense.[66] The British gendarmerie was formed under the leadership of General Hugh Tudor, former commander of the notorious Black and Tans- a British paramilitary outfit which had served in Northern Ireland in the early 1920s.[67] Most of the recruits for the British gendarmerie in Palestine were former members of the Black and Tans or the Royal Irish Constabulary who needed work after Ireland became a dominion in 1921.[68] The methods employed by the Black and Tans were infamous for their brutality, and, even after the gendarmeries were disbanded in 1926, many of its members were simply absorbed by the regular police.[69] *Major General Hugh Tudor Within the Palestine Police Force, the unit responsible for supplying information and intelligence was the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).[70] In 1921 the British established a section within the CID devoted to targeting communists located in Tel Aviv.[71] This section was heavily dependent on the cooperation with Zionists who knew the political complexities of the Yishuv and spoke Yiddish.[72] This anti-communist section mainly focused on surveilling communist activists, gathering intelligence, and disrupting party activities. For instance, police routinely broke up communist demonstrations (particularly May Day), raided party offices, and confiscated party literature.[73] Of particular importance was tracking party contacts with communist organizations outside of Palestine, which normally entailed the seizure of party documents or trailing party messengers or representatives during foreign travels.[74] After a couple of years of this harassment and surveillance, most of the party’s top leaders had been arrested or were under surveillance, and, by the end of 1924, police began censoring party members’ mail.[75] One of the British administration’s favorite methods for dealing with political opponents was deportation. Communists were frequently targeted for deportation, but this presented its own issues as many Eastern European countries where these immigrants hailed from were unwilling to repatriate known communist activists.[76] This left the communists in a sort of limbo of remaining in Palestine under strict surveillance or wallowing in prison, where conditions were atrocious and floggings were frequent.[77] Zionist cooperation in these police units and carceral systems was key in smoothing the way for further British-Zionist cooperation in security, intelligence and military activities. This coincided with the communists’ increasing ostracism within the Yishuv and its labor movement. Already in 1922 David Ben-Gurion had convinced the Trade Unions Executive Council to expel MPS members.[78] The MPS had become increasingly unwelcome within the Histadrut (Jewish General Federation of Labor)* due to its criticisms of the Histadrut’s nationalism and its insistence on reaching out to Palestinian workers.[79] This increased pressure pushed the communists underground where they formed the Fraktzia (Workers’ Faction), which aimed to enter the trade unions affiliated with Histadrut and open them to Palestinian membership.[80] This enmity only increased as the MPS disintegrated, and remnants of the party formed the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) in 1923.[81] This new party took a more openly anti-Zionist position and intensified efforts at organizing Palestinian workers- policies which were more in line with the Comintern.[82] These efforts paid off as the party was accepted to the Communist International as the official representative in Palestine.[83] While this qualified the party for outside assistance, these new stances led Histadrut leaders to tighten their vice grip on the party within the trade union movement. In 1924 the Histadrut launched a systematic purge of communists from the trade unions and affiliated institutions.[84] Additionally, Labor Zionist leaders targeted communists’ livelihoods by pressuring employers to fire communist employees, having them removed from workers’ hostels, and refusing them access to the trade union’s sick fund.[85] While Zionist labor leaders claimed they opposed the deportation of Jewish communists and their harsh prison conditions, this anti-communist campaign had the effect of outing those expelled from or denied admission to the trade unions as active communists.[86] In this way, Labor Zionists got to have their cake and eat it too. They could condemn the brutality of the British authorities while facilitating their work. By the end of 1924, the communist movement in Palestine had been decimated, with most of its leaders in jail or under surveillance. In the following years, it would further pivot to organizing efforts among Palestinians and played a more active role in supporting Palestinian nationalism. While the party would remain active throughout the mandate period, it never truly had much influence within Palestine. Its main significance was how red panic induce fears in the British Empire created the ideological buttressing which justified British support for Zionism and shaped its governance over Palestine. Zionists were able to capitalize on this not only to garner support for a Jewish national home but also to ease the way for British-Zionist security, intelligence, and military cooperation. This helped to strengthen the ties between the British and the Zionists and in many ways made the British dependent on Zionist participation in maintaining order in Palestine. It also enhanced the Yishuv’s police and military capabilities, which would be important in future years, particularly the 1948 war and its resulting expulsion of Palestinians. Ultimately, while communism never held much sway in Palestine, its specter influenced decisions that would have long-lasting effects on the future of Palestine. Work Cited [1] Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 38-45. [2] Walid Sharif, “Soviet Marxism and Zionism,” Journal of Palestine Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 81-83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2535581 [3] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (February 1844), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ [4] Walid Sharif, “Soviet Marxism and Zionism,” Journal of Palestine Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 82-83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2535581 [5] Ibid, 83 [6] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 38 [7] “The Jews and the Young Turks,” The Times (London), August 9, 1911, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS151584009/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=a36e03cd. “Jews and the Situation in Albania,” The Times (London), July 11, 1911, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS84999403/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=b2b0f999. [8] “Jews and the Situation in Albania,” The Times (London), August 9, 1911, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS52624649/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=eeebe3d9. [9] Oren Kessler, “Mandate 100: ‘A dangerous people to quarrel with’: Lloyd George’s Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission Revealed,” Fathom (July 2020), https://fathomjournal.org/mandate100-a-dangerous-people-to-quarrel-with-lloyd-georges-secret-testimony-to-the-peel-commission-revealed/#_edn15. [10] “Central Powers and Zionist Aspirations,” The Times (London), November 30, 1917, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS117770622/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=a18002a6. Jehuda Reinharz, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Maker: A Reassessment,” Journal of Modern History 64 (September 1992): 485-486. [11] “The Jews and Palestine,” The Times (London), October 26, 1917, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS117901658/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=3b31c162. [12] Ibid. [13] “German Gold for Lenin,” The Times (London), February 9, 1918, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS102173257/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=0f4c1ff7. [14] “The German Hand In Russia,” The Times (London), February 9, 1918, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS102173257/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=0f4c1ff7. [15] Steven Wagner, Statecraft By Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 26, https://books.google.com/books/about/Statecraft_by_Stealth.html?id=FKhzDwAAQBAJ. [16] Oren Kessler, “Mandate 100: ‘A dangerous people to quarrel with’: Lloyd George’s Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission Revealed,” Fathom (July 2020), https://fathomjournal.org/mandate100-a-dangerous-people-to-quarrel-with-lloyd-georges-secret-testimony-to-the-peel-commission-revealed/#_edn15. [17] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 41-42 [18] “The Future of the Jews,” The Times (London), letter, May 28, 1917, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS84084924/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=1591a199 [19] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 42-43 [20] Alyson Pendlebury, “The Politics of the ‘Last Days’: Bolshevism, Zionism and ‘the Jews’,” Jewish Culture and History 2, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 96-115, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1462169X.1999.10511933. [21] Ibid, 110 [22] Winston Churchill, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Sole of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920. [23] “The Jewish Peril,” The Times (London), June 2, 1920, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS101387970/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=bf3907c9 [24] Winston Churchill, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Sole of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920 [25] Elizabeth F. Thompson, How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance, (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020), 14. [26] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), 25. *In 1919, the newly formed League Nations decided on how to administer territories which had been possessions of WWI’s losers. The League established a series of “mandates” for these territories which assigned European powers to administer them. These were meant to be temporary arrangements where people deemed not yet ready for self-rule would be placed under the tutelage of Europeans until they were. [27] Ibid [28] Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 29-36. [29] Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers, 1917-1922: Seeds of Conflict, (London: Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1972), 31-32. [30] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), 28-29 [31] Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 59-63. Johan Franzen, “Communism Versus Zionism: The Comintern, Yishuvism, and the Palestine Communist Party,” 36, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 10-11, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2007.36.2.6 [32] Ibid, 60. [33] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), 206-208, 227-231. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 64. [34] “Arab Agitators Only Troublesome Element In Palestine Pastor Avers,” The Sentinel, October 21, 1921, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/cgs/1921/10/21/01/article/115/?srpos=2&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI-agitators+palestine-------------1. [35] “Palestine From Day to Day: Bolshevik Intrigue in Palestine,” The Palestine Bulletin, February 26, 1925, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/plb/1925/02/26/01/?srpos=18&e=-------en-20--1-byDA-img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communist+----------Jerusalem---1. “The East Offers Favourable Ground for Bolshevism,” The Palestine Bulletin, February 24, 1926, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/plb/1926/02/24/01/article/7/?srpos=42&e=-------en-20--41-byDA-img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communist+Palestine----------Jerusalem---1. [36] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 141. [37] S. Landman, “The Jews In Palestine,” The Times (London), May 27, 1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS101650619/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=72173bef [38] T. Radler-Feldman, “Jews In Palestine: A Plea for the Zionist Commission,” The Times (London), July 16,1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS101388528/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=e1b6c211. [39] Eustace Percy, “Jews In Palestine,” The Times (London), July 23, 1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS152768759/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=1c4c6657. [40] Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle For Statehood, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006), 11-12. [41] “No Bolshevists For Palestine: Limit and Control of Immigration,” The Times (London), June 4, 1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS169283780/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=045c74bb Philip Graves, “Some Truths About Palestine: An Independent Inquiry: Placating The Rival Races,” The Times (London), April 4, 1922, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS117904004/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=12a87385 [42] “British Policy in Palestine”, The Times (London), January 15,1923, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS185013295/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=e80abd27 [43] H. Sidebotham, “The Jews In Palestine,” The Times (London), November 22, 1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS101388662/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=10826d67 Lauren Banko, ”Keeping Out the ‘Undesirable Elements’: The Treatment of Communists, Transients, Criminals, and the Ill in Mandate Palestine,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (February 2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1576832. [44] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 226-229 [45] Lauren Banko, ”Keeping Out the ‘Undesirable Elements’: The Treatment of Communists, Transients, Criminals, and the Ill in Mandate Palestine,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (February 2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1576832. [46] Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 107, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [47] Lauren Banko, ”Keeping Out the ‘Undesirable Elements’: The Treatment of Communists, Transients, Criminals, and the Ill in Mandate Palestine,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (February 2019): 8, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1576832. [48] Ibid [49] Steven Wagner, Statecraft By Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 54-55, https://books.google.com/books/about/Statecraft_by_Stealth.html?id=FKhzDwAAQBAJ. [50] Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 112, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [51] John Knight, “Securing Zion?: Policing in British Palestine,” European Review of History 18, no. 4, (August 2011): 525, doi:10.1080/13507486.2011.590283. [52] Ibid [53] Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism, (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 1979), 5 [54]. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 66. [55] Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 107, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [56] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 176. [57] Steven Wagner, Statecraft By Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 54, https://books.google.com/books/about/Statecraft_by_Stealth.html?id=FKhzDwAAQBAJ. [58] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999), 181. [59] Ibid, 183. [60] “The Jaffa Riots: Communist Jews Start New Trouble,” The Times (London), May 4, 1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS152375460/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=3fc00f1b [61] Edwin L. James, “Scores Are Killed In Palestine Riots: Bolshevist Agents Among Immigrants Provoke Serious Encounters With Troops: Jewish Shops Are Rifled,” New York Times, May 4, 1921, https://www.proquest.com/docview/98323451/36A6040F439240EAPQ/12?accountid=7286 [62] “The Jaffa Riots,” The Times (London), November 8, 1921, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS185536872/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=ee9a46d8 [63] Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 108, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [64] John Knight, “Securing Zion?: Policing in British Palestine,” European Review of History 18, no. 4, (August 2011): 526, doi:10.1080/13507486.2011.590283. [65] Ibid [66] Ibid [67] Ibid, 526-527 “Air Rank for G.O.C. Palestine,” The Times (London), January 24, 1923, https://link-gale-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CS169153592/TTDA?