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1/20/2024 Our Postmodern Crisis and the Progressive Alternative in the Harlem Renaissance By: Kathie JiangRead Now This article explores the Harlem Renaissance’s ideological and artistic contributions to the American social consciousness for imagining possibilities for political struggle, and as a timely alternative to the dominant postmodern aesthetic and cultural tendencies of nihilism of our times — including 1950’s Pop Art, the 1980’s neo expressionist art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and contemporary hip-hop culture. Between World War I and the Great Depression, in New York’s Harlem, a dazzling art, literature, and political movement emerged. It strove for the liberation and manifestation of a people’s search for yearning for beauty and meaning. It was creative, courageous, and truthful as it sought new ways to make art an instrument of struggle. Each of the artists, poets, musicians, and intellectuals were activists and freedom fighters in their own right. Their artwork was rooted in and exuded a sense of dignity, innovation, and striving for higher artistic and social ideals. They were selfless and disciplined, in a time when shadow of slavery loomed large and the majority of Black people remained trapped in poverty in Northern ghettos and Southern plantations, with racial terror consuming their lives. The world of the Harlem Renaissance was rich with talent and energy. The movement sought inspiration in the artists’ Afro-American heritage of struggle, but also in the broader American historical and cultural canon. It was influenced by the 1919 October Revolution of the Soviet Union and the Mexican muralist movement. It reached into the past and captured the best of the present to make sense of the historical moment and where Black folk must go from there. It also laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and ‘60s. But during its time, despite its recognition across the nation and the world, Harlem Renaissance artists remained segregated by the color line and from white society. Segregation limited the venues where Black artists were able to perform and exhibit, but also culturally and philosophically relegated the innovations of the Harlem Renaissance to a so-called “primitivist” instinct and thus to an inferior status to the white world. The Harlem Renaissance was powerful for its ideological clarity and commitment. It was led by artists and intellectuals such as WEB Du Bois (1868-1963), who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited its magazine The Crisis. Du Bois’s essay “Criteria for Negro Art” proclaimed that “all art is propaganda” and therefore all Black artists can and should choose to make art in service of their people’s liberation. As such he employed artists and poets like Aaron Douglas and Langston Hughes to fill The Crisis’s pages with art that broadened its readers’ horizons for building a better world. The artists and intellectuals’ close relationships, intense dialogue, and shared commitment to the liberation of the Black masses consolidated the movement around the importance of struggle and clarity, which translated into the exceptional art, music, and scholarly contributions of their time. Aaron Douglas’s Aspirations (left) and Charleston (right) One artist deeply shaped by the Harlem Renaissance and who carried its legacy forward was the painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Southern Black migrant parents, his family moved to Harlem in 1930 when he was 13 years old. His talents and ideological development were nurtured during the movement’s most dynamic years, counting Harlem Renaissance painter Charles Alston (1907-77) as one of his key mentors. Lawrence proclaimed he was first and foremost a historian, a keen observer of Black life, and a painter rooted in the people, truth, and history. This is especially evident in his iconic Migration series, one of the first great works of African American art recognized by the white mainstream art world and completed when Lawrence was just 23 years old. Dynamically employing color, abstraction, and composition, the painting series depicts the organic exodus of the Black masses from the South to the booming northern industrial centers in the early 20th century. Each of the sixty panels captures a different facet of how this movement reconstituted the American social fabric and infused its cities with the spiritual, social, economic, and political strivings of the Black worker. In his statement “My Opinion on Painting,” Lawrence says, “For me a painting should have three things: universality, clarity, and strength. Universality so that it may be understood by all men. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good.” In the 35th panel of the Migration series, titled They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, ten Black figures march across the scene against a pale blue sky, carrying their cargo and dressed in their heavy coats and hats. Limiting the palette to earthy tones and simplifying the varying figures’ profiles, Lawrence keeps the focus on the collective nature of the migration. The painting powerfully evokes the search for fuller dignity, economic livelihood, and citizenship that drove nearly a million Black folk towards cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York — a journey which Lawrence’s own family underwent and Lawrence was closely acquainted with as he came of age in Black Harlem. Lawrence declares, “It is more important that an artist study life than study the technique of painting exclusively… It is more important that a student of art develop a philosophy and clarity of thought than paint nude after nude, still life after still life and cube after cube… One’s pictures should be about things most familiar to him. My pictures express my life and experiences. So I paint about the American Negro working class.” Hence the basis of the Harlem Renaissance and Jacob Lawrence’s spirit of painting was grounded in clarity through the realities, history, and aspirations of the Black worker. His emphasis on clarity was a far cry from the obscurantism of postmodernism that would come in a few generations and dominate today’s art scene. Fast forward a few decades, a new wave of art and culture emerged from New York City, specifically the white elite world. It was an art movement opposite to the Harlem Renaissance in form and content, intent on obfuscation rather than clarity. Looking away from the Black freedom struggle, and siding with imperialism during a period of great world liberation movements, it proclaimed a new set of values on behalf of the American ruling class in a time when capitalism had to be rebranded to suit the new post-WWII paradigm of US global hegemony. The ‘50s was the pivotal moment in US history: allied business, government, and other elite interests locked course on fashioning the country into a global superpower. Their vision was an American assertion of dominance over the world through establishing a military clawhold, capitalist market control, and ideological influence over the American people and abroad. It also sought to counter and repress the developments of the Soviet Union and anti-colonial movements for liberation after centuries of imperial exploitation. The broader philosophical movement of postmodernism emerged shortly thereafter. Postmodernism is centered on unmooring knowledge from the objective rational truth, and recentering the discussion on the fluid and subjective. It rejects the notion that truth is knowable and worth knowing. It may have started off in academic discussions in Western universities, but it has since saturated art, culture, politics, activism, and mainstream thought. One of postmodernism’s earliest artistic tendencies that helped popularize it was Pop Art. Pop Art emerged during the mid-1950s as artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns pioneered a new art movement that sought to elevate the aesthetic and philosophy of capitalism and popular culture to fine art. The very life of Andy Warhol, Pop Art’s most notable champion, serves as an illustrative example of postmodernism’s tenets themselves. Warhol was born in 1928 to working-class Slovakian parents in the Rust Belt’s Pittsburgh. As he came of age in the ‘50’s, he moved to New York City to reinvent himself completely and “make it” as an artist. Yet it was when he began producing what he termed Pop Art that he experienced a meteoric rise to fame. Through his large scale screenprints of Campbell soup cans and popular celebrities of the day, he became one of the richest artists to have ever lived: his art and presence was coveted by the ruling elite during his lifetime and beyond his death. His art reflected these materialistic values: Andy Warhol produced artwork in a studio dubbed “the Factory” and garnered a fortune from manufacturing and selling copy after copy of his works like mere commodities—mirroring capitalism’s mass production of commodities for maximizing profit, rather than the uplift of the masses. He was infamous for punchy interview quotes as part of his absurd, aloof personal brand: he claimed he wanted to be a machine, that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes in the future, and that “you can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking… Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” Although Warhol’s absurdist posturing has been construed as a critique of capitalist values, the Pop Art movement ultimately embraces the opposite, proclaiming that “life is best under capitalism.” Andy Warhol’s public persona best embodied this, which redefined fame and celebrity culture forever: partying, carefully curating appearances as to surround himself with other celebrities and models, and failing to take on any human issue (moral, political, economic) substantively. Thus, Pop Art presents the very economic exploitation that enables such a decadent lifestyle possible for few celebrities, as the only future for humanity. In short, while Pop artists often claimed to “parody” the tenets of capitalism in their artistic and philosophical endeavors, they were in fact cementing their cultural capital and benefitting from their position in a decadently capitalist system. This kind of shallow “irony” allowed Warhol and his compatriots to uphold the ideology of capitalism and shielded them from serious criticism. It excuses Pop Art’s ultimately nihilistic view of human nature as primarily a product of materialistic, profit-driven, and consumerist tendencies—a comfort-seeking, non-struggle position that obscures the sheer will and necessity for the masses of humanity to fight for a better future and against oppression of all forms, unlike the art of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet many academics and curators regard Pop Art as utterly radical, either because it protested social boundaries and art traditions with such disruptive artwork—or that it embodied the best of American values of artistic and consumeristic freedom. But if juxtaposed with the Harlem Renaissance, it’s clear that what Pop Art proclaims to be “radical,” is not the same as what its contemporary movements—the Civil Rights Movement, the 1960s global anticolonial struggles—meant when they evoked terms like “vanguard” or “revolutionary.” Through the example of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the ideal of freedom meant joining the broader struggle for all people’s right to manifest their human potential and strivings, and all children grow up in a world free of exploitation and poverty. Therefore, genuine freedom, in substance, does not signify that we struggle to drink the same bottle of Coke. Rather, it is to speak on behalf of the voiceless, an incisive tool of critique against the very monopolistic forces that seek to disenfranchise the masses—to instill a lack of belief in the masses through their shallow assumptions about the worst of humanity, rather than the best. In their eyes, revolutionary art, as well as the use of irony, would not reflect ruling class ideologies. However, Pop Art, in line with postmodernism, abstracts any notion of true freedom and objective responsibility to the masses, and fails to present any paths for collective, principled struggle against dominant systems of oppression and exploitation. For a few decades, Pop Art and postmodernism primarily operated in mainstream, white American culture, leaving the spirit and legacy of the Black American freedom struggle untouched. This all changed with the arrival of Jean-Michel Basquiat onto the art scene, and after his premature death, in all arenas of culture. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was born to a middle class Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother. Growing up in a Brooklyn brownstone, he received a decent education, reading American literature and Beatnik poetry, and frequenting the city’s abundant museums and galleries. As a child, he witnessed the great Civil Rights and Black Power movements play out: watching Muhammad Ali box courageously and speak out against the Vietnam War, as well as the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton. After running away from home as a teenager, Basquiat co-founded the art collective SAMO (short for “Same Old Shit”), spraying paint wordplay on walls across New York City. He hung around the nascent hip hop scene of the time, influenced by early MC’s, DJ’s, and graffiti artists. Not long after, he began to catch the attention of the establishment art market and gallery world. It took several key downtown gallery exhibitions to catapult this adolescent artist into fame, and his artworks’ sale value into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One night, 22-year-old Basquiat met 54-year-old Andy Warhol at a restaurant, as the young artist was at the cusp of catching his break in the art world. The two immediately clicked, setting off an intense artistic, personal relationship. Andy Warhol became Basquiat’s mentor, promoter, and collaborator, and Basquiat began spending time at Warhol’s Factory, where they produced art together. Yet their relationship never recovered after an irreconcilable falling out, just preceding Warhol’s 1987 death from gallbladder surgery complications and Basquiat’s passing from a heroin overdose the same year. Although the grittier aspects of Basquiat’s life are emphasized as part of his struggles to “make it” as a household name artist, he was ultimately quickly accepted into the mainstream art world because he adopted the principles of postmodernism as a young Black artist, and earned immense fame and wealth because of it. Basquiat’s legacy has both made postmodernism digestible for the masses, and contributed to the elevation and commodification of disaffected youth culture into high art. Yet not only is Basquiat praised as an artistic genius of the likes of Picasso and Warhol, he is also lauded as a postmodernist inheritor of the broader Black American artistic legacy. In his works, Basquiat nods to the rich spirit of jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis. Jazz, after all, has been a vanguard force within several key stages of the Black freedom struggle, including the Harlem Renaissance, which nurtured Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Basquiat’s Horn Players (1983), for example depicts several lumpy, skeletal figures playing a trumpet and a saxophone, with words like “Dizzy”, “Teeth”, “Ornithology” strewn throughout the triptych—in characteristic Basquiat-style of wordplay, rough sketches, and swaths of color. Throughout his works, he experimented with repeating words scrawled in capital letters, combining disparate phrases between his drawings in a graffiti-inspired style. One must ask, how exactly is this postmodern approach honoring or elevating these Black jazz artists? Rather, how is this anything but deconstructing and muddying their great legacies, under the false guise of paying them tribute? It’s often said Basquiat’s irreverent style of scribbling words and doodles is a tribute to the improvisational nature of jazz, but in a visual format. However, compared to the disciplined practice of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, or the Coltranes, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis, it is apparent that Basquiat represents a sharp departure from such a tradition. Unlike Basquiat, the Coltranes, Sun Ra, and Davis did not make much money in their lifetimes, but did spend day and night honing their craft; they deeply studied the spiritual and artistic traditions of European classical music, as well as Eastern, African, and other civilizations, in order to produce new musical innovations for the world. In addition, their improvisational practice was rooted in a sincere engagement with their audience, furthering and following the footsteps of a participatory tradition of dialogue between artist and community, emerging from the legacy of Black struggle in this country. Basquiat certainly was improvisational across his short but prolific art career, his works pulsating with frenetic, unbounded creative energy. But in contrast to the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Basquiat led an indulgent, egoistical, and carefree life—likely exacerbated by the fact that he was but a teenager when the white elite showered upon him staggering amounts of fame and wealth, not yet mature enough to develop a strong inner world that bound him closer to a principled struggle for his people’s liberation. Yet strangely enough, the academic tendency is to paint the artistic legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the postmodern contributions of Basquiat as part of one single lineage of Black culture—the same way hip hop is also considered as “paying homage” to jazz, gospel, and funk. But few critics have explored how Basquiat is an aberration from the longer Black cultural tradition rooted in struggle, for the reasons above. This leaves the unanswered question: what do we stand to lose when we conflate or confuse Basquiat or Warhol’s postmodernist contributions, with the kind of substantive tradition of the Harlem Renaissance which gave a full-throated voice to the Afro-American strivings for liberation? And what do we gain when we choose to inherit the unadulterated spirit of artists like Jacob Lawrence or Aaron Douglas—who painted the Black worker, his dignity, history, and aspirations in their entirety—instead of taking Basquiat as a North Star for “radical” Black art? If we look up to Basquiat and Warhol, do we not lose the ability to see figures like Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, WEB Du Bois as role models for our times: Black leaders who stood tall with dignity and intellect, never compromising their courage and people’s struggle? Instead, the hip hop culture that Basquiat partook in during his lifetime endures today, where those same defining values of his life live on: hip hop is rife with celebrity worship, commodification of art and artists’ persona as a brand, decadence, and nihilism. With its brash and violent lyrics, instrumentation, imagery, and overarching culture, hip hop actively contributes to a broad feeling among young people to wallow in their dissatisfaction, anger, and feelings of impotence to take responsibility for themselves and the world—in short, it encourages them to instead turn towards pessimism and destructive impulses. Culture, whether art or music, plays a significant role in the consciousness of young people, who are most susceptible as they develop their outlook and capacity to imagine and struggle for a future. With such a mainstreaming of postmodernism, what is its impact on the younger generation? What kind of future is postmodernism and its various tendencies striving for? Is it anything like that of the Harlem Renaissance, whose leaders dreamed of a world free of economic exploitation, where one’s sense of self and the human relationships of society are not determined by these values of commodification and decadence? It is clear that hip hop, as a cultural movement emerging from the legacy of Basquiat (and by extension Warhol’s Pop Art and postmodernism), fails to even come close. Ultimately, the nihilistic and materialistic qualities of hip hop and the art of Basquiat more closely embody the ideals of postmodernism and Pop Art, a stifling, deadening culture rooted in the values of the ruling class—rather than descending from an artistic tradition of the oppressed masses, like that of the Harlem Renaissance. Thus, postmodernism and its various tendencies debase the American people and drive them further away from the rich legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and its potential for inspiring a truly dynamic and liberatory art for our times. Once we stop conceiving certain radical-sounding postmodern movements as “organic” to the people and understand their true ideological basis, it becomes apparent why the ruling class needs these movements, and will stop at nothing to entrench them into mainstream culture. Du Bois said it best: All art is propaganda, and both the ruling class and revolutionary artists know it best—art is an ideological weapon to be used either for or against the people’s ability to struggle. Therefore, if we choose the side of the people, it is evident what we must do to move forward: to critique postmodernism in all forms, and draw from the true, organic cultural traditions to give birth a new cultural renaissance that speaks clearly to our times As we enter a new age of the crisis of the West and its values, American capitalism once again tries to rebrand itself, the way the rise of postmodernism marked the start of a new American hegemonic era in the 50s, necessitating Andy Warhol and Pop Art to rebrand capitalism. In a similar fashion, counterrevolutionary currents today cloak themselves in the veneer of wokeness and identity politics, deploying figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat to win over the Black, brown, and working class youth. Yet identifying the origins of these dominant cultural tendencies in postmodernism frees us from their spell, and allows us to look to the true traditions of the people—like that of the Harlem Renaissance. Our task today is to demand a new kind of art and culture for our times, rooted in truth and struggle, just as the Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals did. Humanity deserves art worthy of the people, not these decadent art movements, which are unable to liberate humanity from its current chains and bring about a brighter future. What can we draw from the legacies of Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and WEB Du Bois to respond to this moment and build a path forward? It’s up to us to inherit all that the generations before have left us: their ideas, culture, and spirit of dignified resistance needed more than ever in these times. The memory of these progressive traditions can and must be revived through deep intensive study, as well as creatively applied to our period of crisis. By doing so, we plant seeds of a new revolutionary cultural movement to guide us onward. Image Credits:
AuthorKathie Jiang. This article was produced by Avant Garde Journal. Archives January 2024