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=0da63b12. [68] Matthew Hughes, “A British ‘Foreign Legion’?: The British Police in Mandate Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 5 (2013): 697, : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2013.811656. John Knight, “Securing Zion?: Policing in British Palestine,” European Review of History 18, no. 4, (August 2011): 527, doi:10.1080/13507486.2011.590283. [69] Ibid Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 115, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [70] Eldad Harouvi, Palestine Investigated: The Criminal Investigation Department of the Palestine Police Force, (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2016). [71] Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 115, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . Steven Wagner, Statecraft By Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 54, https://books.google.com/books/about/Statecraft_by_Stealth.html?id=FKhzDwAAQBAJ. [72] Ibid [73] “Arrests Communists In Jerusalem Max Day Celebration,” Reform Advocate, May 12, 1923, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/refadv/1923/05/12/01/article/43/?srpos=20&e=------192-en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communists+palestine+-------------1. “Palestine Police Stop Soviet Celebration,” Sentinel, December 1, 1922, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/cgs/1922/12/01/01/article/150/?srpos=53&e=------192-en-20--41--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communists+palestine+-------------1. “Many Injured in May Day Riots: Arrest Communists in Jerusalem,” Sentinel, May 11, 1923, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/cgs/1923/05/11/01/article/7/?srpos=59&e=------192-en-20--41--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communists+palestine+-------------1. “Communists To Acre Jail,” Palestine Bulletin, May 5, 1925, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/plb/1925/05/05/01/?srpos=38&e=------192-en-20-plb-21--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communists+palestine+----1925---------1. “Trial of Communists,” Palestine Bulletin, May 12, 1925, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/plb/1925/05/12/01/article/14/?srpos=2&e=------192-en-20-plb-1--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communists+----1925---------1. “No Compensation For Jaffa Communists,” Palestine Bulletin, May 12, 1925, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/plb/1925/05/12/01/article/5/?e=------192-en-20-plb-1--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Communists+----1925---------1. [74] Eldad Harouvi, Palestine Investigated: The Criminal Investigation Department of the Palestine Police Force, (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2016), 19. Steven Wagner, Statecraft By Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 57-58, https://books.google.com/books/about/Statecraft_by_Stealth.html?id=FKhzDwAAQBAJ. [75] Ibid, 18. [76] Lauren Banko, ”Keeping Out the ‘Undesirable Elements’: The Treatment of Communists, Transients, Criminals, and the Ill in Mandate Palestine,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (February 2019): 6-11, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1576832. Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 112-114, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [77] Ibid, 115-119. Matthew Hughes, “A British ‘Foreign Legion’?: The British Police in Mandate Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 5 (2013): 704-705, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2013.811656. [78] Ibid, 122-123. [79] Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 130-133. [80] Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism, (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 1979), 6-7. [81] Joel Beinen, “The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948,” MERIP Reports, no. 55, (March 1977): 6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3010830. [82] Ibid, 6-8. [83] Ibid, 6. *The Histadrut was a confederation of trade unions within the Yishuv in Palestine. The Histadrut was more than a trade union and established its own economic sector, which would dominate the Yishuv’s economy for years, and provided other necessary social services [84] Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 130-133. William M. Feigenbaum, “How Communists Were Checkmated In Cloakmakers’ Union,” Forward, December 26, 1926, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/frw/1926/12/26/01/article/57/?srpos=28&e=-------en-20--21--img-txIN%7ctxTI-Federation+of+Jewish+labor+communists-------------1. [85] Eli Tzur, ”The Silent Pact: Anti-Communist Co-operation between the Jewish Leadership and the British Administration in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 123-124, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284006 . [86] Ibid, 124. AuthorAlex Zambito was born and raised in Savannah, GA. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017 with a degree in History and Sociology. He is currently seeking a Masters in History at Brooklyn College. His Interest include the history of Socialist experiments and proletarian struggles across the world. Archives December 2021 12/17/2021 Chile Is at the Political Crossroads: Social Renewal or Decades of Painful Neoliberal Policy. By: Vijay Prashad & Taroa Zúñiga SilvaRead Now“If [Augusto] Pinochet were alive, he would vote for me,” said José Antonio Kast in 2017, during the Chilean presidential election when he ran as an independent candidate. This was an especially provocative statement made by him out of the many he has made over the years—he had also said that “Chileans need God,” during his campaign in 2017, while proposing religious teachers in all public schools in Chile. Kast, who is now a member of Chile’s right-wing Republican Party, is in the running in the 2021 presidential election in Chile as a candidate for the party. The first round of voting for the election took place on November 21. Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), to whom Kast was referring in his 2017 statement, was a military dictator in Chile from 1973 to 1990. A few days after Pinochet led the U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973, that overthrew the popularly elected government of President Salvador Allende, he said, “From time to time, democracy must bathe in blood, so that it can remain a democracy.” Kast, who came fourth in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, supported the eventual winner and now-outgoing President Sebastián Píñera, who is a billionaire. This year, Kast has won the most votes in the first round of the presidential election and sits just behind the left candidate Gabriel Boric in opinion polls for the second round of voting, which is expected to take place on December 19. This year, Kast did not assert that Pinochet would vote for him. He knows that he would. The Heir to Pinochet Kast’s parents fled Germany in the aftermath of World War II because Kast’s father—Michael Kast Schindele—was a member of the Nazi party under Adolf Hitler. They arrived in Chile in 1950, where they built a family business and raised nine children (Kast was born in 1966). The Kast family has a deep history of being involved with the far-right. José’s brother Miguel Kast was one of the many “young economists trained by Milton Friedman” (known as the “Chicago Boys”) who launched a “neoliberal experiment” in Chile under Pinochet “that saw social spending slashed and wealth funneled upward to the very rich,” according to the Intercept. Pinochet might be a dictator for many in Chile, but for the Kast family, he was a heroic leader, which is why it is with no sense of embarrassment that José Antonio Kast said that the dead dictator would vote for him. In fact, the 30 years of Pinochet’s dictatorship are not looked upon with a sense of shame or embarrassment by a large section of the Chilean population. When Pinochet was removed from power in 1990, a series of cases appeared in Chilean courts to bring Pinochet and others to justice for various human rights violations carried out under his regime, including kidnapping and murders. None of the more than 300 cases that implicated Pinochet directly, which were filed by his death—including the assassination of Carlos Prats, a former Chilean Army commander who was an “outspoken opponent” of Pinochet, and other assassinations carried out under Operation Condor—came to any conclusive end. In July 2002, meanwhile, the Chilean Supreme Court closed the prosecution of Pinochet in the cases involving the “Caravan of Death”—which was “an elite death squad” that executed “dozens of former mayors, police chiefs, labor leaders and other local officials” in Chile—stating that Pinochet was “mentally unfit due to dementia.” Using universal jurisdiction, the Spanish Supreme Court prosecutor Carlos Castresana tried to open a separate road within the Spanish judicial system in July 1996, leading to Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998. But the “Pinochet case” was scuttled when the then heads of government of Britain (Tony Blair), Chile (Eduardo Frei), and Spain (José María Aznar) colluded to shield Pinochet by sending him home to Santiago. The impunity for Pinochet marked Chilean politics for years to come, since it meant that no one needed to be embarrassed to claim his lineage despite the atrocities he was accused of. Kast denies that Pinochet was a dictator. He pointed to the Constitution of 1980 and said that this document “contained the entire transition to democracy.” Between 1973 and 1980, before the constitution was introduced, Chile was not a dictatorship, Kast argued, because the government of Pinochet willingly produced a “democratic” constitution (which remains in force today, and is being rewritten by a Constitutional Convention that will close its work after the new president has been elected). Kast, without embarrassment, claims that Pinochet—who personified every attribute of the late 20th century’s dictators—is ironically a guardian of Chilean democracy. Contempt for Human Rights Kast has demonstrated a contempt for human rights. During a presidential debate in October 2021, Kast proposed the closure of the human rights institution in Chile, the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH), saying: “We have suggested that there has to be a reformulation, and to make a reformulation… [of the INDH. W]e believe that the current one (INDH) [has to be closed] because it is clearly not fulfilling its aims.” The reason Kast made these comments is that the INDH, which recently investigated the human rights violations by the Chilean police against the anti-government demonstrators—who have been protesting for more than two years now—concluded that there had been “a breach of the protection of human rights” during these protests. “The Carabineros [Chilean Police],” Kast said during the presidential debate, “is a great institution that does not violate human rights.” Chile has been witnessing a massive political upsurge that began in 2019 and has remained in place up until now as part of a broad dissatisfaction with the plummeting economic conditions and with police violence that has come in response to the peaceful protests. As a consequence of the kind of political discourse Kast has been indulging in and the propaganda being spread by the hard-right, surveys now show that more people in Chile trust the police more than the INDH. Total alignment with the police and the army defines Kast’s politics. That is why he pledged to remove Chile from the UN Human Rights Council, which has since 2019 published reports that have criticized the Chilean police for violating basic human rights protocols in their handling of the “mass protests” in Chile. Kast’s contempt for the UN Human Rights Council reflects his general position on such international cooperation. In February 2021, while tweeting about withdrawing from the council, he said, “While the UN attacks Chile with various policies and false accusations, the [UN] Human Rights Council has as members Venezuela and Cuba, the bloodiest dictatorships in Latin America.” Hatred for the socialist project in Venezuela is amplified in Kast’s hatred for the Venezuelan migrants who have had to leave their country as a consequence of the sanctions imposed by the United States. Kast proposed the construction of a ditch on the Chilean border with Bolivia to prevent migrants—mostly Venezuelans—from crossing into Chile. Trump of the Southern Cone Many comparisons have been made between Kast and other far-right leaders: he has been called the Bolsonaro of Chile, drawing similarities between him and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, and he also has been referred to as Chile’s Donald Trump. Kast has ambitions to form an “anti-globalist” bloc with Bolsonaro and former U.S. President Trump as well as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (he made these comments on a show where he put on a red “Make America Great Again” hat worn by Trump supporters). In late November, Kast traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Issa Kort (the former Chilean representative to the Organization of American States), as well as María Paulina Uribe (marketing manager at PepsiCo) and Joel Velasco (vice president at UnitedHealth Group). Kast is close to the far-right Spanish party, Vox, and its leader Santiago Abascal; Kast has also joined Abascal in the formation of a new far-right group across Latin America called the Madrid Charter. Like Abascal, Bolsonaro, and Trump, Kast is in favor of small government when it comes to the regulation of big business and of large government when it comes to law and order and family values. Kast’s deep misogyny comes out in his promise to abolish the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality in Chile and to roll back the modest provisions for abortion, which is partially allowed in Chile (he eventually had to rescind both promises due to the growing social consensus for women’s rights in the country). “I do not feel right-wing,” said Kast in May 2018 in order to appeal to the center, although his program is entirely in accord with the far-right. Chile faces a real choice in this presidential election: between the far-right’s Kast and the left’s Boric. Boric says that he will reverse Chile’s habits of neoliberalism. But the election might not be a choice between the far-right and the left as much as it might be an election about the failure of Chile to prosecute those who violated the rights of Chileans during the 30 years of Pinochet’s rule. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. Taroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020). She is a member of the coordinating committee of Argos: International Observatory on Migration and Human Rights and is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives December 2021 If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth biggest user of electricity. The paradox of combating climate change is that the extent of the emergency extends far beyond the actions taken by individuals to mitigate the climate crisis, yet collective action is what is most required to address this issue. There are so many examples of this dilemma—from recycling to how power is being generated, to what people should consume. In each case, broad-based action is required to shift the dial, and while it might seem insurmountable, every little bit counts. A great example of this sentiment in action can be found in the growing field of eco-friendly web design. In a 2013 study, the internet’s annual carbon footprint was measured at 830 million tons of carbon dioxide. This would put the web’s electricity output at roughly the same level as the aviation industry. “If the internet were a country, it would now rank sixth in the world for its electricity demand,” states a 2014 article in the Guardian by Gary Cook, a senior IT analyst with Greenpeace. Meanwhile, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic leading to people working remotely from their homes and increasingly relying on at-home entertainment, some countries reported a 20 percent increase in “internet traffic” since March 2020, according to a January 2021 article in Science Daily. Extrapolating that data through the end of 2021, the “increased internet use alone would require a forest of about 71,600 square miles—twice the land area of Indiana—to sequester the emitted carbon,” according to the study, which was conducted by researchers from Purdue University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s no wonder then that there is a growing interest in making the internet a more eco-friendly place. For instance, Tim Frick’s company Mightybytes is helping to create a more sustainable interweb for all. In an interview with the American Marketing Association (AMA), Frick explained how in the past, the internet was viewed as a “green solution” due to the paper-free nature of its existence. But, as more products and services go online, the need to think about the digital carbon offset has become increasingly important. “On its own, a digital product might be lighter in terms of carbon emission and environmental impact, but when you multiply that by the number of users on the internet, that’s a potentially very large environmental impact and a big concern,” Frick told AMA, adding that it’s not just the carbon offset of a physical product that determines its environmental impact; it’s also its digital footprint. Another way to understand why this is the case, Frick explained, is to look at the energy consumption of training a single artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. According to a University of Massachusetts Amherst report, the amount of electricity used for this process has the equivalent amount of CO2 emissions generated by five average American cars throughout their lifetime. When you begin to consider that thousands of algorithms are being created and trained every day, the scaling effect really begins to hit home. What does eco-friendly web design look like? For Frick and his team, sustainability starts by “including the planet as part of your stakeholders.” Website design should prioritize the user (thus the industry term UX, or user experience), which Frick argues should include considering the environment in how things get made. Many internet users and brands don’t consider how much energy is used to power a particular website. According to Frick, “by making your site fast, efficient and easy to find and load, you’re making it better for the planet.” If this seems a bit abstract to you, there are tangible ways to measure roughly how a site ranks in terms of its eco-efficiency. Frick’s company Mightybytes, for instance, has created Ecograder, a platform where you can enter any URL and get a rating based on that website’s environmental impact. This ranking is based on various indicators which include performance, user experience, SEO ranking and whether the site uses renewable energy. Eco-Friendly Web Design in Action Dutch programmer Danny van Kooten offers a good working example of how a small adjustment to a piece of code can make a substantial difference. Featured in Wired in 2020, Van Kooten is the creator of a WordPress plug-in that helps website owners to allow their visitors to sign up for their Mailchimp mailing lists through an embedded form. Van Kooten had previously decided to cut down on his carbon footprint by giving up air travel and eating beef. But when he realized that his plug-in was responsible for making websites larger through the addition of several thousand lines of code required to execute its function, he realized he could do more for the environment than his personal consumer choices. Over time, this extra code meant extra energy, so Van Kooten decided to simplify his plug-in. Although he only managed to reduce its data use by 20 KB, with more than 2 million sites using his plug-in, the cumulative effect on energy usage is significant. With that small adjustment, Van Kooten was able to save the world roughly 59,000 kilograms of CO2 each month, which is “roughly the equivalent to flying from New York to Amsterdam and back 85 times,” according to the article in Wired. Frick, while speaking to Wired, offered another example in the form of ad code. “It’s constantly pinging servers; it’s not very efficient,” he said. Frick’s company, for example, found that when U.S. companies like USA Today were forced to remove certain tracking code from their sites due to European Union regulation, “USA Today’s homepage shed 90 percent of its data size and loaded 15 times faster.” Sustainable fonts have become another popular form of environmentally friendly web design. An article published by Fast Company explores how this simple design choice is improving website efficiency and with it, its impact on the planet. The piece describes the efforts of Amsterdam-based design studio Formafantasma that redesigned its website in a collaborative project with Studio Blanco, a design agency, to make “[t]he site [look] about as plain as possible” by using Arial and Times New Roman as its only fonts. As Formafantasma co-founder Andrea Trimarchi explained to Fast Company, the reason for this design comes down to how a website loads. “All the content that needs to be loaded in a page, including fonts, logos, etc., are a request to the server,” said Trimarchi. “Arial and Times New Roman are default fonts on both Macs and PCs, which means there are no extra requests required.” By saving the site from making these extra requests, the design ultimately conserves energy. Similar to Van Kooten’s bit of coding, this small amount of energy saved adds up over time. Other default fonts the Fast Company article lists include Courier New, Georgia, Verdana and Helvetica. Another advantage to using default fonts is that it means websites load faster. So, while the site may look more generic, the user experience is improved. And going forward, the simplified look of a website will serve as an indicator of its sustainability. Despite the overwhelming majority of websites that remain wasteful in their energy expenditure, Frick remains hopeful of the growth of sustainable web design. Since first developing Ecograder in 2011, “[w]e’ve seen this burgeoning community growing globally,” Frick said during his interview with AMA, “but I would say it’s far from the majority. The only way to make a good, positive impact is at scale, so I would like to see most web designers and developers doing this as opposed to a minority.” Author Robin Scher is a writer based in South Africa. He is a graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Find him on Twitter @RobScherHimself. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives December 2021 12/15/2021 December 15, 2021- The base-superstructure: A model for analysis and action. By: Derek Ford & Liberation SchoolRead NowPhoto by DarwinPeacock, Maklaan. Source: Wikicommons. " This article was originally published on Liberation School on November 22, 2021." Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics. Despite its outsized role in Marxist debates, the model can, when contextualized and understood in its nuances, be quite useful for analyzing capitalist society and organizing for socialism [1]. Marx explicitly introduces the distinction between the base and superstructure in the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the preface, Marx builds on his previous work with Engels, The German Ideology, writing: “In the social production of their existence, humans inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” [2]. The base of society—which is also translated as “infrastructure”—includes the relations of production and the productive forces. Productive forces name labor-power, instruments or tools used by workers, and the materials workers transform in the production process. The relations of production entail the social organization of production and reproduction, or how the re/production of life is structured. It’s important to emphasize that the base isn’t just the forces of production but production relations, which are not only economic but social. The superstructure comprises the political-legal system of the state and consciousness—or ideology—in general, which manifests in culture and art, religion and spirituality, ethics and philosophy, etc. The superstructure emerges from the totality of the relations of production. Political activity and intellectual processes and products are conditioned by the mode of production (the relations and forces of production). And as we’ll see below, elements of the superstructure in turn impact the base. According to Engels, he and Marx laid so much emphasis on the importance of the base because of their historical and material context, because they were responding to those who denied the importance of production. In an 1890 letter to the German socialist Joseph Bloch in which Engels clarifies their model, he notes that “we had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it” [3]. Earlier in the letter, he writes that “the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life,” and that “if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase” [4]. Engels infers that Bloch’s questions come from his study of secondary literature only, and he asks Bloch to read the primary sources, referring him in particular to Marx’s 1852 book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, perhaps the only other place Marx mentioned the superstructure explicitly (although he alludes to it elsewhere). In this earlier work, Marx formulates the superstructure like this: “Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding relations” [5]. Classes, that is, collectives defined by their location in the totality of social production, produce ways of feeling, thinking, and understanding life. The context and relations of the base and superstructureThat the model isn’t a mechanical formula—in which the base unidirectionally produces the superstructure—is evident when we consider the context in which it appears. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was the product of Marx’s ongoing work on Capital. What were some of Marx’s main critiques of political economy? First, it took appearances for granted and didn’t ask about the underlying structures that generated such appearances. Second, it viewed political economy and the world as a series of independent objects and subjects, when they were interconnected and interrelated parts of a unity or totality that was in constant motion. Third, and as a result of the first two critiques, it didn’t take a historical-materialist approach to understanding these transformations, projecting present categories back into the past and the future, so that capitalism as a social system was figured as eternal. Those who take the base as independent and static thus side with Marx’s bourgeois adversaries. It’s not an economistic formula in which changes in the economy automatically and predictably lead to changes in society. The base-superstructure is a “spatial metaphor” that serves descriptive purposes [6]. While it can lend itself to a reading whereby what happens below determines what happens on top, if read as a Marxist model it’s helpful for understanding and analyzing the dynamics of the class struggle. This is why Marx used the superstructure in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: to “distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality” [7]. He goes on to partially locate the failure of the 1848 Paris revolution and the success of the 1851 coup of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in the emergence of social-democracy, which “is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same” [8]. The social-democratic forces, while using revolutionary phrasings, didn’t seek to overthrow the existing relations of production but to manage them in a more equitable manner through the capitalist political and legal superstructure. Marxism and the base-superstructure modelGiven the above, it’s clear that the model is dialectical. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure, nor the relationship between the two, are unified, static, or ahistorical. The relations of production in U.S. capitalism are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other hierarchies. Engels affirms that the relations of production are social (and racial) in an 1894 letter to the German anarchist Walther Borgius. Responding to Borgius’ request for clarification on the role of the base, Engels acknowledges that “economic conditions… ultimately determine historical development. But race itself is an economic factor” [9]. Clearly race is part of the base, yet it’s obviously superstructural as well, in that 1) race is a historically constructed and evolving category and 2) it’s maintained and ordered not just by economic forces and relations but by elements like culture, the media, and the legal system. In fact, Engels soon after says that “political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base” [10]. The boundaries between the base and superstructure are not static or fixed, and superstructural elements in society work to reproduce elements of the base. Capitalism requires, for example, the legal system of the state to enforce private property rights. In this instance, it’s crucial to the reproduction of the base. Because the capitalist legal system arises from capitalist relations of production, changes in the legal system might alter the existing relations of production, but they can’t fundamentally overthrow them, for that requires the creation of a new social and economic system. Although Marx didn’t spend much time studying the political economy of cultural activity, another example of the dynamism of the model appears in his argument that artists and other cultural workers are productive agents. He distinguishes those who produce surplus value from those who don’t, although both can be forms of wage-labor (for example, working for the state doesn’t produce surplus value but is a form of labor-power sold to another). Marx conceptualizes intellectual work, dancing, writing, singing, and other “artistic” or “cultural” actions, when performed through the commodity of labor power, as forms of wage labor [11]. Such forms of work can thus be viewed through the prism of the base or superstructure. All of this highlights that the base and superstructure is a metaphor and model for Marxists, a way to analyze and approach society and social transformation rather than an easy explanation. Smart phones: An exampleTo get a better handle on the relationship between material production and ideas or mental conceptions, think about the proliferation of “smart phones.” When, in order to e-mail, we used to have to sit at a computer and connect via cables to the internet, we had a different idea of time and communication than we do now that many of us can e-mail wherever and whenever. A 2021 Pew Research Poll found that 85 percent of people overall (and 73 percent of people earning less than $30,000 annually) in the U.S. have smart phones, so this isn’t a minor phenomenon [12]. The technology makes it possible for your boss to require you to respond to e-mails (e.g., to work) at night. It blurs the distinction between work and life, let alone between work and leisure. How many of us respond to work e-mails on vacation? The smart phone makes it possible for me to ask you a minor question or a series of them throughout the day, rather than wait and type one single e-mail. We begin to think of time differently, and we begin to relate to each other differently. When I was a student, for example, it was normal for teachers to respond to e-mails within a few days. Now the expectation is that teachers respond within hours. Even our feelings and bodies change. Have you ever felt your phone vibrate in your pocket only to realize it didn’t? This is called “phantom vibration syndrome.” A 2011 study of 290 undergraduate students found that around “89% of the sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and 40% experienced these vibrations at least once a week” [13]. Yet the smart phone didn’t arise spontaneously, it wasn’t dropped from the heavens. Workers conceived of it, designed it, produced it, and made it all possible. It’s a productive material force that changes our forms of consciousness, ways of feeling, senses of time, and more. Yet the reason smart phones were produced and subsequently distributed throughout society is because they increase the productivity of labor. The same object that, when used for work, enters into the base, when used for non-work purposes, enters into the superstructure. Utilizing the model for the revolutionary movementThe socialist revolution can’t come without changing the base of society, as it entails transforming private ownership into collective ownership, abolishing capitalist relations and constructing socialist relations. But the superstructure reacts on the base and informs it. There’s a dynamic interplay between the two, and the question is not so much what is located in which part of the model as what is the most strategically significant for advancing the class struggle in a particular setting? The abolition of wage labor—the socialist revolution—has to focus on the superstructure and the base and understand their composition, contradictions, and potentials. In the chapter on the working day in Capital, Marx describes the decades-long struggle for a “normal” working day. He quotes horrific details about the abuses of industrial capitalism on workers from factory inspectors. At the end of the chapter he declares that “the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.” In other words, the tactical objective is to establish “a legally limited working-day” [14]. This is a clarion call for a change in the superstructure, for a legal reform. It’s a significant fight to reduce the working day, not only to protect workers from the abuses of bosses but also to give workers more time to organize. At the same time, it impacts the base of society as well, because given a limited working day, capital has to pursue other avenues to accumulate extra surplus value. In fact, it’s with these limitations that capital turns to the production of relative surplus value, which is when capitalism as a mode of production properly comes into being [15]. Another example is Marx’s critique of Alfred Darimon, a follower of Proudhon, who wanted to introduce a “socialist form” of money that would represent the actual time that workers labored. While Marx acknowledged that “one form [of money] may remedy evils against which another is powerless… as long as they remain forms of money” they’ll reproduce these evils elsewhere in the same way that “one form of wage labour may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself” [16]. Capitalism can’t be overthrown without changing the relations of production. Revolutions require objective and subjective conditions. Without changes in mass consciousness—which are superstructural but relate to and impact the base—no crisis of capitalism will lead to a new mode of production. A crisis in the capitalist system can, in turn, help change that consciousness, but is not in itself sufficient. Neither can be viewed or approached in isolation, and have to be approached as interacting within the shifting totality of capitalist society. In response to these approaches, our tactics and strategies change. References [1] Thanks to Jon Greenway for feedback on an earlier draft of this article. [2] Marx, Karl. (1859/1970). A contribution to the critique of political economy (New York: International Publishers), 20-21. [3] Engels, Friedrich. (1890/1965). “Engels to Joseph Bloch.” In Marx-Engels selected correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers), 396. [4] Ibid., 394, 396. [5] Marx, Karl. (1852/1972). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers), 47. [6] Althusser, Louis. (1995/2014). On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso), 54. [7] Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 47. [8] Ibid., 50. [9] Engels, Friedrich. (1894/1965). “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” In Marx-Engels selected correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers), 441. [10] Ibid., 441-442. [11] Marx, Karl. (1939/1990). “Appendix: Results of the immediate process of production.” In Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1), trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Penguin), 1044. [12] Pew Research Center. (2021). “Mobile fact sheet.” Pew Research center, April 7 Available here. [13] Drouin, Michelle, Daren H. Kaiser, and Daniel A. Miller. (2012). “Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics.” Computers in Human Behavior 28, no. 4: 1493. [14] Marx, Karl. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): A critical analysis of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 285, 286. [15] See Majidi, Mazda. (2021). “Relative surplus value: The class struggle intensifies.” Liberation School, 18 August. Available here. [16] Marx, Karl. (1939/1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 123. Author Derek Ford Archives December 2021 Auto worker activists for direct democracy leafleted at plants across the country to promote a yes vote on the referendum. Photos: UAWD. This article was originally published on December 1, but is being updated as results come in. The members of the United Auto Workers have voted overwhelmingly to move to a direct voting system for choosing their union leadership—“one member, one vote.” With all votes counted as of December 2, direct elections had the support of 63.6 percent of voters. It's a historic win for reformers in one of the nation’s most important unions, where members have pushed for this change for decades. The referendum is the product of a consent decree between the UAW and the U.S. Department of Justice, after a years-long series of prosecutions of top union officials on corruption charges ranging from embezzling union funds for personal use to accepting bribes from an employer, FCA (formerly Chrysler, now Stellantis), in exchange for accepting contract terms more favorable for the company. One million members were eligible to vote in the mail-ballot referendum, including 400,000 active members and 600,000 retirees. Of those, 143,000 returned ballots.
“Local 862 was the first local to press [internal union] charges against [former UAW President] Gary Jones,” Budnick said. (Jones was ultimately convicted of embezzlement in federal court and sentenced to prison.) “We got it approved by the membership to go forward with it. So our local was very actively fighting against the corruption. Now we’re being asked, ‘Do we want one member one vote or do we want to keep the system?’ It was a vote for change.” Even more surprising, perhaps, was the 69 percent support for direct elections in Local 600, the Ford local in Dearborn, Michigan, which Budnick called “ground zero of the Administration Caucus.” (The Admin Caucus is the one party that has ruled the union for generations.) Rory Gamble, who was UAW president from late 2019 to June of this year, came out of Local 600, as did Bob King, who held the top spot from 2010 to 2014. It’s the union’s largest local, with over 25,000 members and retirees. Eric Truss, who has contested for local office in Local 600 since 2004 and is a member of the UAWD steering committee, said the local’s culture mirrors the culture that has allowed the Admin Caucus to maintain its tight grip on the international union’s delegate system. “Any time you run for something you’re bullied, you’re pressured. So people don’t speak up. When we were flyering, they were excited but they were silent about their excitement. But now, calls and texts are coming in. Now they’re willing to be excited and talk about it.” Other large bases of support came from higher education locals, which make up a fifth of the union’s active membership. University of California graduate workers Local 2865 voted 84 percent yes for direct elections, a percentage beaten only by Local 5118, the Harvard Graduate Students Union, which voted a whopping 97 percent yes. Close behind Harvard was Local 2366, representing about 175 John Deere workers in Coffeyville, Kansas, who voted 95 percent yes. Across nine locals in Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois, Deere workers voted 4,099 to 1,926 (over 68 percent) for one member, one vote. “The strike no doubt gave us a unique perspective, the referendum ballots going out right on the top of our strike,” said Deere worker Nolan Tabb of Local 281. “[UAW leadership] got a 31 percent increase [in pay] in 2018 that the delegates chose for them, but were essentially pushing the original offer from the company which was a minimal increase for us. So it’s like, how is 3 percent sufficient for us but you got a 31 percent increase?” Tabb believes elections at the top will mean accountability for leaders who negotiate bad contracts: “The good old boys system has been held in place because they’re not elected spots. Not only do we not have control over who gets put into those positions, but we don’t have control over getting those people out of those positions.” He said the result “clearly validates the perspective that the rank-and-file members will no longer just keep it 'business as usual'—neither with the company perpetuating corporate greed, nor the good old boys system that's gone unchecked and unaccounted for in our leadership.” THE CAMPAIGN(S)The referendum result is the culmination of two years of organizing against the backdrop of what federal prosecutors have called the largest union corruption scandal ever. In the fall of 2019, after charges were brought against then-President Jones, individual locals began filing resolutions calling for discipline of top officers under Articles 30 and 32 of the UAW constitution. Members then began calling for a special convention, under Article 8, to take up the “one member, one vote” question. Through those fights to hold their top leaders accountable, the rank-and-file group UAWD was formed. Scott Houldieson of Local 551 in Chicago, one of the founding members, was a leader of the fight to bring Article 32 ethics charges against top leaders. “We've been advocating those things for a long time,” he said. “Myself, for better than a decade, but guys like [UAWD steering committee members] Mike Cannon and Bill Parker for the better part of 40, 50 years. Most members are not aware of that history. They just know that they have an opportunity in front of them right now to take back their union, and they’re acting on it.” These efforts fell short of the thresholds that would have been required to call a special convention, but found new life in the consent decree between the UAW and the Department of Justice. The agreement to hold a referendum on “one member, one vote” did not guarantee the outcome, however. For that, rank-and-file members had to organize. Very few local officers came out in explicit support of a yes vote, and the Administration Caucus closed ranks, alternately acting as if the referendum didn’t exist—the incumbents refused to inform members about the vote beyond the strictest mandates of the monitor—and then exhorting members to “Protect the Wheel.” (A wheel is the union’s logo.) The incumbents touted their cooperation with investigators, and exhorted members to stick with the status quo system, where rank and file members elect convention delegates (often local officers) who in turn elect the international officers. They warned against smaller locals being drowned out by larger ones, outside “dark money” influencing elections, and low voter participation allowing a small group to decide the union’s future. Members wondered about the flyers opposing direct elections that mysteriously showed up in their break rooms before shifts, though local presidents would deny putting them there. UAWD, on the other hand, hit the gates in dozens of locals. Active members and retirees flyered, set up textbanks and phonebanks, and held a week of action in May to commemorate the infamous Battle of the Overpass, the dramatic confrontation between auto workers and company goons in 1937 that paved the way to a union at Ford. UAWD held weekly meetings open to all members, circulated “one member, one vote” pledges, launched a website to spread the word about the referendum, and used social media to reach rank and filers across the country and bring them into the campaign for the right to vote. WHAT’S NEXT?What happens next is far from clear. According to the consent decree: “the UAW Constitution shall be amended to incorporate [the one member, one vote] principle with respect to its IEB [international executive board] elections prior to the next IEB elections taking place at or following the next UAW Constitutional Convention in June 2022. In such case, the Monitor will promptly confer with the UAW to draft language amending the UAW Constitution affirming the ‘one member, one vote’ principle for inclusion in the UAW Constitution at the next UAW Constitutional Convention.” In addition: “the Monitor, in consultation with the UAW, shall develop all election rules and methods for the election of members of the IEB during the period of oversight.” Some members are worried about the vagueness of this language and the potential impropriety of the UAW—here meaning the current leadership of the union, which is avowedly against direct elections—conferring with the Monitor on amending constitutional language, and consulting with the Monitor on election rules and methods. Most members expect some kind of delegate-based nominations threshold, as exists in the Teamsters, where candidates have to win the support of at least 5 percent of convention delegates to get on the ballot. Other possible models are the ILWU, where a “primary” election at the convention determines who makes it onto the general ballot, or the Steelworkers, where candidates must receive endorsements from a certain number of local unions to reach the ballot, or a membership-wide, petition-based nominations process (which in the Teamsters is a prerequisite for nomination at the convention). Election rules could also allow electronic balloting and limit campaign spending. One way or another, members expect a showdown at the convention in June 2022, whether over the nomination itself or particularities of how the election is to be conducted, plus any other constitutional changes members would like to pursue. The convention delegate races, which are mostly likely to be held this spring, will be hotly contested. The referendum opens the door for a contested election for the top leadership of the union—something that hasn’t happened in a very long time. The question is, who will run? Administration Caucus leaders like incumbent President Ray Curry are likely to make their case to members that they remain the most qualified candidates, having occupied all the top bargaining and representational positions in the union for decades. When the Laborers voted to switch to direct elections in the 1990s under a consent decree in the wake of a corruption scandal, members voted, on the same ballot, to re-elect their incumbent president. On the other hand, UAW members could “throw the bums out,” opting for a new leadership backed by the nascent reform group UAWD, as happened in the first direct elections in the Teamsters in 1991, when Teamsters for a Democratic Union-backed reformer Ron Carey took the helm. It will be interesting to see whether any leaders of large locals, who have mostly stayed silent till now, find the courage to speak up for reform and throw their hats into the ring. Bruce Baumhower, head of Local 12 in Toledo, the union’s third-largest auto local, was one of the few local presidents to come out publicly in support of direct elections. But, as the Toledo Blade reported in November, “Mr. Baumhower said several of the current UAW vice presidents have been helpful to his union. A one member one vote system does not mean the current leadership will be tossed out, he said, but it would immediately allow for more accountability. ‘I just think times have changed,’ he said.” Ray Jensen, a member of Local 774 at General Motors’ Tonawanda Engine Plant near Buffalo, said his priority will be electing leaders who remember what it’s like to be a working member. “I don’t care what sector they come from,” he said, “as long as they’ve come from the floor, they’ve been in our position, they’ve worked the jobs, they know what it’s like to start at the bottom, not be appointed to a [union staff] position on your second day on the job. “I want someone who’s in touch with reality—the wants, the goals, the job. The UAW is fantastic. It’s the leadership that's given us a black eye,” Jensen said. “I’d like to see someone in there who’s a blue-collar worker, not necessarily a certified public accountant like Gary Jones. Somebody who knows what we need going forward:, to stay healthy, to earn a decent wage and living and decent retirement benefits.” For UAWD, the reform network that was formed just under two years ago, the fight remains the same—if now on far more favorable terrain. Budnick sees the low turnout as a sign of the organizing work that’s yet to be done. In his own local, “we’ve got at least 10,000 members more that are active and didn’t vote, and the ballot went to their house,” he said. “That bothers me. And that’s the whole point of one member, one vote for me—the main point, besides having the right to vote, was for member engagement. This is supposed to engage the membership.” As to why that hasn’t happened through the referendum, Budnick blames decades of Admin Caucus rule. “The membership has been complacent, because we didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said. “Every time somebody tried to do something it just got shot down by the Administration Caucus. They've just been beaten down into their place, and it kind of sucks.” That said, tens of thousands of UAW members have just voted to upend the status quo. For Houldieson, the result shows that “members want a choice. They want to have a say in how their international union, that they pay union dues to, is administered.” Where that choice will take the union is now, finally, up to the members to decide. This article was produced by Labor Notes. Archives December 2021 12/13/2021 Starbucks Workers United scores first-ever union win at big coffee chain. By: Mark GruenbergRead NowStarbucks workers and supporters jump for joy as votes are read during a viewing of their union election on Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021, in Buffalo, N.Y. Starbucks workers have voted to unionize over the company’s objections, pointing the way to a new labor model for the 50-year old coffee giant. | Joshua Bessex / AP BUFFALO, N.Y.