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 IMPERIALIST hegemony over the third world is exercised not just through arms and economic might but also through the hegemony of ideas, by making the victims see the world the way imperialism wants them to see it. A pre-requisite for freedom in the third world therefore is to shake off this colonisation of the mind, and to seek truth beyond the distortions of imperialism. The anti-colonial struggle was aware of this; in fact the struggle begins with the dawning of this awareness. And since the imperialist project does not come to an end with formal political decolonisation, the education system in the newly independent ex-colonies must continuously aim to go beyond the falsehoods of imperialism. This requires that the course contents and syllabi in Indian educational institutions must be different from those in metropolitan institutions. This is obvious in the case of humanities and social sciences where it is impossible to understand the present of the country without reckoning with its colonised past; and metropolitan universities scrupulously avoid making this connection, attributing the current state of underdevelopment of the country to all sorts of extraneous factors like laziness, lack of enterprise, superstition, and, above all, excessive population growth. But even in the case of natural sciences, the syllabi and course contents in third world universities cannot be identical with those in metropolitan universities, not because Einstein’s theory or quantum physics have any imperialist ideology in them, but because the range of scientific concerns in the third world is not necessarily the same as in the metropolitan countries. In fact, this was the view of JD Bernal, the British scientist and Marxist intellectual, one of the great figures of the twentieth century. To believe that the syllabi and course contents in third world universities should be identical with those in metropolitan universities is itself a symptom of being hegemonised by imperialism. Education policy in the dirigiste period in India was aware of this; despite the obvious failings of the education system the education policy of that period could not be faulted for having a wrong vision. With neo-liberalism however things begin to change, as the Indian big bourgeoisie gets integrated with globalised finance capital, as the Indian upper middle class youth looks for employment in multinational corporations, as the nation’s development is made dependent upon exporting goods to foreign markets and attracting foreign finance and foreign direct investment to the country. Significantly, even top functionaries of the government start talking of reinviting the East India Company back to India. Since the era of neo-liberalism entails the hegemony of globalised finance capital, and since this capital requires a globalised (or at least a homogeneous) technocracy, the emphasis shifts to having a homogeneous education system internationally to train such a technocracy; and obviously such a system necessarily has to be one that emanates from the metropolis. This means an education system not for decolonising minds but for recolonising minds. To this end, the UPA government earlier had invited several well-known foreign universities to set up branches in India, and even to “adopt’ some Indian universities that could be developed in their own image. Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge were obviously invited under this scheme not to follow in India the syllabi and course contents prepared within India, but to replicate what they follow back home. The idea was to start a process whereby there would be a uniformity of course contents and syllabi between the Indian and metropolitan universities, that is, to roll back the attempt made earlier towards a decolonisation of minds in Indian universities. In fact an Indian Human Resource Development minister had openly stated in parliament that his objective was to provide a Harvard education within India so that Indian students did not have to go abroad for it. The NDA government has carried forward to a very great extent what the UPA government had started; and the National Education Policy it has enacted gives an official imprimatur to this idea of a uniform education system between India and the metropolis, which necessarily means the adoption of common curricula, course contents and syllabi between Indian and metropolitan universities. Towards this uniformity it has taken two decisive steps: one is the destruction of those universities in India that were providing a counter to the imperialist discourse, and that had, for this very reason, attracted world-wide attention; the obvious examples here are the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Hyderabad Central University, Jadavpur University, and others. The other is the carrying out of negotiations under the pressure of the University Grants Commission between individual Indian universities and foreign universities to make the course contents in various disciplines in the former clones of those in the latter. The only caveat here is that the UGC insists on having some material on subjects like Vedic Mathematics included in the course contents of Indian universities which the foreign universities do not always agree with. No doubt some accord will be reached on these issues in due course, in which case the Indian universities would be having curricula and course contents that represent an admixture of the demands of neo-liberalism and the demands of the Hindutva elements. It would be a colonisation of minds with a veneer of “how great our country was in ancient times”. Imperialism should not have any problem with that. As long as imperialism, which is a modern phenomenon that has emerged with the development of capitalism, is painted not as an exploitative system but as a benevolent civilising mission for countries like India, as long as the present state of underdevelopment of these countries is not in any way linked to the phenomenon of imperialism, which it would not be if there is uniformity of course contents with metropolitan universities, then what had happened in ancient times is not of much concern to imperialism, at least to the liberal imperialist viewpoint, as distinct from the extreme right which favours a white supremacist discourse. An alternative tendency with the same consequence, of recolonising minds, is to do away with the social sciences and humanities altogether, or to reduce them to inconsequential subjects, and substitute them with courses that are exclusively“job-oriented” and do no ask questions about society, like management and cost accountancy. In fact both the Hindutva elements and the corporates have a vested interest in this, since both are keen to have students who are exclusively self-centred and do not ask questions about the trajectory of social development. This tendency too is gathering momentum at present. An education system that recolonises minds is the counterpart of the corporate-Hindutva alliance that has acquired political hegemony in the country. Such a recolonisation is what the corporates want; and the Hindutva elements that were never associated with the anti-colonial struggle, that never understood the meaning of nation-building, that do not understand the role and significance of imperialism, and hence of the need for decolonising minds, are quite content as long as lip service is paid to the greatness of ancient India. An education system that purveys the imperialist ideology with some vedic seasoning is good enough for them. This is exactly the education system that the country is now in the process of building. The corporate- Hindutva alliance however is a response to the crisis of neo-liberalism, when corporate capital feels the need to ally itself with the Hindutva elements to maintain its hegemony in the face of the crisis. The National Education Policy likewise is not for carrying the nation forward but for managing the crisis by destroying thought, by preventing people from asking questions and seeking the truth. The “job orientation” that this policy prides itself on is only for a handful of persons; in fact the crisis of neo-liberalism means fewer jobs overall. In sync with this, the education system excludes large numbers of persons; their minds are to be filled instead with communal poison within an altered discourse that by-passes issues of material life, and makes them potential low-wage recruits for fascistic thug-squads. This education policy therefore can only be transitory, until the youth starts asking questions about the unemployment and distress that has become its fate. And as an alternative development trajectory beyond neo-liberal capitalism is explored, the quest for an education system beyond what the NDA government is seeking to introduce will also begin; and decolonisation of the mind will again come on to the agenda, as it had done during the anti-colonial struggle. AuthorPrabhat Patnaik is an Indian political economist and political commentator. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011). This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives January 2024 1/3/2024 THE PROTESTS OF VIOLENCE:NAVIGATING MORALITY IN ACTIVISM AND REVOLUTIONS By: Marnina(Avirup)Read Now "Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor" This is a quote by perhaps the most popular, if not rigid, advocate of non-violence and pacifism. It might make some uncomfortable while others might derive validation from it and that somehow reflects the debate surrounding violence, or particularly Political Violence. The debate is definitely not new; rather it is perhaps one of the oldest debates of political philosophy, dating back to Ancient Greece. The events that occurred on and since October 7th have shaken the whole world as we witnessed the heights of Palestinian resilience and Israeli brutality. As Operation Al Aqsa Flood began, Liberals and Pacifists around the world were suddenly reminded of the ills of violence or the involvement of violence in politics. Palestinians were being lectured about their methods of resistance, of course none of these champions of non-violence had considered the conditions in which Palestinians lived and resisted(they have been dishonest about it, like most Zionists). A lot is being said and a lot is to be said about the genocide being committed by Israel but I would rather focus on a more general question that has taken precedence in various circles after the events of Al-Aqsa Flood. The Israeli atrocities have made some "firm Pacifists'' question the utility of non-violence as a political tool, while many still remain steadfast in their positions. Thus, through this article, I'd like to investigate the moral and ideological virtues of Political Violence, its relationship with protests or movements, how successful it can be as a tool of resistance and how Pacifists could engage with Political Violence without letting go of their pacifist values. To draw a concrete analysis I would also look at particular movements such as the French and American Revolutions to understand their relationship with political violence and the results it bore. CAKE, TEA AND REVOLUTIONS: Two of the most popular and influential political movements of the 19th Century have to be the French and American Revolutions. In pre-revolutionary France, an Absolute Monarchy prevailed, with the King, Nobility, and Clergy controlling the state. Economic crises fueled political instability, leading to the French Revolution. Unfair taxation, burdening peasants and favoring the elite, also sparked discontent. Attempts at reform within the Estates General failed due to its biased representation and mechanisms. The masses originally tried to reform society through peaceful means of resistance but it proved to be futile. Hence, exhausted by the futility of peaceful means the masses resorted to violence, beheading King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. This symbolized the culmination of societal grievances and the transformation of “revolutionary potential” into revolutionary action. But this revolution(the head-chopping was a French idea)was greatly inspired by a previous, similar revolution— The American Revolution. The discovery of the Americas triggered a colonization race among European powers, leading to English, French, and Spanish dominance in North America. The aftermath of the Seven Years' War left England in debt, prompting heavy taxation laws in the American colonies, sparking protests. Despite repealing most taxes, tensions persisted. England's increased control, military presence, and direct rule over Boston intensified colonial resistance. Colonies sought autonomy, not outright revolution(yet). The British Monarchy still refused to negotiate, escalating the conflict. In 1776, Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" catalyzed the shift towards total independence. Until then, most colonies aimed for a return to the original status, denied by Britain. The American War of Independence began as a struggle for autonomy and tax reduction, evolving into a demand for complete independence as revolutionary ideas gained momentum. A detailed and contextual reading of the French and American revolutions will bring light to a pattern— both these movements were sparked by a very particular problem but later evolved into a revolt against oppressive social relations. These movements also did not begin as a radical armed rebellion or revolution. Instead these movements did not take up the character of an armed rebellion until all avenues of peaceful change or non-violent resistance proved to be futile. Neither the French nor the Americans chose violent and radical resistance as their ideal methods. Violent methods were imposed on them by rulers who were unwilling to reform society or let go of power. This is a hypothesis that I would investigate further through some more examples. THE JUSTICE OF DACOITS AND DECOLONISATION: “Revolutionaries didn't choose armed struggle as the best path, it's the path the oppressors imposed on the people. And so the people only have two choices: to suffer, or to fight." – Fidel Castro, 1967 This Castro quote is perhaps the best summation of the aforementioned proposition on the use of violence by resistance movements. But this idea could be further solidified by looking into the life of India's most famous dacoit— Phoolan Devi. Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 into a poor, lower-caste family in rural India, she faced discrimination and abuse from an early age. At age 12 she was married off to a 38 year old man and consequently sexually abused by him (a practice still very common in India). Phoolan, resilient as always, tried to approach the local police station but instead she was brutally assaulted by the police too. After this incident Phoolan Devi joined a gang of dacoits and with the help of that gang she nearly killed her ex-husband and threatened to kill any man who married a child. Later when she was assaulted by some Upper Caste men of her gang, she formed her own faction to kill them and villagers who had aided her abusers. She embarked on a spree of violent retribution and in one such incident she killed 20 men who were aiding her assaulters. Phoolan Devi’s actions were not just fueled by personal vendettas, but also represented a broader context of violent rebellion against Brahmanism [Note 1: Brahmanism is defined as the socio-economic and ideological structure that maintains the Caste system] and Patriarchy. This helps us engage with the concept of violence on a deeper level because in this case not only is Phoolan Devi denied justice by the State apparatus, which forced her to take up arms, but it will also help us engage with the definition of violence in a more concrete manner which would not have possible with the examples of some social movement. Phoolan Devi resisted Brahmanism and Patriarchy through violence when she was denied justice by the State; her actions are no doubt violent, if not bloodthirsty. But the actions that led her to this murderous path, the trauma she faced because of her caste and gender identity were also bloodthirsty, violent and disturbingly heinous. Similarly, while the French and American Revolutions were violent, the British colonial rule and the French monarchy too were quite violent; rather in the case of Phoolan Devi or any marginalised group for that matter, from African-Americans to Palestinians, from Queer people around the world to Dalits and Adivasis in India, one could argue that every day of their life they face immeasurable amounts of violence. Frantz Fanon makes a similar argument when he states “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” —Frantz Fanon, Wretched Of The Earth Fanon’s argument might be targeted towards Colonialism only, but we can agree that it can very easily be extended to Caste, Racism, Patriarchy, etc. The exploitation of land, resources and labour and the physical and ideological state apparatus used to maintain the system of colonialism are not very dissimilar to the relationship of exploitation and coercion used to maintain systems of Brahmanical Patriarchy. As one would have guessed that these relationships and the complimentary apparatuses are themselves violent by nature. By only calling the resistance movements violent and condemning them for their violence whenever they make any advances, one erases the violence that is legitimised by the ruling class’s hegemony and sanctioned by the State. Whenever talking about the violence of resistance, we must bear in mind that we live in an extremely violent society which unleashes violence on marginalised group on a daily basis; violence that is not just physical but also “racial and cultural” to quote Fanon again. Fanon has explored the psychological impact of violence on its victims too. He proposes that colonisation doesn't just physically and economically assault colonised societies but also unleashes a cultural and ideological attack that morphs the psychological make-up of said societies. This is done by imposing a Colonial Hegemony over the culture of colonised societies; historically this has been done by altering the system of education, exercising control over new mediums of communication and media, legislation, etc.[Note 2: It should be pointed out that while these policies were only intended to further imperialist interests, in some cases they had a progressive effect too (mostly by accident). Eg: the education and recruitment policies of the British, did help marginalised castes gain some mobility. But the same Britishers did practically nothing to stop practices like untouchability or the Devdasi system. No special protections were provided for peasants (majority of whom belonged to marginalised castes) who suffered under the British Zamindari/Landlord system or who died from starvation caused by the artificial famines which were a direct result of British agricultural practices. Thus it is safe to say that these rare and occasional reforms were either mere accidents or just a byproduct of British interests. Nonetheless, these reforms should be mentioned to counter notions, propounded by certain Post-Colonial theorists, that the Pre-Colonial systems and values were somehow inherently better and should be praised uncritically; the British policies were certainly brutal and racist but that does not excuse the brutality of the Mediaeval Indians systems.] Similarly one could draw a parallel between the cultural hegemony of colonial powers and the Brahmanical hegemony over Indian culture; the former was used to mold culture, and by extension the psychological makeup, of the colonised society to suit the interests of the colonisers whereas the latter was used for similar purposes, except that it benefitted the Upper Castes by making the marginalised castes believe that they were inferior. The Savarna[Note 3: Savarna is a term used to collectively refer to the communities that belong to any one of the four varnas, ie, Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra] hegemony over education and religion was the greatest tool in this case which not only provided religious-ideological justification to the subjugation of the marginalised castes but also made them believe in their so-called inferiority. Fanon argues that the oppressed must also wage an intense struggle against Colonial culture and ideology; a cultural and ideological struggle which must also be violent to some extent, ie, (i) the violent rejection of the culture imposed by the oppressors and adoption of an alternative culture which does not psychologically subjugate the oppressed. Eg: Dr. B.R.Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism and conversion to Buddhism. [Note 4: Such ideological or cultural struggle can only have a long-lasting impact if they are accompanied with strong material resistance movements and changes in the social relationships. This is why, while Dr. Ambedkar's conversion holds huge significance in history, conversion to Buddhism has not really been an effective strategy to combat Caste.] (ii) Violence itself could have a huge cultural impact on the oppressed groups. Eg: the victory of the Japanese against Russians in 1910 inspired radical anti-colonial movements around the world. But that still leaves one last question, does the violence of the oppressor justify the violence of the oppressed? Do the atrocities that Phoolan Devi faced justify her retaliation? That brings me to the next section of this article. SASUKE, MANDELA AND CONTEXT: “If anyone who criticises my way of life were to come forward, I'd turn and kill every single one of their loved ones so that they too could grasp what it is like to experience this hatred of mine.” —Sasuke, Naruto Although Sasuke[Note 5: Sasuke is a character from the popular anime series Naruto] is not a philosopher of any kind (even though the idea of a Jacobin ninja is quite enticing), this statement provides us some ground to begin engaging with the question of whether a violent action justifies a violent response, particularly because Sasuke doesn't even try to justify the response through a preceding action; he contextualises it. Sasuke lost all his loved ones and went out to seek revenge, when confronted about his methods, he does not try to justify his actions, almost in a sort of intellectual maneuver he defies the premise of the argument; he instead tries to wants them to judge him after having felt his pain or being in his shoes. Nelson Mandela makes a similar point when he says-- "Choose peace rather than confrontation... Except in cases where we cannot get, where we cannot proceed, or we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.” —Nelson Mandela in Gaza(1999) Here Mandela does not justify violence of the oppressed on a moral basis by focusing solely on the context of violence nor does he condemn violence by focusing on the action and erasing the context. Zizek has defined violence as “the relationship between an action and the context in which it takes place”; since violence, as a quality, cannot exist on its own. It must be ascribed to some action and that action will always require observers to consider the context of said actions; the action and the context are two dialectical halves of violence in which the context is the primary aspect since it is the context or preceding action(colonial, racist or caste violence) that leads to the formation of this relationship and dictates its terms. [Note 6: This dialectical relationship is a reflection of the social dialectical relationship where the oppressor or ruling class is the primary aspect of society]. And that leads me to the final part, a personal address to pacifists. A LETTER TO PACIFISTS: Since October 7th many pacifists from India and beyond, have either joined the global movement against Zionism and sincerely contributed to the movement or are extremely disgusted by the Zionist state but are also hesitant about supporting the methods of Palestinian resistance. While pacifism is certainly not a practical strategy of resistance, this 5000 year old debate is not getting settled anytime soon and it is more important, now more than ever, to aid the Palestinian resistance than to spend our energies on this debate. Hence in this I will try to provide a sort of middle-ground for pacifists. As we've seen, it is the oppressor who dictates the terms of violence and oppression in our society whereas the oppressed mostly respond to it; unless the resistance of the oppressed is strong enough to defy the diktat of the oppressor and set its own rules. It is obvious that revolutionary resistance groups such as PFLP and other groups born of the struggle like Hamas are working towards that goal but Pacifists can also play a progressive role(at least more progressive than being silent bystanders or both sideists) by creating pressure on their own governments to stop supporting Israel. You can boycott corporations that fund Israel, hold protests in public places and threaten elected representatives or governments(with votes) to stop funding or buying weapons from Israel until Palestine gets an equal position on the negotiation table. History has shown that resistance or oppressed groups will opt for peaceful options if possible(particularly because these groups bear the brunt of the violence). Hence the immediate first step towards establishing peace in the region is to get Palestine an avenue of fair negotiations(emphasis on the term ‘fair’) to put forth their demands, to create a situation where non-violent methods can actually work or succeed, to create an environment where non-violent Palestinian protests won't be gunned down[Note 7: The Great March of Return]. This will negate the need for violence by the resistance groups; hence allowing pacifists to not be silent bystanders of genocide while also holding on to their pacifist principles. AuthorMarnina(Avirup) is a Marxist-Leninist writer from West Bengal, India. They write on both international and Indian issues(or their corelation). Most of their work is on Political Theory, Comparative Politics, Political History and Philosophy from a Marxist-Leninist perspective Archives January 2024 10/12/2023 Decades before Snowden, this American patriot waged war against illegal surveillance in the US By: Robert BridgeRead NowIn the 1970s, US Army Captain Christopher Pyle blew the lid on government agencies’ domestic spying  Former undercover agent Christopher Pyle testifies before the Senate Constitutional Rights subcommittee that the Army has spied on politicians and thousands of ordinary Americans on February 24, 1971. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images In 1970, a US Army captain went rogue after he discovered that the military was conducting surveillance on dissidents across the country, thus sparking the first effort in modern times to tame US intelligence. In 1968, almost half a century before the world heard the name of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on a US-run global surveillance system, Christopher Pyle, an Army captain who taught law at the Army's intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was about to do something no less memorable. After Pyle had concluded one of his popular lectures on civil disorder, which focused on how the military could better quell riots in those highly volatile times, a military officer directly involved in such operations approached him with the request for a meeting. Several days later, Pyle was escorted into a large warehouse facility that once had been used to assemble railroad engines. In his 2006 book, No Place to Hide, Robert O’Harrow described what happened next. “Pyle walked into the cage, where an officer showed him books containing mug shots. He looked in the first volume and saw a familiar face. It was Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King's assistant. Officers called the books the ‘black list.’"