—Starbucks Workers United broke a significant barrier on December 9 with the first-ever worker win at the big retail coffee chain. Workers at the Elmwood store in Buffalo voted 19-8 to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, the National Labor Relations Board officer announced. The union also won 15-9 at a second store, but there are seven challenged ballots, and the NLRB will have to decide whether and how many of them to count. The union lost 8-12 at a third Buffalo-area store, with two challenged ballots and two invalid votes. In one of many tactics management used to try to beat the union, the firm abruptly closed two more stores which had the most pro-union staffs and transferred people into other stores. It also brought in co-founder Howard Schultz and other honchos, to argue against the union. But when pro-union worker Gianna Reeve stood up at a captive audience meeting and asked Schultz to sign a set of fair election principles pledge, “he ran away,” she said. Richard Bensinger, left, who is advising unionization efforts, along with baristas Casey Moore, right, Brian Murray, second from left, and Jaz Brisack, second from right, discuss their efforts to unionize three Buffalo-area stores, inside the movement’s headquarters on Oct. 28, 2021, in Buffalo, N.Y. | Carolyn Thompson / AP And it tried to stuff the ballot box by expanding the proposed bargaining unit from the 70 workers whom Starbucks Workers United wanted to include, to 100. It scrambled with last-minute improvements and a promised pay raise. And it hired Littler Mendelson, a notorious union-buster which advertises itself as the nation’s #1 corporate law firm. The tactics failed as the workers became more determined than ever to get their union. The Elmwood workers, gathered at their storefront union quarters in Buffalo, erupted in fist-waving cheers and hugs when the results came in. They literally jumped for joy as they realized their victory was a defeat for a powerful multi-national corporation that rakes in profits from stores around the world. “I’m so proud of the workers in my hometown of Buffalo. Way to go” declared Howard Kling, a vice president of the International Labor Communications Association, who lives now in Minnesota. His organization was holding a virtual convention of labor communicators when the results at Starbucks were announced. “There’s been a very clear shift from ‘partners’ to profits. It’s been a churn and burn,” among the workforce, 11-year-worker Michelle Eisen, a leader among the workers, told a town hall for the workers several days ago, hosted by strongly pro-worker Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt. “Partners” is the Starbucks term for workers, like “associates” at Walmart. Bosses have adjusted even the usage of words in the English language to disguise what they are doing. In true Orwellian style, the Starbucks term “partners” sounds better than “exploited workers.” The town hall is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yolib6O7xhU. Their victory is important: Starbucks, with 9,000 stores and 200,000 workers nationwide, is—like Amazon and Walmart—a domain of low-paid, low-benefit workers. And those workers, marshaled by the Service Employees, the parent union of Starbucks Workers United, and other unions, have been rising up against corporate exploitation for more than a year. The coronavirus pandemic, and the massive job losses it created in the restaurant-bar-hotel sector, already the economy’s lowest-paid, shone a national spotlight on such worker exploitation. Workers have responded with unionization drives, or by finding better jobs in the current recovery, telling their old bosses to “take this job and shove it.” Starbucks tried to cultivate an image that it’s different from those other firms. “It is a company that I came to” 11 years ago “because they professed to be a company I would want to work for, one of the better ones, and someone who cared about the community and their employees and the environment,” said Eisen. “At least I viewed them that way. “And in the last few years, and this predates the pandemic, things have changed. There’s been a slide in the working conditions and a very clear shift in how they value their employees, and I definitely have felt undervalued. Will Westlake, left, and Casey Moore, right, watch as votes are counted during a union election watch party on Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021, in Buffalo, N.Y. | Joshua Bessex / AP “Since we went public on August 23rd, we’ve seen something that’s very contrary to what Starbucks says they are, at least to the public…We’ve seen our stores inundated with Starbucks corporate from all over the country.” Besides Schultz and Starbucks North America President Roxanne Williams, “they’ve sent ‘support partners,’” she added, waggling her fingers to indicate the quotes, “to prevent us from talking about the union with our co-workers. They’re called ‘support managers,’ but we know they’re there to surveil us and prevent us from doing the work we’d like to do.” There were so many managers that one male barista, working at the store on a Sunday, found himself surrounded in a “captive audience” meeting with nine managers and HR reps. “What I’d like to see after we have our union is to have a seat at the table, a say in our working conditions and a say on our pay. I mean someone hired tomorrow is going to make 63 cents less an hour than I do after 11 years with the company and that’s unacceptable.” The gap is so narrow, Eisen added, because while she’s had small raises, the newer workers benefit from New York state’s rising minimum wage. She doesn’t begrudge them that. The state minimum wage is $12.50 an hour outside the New York City metro area, rising to $13.20 on December 31. It’s $15 an hour in the city, its suburbs, and Long Island. “What is clear is that senior employees are not valued the way we should be, given the time and energy we’ve put into this company,” Eisen added. Author Award winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but a holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners. Archives December 2021 12/13/2021 Biden’s democracy summit a good time to discuss ‘Bill of Rights Socialism. By: David CavendishRead NowAmerican democracy is in peril. One only has to follow the news in recent years to realize the dangerous situation this country finds itself in. The most obvious and dramatic example was the Jan. 6th insurrection, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol with the goal of stopping Congress’ certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. They were unsuccessful, but Trump’s supporters in legislatures across the country have subsequently passed a slew of laws to restrict the right to vote. These laws are designed to undo the gains made by people of color since the end of the Second World War. That, along with other measures, such as when and how people may register to vote, or the access to the ballot for independent or third-party candidates, hinder the functioning of an open and fair electoral system. At the same time, the powerful influence of money in the electoral arena, the result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, threatens to drown out the voices of the average voter. The 2020 election saw spending of more than $14 billion. How much of that total came through contributions of working-class voters? President Biden understands the problem—up to a point. In February 2021 he said, “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” To that end, he has convened a virtual “Summit for Democracy” to be held on Dec. 9-10. In addition to countries from Western Europe, the British Commonwealth of Nations, and Japan—the U.S.’ “allies,” there will also be representatives from a number of right-wing authoritarian governments that now rule in countries of the former socialist world, in addition to Taiwan (which the Chinese government reminds everyone is a Chinese province), and Juan Guaidó (who represents no one but the pro-imperialists in Venezuela). Biden, however, does not explain that all democracies are not the same. Democracy in the United States in the 21st century is quite different than the democracy of ancient Athens, not to mention the extent of democracy that existed in our country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Marxist-Leninists, on the other hand, understand that a country’s form of government reflects the power of the dominant class in that country. The Roman Empire had a government dominated by a landed aristocracy; 17th century Holland was one controlled by mercantile interests. In the United States, our government reflects the power of the capitalist class (the industrialists and financiers). We would call it a “bourgeois democracy.” The same for the other capitalist states. There is, however, a second type of democracy existing today, “proletarian” or “working-class democracy,” which is practiced in the socialist countries of China, Cuba, and Vietnam, among others. In the past, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR) and the Paris Commune of 1871 were the first examples of this type. Each of these countries, past and present, built their power on a system of local governing organizations in which urban workers and peasants ran the show. The leaders of the Paris Commune of 1871, the first workers’ state in history, declared, “The inherent rights of the Commune are: The vote on communal budgets, receipts, and expenses; the fixing and distribution of taxes; the direction of public services; the organization of its magistracy, internal police, and education; the administration of goods belonging to the Commune.” (From the Manifesto of the Paris Commune.) Forty-six years later, in the spring of 1917, the Bolsheviks of Russia, led by V.I. Lenin, called on the “Workers, peasants, and soldiers” to “unite everywhere in Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, as organs of alliance and power of the revolutionary forces of Russia!” The workers of Russia were told that the Soviets, or councils, were “the guarantee that the fundamental demands of the Russian people will be realized: land for the peasants, protection of labor for the workers, and a democratic republic for all the citizens.” More than just political bodies, these organizations, as well as their modern descendants in socialist countries, were given the task of transforming society in revolutionary ways. Democracy in socialist countries, when it functions as intended, comes directly from the people and reflects the aspirations, dreams, and hopes of everyday life. Those of us who live in capitalist countries, however, have a one-dimensional type of democracy. Whereas the U.S. Constitution guarantees “one person one vote,” (a political right), for instance, nowhere does it guarantee workers an equal voice in economic matters. Just look at the struggles it takes for unionized workers to get a pay raise, decent medical insurance, or retirement benefits. Not to mention almost no say over what is produced or how much products will cost. On a personal note: As a former social studies teacher I used to ask my kids, “If you or I were to walk into the Oval Office and asked the president to support our demands, and Bill Gates or Elon Musk walked into the Oval Office and made a demand of the president, who do you think the president would most likely support?” Almost without exception they always responded Gates or Musk. Therein lies the crux of our limited democracy. The goal is to create a more democratic society based on something like a “Bill of Rights Socialism,” an idea first enunciated by Gus Hall, former chair of the Communist Party USA. It would guarantee not only those rights in the current Bill of Rights but would expand them to include things such as the right to a job, free medical care, free education, low-cost housing, and the outlawing of racism, among many other things. Therefore, our task is straightforward. We must defend democracy in every way possible while working to broaden it in ways beyond what it is today. Author David Cavendish is a retired teacher, active in the union movement, the peace movement (many years in an anti-Iraq/Afghanistan War vigil), and other progressive political activities. He is a longtime contributor to People’s World. This article was originally published in People's World. Archives December 2021 The U.S.' record on supporting democracy in other nations has more than a few dark spots. Here, in the shadow of an American M-60 tank, two U.S. soldiers hold three Grenadians prisoner in St. George's, Grenada in October 1983 following a U.S. invasion of the island. | AP If you thought discourse in the United States couldn’t get more childish, think again: This week, the White House is convening the geopolitical equivalent of the He-Man Woman-Haters’ Club from Our Gang. The club has an official name, of course; the Summit for Democracy, wherein U.S. President Joe Biden and 110 of his closest friends have a super-secret special meeting in their treehouse to talk about how great they are. But however hard they try to gussy it up, this affair is no different from what Spanky, Alfalfa, and Buckwheat got up to in those Hal Roach short films decades ago. As per usual, the U.S. government has appointed itself supreme authority—this time of the dictionary. Just like “freedom” and “human rights,” we can count “democracy” as another term that’s lost all meaning after years of being trotted out by the country that cares about it the least. Because aren’t all the best democratic processes the ones where the guy with the most money and guns tells everyone what to do? We might ask Salvador Allende of Chile or Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo how the U.S. treats elected leaders who dare to espouse an alternate path for their people—if the CIA hadn’t masterminded their assassinations. | AP photos That’s only half a joke. Of the 110 supposedly willing participants in this “democracy summit,” many are host to U.S. military bases and troops. Indigenous resistance to U.S. military presence—some might say occupation—is frequently suppressed by comprador governments, who depend on American largesse to fill their coffers. This inconvenient fact, among many others, makes it hard to take this week’s charade seriously. We might, for instance, ask Salvador Allende of Chile or Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo how the U.S. treats elected leaders who dare to espouse an alternate path for their people—if the CIA hadn’t masterminded their assassinations. Even when countries follow the U.S. model, if the results don’t favor U.S. interests those who get elected tend to find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun. Or lately, fleeing their homes as “color revolutions” facilitate the installment of new, more amenable leadership. Some may complain these examples are old, from the height of the Cold War. But removal of inconvenient leaders, most of them socialists, by the American military-intelligence complex didn’t stop after the Soviet Union ended in 1991—and it’s naïve to believe otherwise. Notably absent from the hallowed list of this week’s “democratic” participants are Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. These three Latin American countries have regularly scheduled multiparty elections, but because those elections put left-wing governments into power that oppose U.S. hegemony, they are decried as illegitimate, and their leaders as dictators. It should come as no surprise these countries’ poor treatment in the press comes with protracted efforts to overthrow their leadership; to cite only two examples, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez survived an ouster in 2002 and Bolivia’s Evo Morales was deposed in a fascist coup in 2019 before returning the following year when his party won back the presidency. These anti-democratic moves, just like their Cold War antecedents, were cheered on by the same media that now purports to be defenders of freedom, democracy, and human rights. So it’s not even about U.S.-style democracy in the abstract. It’s about whether a given “democracy” benefits the U.S. economically and politically. We see this in the summit invitations extended to Israel, a country presiding over a regime of brutal apartheid against Palestinians; Brazil, where judicial shenanigans remove leftist leaders or block their candidacies; and India, where state-supported pogroms on Muslims go unnoticed to ensure participation in U.S.-led military alliances. As with so many things where America is concerned, geopolitical expediency trumps any imaginary commitment to principle. How popular can the U.S.’ brand of “democracy” be if its existence requires enforcement at gunpoint or, at the very least, the toeing of a particular line? How many countries in the world would, if given the choice, willingly submit to a “rules-based order” that has kept them under colonial and neocolonial domination for decades? Since a global majority names the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace, the answer isn’t hard to imagine. But these run-of-the-mill hypocrisies only scratch the surface. There’s a much deeper issue underpinning U.S. “democracy” and all its contradictions, and it’s one Marxists have known about for some time. As Vladimir Lenin said in State and Revolution, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them.” He was paraphrasing Karl Marx and writing over 100 years ago, but those words are as true as they’ve ever been. Whatever form it takes, under capitalism democracy is little more than a pantomime show. It’s an instrument of class rule, one which provides a vehicle for more efficient exploitation. But all the smoke and mirrors in the world can’t obscure this fundamental fact, and the American people know it on some level—even if they don’t articulate it in those terms. Is it, after all, a democratic right to live in poverty? To work multiple jobs and barely keep your head above water? To worry over being one of the millions evicted amid a still-raging pandemic? Is it a democratic choice to decide between risking one’s life at work or one’s livelihood in unemployment or debt peonage? Nearly 800,000 people in the U.S. have had even those meager “rights” stripped from them, as their democratic government elected to let them die. This is what critics of countries like China don’t understand: You could hold an election every day of the year, but they wouldn’t mean squat if things didn’t improve for the working majority. This is entirely by design. To quote Lenin again: “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich…that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see restrictions [that] exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.” In the U.S., these restrictions most obviously manifest through voter suppression targeting minority groups, but the political system itself is built on a rotten foundation. It is not a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, but one of the capitalists, by the capitalists, for the capitalists. The people don’t enter into it—except as sources of wealth extraction. The governments invited to the ‘Democracy Summit’ hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden include Israel, which presides over a regime of brutal apartheid against Palestinians; Brazil, where judicial shenanigans remove leftist leaders or block their candidacies; and India, where state-supported pogroms on Muslims go unnoticed to ensure participation in U.S.