And thus was born one of the most consequential whistleblowers of the post-World War II era. In January 1970, Pyle, now a full-fledged private citizen, penned an article for the Washington Monthly entitled, ‘CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics.’ The explosive opening paragraph said it all: “[t]he U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators … keep track of political protests of all kinds – from Klan rallies in North Carolina to anti-war speeches at Harvard.” Immediately, some US media swung into action as journalists began hounding the Department of Defense and the US Army to determine the veracity of the claims. Given Pyle’s extreme proximity to the subject matter at hand, however, it soon became clear that Uncle Sam got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. Pyle’s revelations were enough to prompt Congress, as well as a slew of litigation lawyers, to sit up and take notice. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Samuel James Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, worked together with Pyle to investigate and expose the clandestine domestic spying program. Pyle and Ervin eventually spent countless hours delivering testimony before various congressional meetings over a span of several years. The first fruit of their labors came with passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on December 31, 1974, the legislation states: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains...” In other words, although the law didn’t actually stop the US Army or intelligence agencies from infiltrating civil action groups and public demonstrations, it did hamper the feds from disclosing the identities of the activists without their foreknowledge. To this end, Pyle served as a consultant for three Congressional committees: the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on the Judiciary Committee (1971-1974), the Committee on Government Operations (1974), and the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975). According to Pyle, as a result of those successful investigations, “the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished and all of its files were burned.” For his actions, Pyle ended up on then-President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.” Given the severity of their overall findings, however, the congressional investigations triggered by the US Army captain did not stop there. 1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’ On January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4, the US Senate created the so-called Church Committee, chaired by Democrat Senator Frank Church, to further examine abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The House carried out its own set of investigations with the Pike Commission and the Rockefeller Commission, thereby prompting the media to label 1975 as the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ and not in a way that was flattering to the intelligence community.
The most impactful discovery made by the Church Committee, however, was that of Project SHAMROCK. Started in 1940 during World War II and running into the 1970s, the NSA was given secret authority to access all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. At the peak of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages were captured and analyzed by NSA personnel in a month. The pertinent information contained in these messages was then forwarded to other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Department of Defense. This formed the basis of the so-called ‘Watch List’ of the 1970s that included thousands of American citizens, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities, academics and antiwar activists. The findings led Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was "probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken." Based on the recommendations of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Under FISA, the government is required to obtain warrants to conduct electronic surveillance against individuals from a special court. Such a warrant requires “probable cause to believe” that the surveillance target is a foreign government or organization, or an agent thereof, “engaging in clandestine intelligence activities or international terrorism,” as per a Department of Justice (DOJ) clarification. Yet, as we shall see, even this minor legislative hurdle would prove too cumbersome for the Bush administration in its war on terror. Privacy in the age of terrorism The tireless work of the Church Commission was put to a test in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as US lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle were prepared to sacrifice citizens’ privacy in the name of national security. Thus, less than one week after three hijacked aircraft toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people in the process, one of the most comprehensive plans for conducting surveillance on American civilians and individuals worldwide – the USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’) – was already being disseminated to members of Congress. Arguably the most controversial part of the Patriot Act is contained in Section 215 of the 342-page document, which calls for sweeping government powers against private and public enterprises, individuals, and personal privacy. Most crucially, Section 215 did away with the requirement that the target of the records search be a non-US citizen and "an agent of a foreign power." American citizens were now legitimate targets as well. In the Senate, the Patriot Act passed in a 99 – 1 vote. The only senator to vote against it was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. "There is no doubt," he declared on the Senate floor before the historic vote, "that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists...But that would not be a country in which we would want to live." Even with this widening of surveillance powers, then-US President George W. Bush, as part of the global ‘War on Terror’ that he declared following the events of 9/11, ordered the NSA to tap the communications of an untold number of people in the US, including citizens, without the warrants demanded by the FISA court – despite the fact that between 1979 and 2005, only four out of over 15,000 warrant requests were rejected by the FISA court.  Christopher Pyle, who was still committed to his cause over 30 years after he chose to become a whistleblower, labeled Bush “a criminal” for violating the FISA law and suggested that he should be impeached. “The Constitution says he must take care that all laws be faithfully executed, not just the ones he likes,” Pyle said during an interview with Democracy Now in 2005. “The statute says … that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive law governing these international intercepts, and he violated it anyway. And the law also says that any person who violates that law is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. By the plain meaning of the law, the President is a criminal.” More recently, Christopher Pyle, 83, who now works as Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, spoke out on behalf of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who revealed a massive global intelligence program run by the so-called Five Eyes, a once-secretive intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. “He’s just an ordinary American,” Pyle explained in 2013. “He’s trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that and taken at face value and we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money and politics.” AuthorThis article is produced by RT. Archives October 2023 9/12/2023 What if There Had Been No Coup in Chile in 1973?: The Thirty-Sixth Newsletter (2023) By: Vijay PrashadRead Now Gracia Barrios (Chile), Multitud III (‘Multitude III’), 1972. Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Imagine this scenario. On 11 September 1973, the reactionary sections of the Chilean army, led by General Augusto Pinochet and given a green light by the US government, did not leave their barracks. President Salvador Allende, who led the Popular Unity government, went to his office in La Moneda in Santiago to announce a plebiscite on his government and to ask for the resignation of several senior generals. Then, Allende continued his fight to bring down inflation and to realise his government’s programme to advance the socialist agenda in Chile. Until the moment when the Chilean Army descended upon La Moneda in 1973, Allende and the Popular Unity government were in a pitched fight to defend Chile’s sovereignty, particularly over its copper resources and its land as they sought to raise sufficient funds to eradicate hunger and illiteracy and to produce innovative means to deliver health care and housing. In the Popular Unity programme (1970), the Allende government founded its charter: The social aspirations of the Chilean people are legitimate and possible to satisfy. They want, for example, dignified housing without readjustments that exhaust their income; schools and universities for their children; sufficient wages; an end once and for all to high prices; stable work; timely medical attention; public lighting; sewers; potable water; paved streets and sidewalks; a just and operable social security system without privileges and without starvation-level pensions; telephones; police; children’s playgrounds; recreation areas; and popular vacationing and sea resorts. The satisfaction of these just desires of the people – which, in truth, are rights that society must recognise – will be a preoccupation of high priority for the popular government. Realising the ‘just desires of the people’ – a laudable objective – was possible amidst the public’s optimism for the Popular Unity government. Allende’s administration adopted a model that decentralised the government and mobilised the people to attain their own ‘just desires’. Had this model not been interrupted, the depositors in the government’s social security institutions would have remained on directive councils with oversight of these funds. Organisations of slum dwellers would have continued to inspect the operations of the housing department tasked with building quality housing for the working class. Old democratic structures would have continued to strengthen as the government used new technologies (such as Project Cybersyn) to create a distributed decision system. ‘It is not only about these examples’, the programme noted, ‘but about a new understanding in which the people participate in state institutions in a real and efficient way’.  Roberto Matta (Chile), Hagámosnos la guerrilla interior para parir un hombre nuevo (‘Let’s Fight the Guerilla War Within Ourselves to Give Birth to a New Man’), 1970. As Chile’s people, led by the Popular Unity government, took control over their economic and political lives and worked hard to improve their social and cultural worlds, they sent a flare into the sky announcing the great possibilities of socialism. Their advances mirrored those that had been attained in several other projects, such as in Cuba, and boosted the confidence of people across the Third World to test their own possibilities. The eradication of poverty and the creation of housing for every family was an inspiration for Latin America. Had the Popular Unity project not been cut short, it very well might have encouraged other left projects to demand the satisfaction of just desires in a world where it was possible to attain them. No longer would we live in a world of scarcity, which impedes the realisation of these desires. No Chicago Boys would have arrived with their noxious neoliberal agenda to experiment in the laboratory of a military regime. Popular mobilisations would have exposed the illegitimate desire of the capitalist class to impose austerity on the people in the name of economic growth. As Allende’s government expanded its agenda, driven by a decentralised government and by popular mobilisation, the ‘just desires’ of the people might have eclipsed the narrow greed of capitalism. If there had been no coup in Chile, there might not have been coups in Peru (1975) and Argentina (1976). Without these coups, perhaps the military dictatorships in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay would have withdrawn in the face of popular agitation, inspired by Chile’s example. Perhaps, in this context, the close relationship between Chile’s Salvador Allende and Cuba’s Fidel Castro would have broken Washington’s illegal blockade of revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps the promises made at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting in Santiago in 1972 might have been realised, among them the enactment of a robust New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974 that would have set aside the imperial privileges of the Dollar-Wall Street complex and its attendant agencies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Perhaps the just economic order that was being put in place in Chile would have been expanded to the world. But the coup did happen. The military dictatorship killed, disappeared, and sent into exile hundreds of thousands of people, setting in motion a dynamic of repression that has been difficult for Chile to reverse despite the return to democracy in 1990. From being a laboratory for socialism, Chile – under the tight grip of the military – became a laboratory for neoliberalism. Despite its relatively small population of roughly ten million (a tenth of the size of Brazil’s population), the coup in Chile in 1973 had a global impact. At that time, the coup was not just seen as a coup against the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, but as a coup against the Third World. That is precisely the theme of our latest dossier, The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973, produced in collaboration with Instituto de Ciencias Alejandro Lipschutz Centro de Pensamiento e Investigación Social y Política (ICAL). ‘The coup against Allende’s government’, we write, ‘took place not only against its own policy of the nationalisation of copper, but also because Allende had offered leadership and an example to other developing countries that sought to implement the NIEO principles’. At the third session of UNCTAD in Santiago (1972), Allende said that the mission of the conference was to replace ‘an obsolete and radically unjust economic and trade order with an equitable one that is based on a new concept of man and human dignity and to reformulate an international division of labour that is intolerable for the less advanced countries and that obstructs their progress while favouring only the affluent nations’. This was exactly the dynamic that was derailed by the coup in Chile as well as by other manoeuvres of the imperialist bloc. Instead of promoting an order ‘based on a new concept of man and human dignity’, these manoeuvres resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of people’s advocates (among them leftists, trade unionists, peasant leaders, environmental justice campaigners, and women’s rights activists) and prolonged the destiny of hunger and illiteracy, poor housing and medical care, and the general orientation of a culture of despair and toxicity. Please read our dossier and share it. These dossiers – produced once a month – are a product of collaboration and hard work, a synthesis of how we, as an institute rooted in popular movements, see key events of our history. The art for this dossier comes from the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, which preserved art from the Popular Unity period and from the struggle against the coup. We are grateful to them, and to ICAL, for our collaborations based on solidarity and against the neoliberal ethic of parochial greed.  Two weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, Guillermo Teillier, the president of the Communist Party of Chile (PC), died. At his funeral, the party’s general secretary Lautaro Carmona Soto described how Teillier – with the coup’s cordite still in the air – went to work in Valdivia to protect and then build the party as part of the broader resistance to the coup regime. In 1974, Teillier was arrested in Santiago and subsequently held and tortured for two years in the Academia de Guerra Aérea. For another year and a half, Tellier was held in concentration camps in Ritoque, Puchuncaví, and Tres Álamos. Released in 1976, he went into hiding and continued to build the party back to its fighting strength, joined the following year by PC leader Gladys Marín. This was dangerous work, made even more dangerous when Tellier took over as the leader of the party’s military commission, which managed the aid sent from Cuba to Chile and oversaw the creation and operations of the Manuel Rodríquez Patriotic Front (FPMR), the PC’s armed wing. Though attempts to assassinate Pinochet failed, broader work to build the movement for democracy succeeded. It is the bravery and sacrifice of people such as Tellier, Marín, and countless – and often nameless – others, that brought the dictatorship of Pinochet and the Chicago Boys to an end in 1990. The 1973 coup in Chile destroyed lives and suspended a process of great promise. Today, that promise must be revived. Warmly, Vijay AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. 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 triContinental. Archives September 2023  Chilean Troops Surround the Presidential Palace. Photo: BBC/File photo. This year, five documents were released that confirmed the participation of the United States before and after the coup d’état in Chile against Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Below, are some details regarding the declassified files. Documents from the US National Security Archive reveal that five weeks before the coup, President Richard Nixon ordered a CIA-orchestrated plot. US President Richard Nixon called in his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to oversee operations to prevent the inauguration of President-elect Salvador Allende. Kissinger reported that the Chilean army turned out to be “a rather incompetent group” after failing to take advantage of the chaos caused by the attack on the commander in chief of the Chilean Army, General René Schneider. The key role of the media in the coup Agustín Edwards, owner of Chile’s newspaper El Mercurio, met with President Nixon and the CIA at the White House. We know in advance the role of the private media in the coup: propaganda and disinformation. Unpublished audio files of Orlando Letelier confirm that Salvador Allende was preparing to call a plebiscite on September 11, 1973 An unpublished audio recording of the murdered former minister Orlando Letelier confirms that President Salvador Allende was prepared to call a plebiscite on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the day he was killed. There was never a plan to defend the government by way of arms. This was confirmed after the release of the US president’s daily report of September 8, 1973, in which he said that, for President Allende, the only solution to the conflict was “political.” Attack on the left The release of the secret files of Álvaro Puga, an adviser to Pinochet’s intelligence services, reveals how the dictator used lies and fabrications against the left to create a negative vision of it and thus justify the atrocities committed. (Misión Verdad) Translation: Orinoco Tribune AuthorMisión Verdad is a Venezuelan investigative journalism website with a socialist perspective in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution This article was produced by Orinoco Tribune. Archives September 2023 As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.  Renaissance Unity Church in Warren, Michigan, formerly known as Church of Today Marianne Williamson announced her second run for president of the United States on March 4, 2023. By May she was polling at 9%, a significant margin for a fringe challenger to the incumbent president. Williamson became famous in the 1990s after becoming Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual advisor. She began her career by teaching A Course In Miracles, a book by New Thought teacher and clinical psychologist Helen Schucman, which argues for the value of recognizing “awareness of love's presence” through listening to the “inner dictation” of Jesus Christ. Although Williamson was raised Jewish she did not see A Course in Miracles as necessarily Christian, saying, “A conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity. It is a conversion to a conviction of the heart.” Williamson advocates a progressive domestic program that includes socialized healthcare, child tax credit, wiping out student debt, criminal justice reform and support for organized labor. She also advocates a dovish foreign policy including closing overseas military bases and establishing a US Department of Peace that would research ways to peacefully resolve conflict and avoid wars. She has modeled her campaign off of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights saying: Roosevelt didn’t live to see the realization of an Economic Bill of Rights. But the idea was kept alive, including in the 1960 Democratic Platform as well as the urging of Martin Luther King Jr. There are echoes of it in the current revitalization of the American labor movement. I introduce it now as the basis for the economic u-turn that is at the heart of my presidential campaign. Once again, the people of the United States are demanding economic justice, and the Democratic Party should be listening to those demands, responding to those demands, and turning them into political power. Williamson is the spiritual leader of a Unity Church in Warren, Michigan known as Renaissance Unity, formerly the Church of Today. Unity is a New Thought religious movement started by American mystics Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Missouri in the 1880s. I also happen to be a member of a Unity Church. Should Marxists support someone who comes from a New Thought spiritual tradition? What exactly is New Thought?  Phineas P. Quimby New Thought has its origin with Phineas Quimby, a practitioner of Mesmerism or “Animal Magnetism” who explained his basic premise thusly: The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in…. Therefore, if your mind had been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory or truth, I come in contact with your enemy, and restore you to health and happiness. This I do partly mentally, and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impression and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure. Psychologist and historian William James described New Thought thusly: It is an optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side…. One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount. New Thought essentially boils down to this: Positive thinking can result in positive changes in life, material wealth, health and mood. Clearly, such idealism is counter to Marx’s dialectical materialist philosophy, but Marx did not completely reject idealism. His early 1844 manuscripts contain a great deal of idealism while even some of his later works such as 1859’s Grundrisse and 1867’s Kapital contains ideas such as exchange value and commodity fetishism that some have regarded as idealist. Some have criticized such idealism as counter revolutionary. V. I. Lenin criticized George Berkeley, father of Berkeleyan idealism, and the “Prolekult” Soviet idealists in his 1908 work Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Marx, although heavily influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectical method, opposed his idealism in his Critique of the German Ideology where he wrote: [C]onsciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc…. It is self-evident, moreover, that “spectres,” “bonds,” “the higher being,” “concept,” “scruple,” are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move. Clearly Marxist materialism and New Thought idealism contradict each other, but can they be reconciled? Marx does acknowledge the power of human cognition and consciousness to transform the material world. He wrote in 1844, “Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges.” It is human consciousness alone that determines history as Marx wrote a year later, “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” This is also a basic axiom that he shares with New Thought. New Thought is a religious, spiritual and metaphysical movement. Marx, on the other hand, advocates irreligious criticism of religion: Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. Jesus Christ made a similar criticism of religion reported in the books of Matthew and Luke: Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. Should New Thought teachers be regarded as false prophets? Are New Thought teachers deluding people with an illusory opium, or are they disillusioning people to “think, act and fashion” reality so that they will “move around as” their “own true Sun?” What are the “fruits of their labor?” To answer these questions we must dive deeper into the history of New Thought to determine whether it is a malign or benevolent influence on the toiling masses. I have already written extensively on religion’s impact on the socialist movement in early America. The Christian Perfectionists, Shakers and Hicksite Quakers were especially eager to join the 19th century American communal tradition. The participation of New Thought’s predecessors, the transcendentalists and the spiritualists, was also essential to the growth of early American socialism.  