-led military alliances. | AP China, however, turns this relationship on its head. The Communist Party of China, the country’s leading political organ, is a body with membership from the whole of Chinese society, but its base of support was forged in an alliance of workers and peasants. That alliance continues to predominate, ensuring the working majority remains the primary focus when crafting policy and allocating resources. In countries like the U.S., the affluent form interest groups to protect and expand their profits; Communists’ only interest group is the people. If action is taken in China or other countries governed by communist parties, social benefits and costs are factored in long before anyone considers what the bourgeoisie will think. Because why should we? They aren’t the majority, and if their ideas were put to a vote they’d lose every time. “More money for us,” sad to say, remains quite unpopular. There are other aspects of what China terms its “whole-process democracy” that could, and should, be addressed in greater detail. Whole-of-society participation in the political process through oversight, consultation, public review, grassroots governance, and many other avenues make China a far more democratic society than the U.S. and its hangers-on will ever give it credit for. But that’s a topic for another time. For now, I’ll leave you with one last quote: “If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.” That’s not Marx or Lenin. That’s Chinese President Xi Jinping, and he’s saying exactly what they would if they were alive today. This article was originally published in People's World.
12/13/2021 Racism in America & The Hypocrisy of the 'Summit for Democracy'. By: Caleb T. MaupinRead NowThe image of George Floyd’s brutal killing not only shook the United States but also the world. The treatment of African-Americans by police officers and US society in general has long been a source of international condemnation. In the last few decades the United States has desperately been trying to reassure the world that the ugly realities of racism are being addressed, but the world sees through these claims. The reality of the facts on the ground for African-Americans in the United States points to a huge amount of hypocrisy in the rhetoric surrounding Joe Biden’s recent “Summit for Democracy,” which was used to pile condemnation on different countries throughout the world. Police Repression & Inequality of OpportunityIn 2014 Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation, and Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing both called out the USA for the fact that access to running water had been cut off at an ‘unprecedented scale’ among ‘the most vulnerable and poorest’ residents of the overwhelmingly African American city of Detroit. From 2014 to 2019, the majority African-American city of Flint, Michigan had contaminated water. Corruption and lack of concern from government officials resulted in 6,000 to 12,000 children drinking water contaminated with lead. Michelle Alexander composed best-selling book entitled “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness” exposing the ugly reality of prisons for profit and the criminalization of African-Americans as a mechanism for money. The USA maintains the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. In 2016, 1 in 38 Americans were under some form of correctional control. In low-income communities, children attend low quality schools and face an atmosphere called the “school to prison pipeline.” The obvious inequality and overall lack of quality in the US educational system has been highlighted in the work of award-winning scholars such as Jonathon Kozol. Texts such as “Death and Early Age” and “The Shame of a Nation” reveal the conditions within the schools low-income and African-American children attend, and how they set the children up for a life of hardship and lack of opportunity. Department Stores in New York City faced the 2013 “shop and frisk” scandal, when police maintained the practice of arresting African-American shoppers simply for buying expensive products. Because the customers were African American, the police assumed the credit cards to be fraudulent and cuffed them immediately after making their legal purchases. In 2021, the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed the nefarious practices of the New York City Police Departments Vice Squad. The police division was known for a record of routine wrongful arrests of people in minority communities accused of engaging in prostitution, in addition to using threats of arrest to obtain sexual favors. In one case an undercover police officer knocked on the door of a single mother with children requesting sex. After being told “no” 12 different times, the police burst in and arrested the woman anyway causing her to lose custody of her children for 2 months. US Political Elite Linked To Racial InjusticeMany attempts by US leaders to gloss over and clean up the image of US society in recent years do not reflect the actual conditions on the ground. Inequality, police brutality, lack of opportunity and low quality conditions of life continue to affect many African Americans. Many top US officials have been heavily involved in creating many of the problems they now claim to be correcting. US President Joe Biden was famous for his “crime bill” that he worked hard to pass in 1994. This law significantly contributed to the problem of mass incarceration now be widely condemned. Kamala Harris rose up the ranks of US politics as a criminal prosecutor in California. Writing for reason.com, C.J. Ciaramella exposed how Kamala Harris was very much the “law and order” candidate when running the criminal justice system of California, and she has tried to conceal this now. He writes: “Harris avoids addressing why her office did things like defend egregious prosecutorial misconduct, fight exonerations, oppose civil asset forfeiture reforms, or appeal the removal of the entire Orange County district attorney's office from a high-profile death penalty case after a bombshell report revealed an unconstitutional jailhouse snitch program.” Harris is video recorded gleefully bragging about locking up the parents of low-income children who are truant from school. Many expected that the elections of Barack Obama, an African-American President, would lead to less racial tension in the United States, but the opposite occurred. Under Obama’s presidency in 2014 the city of Ferguson, Missouri became the sight of rioting for months in response to the police killing of Michael Brown. In 2015, the city of Baltimore went up in flames in response to police brutality and the national guard was sent in. The episode of rioting in the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd was met with conciliatory words from US officials, but the angers and underlying injustices persist. International Support for Black LiberationSome of the greatest boosts to the struggle against racial injustice in the United States have come from countries the United States declares to be “undemocratic.” The Soviet Union publicized the mutilated body of 14 year old Emmet Till after he was brutally lynched in 1954 for whistling at a white woman, embarrassing the United States before the world. The Soviet Union brought William L. Patterson’s document “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations, exposing the horrors of racism in 1951 on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress. When Robert F. Williams, a leader of the African-American community of Monroe, North Carolina, was charged with murder for defending himself from Ku Klux Klansmen, he fled to Cuba. From Cuba he broadcast “Radio Free Dixie” into the US south urging African-Americans to fight for their rights. William L. Patterson was also welcomed to China by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. On August 8th, 1963 Mao Zedong wrote: “An American Negro leader now taking refuge in Cuba, Mr. Robert Williams, the former President of the Monroe, North Carolina, Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, has twice this year asked me for a statement in support of the American Negroes’ struggle against racial discrimination. On behalf of the Chinese people, I wish to take this opportunity to express our resolute support for the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination and for freedom and equal rights.” Mao’s statement went on: “I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened persons of all colors in the world, whether white, black, yellow or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present, it is the handful of imperialists headed by the United Slates, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing aggression against and menacing the overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the world.” When Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Mao Zedong once again made a public statement, saying: “Some days ago, Martin Luther King, the Afro-American clergyman, was suddenly assassinated by the U.S. imperialists. Martin Luther King was an exponent of nonviolence. Nevertheless, the U.S. imperialists did not on that account show any tolerance toward him, but used counter-revolutionary violence and killed him in cold blood. This has taught the broad masses of the Black people in the United States a profound lesson. It has touched off a new storm in their struggle against violent repression sweeping well over a hundred cities in the United States, a storm such as has never taken place before in the history of that country. It shows that an extremely powerful revolutionary force is latent in the more than twenty million Black Americans.” The Black Panther Party, which fought for the rights of African-Americans across the country, studied Mao Zedong’s writings as required reading and regularly pointed toward China as an example of a country that had achieved national liberation. At the same time that Black activists in the United States were imprisoned, spied on, and in some cases assassinated by the US government as part of the FBI COINTELPRO program, the very countries the US government labels as “undemocratic” were loudly offering support for their struggle against oppression. All of this gives important context to the bombastic tone of Biden’s “summit for democracy” and the image it presents of the United States in relation to other countries. Author Caleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved many struggles for social justice. He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well as 21st Century Socialism. He doesn’t shy away from the word “Communism” when explaining his political views, and advocates that the USA move toward some form of “socialism with American characteristics” rooted in the democratic and egalitarian traditions often found in American history. He argues that the present crisis can only be abetted with an “American Rebirth” in which the radicalism and community-centered values of the country are re-established and strengthened. Archives December 2021 12/12/2021 Why Xiomara Castro’s Win in Honduras Could Address the Country’s Endemic Corruption and Violence. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead Now“I am overwhelmed with joy; I just cannot believe it,” says Dr. Oriel María Siu speaking to me from the city of San Pedro Sula the day after Hondurans like herself voted in presidential elections. Siu was ecstatic to learn that Xiomara Castro de Zelaya had an insurmountable lead over Nasry Asfura, the candidate representing the incumbent conservative party. Castro, the wife of ousted former president Manuel Zelaya, is a democratic socialist and will become the first woman president of Honduras. She triumphantly told her supporters, “Today the people have made justice. We have reversed authoritarianism.” Castro was referring to the 12 years of repressive rule by the National Party, which took power after Zelaya was ousted in a 2009 military coup that, as per Siu, “the United States orchestrated.” Years after the coup, Hillary Clinton, who was the U.S. state secretary at the time of the coup, justified Zelaya’s removal, saying in a 2016 interview, “I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedence.” The Intercept later exposed how U.S. military officers at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies assisted Honduran coup leaders in their efforts. National Party leader Juan Orlando Hernández claimed electoral victory in 2013 against Castro and then again in 2017 against Salvador Nasralla in the face of credible accusations of massive fraud. The man who has been deeply implicated in narco-trafficking in the U.S. (his brother was convicted in a New York court of smuggling in hundreds of tons of cocaine) used the Honduran security forces as his personal militia during his tenure. Terror and violence reigned across Honduras, and among the many victims of the post-coup era was prominent environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who led the resistance to a hydroelectric dam and was killed in 2016. Another victim was a 26-year-old nursing student named Keyla Martínez, who died in police custody in February 2021 after being arrested for violating a curfew. Her death prompted fresh protests. Over the years, relentless state violence and corruption swept thousands of Honduran migrants northward who preferred the callousness of the U.S. immigration system to the barbarity of Hernández’s security forces. Conservatives in the U.S. refused to acknowledge the push factor of post-coup violence as a reason for Central American migration. Still, resistance continued inside Honduras, and, according to Amnesty International, “the wave of anti-government demonstrations has been a constant in the country” in the face of massive repression. Castro’s win may finally end this dark chapter, and it’s no wonder that Hondurans like Siu are celebrating. “People were expecting the narco-dictatorship to again steal these elections,” she says. Castro, according to Siu, rose to prominence after her husband’s ouster and “was at the forefront letting people know, nationally and internationally, what was going on” in Honduras. Castro campaigned on a socialist platform and brought together a coalition of what Siu described as “local youth, Indigenous, Black, Garifuna movements” that, after the 2009 coup, “became a very strong social movement attempting to fight against the criminality of [the] corruption, militarism, police presence in the streets and extrajudicial killings” that occurred under Hernández. Although Castro is the wife of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, Siu insists that President-elect Castro “has a brain of her own and has a platform that is beautiful.” Suyapa Portillo Villeda, a Honduran American and associate professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a transnational studies at Pitzer College, says that Castro won on a proposal of promising “participatory democracy” and that “she is trying to establish a new kind of pact with the people in calling for a national assembly to rewrite the constitution.” It’s a bold position considering that former President Manuel Zelaya was on the verge of holding a referendum on the constitution when he was deposed in a military coup. “This is the demand that has been there since 2009 that people have been organizing around, to have a new constitution that would get rid of the Cold War anti-communist constitution that was written during the Reagan era,” says Portillo Villeda. While the conservative backlash to a new constitution ushered in Hernández’s violent tenure, in many ways, Honduras’ democracy may have emerged stronger as a result. A system that Portillo Villeda describes as consisting of two “oligarchic” ruling parties is now a multiparty system, and Castro