William Henry Channing Transcendentalist Unitarian minister William Henry Channing founded the socialist community known as Brook Farm in Massachusetts. The transcendentalists believed that people were inherently good, but were corrupted by society’s institutions, particularly money. Marx said essentially the same thing when he wrote about alienation, “The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.” For some transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson the way to escape this predicament was to become self reliant. For the transcendentalist socialists at Brook Farm and for Marx, the way was to combine with others. In New Thought, since there is no distinction between the individual and collective consciousness or inner and outer worlds, this contradiction has been resolved. Of course, this puts New Thought practitioners in the difficult position of having to decide for themselves the best course of action in conjunction with the scriptures and the metaphysical practice of looking within. While New Thought practitioner Neville Goddard's radical individualism influenced Ayn Rand’s right-wing “objectivism,” New Thought leader Wallace D. Wattles believed Jesus was a radical socialist. He even ran for congress on the Socialist Party ticket. Imagine that! A religion that tells people to think for themselves so they can "move around" as their "own Suns." According to contemporary New Though practitioner and historian Mitch Horowitz: Is there a dichotomy between Neville’s radical individualism and the communal vision of Science of Getting Rich author Wallace D. Wattles, who saw New Thought as possessing an intrinsic ethic of societal betterment? Not for me. I’m skeptical toward language such as inner/outer, essence/ego, spiritual/material, which buzzes around many of our alternative spiritual communities. Not only do opposites attract, but paradoxes complete. It is in the nature of life. New Thought is not essentially socialist or capitalist. Despite criticisms that it is a movement of get-rich-quick charlatans, it has also been the philosophical home of socialists and communists who saw the practice as a means to achieve social betterment. Like the philosophical science technology of dialectical materialism, New Thought is a religious science technology that need not exclusively be at the service of capitalism. If neoliberal academics can use of dialectical materialism as a tool for their own research and propaganda, New Thought need not be abandoned to the capitalists. Three New Thought socialists, Wallace Wattles, Preston Bradley and Father Divine demonstrate the potential New Thought has to offer the socialist movement.  Wallace D. Wattles Wallace Wattles, like Marx, studied Hegel. It was Hegel’s philosophy that brought him to New Thought via what he called the "monastic theory of the cosmos." However, it was religion, specifically Christian Congregationalism, not Marxism or any other political philosophy, that brought him to socialism. Wattles met Congregationalist minister George D. Herron in 1896 who encouraged him to join the Socialist Party of the USA (SPUSA). Wattles devoted his life to Christian Socialism. He wrote a book entitled A New Christ and another entitled Jesus: The Man and His Work in 1910 in which he outlined his vision for Christian Socialism. He used to say: The call of Christ has even been to bear the burdens of an oppressed and disinherited humanity; to join your lives to those of the poor; to feel their pain, to share their suffering, to live for their deliverance – to bow beneath their sorrows in dark Gethsemane; to walk thorn-crowned with staggering steps up to the steep way to Calvary; sustained because beyond the cross we see the riven sepulcher and through it shines the glory of a resurrected humanity. His daughter Florence, who was herself a committed socialist, wrote of him, “The master passion of his life was the establishment of just relations among men.” Wattles and his family struggled with poverty until one day he painted a mental picture of his ideal self in his mind. He began attending New Thought meetings in Chicago and developed a mental technique to obtain greater material prosperity. According to Florence, he pictured himself as “a successful writer, a personality of power, an advancing man, and he began to work toward the realization of this vision.” He began to gain success and recognition for his theories. He tested the theories on himself. His most well-known work is The Science of Getting Rich, published in 1910. Although an ironic title for a socialist, Wattles explains how he reconciled his socialist vision with his New Thought philosophy of getting rich: Man cannot live fully in body without good food, comfortable clothing, and warm shelter; and without freedom from excessive toil. Rest and recreation are also necessary to his physical life. He cannot live fully in mind without books and time to study them, without opportunity for travel and observation, or without intellectual companionship. To live fully in mind he must have intellectual recreations, and must surround himself with all the objects of art and beauty he is capable of using and appreciating. To live fully in soul, man must have love; and love is denied expression by poverty. Man’s highest happiness is found in the bestowal of benefits on those he loves; love finds its most natural and spontaneous expression in giving. The man who has nothing to give cannot fill his place as a husband or father, as a citizen, or as a man. It is in the use of material things that man finds full life for his body, develops his mind, and unfolds his soul. It is therefore of supreme importance to him that he should be rich. Marx argued essentially the same thing in an 1844 critique of Hegel: Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. Wattles’ vision of getting rich meant balancing altruism and individualism. The Science of Getting Rich says: Get rid of the idea that God wants you to sacrifice yourself for others, and that you can secure his favor by doing so; God requires nothing of the kind. What he wants is that you should make the most of yourself, for yourself, and for others; and you can help others more by making the most of yourself than in any other way. He ran for Indiana’s Eight Congressional District Representative in the election of 1908 and for Madison County, Indiana 50th court district prosecutor in 1910. A few months later, in February, 1911, he died in Ruskin, Tennessee. Labor organizer and Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs eulogized Wattles in a letter to his daughter published in the New Thought publication Nautilus: My Dear Comrade :— I have just learned through Mrs. Strickland of the death of your beloved father and beg to offer these few words of loving sympathy in your great bereavement. I was never more painfully surprised than to hear of your father’s untimely death, and I feel as if I had lost not only a comrade beloved, but a very brother in flesh and blood and spirit. Your father was indeed one to win and hold the lover of all who ever touched his hand and looked into his gentle, sympathetic, soulful eyes. He was sweet-natured, perfectly poised, great-hearted, and gifted with an unusually clear vision, and his loving service will bear fruit that is truly golden and preserve his name for all time. I never knew a man to consecrate himself more freely to a cause than did your father to the Socialist movement. And I lovingly pay to him in the hour of his passing this humble tribute to his noble life and his beautiful memory. I beg of you to tender my profound sympathy to the venerable mother, to the sorrowing wife, and to all of the stricken household. There should be no hopeless grief in the home made sweet and white and beautiful for all time by our beloved Comrade Wattles. With love and devotion to you all, I remain, Fraternally yours, (Signed) Eugene V. Debs Although Wattles is perhaps the clearest example of a New Thought socialist, others have incorporated both New Thought and socialist theories in their spiritual and political messages.  People’s Church postcard featuring Preston Bradley Preston Bradley was a Unitarian minister who presided over the largest non-Catholic congregation in Chicago. Unitarianism is distinct from Unity, although it shares certain features including the idea that all religions are a path to Divine Truth. Although Unitarianism is not considered a New Thought religion, it has been associated with New Thought’s precursors such as the Channing brothers, William Ellery and Brook Farm founder William Henry, who were extremely close with transcendentalists. Bradley went to the conservative Moody Bible Institute and attempted ordination in the Presbyterian Church, but left in 1912, insisting he would not be held down by any orthodoxy. He founded the Unitarian People’s Church in 1922 after years of preaching at theaters in Chicago. Although not necessarily officially a member of the New Thought movement, Bradley’s teaching contained significant similarities to New Thought ideas. Unitarian civil rights, labor and peace activist Patrick Murfin writes, “There was the positive thinking side of his ministry. This was derided as shallow theology by some. It shared elements made popular by Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie. But he made it uniquely his own. It was a predecessor to the ‘self help’ revolution that took off in the '70s and shows no signs of abating.” Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, and Carnagie, author of Win Friends and Influence People were not known as New Thought teachers either, but their work drew on the insights of New Thought teachers like Mary Baker Eddy, Neville Goddard and Emmet Fox writing years before. In his autobiography Along the Way, Bradley wrote: I've never met a person, I don't care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don't care how much a man may consider himself a failure. I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life any time he is ready and prepared to do it. Whenever he develops the desire he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within. Such a positive message echoes with promise for the downtrodden proletariat. Script writer Irna Phillips was a member of Bradley’s People’s Church. She based the CBS soap opera Guiding Light on Bradley’s radio sermons. Organist Irma Glen, who worked on soap operas for NBC, was also a member. When she wrote to Bradley about her interest in the New Thought movement known as Religious Science, Bradley wrote to her, “Do not allow anyone to hold you to any orthodoxy for no one has a monopoly on Truth, nor do they control it.” Glen would go on to become an ordained minister in Religious Science. Bradley was as progressive a preacher as there ever was. He was an advocate of political theorist Henry George’s land-value tax. He was an outspoken advocate of organized labor. He was an opponent of fascism, anti-Semitism and racism. He joined Emma Goldman’s on-again off-again lover Ben Reitman to oppose obscenity laws that banned education about sexually transmitted diseases. He even persuaded millionaire philanthropist W. Clement Stone to fund the black street gang the Vice Lords in the interest of turning them into a community oriented organization. Bradley lived to be 95 years old. He died in June of 1983.  Father Divine, born George Baker Jr., was the son of freed slaves. He was involved in black churches, but he sought to combine different spiritual traditions with his own teaching. He read Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, and developed an interest in New Thought. During a 1906 trip to California he discovered the ideas of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of Unity. Historian Jill Watts explains the Fillmores’ influence on (at the time still known as George) Baker’s spiritual development in her biography of Father Divine, God, Harlem USA: For Baker, much of the attractiveness of Unity School theology rested in its implications. Fillmore’s brand of New Thought provided a formula for the acceptance and inclusion of African Americans without altering or threatening the structure of American society. Exercising mind-power and oneness with God, anyone, regardless of race, had the potential to achieve spiritual and social equality. Black possessed just as much divinity as whites and, by applying mind-power, could overcome oppression and reap the benefits of American enterprise. Positive thinking allowed African Americans to assert control over their destiny and to combat their feelings of powerlessness in white America…. The solution to racism was quite clear; it rested on a spiritual cleansing of the American mind. Father’s Divine incorporated the Fillmores’ ideas of positive thinking into his own theology. Singer Johnny Mercer even credited Father Divine for inspiring his 1944 song “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive." Mercer said in an interview, “[My] publicity agent ... went to hear Father Divine and he had a sermon and his subject was 'you got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.' And I said 'Wow, that's a colorful phrase!’” In 1912 Father Divine declared himself to be the living embodiment of God. This may also have been inspired by Fillmore's teachings on Christ or God consciousness, which Charles Fillmore described as “consciousness of himself as a spiritual being, knowing himself to be the Christ of God, he is I AM, and ready to recreate the world.” Recreation of the world became God’s, or rather Father Divine’s, life-long mission on this earth. Father Divine founded the International Peace Mission in 1931. After withstanding persecution for his anti-racism in the South and arrest and trial for “disturbing the peace” in Sayville, New York, he moved the International Peace Mission to Harlem. The Peace Mission preached celibacy and communal living, similar to the Shakers. In fact, as of 2000, the remaining practicing Shakers and the remaining members of the International Peace Mission considered themselves to be sister organizations. Edna Rose Ritchings, who after marrying Father Divine in 1946 became known as Mother Divine, said of the relationship between the two religions: The Shakers live in Community, just as we live in Community married to CHRIST, and endeavoring to let the Government of GOD rule their Community. It has prevailed through the centuries, and FATHER came in this Latter Day to universalize this Way of Life. It is the Foundation of the coming of the Kingdom of GOD on earth, which Jesus taught us to pray for 'Let the Kingdom come, and let the Will be done.' While in Harlem, the International Peace Mission engaged in many civil rights struggles, including national anti-lynching campaigns. As a result, the Peace Mission came into contact with members of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). The two groups formed an alliance. Watts explains: One of the first and most prominent groups to ally with the Peace Mission movement was the Communist party. The only major American party openly committed to fighting for racial equality, the Communists hope to incorporate oppressed black Americans into their struggle. By 1934, the Communists’ United Front, a program aimed at affiliating the party with non-Communist groups on issues of common interest, spread in Harlem. The Communists courted many of Harlem’s religious leaders and focused on Father Divine. Their commitment to equal rights and defense of the Scottsboro Nine impressed Father Divine, and he willingly supported many party activities. CPUSA even went as far as to expel members that criticized Father Divine and his Peace Mission. However, Father Divine opposed welfare and labor unions and insisted that poverty was the result of oppression and injustice, not capitalism itself. Eventually the alliance fell apart as the CPUSA transitioned away from the United Front strategy. Although historically New Thought and socialism have had an uneasy alliance at best, the doctrines of social betterment and the cognitive power to recreate the world offer a link between the two philosophies that has the potential to create a powerful coalition. Filipino philosopher Vincent L. Casil explains in his 2017 dissertation entitled “Marx’s Idealism”: In the Manuscripts, cognition, rather, takes part in the drive to realize a humane world; it has the capacity to create a conception of reality that best serves the needs of humanity. Its idealism suggests that it has a critical role to play for changing and humanizing the world. It shows that the quest for societal change not only requires us to act but also to challenge our assumptions and foundations of our thinking. It requires us to be conscious, not only about the information we have in this world, but also with the interests and needs our cognition serves. In the end, the Manuscripts’ idealist epistemology provides a vantage point where the change even in our very cognition could be asked. It provides a space where we can challenge the foundation of cognition that supports and recreates estranged reality and to create a type of cognition that liberates man from estrangement and serves the creation of a humane world. Early Marx was not so distant from New Thought idealism as it would seem. Marianne Williamson’s program is reformist, yes, but she is running as a maverick candidate that opposes big business and the war machine. Rather than embracing the purity fetish windigo that has infected the left, allying with those who do not completely agree on everything is the only way to a revolution. As Lenin said, “[P]olitics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions, that is where serious politics begin.” There are not millions of Marxists yet in the United States today. There are about 15,000 members of CPUSA today. At its peak in 1939 there were about 200,000 members. By contrast, Unity has a mailing list of about 1 million individuals and has about 110,000 official members in about 300 churches. That means Marxists have no choice but to work with those who they do not 100% agree with. That is the only way to win. Although the masses may be reformist, treating disagreements among the masses with sensitivity and kindness is the only way to build the movement towards revolution. As revolutionary Muslim clergyman Malcom X said, “Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.” The bible contains a message as revolutionary as that of Marx or Lenin. John the Elder wrote in the book of Revelations: Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Marx argued this message has a soothing effect in his 1843 critique of Hegel: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Religious clergy like Cornel West and Marianne Williamson, who are both running for president of the US right now, are currently the most visible representations of the discontent of the masses. Their shared message of love rather than hate has been ridiculed as sentimental and utopian, but an emotional appeal to sentimentality may be just what America needs today. Religion is not going away any time soon, so it is essential that revolutionary socialists work with religious people to encourage those elements of their theology that emphasize social justice and societal recreation. There is, of course, a danger that New Thought and other spiritual self-help ideas can lead to individualism, solipsism and narcissism. As cultural critic Christopher Lasch argued After the political turmoil of the sixties, American have retreated to purely personal preoccupations. Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement…. Harmless in themselves, these pursuits, elevated to a program and wrapped in the rhetoric of authenticity and awareness, signify a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past. However, history shows us another way. Lasch says: These are not the attitudes historically associated with millenarian outbreaks…. Such traditions, often associated with national resistance to foreign conquest, have flourished at many times and in many forms, including the Christian vision of the last judgment. Their egalitarian and pseudohistorical content suggests that even the most radically otherworldly religions of the past expressed a hope of social justice and a sense of continuity with earlier generations. New Thought is a religious technology that can help the individual renew themself and can also offer tools to reshape and recreate society. It teaches individuals to shape their reality so that they can “move around” as their “own Suns,” as Marx put it. The Fillmores’ idea of omnipresent divinity, the oneness of all things and the ability to co-create with God offers avenues for psychological and social restoration. Socialists would do well not to write off New Thought as an aberration or another stupefying superstition. Despite its connection to prosperity gospels, self-help and radical individualism, New Thought’s integration of the ideal and material can offer valuable mental tools for overcoming oppression and economic exploitation leading to the total reorganization and regeneration of society. AuthorMitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Archives August 2023
In this way, the United States inaugurated a tradition that would characterize its behavior in the international arena to this day, in which the words of its political leaders not only conceal their true intentions, but in many cases the intentions have been the total reverse of the words. It was not for nothing that the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, left posterity a phrase that is still valid today, when he pointed out in 1829 that the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.[i] The Monroe Doctrine served as the basis of the United States’ political and economic policy. The Monroe Doctrine served Washington to declare unilaterally and as if it were a divine right, protector of the American continent, letting the rest of the world know where its zone of influence, expansion and predominance resided. However, during the first three years following its enunciation, the countries of the region invoked it on no less than five occasions in order to confront real or apparent threats to their independence and territorial integrity, only to receive negative or evasive responses from the U.S. government. The passage of time confirmed that the Monroe Doctrine had been created only to be defined, interpreted and applied at the convenience of the United States. Over time it would have numerous updates and corollaries from different U.S. governments, always seeking to close any gap that could, from the interpretation and practice of other international actors and the countries of the region themselves, jeopardize its true designs. To mention just a few of them, the Polk Corollary[ii] of 1848: not only would the United States not admit new European colonizations on the American continent, but also that no nation in the region would freely request the intervention of European governments in its affairs or its own union with any of them; it also stated that no European nation could interfere in the will or desires of countries of the continent to join the United States; the Hayes Corollary[iii] of 1880: fixed the Caribbean and Central America as part of the exclusive sphere of influence of the United States and that to avoid interference by European imperialism in America, Washington should exercise exclusive control of any inter-oceanic canal to be built; Roosevelt Corollary[iv] of 1904 -much better known-: proclaims the duty and right of the United States to intervene as international arbiter or policeman in Latin American and Caribbean countries in the face of conflicts or debts with extra-regional powers; and the Kennan Corollary[v] of 1950: justified U.S. support for the dictatorships that flourished in the region under the pretext of anti-communism, which would even be called “national security dictatorships”. None of the U.S. leaders ever entertained the idea that Monroe’s declaration could constitute an act of altruism or of particular friendship towards the neighboring republics to the south -as many Latin American governments fervently believed for years- let alone that it implied for the United States the obligation to intervene in defense of any country in the continent that was the victim of external aggression. For U.S. statesmen, the Monroe Doctrine was limited to announcing the eventual intervention of the United States only in those cases and in those areas of the region that were of vital interest for its domination. This is what the Secretary of War of the Monroe administration, John C. Calhoun, stated: “We must not be subjected to having our general declarations quoted to us on every occasion, to which we can give all the interpretations we want. There are cases of intervention where I would appeal to the vagaries of war with all its calamities. Am I asked for one? I will answer. I designate the case of Cuba. As long as Cuba remains in the power of Spain, a friendly power, a power which we do not fear, the policy of the government will be, as has been the policy of all governments since I have intervened in politics, to leave Cuba as it is, but with the express design, which I hope never to see realized, that if Cuba leaves the dominion of Spain, it shall not pass into other hands but ours…In the same category I will mention another case, that of Texas; if it had been necessary, we would have resisted a foreign power.”[vi] Between 1825 and 1826 it was corroborated that the Monroe Doctrine had nothing to do with “peace and security”, and much less with a sincere and disinterested support to the independence of their “brothers of the South”, when the United States opposed by diplomatic means and in a threatening tone, before a possible joint Colombian-Mexican expedition, with the objective of bringing independence to Cuba and Puerto Rico, a project that Simón Bolívar and Guadalupe Victoria, the latter president of Mexico, had cherished. In the face of strong U.S. diplomatic pressure, the governments of Bogota and Mexico responded that no operation of great magnitude against the Spanish Antilles would be accelerated until the proposal was submitted to the judgment of the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama to be held in 1826. Washington’s concern, as is logical, continued, transferring its concern to the governments of Colombia and Mexico and moving all the levers of its diplomatic power. [vii] Years later, José Martí would refer to this embarrassing passage in the history of the United States, a reflection of the Monroist ideology, in one of his famous speeches when he said: “And Bolívar was already putting his foot in the stirrup, when a man who spoke English, and who came from the North with government papers, grabbed his horse by the bridle and spoke to him as follows: “I am free, you are free, but that people who are to be mine, because I want them for myself, cannot be free!”[viii] The status quo convenient to the interests of the United States could not be altered by extra-continental powers, but not even by the countries of the region themselves. This situation would be maintained during the years 1827, 1828 and 1829, every time an attempt was made to revive the redemptive enterprise; both by Colombia, Mexico and Haiti. It is very illustrative in today’s light, when we continue to see the Yankee obsession with Cuba, that in the context of the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, the interests of U.S. domination over the Greater Antilles were especially gravitating. The Monroe Doctrine was also complemented by the so-called theory of the Ripe Fruit, formulated by John Quincy Adams in 1823, in which Cuba was compared to a fruit on a tree, to metaphorically point out that just as there were laws of physical gravitation, there were also laws of political gravitation and, for such reasons, there was no other destiny for Cuba than to fall into American hands, it was only necessary to wait for the opportune moment for the fruit to be ripe for that inevitable end to be fulfilled. During this process – Adams also pointed out in a letter sent on April 28, 1823 to the diplomatic representative of the United States in Madrid – it was preferable that the desired fruit remained in the hands of Spain before it passed into the hands of the more powerful powers of the time. Hence, when the British Foreign Minister, George Canning, proposed to Washington the signing of a joint declaration rejecting any attempt by the Holy Alliance and France to restore Spain’s absolutism in the Spanish-American territories, the United States took the lead in a masterstroke, making a declaration of its own -later known as the Monroe Doctrine- that left the United States’ hands absolutely free in America and tried to tie them to the rest of the powers, including England. At the root of the emergence of the Monroe Doctrine was Cuba, as one of the territories most coveted by the U.S. political class. Also Mexico, more than half of whose territories would later be usurped during the war of 1846-1848. IIn 1830, Simón Bolívar, who during his struggle for independence and the unity of the peoples of Spanish America had felt the rejection of the United States as a great obstacle and permanent danger, as well as his calculating and cold stance -which he called arithmetical behavior- in relation to the emancipation process that was taking place in South America, was leaving for eternity. Against the Liberator and his plans for the unity and integration of Spanish America, a wide conspiratorial network was woven from Washington, which is still astonishing today for its level of articulation, when the means of communication and intelligence available to U.S. imperialism today did not yet exist. However, U.S. diplomatic representatives such as William Tudor, William Harrison, Joel Poinsett, among others, did a very effective dirty work to defeat more than the person of Bolivar, the ideas he represented and defended, totally antagonistic to the Monroist philosophy. His pioneering thought of anti-imperialism, about the unity and integration of the territories freed from the yoke of Spanish colonialism, in favor of the abolition of slavery, of the most dispossessed classes and the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico, were the greatest threat to their interests of expansion and domination that Washington faced in those years, hence their innumerable attempts to discredit him by calling him “usurper”, “dictator”, “the madman of Colombia”, among other offensive adjectives. II In the second half of the 19th century, the Bolivarian ideal would have in José Martí, the Apostle of Cuban independence, one of its most brilliant disciples, who could see like no one else into the entrails of the monster and warn of its dangers for the independence of Our America and the very balance of the world. It was then up to him to confront Monroeism at the stage when the United States was taking its first steps of transition to the imperialist phase and when the Monroe doctrine was being modernized through Pan-Americanism, which advocated continental unity under the dominant axis of Washington from the narrative of the so-called Manifest Destiny, a thesis of supposed biblical roots, which affirmed that the divine will granted the American nation the right to control the entire continent. The United States sought hemispheric supremacy in international legal forums and instruments and with it the institutionalization of the postulates of the Monroe Doctrine. Through his chronicles and articles in more than twenty Spanish-American newspapers, José Martí developed an intense anti-imperialist work to defeat the thesis of a single currency, arbitration and customs union, promoted by the U.S. Secretary of State, James Blaine, at the American International Conference held in Washington between 1889 and 1890. He would also do so at the Monetary Conference of the Republics of America in 1891, where he actively participated as Consul of Uruguay. There has never been in America, from independence to the present time,” warned Martí, “a matter that requires more wisdom, nor obliges more vigilance, nor demands clearer and more meticulous examination, than the invitation that the powerful United States, full of unsaleable products, and determined to extend their dominions in America, make to the less powerful American nations, linked by free and useful trade with the European peoples, to establish a league against Europe, and to close deals with the rest of the world. From the tyranny of Spain, Spanish America knew how to save itself; and now, after seeing with judicial eyes the antecedents, causes and factors of the invitation, it is urgent to say, because it is the truth, that the hour of declaring its second independence has arrived for Spanish America.”[ix] Shortly before falling in Dos Rios on May 19, 1895, in an unfinished letter to his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado, Martí left testimony of which had been the sense of his life: to prevent in time with the independence of Cuba, that the United States spread through the Antilles and fall with that force more on our lands of America. With a far-sighted vision Martí had seen the great danger that the voracious imperial appetites of Washington represented for Cuba and the countries of our America and foresaw what could happen if the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico was not achieved in a short time, where he considered the balance of the world was to be found. In the faithful of America are the Antilles,” wrote Martí in an analysis that demonstrates his knowledge and vision of the geopolitical interests that were moving on the international scene, “which would be, if slaves, a mere pontoon of the war of an imperial republic against the jealous and superior world that is already preparing to deny it power, -a mere fortress of the American Rome; and if free -and worthy of being so by the order of equitable and hard-working freedom- they would be in the continent the guarantee of balance, that of independence for the still threatened Spanish America and that of honor for the great republic of the north, which in the development of its territory, unfortunately already feudal and divided into hostile sections, will find more certain greatness than in the ignoble conquest of its smaller neighbors, and in the inhuman fight that with the possession of them would open against the powers of the world for the predominance of the world”. And a few lines further on he expresses: “It is a world that we are balancing: it is not only two islands that we are going to liberate.”[x]. III In 1898, with its intervention in the Cuban-Spanish conflict, the United States turned the island of Cuba into a test tube for neocolonialism in the region, thus initiating a historical period characterized by the consummation and success of the Monroe Doctrine, consolidating its dominance in the Western Hemisphere and gradually displacing rival powers, especially England. In addition to Cuba and Puerto Rico, Washington secured control of the Isthmus of Panama, one of the most important geostrategic points. The Dominican Republic, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti suffered directly from the policy of the Big Stick and the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine with the intervention and territorial occupation of the Yankee Marines. In the case of Cuba, Monroeism acquired legal connotation through the Platt Amendment, an appendix to the 1901 Constitution, imposed by force on the Cubans under the threat of permanent military occupation. The Platt Amendment gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba whenever it deemed convenient and to lease territories for the establishment of naval and coal bases, the origin of the illegal U.S. presence in Guantanamo Bay to this day. The Platt Amendment was neither conceived nor imposed to safeguard Cuba or any Cuban interest, but as a tangible expression of the Monroe Doctrine. Roosevelt’s successor in the White House, William Taft, through dollar and gunboat diplomacy, combined military intervention with U.S. financial and political control, expanding and consolidating U.S. domination in Central America and the Caribbean. “The day is not far distant,” Taft would unabashedly point out, “when three stars and three stripes at three equidistant points will delimit our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will in fact be ours by virtue of our racial superiority, as it is already ours morally.”[xi] This was followed by the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, all of whom, in one way or another, reinforced the postulates of the Monroe Doctrine, intervening or threatening militarily whenever the requirements of their imperial security in the region were threatened. The Mexican Revolution suffered the onslaught of Monroeism in those years, as did Nicaragua from 1926 to 1933, when Augusto César Sandino, leading a popular army, confronted the Marines who had invaded and occupied the country. The U.S. troops were finally defeated and had to withdraw from the Central American nation on January 3, 1933. However, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, the same one that had advocated the deception of the Good Neighbor policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean, did not stand idly by and conspired against Sandino until his assassination was carried out and the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza was established, “a son of a bitch”, as Roosevelt himself described him, “but our son of a bitch”. IV The outbreak of World War II was a perfect opportunity for the U.S. government to further expand its domination throughout the hemisphere, extending its military bases in the region and getting numerous Latin American and Caribbean countries to join its “hemispheric security” projects, in reality becoming subordinate to the geostrategic objectives of U.S. imperialism. The signing in 1947 by 20 Latin American and Caribbean governments of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) was a palpable example of this. Monroe and Adams could not have been more satisfied from their graves, especially when in 1948 the Organization of American States (OAS) was created as an instrument of the United States to modernize and institutionalize its domination over Latin America and the Caribbean. Its birth was baptized with the bloodshed of the Colombian people, in the midst of a popular uprising triggered by the assassination of progressive leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The government servile to Washington’s interests imposed after those events would be the only one to send troops to the Korean War to please the master of the North. It immediately became evident that the purpose of the OAS had nothing to do with “continental unity and solidarity” in the face of common challenges and “extra-regional threats”, but that it was just another piece in the new world system that was emerging to satisfy the hegemonic interests of the U.S. power elite. The so-called Inter-American system was in reality part of its system of domination. The OAS was an adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine to the post-war scenario in order to align the entire region in the face of the “dangers of international communism”. Hence its uselessness -beyond the possibility of verbally condemning U.S. imperialism- to represent the interests of the Latin American and Caribbean peoples. The history of the OAS has been none other than the most infamous support of oligarchic governments to Washington’s interests, or Washington’s disrespect for the majority, when that majority has disagreed with its positions, reflecting the fallacy of its own existence as a space for concerted action between the two Americas. The OAS Charter itself has been violated and regional consensus has been flouted by the United States on multiple occasions. Undoubtedly, it was conceived and continues to try to function as a Yankee “Ministry of Colonies”, at the root of which lies the Monroist philosophy. At the end of World War II, the United States achieved absolute supremacy in the Western Hemisphere, reaching the pinnacle of the aspirations of the founding fathers, of Adams and Monroe when they launched the famous doctrine and of their most loyal and creative continuators. Having reached that level of control in what they considered their backyard, the power elite of U.S. imperialism felt in a position to extend its hegemony to other geographical areas of the world, even going beyond the limits of what was expressed in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. V The 1960s brought a new revival of the Monroe ideal in the face of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the supposed penetration of communism in the Western Hemisphere, a pretext that was assumed and disseminated from Washington to follow an even more aggressive course against the Cuban revolutionary process and provoke its diplomatic isolation in the hemisphere, a fact that materialized when Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962. In that same year President Kennedy said at a press conference: “The Monroe Doctrine means what it has meant ever since President Monroe and John Quincy Adams enunciated it: that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power into the Western Hemisphere, and that is why we oppose what is happening in Cuba today. That’s why we have cut off our trade relations. That’s why we work in the Organization of American States and in other ways to isolate the communist threat in Cuba.”[xii] The resistance and achievements of the Cuban Revolution, its example of independence and absolute sovereignty at the very gates of the U.S. empire, was an inadmissible reality for the true hegemonic purposes under which the Monroe Doctrine was inspired. At the same geographical point where Washington had begun its long road of successful expansion and preeminence, making its debut as an empire, the most forceful and sustained challenge ever faced by the colossus of the North from the periphery of the South also began and, as if that were not enough, under its own nose and by an island, small in size, but a giant as a moral example for the world. Fidel Castro Ruz, would embrace the Bolivarian, Martian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, internationalist and Marxist ideal, becoming a heresy that even today and facing the future, continues to fight and win great battles, while his example and thought lives on in the Cuban people and revolutionaries around the world. In addition to unleashing a full-spectrum war against Cuba that continues to this day, this anomaly to U.S. domination in the Western Hemisphere led the various U.S. governments to unleash a whole series of violent and reactionary policies to prevent the existence of more Cubas in the region. A new stage of invasions, coups d’état and support for bloody dictatorships began, under the pretext of the fight against communism. In the name of freedom – also of human rights – as Bolivar had warned in 1829, Washington was responsible for the most horrendous crimes practiced against the peoples south of the Rio Bravo. Millions of disappeared, tortured, murdered, was the cost paid by our peoples, a figure impossible to fully calculate if we add up the victims of Monroism since the 19th century. We can never forget that history, which is also part of what these two hundred years of the Monroe Doctrine have meant. How can we not refer to Operation Condor, which between 1975 and 1983 was responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances throughout the continent, where the criminal efforts of the U.S. government and the CIA joined forces with the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Bolivia, as well as terrorist groups of Cuban origin based in Miami, with the aim of curtailing the progressive and revolutionary movement in Latin America. Fifty years ago the Nixon-Kissinger administration unleashed a great plot against the Popular Unity government presided by Salvador Allende in Chile, this operation culminated on September 11, 1973 with a coup d’état, the death of Allende and the establishment of one of the most atrocious dictatorships of the entire continent, whose aftermath is still visible in that country today. Also 40 years ago, the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan launched an invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada on October 25, 1983, where a revolutionary process led by Maurice Bishop was taking place. History as a teacher of life teaches lessons for the present. Fidel’s words to the Chilean people, in Santiago de Chile, on December 12, 1971, warning of the threat posed by the fascist right wing supported from Washington to the revolutionary processes, are especially relevant today: “But what do the exploiters do when their own institutions no longer guarantee their domination? What is their reaction when the mechanisms they have historically counted on to maintain their domination fail them? They simply destroy them. There is no one more anti-constitutional, more anti-legal, more anti-parliamentary, more repressive, more violent and more criminal than fascism. Fascism, in its violence, liquidates everything: it attacks the universities, closes them down and crushes them; it attacks the intellectuals, represses and persecutes them; it attacks the political parties; it attacks the trade union organizations; it attacks all the mass organizations and the cultural organizations. So that there is nothing more violent or more retrograde or more illegal than fascism.”