has managed to build a formidable coalition among several of them. “This was a very Honduran type of win,” says Portillo Villeda, referring to the grassroots organizing around Castro’s candidacy that included a lot of young Hondurans. Castro’s win also represents a potential end to more than a decade of repression that includes violent misogyny. “Women here die every day and rapes go without any form of justice,” said Siu, who says she doesn’t dare to walk on the streets after sundown. Honduras has been referred to as, “one of the most dangerous places on Earth to be a woman.” Since 1985, Honduras has also maintained one of the most draconian abortion bans in the world, and under Hernández’s rule, Congress strengthened the ban. Pregnant people are not allowed abortions under any circumstances including rape or incest. Castro has promised to ease the ban. The coalition that brought Castro to power includes a nascent feminist movement as well as a new queer and transgender movement working alongside traditional activist groups like unions, as well as Black and Indigenous communities. That is a big reason why Hondurans like Siu are hopeful, saying, “she has the support of historically marginalized communities all throughout the nation.” Taking her broad mandate from a population eager for change and translating that to legitimate power in a nation whose governmental machinery has been decimated will be Castro’s most serious challenge. “Of course, it’s going to be difficult,” says Portillo Villeda, of the task ahead of Castro. “She’s inheriting a broken country, legal system and Supreme Court and is coming into an empty house that has been robbed.” Author Sonali 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 December 2021 Archives December 2021 12/12/2021 There’s a Nonsensical Propaganda Campaign to Make China Look Bad in Uganda. By: Vijay PrashadRead NowOn November 25, 2021, an article appeared in Uganda’s national newspaper the Daily Monitor with the headline: “Uganda surrenders airport for China cash.” The article pointed to “toxic clauses” in the loan agreement signed by the Ugandan government with the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China on March 31, 2015. The loan--worth $207 million at 2 percent interest—was for the expansion of the Entebbe International Airport—a project under the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Work on the expansion of the airport began in May 2016. The article in the Daily Monitor, which was written by Yasiin Mugerwa, said that the Chinese authorities were going to take control of the airport because of the failure of Uganda to pay off the loan. A few days after the Daily Monitor article, U.S. media company Bloomberg also ran a similar article on November 28 without providing any further details on this news development, as did other U.S. and international outlets. The story by the Daily Monitor, meanwhile, went viral on Twitter, WhatsApp, and beyond. The story is not new. On October 28, the Ugandan Parliament Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authority and State Enterprises (COSASE) held a hearing on the loan with the Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija (member of parliament [MP] for Buyanja County) in attendance, according to NTV Uganda. Several members of parliament grilled Kasaija about the loan, with Nathan Itungo (MP from Kashari South) asking him if he and his department had been “doing due diligence” within the negotiating framework. Answering this question, Kasaija said, “I think we did, by looking at other agreements that have been signed along the same lines.” While explaining why the government went ahead with the loan agreement for the Entebbe International Airport, the finance minister said of the agreement that Uganda was looking at the “cheapest alternative, and we jumped on it.” Joel Ssenyonyi, the chair of COSASE, said that many of the clauses in the loan agreement between Uganda and China’s Exim Bank would cause problems, since the termination of the contract based on the clauses would come “at a huge cost.” Kasaija apologized to the parliamentarians and said, “We should not have accepted some of the clauses.” On the fundamental point of the ownership of the airport, Dan Kimosho (MP, Kazo County) asked, “What happens to the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority [UCAA] and the Ugandan Airport if we fail to pay this money?” “I don’t think it’s at risk,” Kasaija said, adding that if there is a problem and the UCAA was unable to generate the revenue required to pay for the loan, “then the central government will step in.” At no point did Kasaija or any of the other parliamentarians say that China would take over the Entebbe International Airport. The UCAA managers had pointed to 13 clauses that they said were onerous. These included the clauses that give the right to China’s Exim Bank to inspect the accounts of the UCAA and provide for any dispute resolution to go through the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC). Neither of these two examples, nor the other clauses, are outside the bounds of normal trade practices. In terms of the clause allowing for CIETAC to be the main arbitration panel for the loan agreement, this would not have happened if the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) was allowed to operate. Countries of the Global South have long complained about the effectiveness of using the dispute resolution mechanisms of the World Trade Organization—whose function has been compromised by the U.S. blocking of appointments to its appellate body. Meanwhile, U.S. firms continue to take refuge in the U.S. Trade Representative and the powers that stem from Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, “which allowed the United States to take retaliatory action against nations whose trade practices it deemed unfair or discriminatory.” Denials On November 27, two days after the story was reported by the Daily Monitor, Vianney Luggya, spokesperson for the UCAA, wrote on his official Twitter account, “I wish to make it categorically clear that the allegation that Entebbe Airport has been given away for cash is false.” The government of Uganda, he wrote, “can’t give away such a national asset,” the country’s only international airport. “There isn’t an ounce of truth” in the story, he wrote, dismissing rumors regarding China taking over control of the airport. Luggya further tweeted that the UCAA controls the funds it deposited in the Stanbic Bank Uganda as part of the agreement and that the UCAA remains within the loan grace period of seven years. On his own personal Twitter account, Luggya further clarified that the seven-year “grace period ends in December 2022.” Flooded with accusations, the Chinese Embassy in Kampala, Uganda, posted a statement on its Twitter account on November 28. The embassy said that the story in the Daily Monitor “has no factual basis and is ill-intended only to distort the good relations that China enjoys with developing countries including Uganda. Not a single project in Africa has ever been ‘confiscated’ by China because of failing to pay Chinese loans. On the contrary, China firmly supports and is willing to continue our efforts to improve Africa’s capacity for home driven development.” The next day, on November 29, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin repeated the word “confiscated,” refuting allegations of China’s takeover of Entebbe International Airport and underlining the fact that China has not “taken over” any “China-Africa cooperation project” on the African continent due to nonpayment of loans. A study by the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., shows that none of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative projects have been the author of debt distress; of the 68 BRI projects, only eight are in countries struggling with debt, but this struggle predates Chinese investment. Close studies of Chinese investment in the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota (published in the Atlantic) and in the African country of Djibouti (published in the Globe and Mail) show that there is no evidence of asset seizure in either of these cases. Billion Doses In 2020, Uganda’s deputy head of mission to the embassy in China, Ambassador Henry Mayega, said, “China has been a very good development partner to many African countries especially Uganda and that’s why it gives us loans every time we are in need.” Mayega’s comment came at a time of great tension on and around the African continent regarding Chinese investments and relations with African countries. In 2000, the Chinese government, in partnership with several African states, set up the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). A few days after the Daily Monitor ran its story, FOCAC gathered in Dakar, Senegal, for its Eighth Ministerial Conference from November 29 to November 30. The news from Uganda threatened to overshadow the events across the African continent. Nonetheless, China’s President Xi Jinping made two announcements that caught the eye: China will provide 1 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to the continent (600 million as donations and 400 million produced in joint ventures with certain African countries), and China will invest $40 billion in the African continent. The announcement of the vaccines comes just as Europe, the U.S. and several other nations shut their doors to Africa after fears and rumors that the COVID-19 variant Omicron—which was declared a variant of concern by WHO--originated from Botswana. This decision to initiate travel curbs against certain southern African countries was harshly criticized for its racism by Dr. Ayoade Olatunbosun-Alakija of the African Union’s African Vaccine Delivery Alliance. The false story from Uganda did not derail the FOCAC meeting, but it has inflamed public opinion—particularly on Twitter—about Chinese investments. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives December 2021 12/12/2021 Why Poorer Nations Aren’t Falling for Green-Washed Imperialism. By: Prabir PurkayasthaRead NowThe world’s wealthiest countries make a big show of fighting climate change without offering poorer countries the finances to switch to renewable energy. Fighting global warming is not just about providing a path to net-zero carbon emissions for all countries. It is also about figuring out how best to meet the energy needs of people across the world while working toward net-zero emissions. If fossil fuels have to be given up, which has now become an urgent need given the current environmental challenges, countries in Africa and a significant part of Asia, including India, need an alternate path for providing electricity to their people. What then is the best alternate course for poorer countries to follow for electricity production—if they do not use the fossil fuel route—that is being used by rich countries? This in turn also raises questions about how much this alternative energy source route will cost poorer countries, and who will pay the bills incurred when making the switch to this new source of energy. Discussions on these issues, which are pertinent to resolving the climate crisis, were completely absent from the COP26 agenda, which concluded on November 13. The financing of a low carbon emission path was conveniently delinked from commitments toward cutting down carbon emissions and now faces an uncertain future, with developed countries failing to live up to their earlier “pledge” of providing finance to developing nations to “help them adapt to climate change and mitigate further rises in temperature.” Some numbers are important here to understand the extent to which developing nations have contributed to the present climate crisis and to greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union plus the UK (EU-UK) produce more than twice the carbon emissions of the entire continent of Africa, with less than half of Africa’s population. With less than a quarter of India’s population, the United States emits significantly more carbon than India does—almost twice as much. It is argued that as the cost of electricity from renewables has now fallen below the cost of electricity from fossil fuels, it should be possible for all countries, rich or poor, to phase out fossil fuels completely and shift to renewable energy sources without addressing the issue of funding. It is true that the cost per unit of electricity generated with renewables is lower today than that from fossil fuels. What has, however, been overlooked here is that for poor countries to make this switch, they would need to build three or four times the capacity to generate electricity from renewables to supply the same amount of energy that they currently get from fossil fuel plants. This is because the capacity factor or the plant load factor (PLF)—how much electricity a plant produces compared to what it can produce by working continuously at full capacity—for renewable energy sources is about 20-40 percent that of fossil-fueled plants. The wind does not blow all the time; nor does the sun shine at night. That means that a country will have to build several times the capacity—and therefore invest more capital—using the renewable route to generate the same amount of electricity it would get from fossil-fueled plants. This level of investment in renewables by a rich country may not be a problem. But for a poor country trying to build its basic infrastructure of electricity, roads, railways and other public infrastructure, including schools, universities and health care institutions, this switch to renewables will not be easy without financial support from the rich countries. This is why the rich countries asking the poor countries to make net-zero pledges without committing to providing them with any money is completely hypocritical. Tomorrow, the rich countries can—and most probably will—turn around and say that the poor countries made the commitment toward ensuring net-zero emissions, and they should now borrow from the rich countries at high interest rates and make good on their promises, or else face sanctions. In other words, this would lead to a new form of green colonialism. The second problem with renewables as the main source of electricity is that there are significant additional costs for setting up the grid for short-term or long-term storage of electricity. This is to balance the daily fluctuations or the seasonal fluctuations that may arise. For example, in 2021, Germany saw a significant slowing down of winds in summer, leading to a sharp fall in electricity generated from wind. In their case, Germany balanced the low production of wind power by increasing the production of electricity from coal-fired plants, leading to their greenhouse gas emissions going up significantly. In a scenario in which coal-fired plants do not exist, what will countries do when renewable energy capacity fluctuates? While daily fluctuations for countries using renewable energy sources can be met with large, grid-sized batteries, this is not feasible for seasonal variations. These countries will have to either use pumped storage schemes with hydroelectric power or store hydrogen in large quantities for use in fuel cells. A pumped storage hydroelectric scheme means pumping water up to a reservoir when there is surplus power available for the grid, and using it to produce electricity when there is a shortfall. Storing hydrogen in quantities large enough to meet seasonal grid requirements is still another idea that needs to be explored and assessed for its technical and economic feasibility. The point here is that shifting to a grid, which is entirely based on renewable energy, is still technologically some time away. We need to develop new technologies for storing energy. And we may need to use concentrated sources of energy—fossil or nuclear—to meet the requirement of daily or seasonal fluctuations until that time. The other possibility is using fossil fuels without greenhouse gas emissions. It means not letting the carbon dioxide escape into the atmosphere and, instead, pumping it into underground reservoirs; or what is called carbon capture and sequestration. Such carbon capture projects in rich countries were given up in the belief that renewables would solve the problem of carbon emissions. It is now clear that having renewables as the only source of energy in a grid is not enough, and the world may need to look for other solutions as well. Meanwhile, in the short term, nuclear power does not appear to be a permanent solution to moving toward cleaner energy sources as “there is not enough time for nuclear innovation to save the planet,” according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs. This means gas, oil, and coal are the only short-term solutions before us for meeting long- and short-term fluctuations in energy production. And here, the duplicity of the rich countries becomes clear. Rich countries like Europe and the U.S. have enough gas resources. Poorer countries like India and China do not; they only have coal resources. Instead of discussing how much greenhouse gases each country should emit, the rich countries decided to focus on what fuel needs to be phased out. Yes, coal emits