[xiii] VI The fall of the socialist camp unleashed triumphalist airs in Washington about the arrival of the “Pax Americana”, it was no longer just “America for the Americans”, but the world at the feet of the victorious world power of the Cold War as a supposed end of history. However, in addition to the fact that they could not sweep away Cuba, which resisted and emerged victorious again as the main stone in their shoes, popular rebellions and resistances in what the United States considered its safe backyard, immediately began to happen and the least the power elite in that country could have imagined was that there would be a resurgence of the US imperialist regime, which would be the first to be able to take control of Cuba, The least the power elite in that country could have imagined was that there would be a resurgence of Bolivarianism and the arrival to power of progressive and leftist forces, which articulated a change of era where Monroism was called into question, rescuing and updating the Bolivarian ideal for the 21st century. The role of Venezuelan President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, at the head of the Bolivarian Revolution, undoubtedly marked a turn and a leap in Latin American and Caribbean history. Together with the governments of Nestor Kichner in Argentina, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Fidel and Raúl in Cuba, a regional “Our American” project began to take shape, which included the creation of integration organizations such as ALBA-TCP, UNASUR, CELAC, TELESUR, PETROCARIBE, among other mechanisms that sought to break with the domination schemes that had been imposed from the North for decades. In November 2005, the attempts of US imperialism to recolonize the region under a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were defeated, when in Mar del Plata, Argentina, during the IV Summit of the Americas, several Latin American and Caribbean presidents stood up to it, among them the very host of the meeting, President Néstor Kirchner, together with Chávez and Lula. The United States had never faced such a break in its domination of the Western Hemisphere since the end of World War II. The administrations of William Clinton, W. Bush and Barack Obama reacted with all their arsenal and allies to stop and overthrow this process: coups d’état, parliamentary coups, oil coups, economic sanctions, blockades, cultural, media, psychological and fourth generation wars, subversion, espionage, interference in internal affairs, encouragement of treason and division, prosecution of progressive and leftist leaders, diplomatic and economic threats, military maneuvers, activation of the IV Fleet, among many other actions that marked the imperial, oligarchic and right-wing counter-offensive throughout the region. However, under the precepts of Smart Power, in 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama expressed that the Monroe Doctrine had come to an end and in a speech before the OAS, the then Secretary of State, John Kerry, stated that the relationship between the United States and Latin America should be that of equivalent partners, and that his government sought to establish a link not based on doctrines but on common interests and values. But the best lie to these declarations came only two years later when a new coup attempt against the Bolivarian Revolution took place, where U.S. interference became evident. A few weeks later, the White House declared Venezuela an extraordinary threat to its national security. In the case of Cuba, despite the announcement of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014 and the so-called new policy approach, the purposes of achieving regime change and the overthrow of the Revolution were never abandoned by the Obama administration. Facts, statements and documents of the period prove it. However, his successor in the White House, Donald Trump, and his main foreign policy advisors would unabashedly resume the Monroist discourse. One of the statements that generated the most headlines was that of his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who, during a tour of Latin America, stated that the Monroe Doctrine “is as relevant today as the day it was written”. These statements were not only a reaction to a greater presence of China and Russia in the region, but were a response to the non-acceptance of “foreign ideologies” such as those defended by Cuba and Venezuela, although at the heart of the matter we know that the real concern is the disconnection from the system of US imperial domination that the examples of the Cuban and Bolivarian Revolutions signify. VII Today it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are witnessing a world in geopolitical transition and an accelerated decline of US hegemony at the global level. The U.S. power elite in this scenario clings more and more to the Monroist philosophy and, faced with a state of imperial oversizing that prevents it from maintaining control in much more distant geographical areas -as has occurred in Africa and the Middle East-, it is logical that its attention should be focused on the area that for 200 years it has considered its vital space of reproduction and hegemonic expansion: Latin America and the Caribbean. From the imperial logic, what is at stake is to recover the lost ground at any cost in the face of the advance of China, Russia and the progressive and leftist governments themselves. Latin America and the Caribbean continue to be the top priority in U.S. foreign policy. The head of the U.S. Southern Command, Laura Richardson, recently reaffirmed this when, in a conversation with the Atlantic Council think tank, she said: “If I talk about my number two adversary in the region, Russia, I mean, I have, of course, the relations between the countries of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua with Russia. But why is this region important? With all its rich resources and rare earth elements, you have the lithium triangle, which today is necessary for technology. 60% of the world’s lithium is in the lithium triangle: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, you have the largest oil reserves, light sweet crude discovered off Guyana more than a year ago. You have the resources of Venezuela as well, with oil, copper, gold. We have the lungs of the world, the Amazon. We also have 31% of the world’s fresh water in this region. I mean, it’s out of the ordinary. This region matters. It has to do with National Security and we have to step up our game.”[xiv] The scenario that is being drawn is one of opportunities before the gaps and weaknesses of the imperial system itself and the continuous mistakes of the right wing without an alternative project to offer to our peoples, but also of great dangers before the growth of neo-fascist tendencies that are glimpsed on the horizon and also in other parts of the world, especially in Europe. The systemic crisis of imperialism itself leads to increasingly violent and reactionary reactions, given the loss of capacity to maintain the expanded accumulation of capital and the rebellions and rebellions that arise one after another in the periphery and in the very centers of domination, the results of which announce the birth of a multipolar world. In this process, the left forces of the region have a unique moment to relaunch as never before the processes of unity and integration of Latin America and the Caribbean. The conjunctures are very changeable and shifting, tomorrow will be too late. Only united will we be truly free and an international actor with an influential place in the destinies of humanity, which must move urgently, so as not to disappear, towards a change of civilizational paradigm. Otherwise, the United States would once again fall upon our lands in the Americas, breaking the balance of the world, at a time when there may be no way back to save not only the independence and sovereignty of our peoples, but even the human species itself. As the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, pointed out at the first Ibero-American Summit, in Guadalajara, Mexico, on July 18, 1991: “The time has come to fulfill with deeds and not with words the will of those who dreamed one day for our peoples a great common homeland that would be worthy of universal respect and recognition”. In the 21st century, the Monroe Doctrine is as alive as it was in 1823, two hundred years ago. But the ideals and struggles of our peoples are also alive. The ideals and struggles of the Latin American and Caribbean heroes who gave their lives for the independence and unity of Our America are alive today more than ever. In this year 2023, what we truly commemorate is the 95th anniversary of the birth of one of the highest paradigms of revolutionaries for all times, Ernesto Che Guevara, who gave his life to the emancipation of the Latin American, Caribbean, African peoples and the entire global south under the imperialist yoke, our greatest commitment must be, without dogmas and atavisms that hinder the way, the struggle for social justice and the unity and integration of our peoples. Notes [i] Letter from Simón Bolívar to Colonel Patricio Campbell, British Chargé d’Affaires to the Government of Colombia, Guayaquil, August 5, 1829. [ii] James Knox Polk, President of the United States between 1845 and 1849. [iii] Rutherford Birchard Hayes, President of the United States between 1877 and 1881. [iv] Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States between 1901 and 1909. [v] George F. Kennan (1904-2005). American diplomat and government advisor and author of the doctrine of containment against communism. [vi] Indalecio Liévano Aguirre: Bolívarismo y monroísmo, Editorial Revista Colombiana, Bogotá, 1971, pp.40-41. [vii] See Elier Ramírez Cañedo, La miseria en nombre de la libertad, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana, pp.67-74. [viii] Speech by José Martí at Hardman Hall, New York, November 30, 1889. [ix] José Martí, “Congreso Internacional de Washington, su historia, sus elementos y sus tendencias”, Obras Completas, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1975, t. 6, p. 46. [x] José Martí, “El tercer año del Partido Revolucionario Cubano”, Obras Completas, Editorial Nacional de Cuba, Havana. t. 3, p.142. [xi]Quoted by Juan Nicolás Padrón in: The U.S. war against Cuba in the neocolonial republic (II), La Jiribilla, August 3, 2022. [xii] New World Encyclopedia. “Monroe Doctrine.” New World Encyclopedia. October 18, 2018. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Monroe_Doctrine. [xiii] Speech delivered by Commander Fidel Castro Ruz, at the farewell ceremony given to him by the people of Chile, at the National Stadium, Santiago de Chile, December 2, 1971. [xiv] See on the Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBHznUxu2_E AuthorElier Ramírez Cañedo This article was produced by Resumen. Archives July 2023 7/12/2023 Archaeology Is Flipping the Script on What We Know About Ancient Mesoamerica By: Gary M. Feinman & David M. CarballoRead Now Recent archaeology emerging from ancient Mesoamerica is flipping the script of public understanding about the people and institutions that inhabited this world: the evidence tells us that cooperative and pluralistic government was at least as common and more resilient than despotic states. This more complex picture and the achievements of Mesoamerica’s peoples are all the more impressive given the area’s rugged terrain and resource constraints. Compared to ancient Eurasia, the inhabitants of Mesoamerica—the region stretching from Costa Rica to central Mexico—lacked beasts of burden and wheeled transport, and the use of metals was generally limited. Until recently, our understanding of how most societies and early states developed was heavily grounded in interpretations of urban societies in Eurasia. Despotic, coercive rule was assumed (except for ancient Athens and Republican Rome), the actions of the elite were ascribed great importance, and core functions of the economy were presumed to be in the hands of the ruler. Precolonial Mesoamerica doesn’t fit this cookie-cutter framework: neither was economic production or distribution centrally controlled by despotic rulers, nor was governance in societies with very large populations universally coercive. This new perspective is the outgrowth of a decades-long shift in archaeological research’s focus from temples and tombs to regional settlement patterns, urban layouts, house excavations, domestic economies, and agricultural production. By concentrating on the archaeological record, recent generations of researchers have brought fresh attention to features of pre-colonial Mesoamerica that did not fit entrenched stereotypes, many of which had their roots in the nineteenth century. Mesoamerica’s cities and large-scale societies arose independently of other global regions, spawned by their own regional populations. Mesoamerican technological development never experienced the centralizing impact of the monopolization of bronze weaponry through control of scarce tin deposits, nor the “democratizing” or “decentralizing” effects of the adoption of more widely available iron. Mesoamerica was also spared the stark inequalities in military and transportation technology that appeared in Eurasia when some societies developed the chariot, serious naval capabilities, and fortified palaces while others lagged behind. In Mesoamerica, military might came through the control of large infantries using weapons crafted primarily from widely available stone, all of which made for generally more balanced political relations than in Eurasia. Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica is therefore emerging as an ideal place to examine the different ways that humans coalesced in urban contexts, in both collective and autocratic political formations, without some of the key factors that earlier scholars have traditionally seen as necessary or transformative for the rise of premodern societies. How were these large, preindustrial urban centers in Mesoamerica organized? Were they long-lasting? And if so, what accounts for their comparative degrees of resilience across time? In a 2018 study, we coded data from a carefully selected sample of 26 precolonial Mesoamerican cities and prominent political centers. We found that more than half of them were not despotically ruled and that the more collective political centers had greater resilience in the face of droughts and floods, and warfare or shifts in trade. Cities that addressed their social challenges using more collective forms of governance and resource management were both larger and somewhat more resilient than the cities with personalized rulership and more concentrated political power. In general, collectively organized political centers relied more heavily on internal finance generation, such as taxes, as compared to the more autocratic centers that relied more on external financing, such as monopolized trade networks and war booty. The more that political elites can support themselves without relying on financing from the general population, the less they face accountability from the people, and the greater the likelihood that governance and power are hoarded. Additionally, higher levels of internal financing and communal resources often corresponded with evidence of the wider circulation of public goods and the bureaucratization of civic offices. Collectively organized centers with these features as well as spatial layouts, such as large open plazas and wide streets, that provided opportunities for householders and urban dwellers to communicate and express themselves seem to have fostered community persistence as major centers. In a later study that included an updated and expanded sample of 32 well-researched Mesoamerican cities, we found that centers that were both more bottom-up and collective in their governance, were more resilient. While some of these cities had palaces and monuments to rulers as their focal points, others featured more shared and equitably distributed forms of urban infrastructure. This includes apartment compounds, shared terraces or walls within neighborhoods, neighborhood plazas, temples and other civic buildings, and shared roads and causeways, all of which required cooperation and collective labor for their construction and maintenance and would have facilitated more regular face-to-face interaction and periodic public gatherings. The implications from this archaeological research are too informative and powerful to stay put in textbooks. They resonate with evolving views of our present world, which are finding that public space, open communication, fair taxation, and effective bureaucracy can be cornerstones of well-being. These parallels with and understandings from the past can be insightful for us today as models to guide our future planning and identify the social models that best position us to survive the tests of time. AuthorGary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2023 7/12/2023 The doomed OceanGate submersible offers us many of the same lessons that the 1912 Titanic sinking did. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead NowThe Titan and the Titanic: Two Tales of Capitalist Hubris  A hundred and eleven years ago, a ship considered to be “unsinkable” fell to the bottom of the ocean after hitting an iceberg. More than a thousand people died as the Titanic sank into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, among them the engineer who had warned against cutting corners and safety standards. The parallels between the Titanic and the Titan—the tiny headline-garnering submersible that was lost while trying to view the sunken ship’s remains—would be laughably striking were it not for the fact that lives were lost. Whereas the White Star Line company was focused on building luxury liners for the very wealthy, OceanGate, the company that owned the doomed submersible, runs a marine tourism business for people willing to pay $250,000 to dive more than 12,000 feet into the ocean inside a cramped tube to see the ruins of the Titanic. There appears to be no end to the irony linking the Titanic to the Titan. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the submersible and is presumed dead along with his four passengers, once boasted about “breaking rules” to engineer a craft made of carbon fiber instead of steel to withstand the pressures of the deep ocean. According to the New York Times, his wife Wendy, “is a great-great-granddaughter of the retailing magnate Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, two of the wealthiest people to die aboard the [Titanic] ocean liner.” Hindsight is 20-20. The Titanic’s appeal endures in part because it offered a lesson in capitalist hubris as a ship deemed “unsinkable” sank on its maiden voyage in spite of warnings about safety standards. It also offered a stark lesson in how the wealthy were privileged over the poor before and during evacuation. But the Titan story suggests our values have not changed since 1912. Like the Titanic, the Titan faced criticism over safety standards. In 2018, OceanGate’s own director of marine operations, David Lochridge warned of “potential dangers to passengers of the Titan.” That same year, several experts with the Marine Technology Society signed onto a letter warning Rush of potentially “catastrophic” consequences for forgoing safety certifications. In a 2019 press release, OceanGate countered such criticisms saying, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” Just as the Titanic’s owners eschewed some safety standards in their eagerness to sell tickets to high-paying customers, the OceanGate CEO made it clear that he felt he was above the laws of physics. “At some point, safety just is pure waste,” he said a year before his death. Ouch. Experts now believe it was Rush’s reliance on carbon fiber that likely caused the Titan to implode. Rapid innovation can cause rapid death. The fate of the Titan also offers a warning against the arrogance of thrill-seeking billionaires. The “extreme tourism” industry has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions were eased. One of the five men who died on the Titan, Hamish Harding, a British billionaire based in Dubai, UAE, had a penchant for dangerous and expensive exploration and boasted recognition by the Guinness World Records Book. Just a year before he boarded the Titan to dive more than ten thousand feet below the ocean surface, he flew into space on board Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s vanity project, Blue Origin. “What I’ve seen with the ultra-rich—money is no object when it comes to experiences,” remarked a public relations specialist to CNN. “They want something they’ll never forget.” While the Guinness World Records eulogized the late Harding with words like “adventuring,” “pioneering,” and “entrepreneurial,” according to Newsweek, the type of extreme tourism that Harding and others like him are drawn to “can threaten the environment or lead to exorbitant rescue missions and, rarely and most recently, tragedy.” Indeed, a massive amount of publicly funded infrastructure was mobilized in a days-long rescue operation for the doomed Titan before it was known that the submersible had imploded, killing everyone on board. U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told CNN, “Teams were able to mobilize an immense amount of gear to the site in just really a remarkable amount of time… given the fact that we started without any sort of vessel response plan for this or any sort of pre-staged resources.” In response to a call for help from the U.S. Navy, even the French government sent a ship to help. News stories breathlessly shared details of what it would be like to be lost in the deep sea inside a claustrophobically small metal tube floating in the ocean’s abyss, piloted only by a video game console. We were called upon to personally feel the pain of the wealthy explorers. But there was little public discussion of the disaster that took place only a week before the Titan went missing when hundreds of migrants heading from Libya to Italy were presumed dead after their boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Writing for NBC, reporter Chantal Da Silva wrote one of the very few stories on what is likely to be among the worst such disasters in recent history and rightfully compared it to the response garnered by the Titan. She quoted Human Rights Watch’s Judith Sunderland, saying, “It’s a horrifying and disgusting contrast,” to see the difference in resources being mobilized for the Titan versus a boat of hundreds of desperate refugees. Sunderland added, “The willingness to allow certain people to die while every effort is made to save others… it’s a… really dark reflection on humanity.” The Titan is what you get when a corporate cost-cutting mindset meets the lavish thrill-seeking, money-is-no-object ethos of billionaires—the same sort of people who espouse cost-cutting in the interest of profits. In his 1955 bestselling book about the Titanic, A Night to Remember, Walter Lord wrote, “The Titanic woke them up. Never again would they be quite so sure of themselves. In technology especially, the disaster was a terrible blow.” Will the Titan’s fate be a lesson to the so-called “innovators” who scoff at safety regulations as a waste of time? Lord also wrote of the Titanic, “If this supreme achievement was so terribly fragile, what about everything else? If wealth meant so little on this cold April night, did it mean so much the rest of the year?” As the bodies of migrants whose names we will never know remain lost at sea, we are reminded that just like the billionaires who care more for the state of a rotting shipwreck than of humans fleeing violence, war, and poverty, our own collective values have been perverted to uplift elites over others. Will society rethink its faith in moneyed heroes? As broken bits of the submersible lie on the ocean floor next to the equally doomed Titanic, when will we learn from the lessons in hubris offered by such disasters? AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2023  As the Communist Party of the United States entered the fourth full year of the Great Depression in 1933, its leadership recognized that a major consolidation and refocus of Party effort was necessary to reach the vast potential of the moment. The communist movement had been established in the U.S. for 15 years by that point, and some advances had been made in rooting the Party in certain key sectors – but not in others. The left and socialist organizations were all growing amidst the Depression conditions as the tempo of the class struggle increased daily. Turmoil among unemployed workers, small farmers, and veterans was beginning to approach a mass scale, and the battered trade unions had begun stirring in scattered and desperate strikes in opposition to wage cuts and employer assaults. Rightists, fascists, and militarists of every stripe likewise emerged in the economic collapse, tapping ruling class and mass working class discontent alike. Carbon copies of this process were unfolding world-wide. Something big was in the works, but what? A shift to the left? Or the right? Was another world war coming? Where was the United States going? What was ahead for the left? Would it be able to play a serious role in the fast-changing political and economic situation? The Extraordinary Conference Faced with this situation of both extreme threats and opportunities, the Communist Party opted to self-critically examine the actual state of things in its organization and work. Following a directive by the Communist International to conduct this “taking of stock”, parties across the world made the difficult self-assessment. The process that unfolded here in the United States culminated in a national Extraordinary Conference of the Communist Party that convened in New York City in early July 1933. Every facet of Party work, leadership, and membership was critically dissected to prepare for the Conference. What was the real size and composition of Party forces? What was the condition of their actual organizational and political activity? What was working, and what wasn’t working? Was there growth, or not? Why not? What did the membership really amount to, both geographically and industrially? How many were in the unions? In what areas of activity had the Party fallen short, or failed? What was the actual measure of the influence of the Party at that moment? How effective was the leadership? Were new priorities needed? Were previous leadership decisions being carried out, or not? Was new leadership needed? A rapid yet expansive and comprehensive inventory and inspection was made to determine what was really happening on the ground, top to bottom, in real numbers. Fuzzy claims and guesswork were discarded in favor of clear fact-based assessments. ( (For those seeking background on the 1932 and 1933 period see Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume 11, The Great Depression and William Z. Foster, The History of the Communist Party of the United States, both from International Publishers. A Party Only on the Margins The 350 delegates who eventually took part in the 1933 Extraordinary Conference travelled to New York City with their heads spinning. They had much to consider as such a process had never before been attempted on such a scale. There was no escaping the fact that while the Party had made progress, and membership had increased markedly in the early Depression, the rate of progress, and the depth of the progress was insufficient to take advantage of the tremendous openings presented under the new conditions. Mistakes, miscalculations, and failures were chronicled. Some success was noted, but not nearly enough. Overwhelmingly the preparatory work and the Conference deliberations themselves revealed and concluded that the Party was still not growing and expanding in major ways. But why? Tremendous efforts were being made, some truly valiant and self-sacrificing. The answer to these questions became self-evident as a result of the work done to arrive at the Extraordinary Conference: insufficient effort, sometimes no effort had been conducted to root the organization in the working class, in the industries, in the workplaces, and in the unions. While all manner of good works and activities were being carried out by Party members and leaders in many fields, the Conference zeroed-in on the undeniable fact that the focus of the vast majority of its activity was far, far, removed from the workplaces and the trade unions. Too much priority was being placed on struggles removed from the centrality of the workplace and the working class that comprised the natural constituency of a mass socialist party. The Communist Party existed largely in the margins of U.S. political life, with no roadmap into the mainstream. Facing this fact meant confronting it, explaining the error, and redirecting the new and greatly unified Party work. This work was intended to bring not just membership growth in numbers, but in quality. Growth needed to occur in places likely to position the Party for potential mass growth among workers as the Depression continued to worsen. At its conclusion the Conference issued a broadside to the membership, an “Open Letter”, explaining that business as usual, the same routine, just putting one foot in front of the other, all these failed approaches had to be cast aside. Foster Endorses the Renewed Direction William Z. Foster recalled that the Extraordinary Conference “…addressed an Open Letter to the Party, outlining a program of militant struggle, stressing the need to concentrate upon building Party units and trade unions in the basic industries and to give all support to the growing mass strike movement. …(The Extraordinary Conference) …played a vital role in preparing the Party for the big mass struggles.” While not long the “Open Letter” issued by the Conference was distributed in massive quantities to all corners of the Communist Party membership and among supporters and contacts. An open letter to all members of the Communist Party, The Daily Worker of July 12, 1933, featured a front-page headline and article regarding the Conference, blaring that “Communist Party Holds Extraordinary National Conference to Strengthen Work in the Factories and Trade Unions”. The next day the Daily Worker published the entire text of the Open Letter to inform the membership and trigger discussion. For many months after the Conference, Party publications and cadre repeated the drumbeat; “Into the factories, into the unions!” There was unity on a scale never before seen. It wasn’t unanimous, or monolithic, but large sections of a national organization were moving in the same general direction. For a change. he effect of the Open Letter was immediate and electrifying. The preface of the letter explained that “This Extraordinary Conference and the Open Letter are designed to rouse all of our resources, all of the forces of the Party to change this situation, and to give us guarantees that the essential change in our work will be made.” Several basic tasks were mandated to move the organization forward, out of its isolation from the mass of the working class, to be in a better position to play a decisive role in the rapidly unfolding and spreading labor upsurge. It was decided that the Party was to refocus its primary efforts on organizing the workplaces and unions, specifically in geographic areas where key industries were concentrated. Expanded work was directed in the left-led unions and labor movement generally. It called for greatly increased activity among the unemployed, for a complete overhaul of work to expand distribution of the Party press and therefore its message. It called for the Party to embark on a program to dramatically expand the ranks of Party leaders and cadre drawn primarily from the workshops and unions. Other work of the Party was not abandoned, but all of it was rethought and relaunched to support and complement the new emphasis. The results were immediate. New members began to trickle in, then pour in. Work in the unions exploded on all fronts, placing the Communist Party in the leadership of more labor struggles than it could have imagined just the previous year. Party morale zoomed as nearly everyone sensed that the decisions of the Extraordinary Conference had been correct. Can We Do Anything Today? Could any process such as that recounted here with the Extraordinary Conference be replicated today? So far as the status today of the left-wing organizations and networks, they apparently continue to slowly grow and develop, albeit without any central strategy or concentration of activity. With only a few exceptions the left organizations remain small and scattered although virtually all have grown significantly in the past decade. Much of the new membership arrives spontaneously or anonymously via the Internet. Members lapse or drop and there are few explanations for why they did this. Actual programmatic recruitment seems sparse and is sometimes completely neglected. Organizational functioning seems haphazard, and in some cases is conducted solely by Internet. In-person meetings and work still lag on account of the pandemic’s residual effects and likewise because of the widely scattered membership. Tremendous energy is expended on support for left Democrats running for office – or governing – in some of the organizations. The jury seems out on whether this work builds the organization of the Democratic Party or of the socialist organization offering the free assistance. Every left group or chapter announces its formation with a creative logo, a web site, and with an ample social media presence, just before deciding “what to do first?” Actual discussion of socialism or study of socialist history or philosophy seems to be underway here and there but is not promoted widely. Socialist oriented podcasts, videos, and on-line journals seem to be having no problem growing and expanding – and reaching a significant audience – but few put any emphasis on actually building the socialist movement in any concrete way. For the first time in many decades, it appears that the center of gravity for the left has migrated away from the college campuses and into the communities, although the colleges and universities continue to dominate the vast bulk of left leadership and writing. “Socialist” activism today is most certainly rooted and focused on activities mostly outside of the workplace, outside of the unions, with some noted exceptions. As was the situation facing the left organizations and the Communist Party of 1933 there were hopeful signs and good works being done, some progress, but not nearly enough of either. As for the workplace and trade union work of the left organizations today, there is only spotty and relatively recent work in evidence. All is positive, but as yet in too small a supply to be decisive or even measurable in many places. Anecdote might also lead us to conclude that the majority of workplace and trade union work underway by the left is spontaneous and not deliberately organized, a result of no more than the need of everyone post-school to go to work and somehow earn a living. The development and reinforcement of left forces within the unions is fragmentary at best, and as the last retirements of the 1970’s generation proceed many unions find themselves without any substantial left-wing membership or activism. There are widespread numbers of dedicated socialist trade unionists and hopeful organizers and salts at work, but again scattered with apparently little coordination, strategy, or common mission. Ignore Workers? Or Reach Out to the Working Class? Critics and opponents of the Open Letter and its methodology will likely point out that the degree of organizational unity and action that the Communist Party was able to muster was the result of a Leninist, meaning “democratic centralist” party structure and functioning. They might offer that to expect today’s left-wing groups to function with this degree of cohesion and discipline is unrealistic, even impossible. But this instantaneous rejection of a refocused course of action is defeatist in the extreme, perhaps unintentionally so. Trade unions are periodically able to adopt a unifying common mission, then apply resources and leadership effort towards that goal. The decision by the socialist organizations to refocus on workplace and trade union organizing does not require a restructuring of the organization along Leninist lines. Such a direction would be beneficial but is not required for the concentration on the working class to be initiated.The left organizations have for the most part avoided concentration on the workplace and the unions for decades, and their decisions to focus on the “community” aspects of work has proven to yield a poor return for the oceans of effort poured into it. As William Z. Foster proved with both the meat packing campaign and the great steel organizing drive – and later the steel strike – otherwise small and scattered left forces can literally move mountains when there is a clear, defined, and achievable goal with realistic time frames offered for the duration of the struggle. The bulk of Foster’s early work and accomplishments were not the result of the work of disciplined Leninist cadre but were instead the result of a relative handful of single-minded militants leading significant numbers of members in the unions – and relentlessly pushing on the union leaderships to carry out a popular course of action. Mass campaigns are feasible today that would sweep into action large numbers of militants and members with no required discipline other than common agreement. The existing left organizational leadership must be won over to this understanding, and to an admission that so long as the left organizations pursue a loose, unfocused, and scattered program of activity that the results will remain small. So long as the left organizations treat the workplace and unions as an afterthought, or as a sideline, the bottomless basket of left issues will forever take precedence over direct worker contact and organization. And unless the socialist movement is able somehow to root itself directly in working class struggles, history has shown repeatedly that it will ebb and flow and eventually dissipate as new issues du jour appear and disappear. The Left Wing Must Do the Work The legacy of the Extraordinary Conference and its Open Letter is sadly forgotten but should be revisited. Not only for the organizational lesson that it offers, but because it requires socialist leadership to accept responsibility for their work and performance. The resolve of the Communist Party leadership and membership that flowed forward from the Conference and its Open Letter set a tone and course for a focus on union organizing and contact with the working masses that contributed greatly to the 1930’s radicalization. The foundations of the CIO upsurge were laid in many quarters by the work of the trade union militants in or around the Communist Party, and by millions of ordinary workers swept up in the left-wing spirit of the times. Left organizations other than the Communist Party – small and not so small alike – for the most part all turned their focus towards working class organization and trade union struggles in that period. These factors all contributed to the largest socialist and trade union organizational growth in the past 100 years. Several of the significant left organizations and networks now approach their respective conventions in the year to come. Is such a refocus on the centrality of the class struggle and the working class possible, even in part? Can it be placed on the agenda? Will forces emerge to promote something resembling a concentration on the workplaces and the unions? Or will the situation persist where all issues are treated as equals, with little emphasis, and little hope of significant growth and revival of the labor movement? Will the leadership of the left organizations be measured by their performance so far as building the organization and its real reach, or will they be swept again into office based on a renewed approach to methods already proven to be failed? I encourage all of the left militants, trade unionists, and workers toughing it out in the shops trying to organize to familiarize themselves with the Open Letter. It is perhaps a modern-day guide for action today. Author-Chris Townsend was a member and staff member of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) for a combined 38 years. He continues to work as a union organizer today. He may be reached at [email protected] This article was republished from Marxism-Leninism Today. Archives June 2023 6/10/2023 Revolution and counterrevolution: remembering Tiananmen 34 years later By: Amanda YeeRead Now This June 4 marks the 34th anniversary of what is known in the United States as the Tiananmen “massacre.” The story we are typically told in the West is that young student activists had gathered in Tiananmen Square, uniting around the liberal demands of democracy and freedom, bravely defying the repressive Chinese government. After weeks of these ongoing protests, the Communist Party of China had had enough and cracked down on the peaceful protesters. As the story goes, in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989, People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into the square. They were said to be indiscriminately shooting and mowing down innocent, unarmed protesters, killing thousands. To put it simply, this particular understanding of a “massacre” of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4 is a fabrication, the mythology of which has been exploited by the West for over 30 years as evidence of the ruthless, authoritarian nature of the CPC to justify imperialist aggression against China.  The iconic “tank man” Even the story of the “tank man” — the most iconic image to come out of the event and has become a metonym for the Tiananmen massacre itself — has been deliberately manipulated by the U.S. media machine in the service of its anti-China propaganda effort. For one, the photo was taken on the morning of June 5, not June 4, so the military tanks were actually leaving the square. And second, the man in the photo was not run over by the tanks as implied by the image. The full video shows that after a few seconds of the stand-off, the tank attempts several times to swerve around the man, but he manages to keep stepping in its way blocking its path. Finally, the man climbs on top of the tank, looks to speak to the driver for a few minutes, before finally climbing off and eventually jumping in front of the tank’s path again. The standoff continues for another few seconds, before the man is finally pulled away by a group of civilians. The truth of the 1989 Tiananmen protests is far more complex than the simple rendering of an authoritarian Chinese government cracking down unprovoked on pro-democracy protesters — it’s a story of societal divisions unresolved from the Cultural Revolution, which bled into the “reform and opening up” policy implemented under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, finally erupting into the the seven-week long occupation of Tiananmen Square. It is also a story of the internal and external contradictions the Communist Party of China found itself navigating as it embarked on economic development. 1966-1976: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution To fully understand the Tiananmen protests, we need to lay out the economic conditions and emerging ideological undercurrents which laid the foundations for them. In 1966, Mao along with close allies in the leadership of the Communist Party, like Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan — known as the Gang of Four — launched what is known in China as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This triggered a decade-long struggle within the CPC between their faction — which sought to prevent China and the international communist movement from going down the path of what they saw as Soviet revisionism that strayed from the revolutionary principles of Marxism — and who they called the “capitalist roaders” led by Deng Xiaoping. It’s important to note here that both factions of the CPC feared counterrevolution and recognized the necessity of economic development in order to overcome the legacy of its century of domination by colonial powers, but differed in their assessment of how to achieve it. Mao favored the continuation of a fully planned economy. He feared a new local bourgeoisie would develop as a result of opening up China to the global capitalist economy, and that it would bring with it counterrevolution. Deng, on the other hand, recognized these risks, but was willing to take the gamble. By granting access to its domestic market and cheap labor pool, China would in exchange receive access to Western technology, allowing it to develop the productive capacity of its economy. Deng saw no other option but to walk that tightrope to achieve modernization. Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as a continuation of the class struggle. The ten-year campaign not only targeted those seen as revisionists and counterrevolutionaries both inside and outside the party, but also attempted to bridge the divide between the rural and urban populations. The political tumultuousness and social upheaval of the period is well known, but less acknowledged are its achievements, particularly in education reform and expansion of medical care into the rural sectors of society. At the time, 80% of the Chinese population lived in the rural areas, and most of them were illiterate. The Cultural Revolution saw expansion of primary school education and development of railways and other infrastructure to these areas. During this period, college entrance exams were suspended, and instead, high school graduates were sent to the countryside to do work and learn from local populations. Despite these achievements, the rural-urban class divide still remained, and these antagonisms would intensify in the lead-up to, and during, the Tiananmen protests. 1976-1978: death of Mao and path to reform After a decade, the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976. In December 1978, at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, the CPC met and adopted the “Resolution on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China” to reckon with and correct what they saw as the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, and to officially set the party on the path to reform. Recognizing the Cultural Revolution as a “severe setback,” this resolution placed the responsibility for its excesses on Mao, but did not repudiate him. It argued Mao made grave mistakes during the later years of his life, but what he contributed to China and the CPC far outweighed whatever missteps he took. With this resolution came a reevaluation of the priorities of the revolution. Whereas Mao had previously identified the class struggle — of which the Cultural Revolution was the culmination — as the principal contradiction, the CPC now contended that China had advanced past this stage, as the “exploiters have been eliminated as classes.” While elements of class struggle still remained, the principal contradiction was now of backward social productivity versus people’s material needs. This resolution concluded: After socialist transformation was fundamentally completed, the principal contradiction our country has had to resolve is that between the growing material and cultural needs of the people and the backwardness of social production. It was imperative that the focus of Party and government work be shifted to socialist modernization centering on economic construction and that the people’s material and cultural life be gradually improved by means of an immense expansion of the productive forces. In the final analysis, the mistake we made in the past was that we failed to persevere in making this strategic shift. What is more, the preposterous view opposing the so-called “theory of the unique importance of productive forces,” a view diametrically opposed to historical materialism, was put forward during the “cultural revolution”… All our Party work must be subordinated to and serve this central task — economic construction. All our Party cadres, and particularly those in economic departments, must diligently study economic theory and economic practice as well as science and technology. Thus, the CPC embarked on the road to combine its planned economy with a market-based one in order to, in Deng’s words, “liberate the productive forces and speed up economic growth,” so that the people of China would one day achieve common prosperity. 1980-1989: Reform and Opening-Up era Under Deng’s leadership, the CPC officially launched its “Reform and Opening-Up” program in 1980 to reboost an economy devastated by the Cultural Revolution and speed up modernization to build its productive forces. During this period, China integrated itself into the world economy abroad, while scaling back social welfare programs and implementing economic liberalization policies domestically. The “reforms” included domestic policies to boost economic productivity. The government’s “iron rice bowl” safety net was gradually chipped away, jobs were no longer guaranteed by the government, and the centrally planned economy was transformed into more of a market-oriented one, while retaining some level of state control. In the rural areas, communes were decollectivized, with the collective farming system converted into a “household responsibility system,” which “allowed households to contract land, machinery, and other facilities from collective organizations.” The households could make independent operating decisions within the confines of their contract, which allowed farmers to financially benefit from their crops. Farmer incomes and agricultural prices were raised to encourage consumption in the rural areas and help further close the rural-urban income gap. Crop yields increased significantly during this period, adding another major boon for farmers. Urban reforms included decentralizing state industrial management and reforming state-owned enterprises to grant them some level of business independence and autonomy, and the lifting of price controls on staple foods and agricultural commodities. The “opening up” included the implementation of Deng’s “Open Door Policy,” which allowed for foreign business investment into the country in exchange for access to China’s cheap labor pool and the promise of super-profits. A degree of risk was always present in the pursuit of these economic policies. They opened up China to foreign investment and foreign technology transfer to allow it to overcome its poverty and underdevelopment, but as predicted a capitalist class emerged. Along with that came a new bourgeois ideology, producing social forces hostile to socialism. Now a segment of society, particularly students and intellectuals, increasingly looked westward to the United States and its institutions as an aspirational political model. Liu Xiaobo — one of the most vocal activists during the Tiananmen protests who later won the Nobel Peace Prize — relayed such pro-colonialist aspirations in a 1988 interview when he firmly stated, “To choose Westernization is to choose to be human.” In another 1988 statement, Liu similarly asserted, “It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is. Given the size of China, certainly it would need 300 years of colonization for it to become like what Hong Kong is today. I even doubt whether 300 years would be enough.” Of this political shift among China’s intellectuals, Li Minqi, a Chinese political economist who also participated in the Tiananmen protests as a student, wrote, “[A]mong the intellectuals, there was a sharp turn to the right … Many regarded Mao Zedong himself as an ignorant, backward Chinese peasant who turned into a cruel, power-hungry despot who had been responsible for the killing of tens of millions. The politically active intellectuals no longer borrowed discourse from Marxism. Instead, western classical liberalism and neoliberal economics, as represented by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, had become the new, fashionable ideology.” For his part, Deng anticipated and warned of these kinds of bourgeois ideological undercurrents, which would later feature so prominently among the student protesters at the 1989 Tiananmen protests. In 1985, he stated matter-of-factly, “Since the downfall of the Gang of Four an ideological trend has appeared that we call bourgeois liberalization. Its exponents worship the ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ of the Western capitalist countries and reject socialism. This cannot be allowed. China must modernize; it must absolutely not liberalize or take the capitalist road, as countries of the West have done.” Though Deng saw the necessity of employing “the mechanisms of the marketplace to develop its productive economy” for the time being, the goal of socialism remained. Deng argues that the development of production would in time lead to common prosperity for the people. 