twice the amount of carbon dioxide compared to gas-fired power plants for the production of the same amount of electrical energy. But if countries produce twice the amount of electricity from gas-fired power plants as from coal, they will still produce the same amount of carbon emissions. If the U.S. or the EU-UK are producing more carbon emissions than India or Africa—which have larger population sizes—why ask for phasing out coal only, while no such targets are set by the U.S. or EU-UK for phasing out their carbon emissions by using gas-fired power plants? This is where the energy justice issue becomes important. The U.S. per capita energy use is nine times that of India, while the UK’s per capita energy use is six times more than that of India. If we consider countries in sub-Saharan Africa such as Uganda or the Central African Republic, their energy consumption is even lower, i.e., the U.S. consumes 90 times, the UK 60 times more energy than these countries! Why should we then talk only about which fuels need to be phased out and not about by how much countries need to immediately cut their carbon emissions? I am not raising here the issue of an equitable share of the carbon space, and if a country has used more than its fair share of carbon space, how it should compensate the poorer countries for it. I am simply pointing out that by talking about net-zero emissions and phasing out certain fuels, the rich countries are continuing on their path of excess carbon emissions while changing the goalposts for others. The last word on hypocrisy is Norway’s. At a time when it is expanding its own oil and gas production, Norway, along with seven other Nordic and Baltic countries, has been lobbying the World Bank “to stop all financing of natural gas projects in Africa and elsewhere as soon as 2025,” according to an article titled, “Rich Countries’ Climate Policies Are Colonialism in Green” in Foreign Policy magazine, which has been written by Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute. While Norway may have been the most blatant, 20 countries moved similar resolutions in COP26 to end “financing for fossil fuel development overseas,” according to the Guardian. For them, climate change negotiations are the way to keep their dominant energy positions while denying not only climate reparations but also finances to the poorest of countries that are trying to provide their people with subsistence energy. It is clear that no country in the world has a future if it does not stop the continued emission of greenhouse gases. But if rich countries do not also find a path for the poorer countries to meet their minimum level of energy needs, they will see the collapse of huge swaths of their own countries. Is it logical to think that countries in sub-Saharan Africa can continue living on a ninetieth of the energy consumption of the U.S. without there being consequences for all countries? Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his followers may believe that India is on the way to becoming a developed country, even a superpower. The fact is that, in per capita electricity consumption, India is, in fact, closer to Africa than to China or the club of the rich nations, the U.S., the UK, and those in the EU. Addressing climate without energy justice is only a new version of colonialism, even if it’s clothed in green. Ramachandran calls this out for what it is, writing: “Pursuing climate ambitions on the backs of the poorest people in the world is not just hypocritical—it is immoral, unjust, and green colonialism at its worst.” Author Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement. Archives December 2021 12/12/2021 Why Biden Shouldn’t Use the ‘Summit for Democracy’ to Start More Cold Wars. By: Katrina vanden HeuvelRead NowOn December 9 and 10, President Biden will host a virtual “Summit for Democracy.” The gathering will bring together leaders from 110 countries who work in government, civil society and the private sector, with the officially declared purpose of developing an agenda to renew democratic government and keep democracy’s ideals strong. (The guest list includes Pakistan, Ukraine and Brazil.) As authoritarianism grows around the world, including in the U.S., the administration says it seeks practical ideas and strong alliances against its spread. But how to square this high-sounding project when just a few months ago “America is back” was President Biden’s mantra as he met with the Group of Seven in Cornwall, NATO allies in Brussels and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva? Biden earned widespread praise for leading a return to normality after Donald Trump’s reign of error. The question is, though, what is normality, and “America is back” for what? Biden’s emphasis in the European meetings was bolstering NATO allies for a new global face-off with Russia—and increasingly China. Despite existential threats posed by catastrophic climate change (which Biden and other world leaders inadequately addressed at COP26) and an ongoing global pandemic, Biden’s new normal seems ominously leaning to a revival of Cold War politics. “We are committed to the rules-based international order,” concludes the final communiqué from the June NATO meetings, but “Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security… China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an alliance.” Much of the NATO plan addressed bolstering the alliance’s growing military capabilities on the Russian borders, and NATO for the first time also designated China as a “systemic challenge.” As the Democracy Summit convenes, old Cold War tropes are indeed being recycled. In a rare joint op-ed article, China and Russia’s ambassadors to the U.S. depict the summit as “[a]n evident product of its Cold War mentality, [which]… will stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new ‘dividing lines.’” In the United States’ narrative that is described in the Chinese and Russian ambassadors’ warning, the world is divided between democratic and authoritarian nations. The U.S. has never ceased to paint the latter as repressive and rapacious, threatening their neighbors and working to disrupt a presumably benign rules-based order. China is the new “number one pacing challenge,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put it in March, with Russia relegated to second place. It is vital, the United States insists, that it and its NATO allies invest to maintain superiority in every domain of warfare—land, air, sea, space and cyber—and in every region from the borders of Russia to the Great China Sea. In a Washington addled by bitter partisan divides, the call to meet the threat posed by China and Russia forges bipartisan consensus. Right-wing Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote in a February report titled “Beat China” that he sees the Asian country as the new Soviet Union: “Once again, America confronts a powerful totalitarian adversary that seeks to dominate Eurasia and remake the world order.” As during the Cold War with the USSR, with China, the threat abroad is being used to justify action at home. When it comes to investing in the American people, Republicans such as Cotton see big government as evil and industrial policy as creeping socialism; when it comes to foreign policy, they eagerly join the call for updating “America’s long-term economic, industrial and technological efforts… to reflect the growing threat posed by Communist China.” The same GOP senators who couldn’t bring themselves to back an investigation into the sacking of the Capitol rush to support research and development when framed as addressing threats posed by Chinese investments. While dangerous, a Cold War face-off between democracies and authoritarian states, anchored by China and Russia, is the establishment’s sweet spot. The powerful military-industrial security interests gain renewed importance. The tremendously bloated Pentagon budget continues without question as it presumably gears up for new deployments, and a new array of weapons to counter growing Chinese assertiveness. NATO gets a revived mission. A bipartisan center can be reestablished, with bickering about tactics and spending anchored by an agreement on mission. The costs of going back to the Cold War are immense, however. While Senator Bernie Sanders praised Biden in June for recognizing authoritarianism as a “major threat to democracy,” he wisely cautioned that “[t]he primary conflict… is taking place not between countries but within them… And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can.” It also deeply distorts the real security threats America faces. This summer, as the impacts of extreme weather exacted an ever-greater toll on American lives and resources, it became increasingly difficult to pretend that climate change is only a distant threat. No progress can be made without China, which now leads the world in fossil fuel emissions and at COP26 pledged to cut them to net zero by 2060. Climate can no longer be relegated to a rhetorical statement of concern at the end of documents focused on military buildups and great power conflicts in peripheral countries. A renewed Cold War will reinforce the nationalist and militarist factions in all countries. More than a year after Trump left the presidential office and social media platform from which he could amplify his lies about China and COVID-19, the fearmongering he fueled continues to contribute to a rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans in the United States. This is but one of many aspects of how the deep fractures within the country will make revitalizing its democracy even more difficult. Before America chose to lead any kind of “Summit for Democracy,” and before “America is back” to a new Cold War, the country urgently needs a more serious discussion about its real security priorities—and the real challenges it faces. Author Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of the Nation and is president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord (ACURA). She writes a weekly column at the Washington Post and is a frequent commentator on U.S. and international politics for Democracy Now, PBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN. Find her on Twitter @KatrinaNation. Archives December 2021 On November 19, 2021, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “[W]e have decided to repeal all three agricultural laws.” The prime minister was referring to the three agriculture laws that were rushed through the parliament in 2020. During his speech to announce the rollback, Modi told the farmers that they “should return to [their] homes, fields and to [their] families. Let’s make a fresh start.” At no point did Modi admit that his government had passed laws that would negatively impact the farmers, who have spent a year protesting the laws thrust upon them. It seems likely that Modi will not give up on his policies to privatize agriculture, but rather will return to them with different packaging. “Our government has been working in the interest of the farmers and will continue to do so,” he insisted. Jubilation at the Victory The idea that Modi’s BJP-led government had been “working in the interest of the farmers” was not apparent to the protesting farmers. To gauge the sentiment of the farmers and their organizations, I interviewed Dr. Ashok Dhawale, the national president of the All India Kisan Sabha—one of the key farmers’ associations—and a leader of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM)—a United Farmers’ Front. Dhawale told me that Modi’s promise to repeal the three farm laws “is a classic case of too little, too late.” It is “too little” because Modi only accepted one of the farmers’ demands (repealing the laws) and not the slate of other demands, which included the creation of a robust minimum support price (MSP) structure; it is “too late” because during this year-long protest, 700 farmers have lost their lives due to the privations of the protest and government repression. “This is only the second time in the last seven years of his rule that Modi has been forced to make a humiliating climbdown,” Dhawale told me. “The first was in 2015, when he was forced to take back the Land Acquisition Act [of 2013], again as a result of a countrywide farmers’ struggle.” Since Modi came to power in 2014, he has pushed an agenda to deliver Indian agriculture to the large corporate houses. But the farmers fought him then and continue to fight him now. The farmers have not left their protest encampment despite Modi’s statement on November 19. “They will stay put until these hated farm laws are actually repealed by [the] parliament,” Dhawale told me. “And also, until their other demands are… [met]. All over the country, there is jubilation that one part of the battle has been won. But there is also [a] determination to see that the other just demands of this struggle are conceded.” Why Modi Surrendered Dhawale said that there are several reasons why Modi decided to repeal the three farm laws. The first has to do with the upcoming regional elections in the three key states that border India’s capital, Delhi (Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh). In recent months, the BJP saw its supporters dwindle in number during the by-elections that took place in the Indian states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan—in which the BJP did not perform well. These six states in northern India where elections have either taken place or are scheduled to take place are in close proximity to Delhi and are the states from where many of the farmers joined the protests, which took place at Delhi’s border. If the protests had continued, the leaders in the BJP felt that the party would see major attrition not only among the farmers and working class but also among sections of the middle class in India. Nothing is more important to focus on, Dhawale said, than the actual struggle and determination of the farmers. On September 5, for instance, the farmers organized a Kisan Mahapanchayat (a mass meeting of farmers), which was called by the SKM and saw a huge turnout. The tone of the meeting was fierce, with the farmers clear that they were not only fighting against these three laws but also against the entire approach of the BJP government. The tenor of the protest was to fight for a secular and socialist India, a vision diametrically opposed to the political ideology of Modi’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party known as Hindutva. The tempo of the struggle began to increase through September. On September 27, the SKM called for a general strike across India (Bharat Bandh), which was the third such strike during this year-long protest by the farmers. It was “the most successful of the three,” Dhawale said, with millions of people joining the struggle. A month later, on October 18, the farmers blocked train tracks (Rail Roko) across the country against the BJP government, which had tried unsuccessfully to use religious differences to divide the farmers. Despite Modi’s announcement to roll back the farm laws, tens of thousands of farmers planned to gather at Delhi’s borders on November 26, the first anniversary of the farmers’ revolt, with others protesting in solidarity around the country. To build toward this, on November 22, after Modi’s surrender, leaders from the farmers’ organizations met at a large Kisan Mahapanchayat in Lucknow (the capital of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) to pledge to continue the struggle. “The mood of victory and determination was infectious,” Dhawale told me. Unsettled Issues Between 1995 and 2018, 400,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide, 100,000 since Modi took office in 2014, Dhawale said. Their deaths are directly linked to the agrarian crisis in India produced by a combination of the withdrawal of state regulation and intervention on behalf of the farmers and the impact of the climate catastrophe. In 2004, the Indian government asked the eminent scientist M.S. Swaminathan to lead the National Commission on Farmers. By 2006, the commission produced five landmark reports with a long list of important recommendations. Almost none of the substantial recommendations have been adopted by the successive governments. One of the recommendations was to increase and strengthen the MSP for farmers. Window dressing by governments has not improved the situation for the farmers; a recent survey shows that the farmers’ incomes have declined. Farmers know what they want, and they have said so clearly: price supports, loan waivers, withdrawal of electricity price hikes, repeal of the labor codes, subsidized costs of fuel, and so on. These issues, Dhawale said, “are at the root of the agrarian crisis and massive peasant indebtedness. They lead to farmer suicides and to distress sales of farmlands.” “If farmers are to grow our food and farmers are to eat, then the demands of the farmers must be met,” Dhawale said. This is not just a cry for Indian farmers. The farmers in India continue to fight in a struggle they share with farmers everywhere throughout the world. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives December 2021 |
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