1989: the Tiananmen Square protests It was these legacies of the Cultural Revolution and the economic liberalization reforms, which would provide the social basis for the Tiananmen protests. On April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang, former General Secretary of the CPC and one of the more radical advocates of the free market program, suffered a heart attack and died suddenly. Hu was one of the leaders of the “Boluan Fanzheng” (translated as “to eliminate chaos, and return to normality”) campaign, which reversed many policies of the Cultural Revolution. It was the Boluan Fanzheng policy which saw the reopening of universities closed during that ten-year period, as well as the reopening of college entrance exams, granting students a pathway to higher education again. He also exonerated a number of intellectuals persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. For these reasons, Hu was a beloved figure among students and intellectuals. Over the next few days, university students mourned Hu’s death and held rallies in his honor, marching to Tiananmen Square to place flowers for him at the Monument to the People’s Heroes. These rallies then evolved into protests for further economic and political reform, turning into an occupation of the square, which lasted seven weeks until June 4, in what we now know as the Tiananmen protests. The demands in the beginning of the protests were mostly related to the lifting of price controls, inflation and labor market competition. The lifting of price controls led to price hikes on staple foods and commodities for those in urban areas. This was a boon to rural businesses and farmers, but in the cities this intensified an existing inflation and cost of living crisis. Urban workers’ wages were not keeping pace with this inflation, which had reached a staggering 18% by 1989. It was for these reasons that a significant number of workers eventually joined the students in the protests in Tiananmen. Demands also revolved around ending corruption within the CPC, as some party members used their political leverage to become the earliest capitalists, enriching themselves. The student protesters especially resented those in the party who with the right connections were able to attain the few higher level jobs that existed. While the 1980s saw an expansion of higher education, most jobs at that time were still in low-end manufacturing, which didn’t appeal to university students. But sharp class divisions were evident among those in the square, and tensions existed between student and worker protesters. Though they were eager to grow their numbers and enlist support, the student protesters shunned and looked down upon the urban workers, and the two segments were often segregated at Tiananmen. Student leaders insisted that the workers stay off the main part of the square, in order to keep the democracy movement in their eyes “pure.” The student leaders of the protests were not shy in voicing their contempt for the workers. In an interview for The New York Times, Wang Dan, a 20-year-old history student at Beijing University who was one of the most prominent student leaders in the square, stated bluntly that the movement was not yet ready for worker participation. According to him, “Democracy must first be absorbed by students and intellectuals before they can be spread to others.” Li Minqi similarly wrote of these elitist attitudes felt among the students in his later reflection of the protests: As the student demonstrations grew, workers in Beijing began to pour onto the streets in support of the students, who were, of course, delighted. However, being an economics student, I could not help experiencing a deep sense of irony. On the one hand, these workers were the people that we considered to be passive, obedient, ignorant, lazy, and stupid. Yet now they were coming out to support us. On the other hand, just weeks before, we were enthusiastically advocating “reform” programs that would shut down all state factories and leave the workers unemployed. I asked myself: do these workers really know who they are supporting? Indeed, the demands put forth by the protests overall were often diverse, and at times at odds with one another. Workers were critical of Deng’s economic liberalization policies as they bore the brunt of their negative impacts. Inspired by the emerging capitalist class in China, the students demanded an acceleration of these reforms, yet were also protesting the very consequences these reforms brought — corruption, inflation and skyrocketing cost of living. And of course, the vague demands of “democracy” adopted by the students and intellectuals reflected the nascent “bourgeois liberalization” political orientation that Deng had previously warned of. And while worker participation in the protests was certainly not insignificant, it should be noted that the political character of a movement is not determined by the individual ideologies of the participants — it is determined by the movement’s leadership. It was the student protesters with their pro-western orientation, signs written in English and cries for bourgeois democracy that received the most international media attention and the most resources. They refused to cede or even share leadership with urban workers. Over time due to this media amplification, it was the student leaders’ demands that became synonymous with the movement itself. Reporters from NBC, BBC, ABC and Voice of America had a consistent presence throughout the protests and covered them extensively. The U.S.-funded propaganda arm VOA, in particular, had an especially heavy presence in Tiananmen with one correspondent recalling, “VOA was extremely popular on the square, with students holding up radios so crowds could hear our Mandarin-language newscasts. Others transcribed our stories and posted them on electrical poles around the city.” As time passed, the actions along with the demands began to escalate as student leaders became more and more hardline and radicalized. In mid-May, the student leaders organized mass hunger strikes to coincide with the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, then-leader of the Soviet Union. The hunger strikes prevented the Chinese government from welcoming Gorbachev in Tiananmen Square. The protests paralyzed the city and alarmingly created fissures and power struggles within the CPC. Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang openly expressed sympathy toward the student protesters even visiting them in the square as a show of support. Premier Li Peng finally declared martial law on May 20, further radicalizing the students. Many protesters defied martial law and chose to remain in the square. In late May, to further pander to western sympathies, the students built and erected a 30-foot “Goddess of Democracy” statue, bearing a striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty, attracting international attention. There was undoubtedly CIA involvement in the protests, but the full extent remains unclear to this day. According to a Vancouver Sun article from Sept. 17, 1992, the CIA had sources among protesters and within Chinese intelligence services, and it was assisting students in organizing the anti-government movement by providing support in the form of typewriters and other equipment. Chinese officials at the time also accused U.S. diplomats and CIA agents of “collecting intelligence aggressively” during the protests, and Zhao was later arrested and charged as having connections to U.S. intelligence. Given what we do know about CIA involvement in other socialist countries during the Cold War, however, we can safely assume there was some level of U.S. intelligence at least attempting to steer the direction of the student demonstrations. Soon, what were demands to control inflation turned into calls to overthrow the CPC entirely, with some leaders even going so far as calling for bloodshed. In a now infamous tearful interview, 23-year-old student protest leader Chai Ling, who was considered “commander-in-chief” of the square, tells a BBC reporter: The students keep asking, “What should we do next? What can we accomplish?” I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. It’s worth noting here that by the time of this interview, Chai had already secured a visa to the United States as part of the CIA’s Operation Yellowbird mission, which secretly smuggled hundreds of student dissidents out of China. She would not even be around for the bloodshed she was calling for. After their arrival into the United States, student leaders like Chai would then be thrust into the media spotlight, meeting with politicians and used as propaganda tools to cement the mythology around the so-called June 4th massacre. Up until that point, the response to the demonstrations on the part of the CPC had been remarkably restrained throughout. But It was clear that without decisive action, the protests had the potential to escalate even further, bringing about the very real threat of civil war or even toppling the Chinese government. June 4, 1989: myth vs. reality As the story goes, the protesters continue to defy martial law, and finally having had enough, the CPC orders the People’s Liberation Army to clear Tiananmen. According to this story, in the early morning hours of June 4, PLA tanks roll into the square, indiscriminately mowing down peaceful, unarmed demonstrators in a bloody crackdown. The “massacre” narrative is as sensationalist as it is incontestable: Supposed eyewitness accounts tell tales of student protesters linking arms only to be run over repeatedly by military vehicles, remains of protesters incinerated and then washed down drains, of students begging for their lives only to be bayoneted by soldiers. Some western reports estimate as many as 10,000 killed. But there was no such massacre in Tiananmen Square. By that time, most of the protesters had left the square, and the ones who remained left peacefully after negotiating with the army. A leaked diplomatic U.S. cable sent around that time confirms there was no such bloodshed in the square. “They [student protesters] were able to enter and leave the square several times and were not harassed by troops,” the cable reads. “Remaining with students by the Monument to the People’s Heroes until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings of students in the square or at the monument.” Other eyewitness accounts from on-the-ground journalists corroborate this. CBS News correspondent Richard Roth, who covered the protests later wrote, “There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a ‘massacre’ had recently occurred in that place.” Likewise, Jay Matthews, who traveled to Beijing to cover the protests for The Washington Post, wrote in 1998, “The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square. A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.” Reporter Nicholas Kristoff, then-Beijing correspondent for The New York Times, similarly disputed the account, printed in the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, of PLA troops attacking students in Tiananmen: The central theme of the Wen Wei Po article was that troops subsequently beat and machine-gunned students in the area around the monument [Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen] and that a line of armored vehicles cut off their retreat. But the witnesses say that armored vehicles did not surround the monument — they stayed at the north end of the square — and that troops did not attack students clustered around the monument. Several other foreign journalists were near the monument that night as well and none are known to have reported that students were attacked around the monument. Street fighting on the night of June 3 While these journalists refute the narrative of a Tiananmen “massacre,” most of them do acknowledge that street fighting had occurred the night of June 3 in other parts of Beijing, albeit under different circumstances. This is consistent with Chinese government accounts of the events. On June 2, the CPC decided to clear Tiananmen Square. On the night of June 3, PLA tanks pushed into Beijing with clashes occurring in the neighborhoods of Muxidi, Gongzhufen, and along Chang’an Avenue. These clashes occurred outside of Tiananmen, so while there were some students involved, they were relatively few in number. Armed with Molotov cocktails, workers and civilians stopped and attacked trucks of soldiers, seizing weapons to use against the soldiers. Tanks were set ablaze by the rioters with soldiers still inside. Some soldiers were even lynched. A Wall Street Journal article from June 5, 1989, recounts: “As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen, many troops were set on by angry mobs who screamed, ‘Fascists.’ Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung up at an intersection east of the square.” Journalist David Aikman recalls, “In some places, soldiers were stripped almost naked, chased or struck by angry citizens. Other injured troops had difficulty getting to hospitals as mobs deflated or slashed the tires of military ambulances.” According to official Chinese government figures, the number of people killed in these clashes totaled 241, a figure which includes PLA soldiers. June 3 reveals historical legacies of Chinese socialist path One might ask why these details matter. After all, people were killed during that time — what is the significance of the exact location, or how many? The details matter because they present a narrative not so easily co-optable by western press in the service of its imperialist aims. For one, the reality of the street fighting disrupts the popular understanding of the military attacking “non-violent” protesters — it is this characterization of “nonviolence” which is crucial to evoking western sympathy. The workers involved in these protests and clashes came from factories, steel mills, railway yards and construction companies, and they did not have the level of higher education that the student protesters did. They did not draw the same level of attention from western press as the highly educated, pro-western student leaders, who their university-educated counterparts in the United States could identify with and see themselves in. It is this status of untainted victimhood which mobilizes support for foreign intervention. The details also present a story of what were at the time the contemporary realities and historical legacies of the Chinese socialist path. The night of June 3 saw an eruption of class antagonisms and deep societal divisions from the Cultural Revolution never fully resolved — and in fact heightened — by the policies of the Reform and Opening-Up era. PLA soldiers, for instance, were mainly recruited from the countryside where the CPC drew a large base of support and where there were many beneficiaries of Cultural Revolution and reform policies. Many urban workers and middle-class students and intellectuals suffered many negative impacts of these policies — albeit unevenly — such as inflation, job precarity and high cost of living. These clashes then can be understood as spontaneous expressions of these long-standing divisions. These deaths are a tragedy and are understood in China as such, but they should be recognized as part of the tragic complexities of a nation attempting to overthrow the yoke of a century of underdevelopment and subjugation, and to assert its own sovereignty. That the West manipulates the details and fabricates its own mythology around what happened only speaks to its own self-serving imperialist ambitions. The Tiananmen protests as a counterrevolutionary force Again, the class character of a movement is determined not by the individual make-up of its participants, but by its leadership. Workers may have been active during the demonstrations, but the student leadership had a bourgeois, pro-capitalist orientation. It’s clear from the students’ contempt for and behavior toward the workers at Tiananmen alone that their goals did not lie in advancing the interests of the broad masses of people. For western imperialists, Deng’s reforms were not enough: They wanted unfettered access to China’s markets and resources so that the country became a neocolony of the United States. Around the same time as the Tiananmen protests, anti-communist and counterrevolutionary revolts were spreading across Eastern Europe. One only needs to look toward the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few years later to understand the stakes of Tiananmen in 1989. If these anti-government forces had succeeded, China would have been thrust back decades in its economic and socialist development. An overthrow of the CPC would have resulted in the kind of “shock therapy” capitalist reforms that devastated the former USSR applied to China’s 1.1 billion people. The ensuing poverty, disease and starvation would have been massive. It was at Tiananmen that the unresolved contradictions from the Cultural Revolution and the Reform and Opening-Up period were unleashed — this much is true. But in the end, the final confrontation was between revolution and counterrevolution, and the outcome has had profound consequences that continue to shape the world today. AuthorAmanda Yee This article was republished from Liberation News. Archives June 2023  Recently, the United States has been followed by a number of European countries in supporting a cold war policy toward Russia and China. This has created increasing problems in Europe—bringing a major war to the continent, creating serious economic difficulties, and intensifying a decline in living standards. In this context, the case for Europe establishing an independent foreign policy has gained support, as a way of ensuring security and prosperity. Starting with the most extreme expression of the situation, the war in Ukraine has claimed tens of thousands of lives. The UN calculates nearly 18 million people need humanitarian assistance and millions have been displaced. This tragedy was avoidable. The underlying cause of the war was the U.S. policy to expand NATO up to Russia’s border, including the proposal that Ukraine join NATO when Russia has repeatedly made clear that that is a ‘red line’ threat to its security interests. The U.S. continued to push for NATO expansion despite this. The absence of an independent European foreign policy has been demonstrated in the policy of major European governments during the past year, with these governments supporting U.S. policy in Ukraine. This has been extraordinarily expensive. In 2022, NATO powers allocated huge sums to Ukraine—about $50 billion from the U.S., €52 billion from the EU and its member states, and £2.3 billion from Britain. In 2023, there has been an escalation in military aid sent. After pressure from the U.S., Germany approved the deployment of their Leopard tanks, while the British government is sending depleted uranium munitions. Militarization in Europe is clearly on the rise, in the past year, with major European governments increasing military spending—something the U.S. has called for over many years. Last year, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged €100 billion in military spending, committing Germany to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense going forward. President Emmanuel Macron is increasing France’s military spending to around €60 billion by 2030—approximately double 2017’s allocation. Britain, historically the U.S.’s closest European ally, already spends 2.2 percent of GDP on the military, £48 billion a year. The U.S., in turn, has 100,000 troops stationed in Europe and numerous military bases, including 119 in Germany. The impact of this has negatively affected Europe’s interests. Without an effort to negotiate peace in Ukraine, rather than escalation, many will die and be displaced. Meanwhile, across Europe, there is an impact of high energy prices as a result of sanctions on Russia, while increased military spending diverts resources away from addressing the cost-of-living crisis. Europe has become more dangerous and poorer. The U.S. has not supported recent proposals for peace in Ukraine, such as those from China, which means a prolonged war. European countries could pursue a different path and play a role in backing negotiations to end the conflict. Global Cooperation Is the Key to Economic Prosperity Economically, Europe faces a parallel crisis. Slow economic growth, high inflation, and government austerity policies are hitting living standards while some European governments’ policies toward Russia and China have made the situation worse. Europe has been seriously damaged by participation in sanctions against Russia. These have increased energy prices while the U.S. has profited from selling more expensive liquefied gas to Europe to replace cheaper Russian gas delivered by pipelines. Journalist Seymour Hersh has made a serious case that the U.S. was also responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany. But European governments have failed to support the call for an independent investigation into this attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure. The U.S. has also urged Europe to pursue a more anti-China posture. This recently led to Europe’s relationship with China deteriorating. The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment between China and the EU, agreed in principle in December 2020, has not been signed despite the economic opportunities it opens for Europe. European governments are also being asked to join the U.S. attacks on China’s technology industry, some recently banning TikTok from government work phones with pressure for a wider ban. The economic consequences of this direction would be serious for Europe. China is the EU’s largest trading partner and the most rapidly growing major economy. The IMF’s latest growth projections for 2023 estimate China will grow by 5.2 percent—six times faster than the euro area’s 0.8 percent. The potential benefits for Europe of increasing win-win economic cooperation with China are therefore considerable. The Struggle for an Independent Foreign Policy The U.S.’s new cold war policy has therefore tended to produce chaos in Europe. In light of this, there are now signs some major European politicians do not wish to continue down this course. President Macron made a widely reported comment following his April 2023 visit to China. He stated that Europe must not be a “follower” of the U.S. when it comes to Taiwan, a key issue, and should instead pursue “strategic autonomy.” This followed significant economic deals struck between France and China during Macron’s visit. It remains to be seen whether Macron will have the political strength to follow through on such an independent approach, particularly given the backlash these comments immediately received from Washington. In March 2023, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez struck a similarly independent tone, stating, “Relations between Europe and China do not need to be confrontational. There is ample room for win-win cooperation.” Globally, the pursuit of an independent foreign policy is a growing trend. Such an approach has sustained peace in Asia with most countries focusing on economic development rather than confrontation. The recent breakthrough restoring diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, established with China aiding negotiations, opens up the possibility of overcoming a number of conflicts in the Middle East. In Latin America, Lula’s recent reelection in Brazil strengthens the political forces in favor of regional independence and development. Trends in Europe seeing an independent foreign policy as important for the region’s future are therefore in line with this overall global development. AuthorFiona Edwards is a writer and activist based in London and a member of the No Cold War international committee. Follow Fiona on Twitter at @fio_edwards. This article was republished from The Revolution Report. Archives June 2023  Thirty years ago today, the leader of the Grenadian Revolution, Maurice Bishop, was gunned down by his own comrades, the result of a disastrous split within the governing New Jewel Movement. There are many stones still to be unturned in connection with the revolution’s collapse and the anti-popular coup that paved the way for US invasion, but it’s clear that the movement fell victim to the sectarianism, dogmatism and individualism that emerge with frustrating frequency on the left. Combined with the systematic campaign of destabilisation and psychological warfare waged by the US, these factors led to the destruction of one of the most promising political processes of the latter part of the 20th century. Maurice Bishop was a popular, creative and intelligent revolutionary, with an intuitive grasp of where the masses were at. The clear leader of the Grenadian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the corrupt and pro-imperialist administration of Eric Gairy, Bishop was a brilliant communicator, and his mutual empathy with the masses of the people was one of the major driving forces of the revolution – not unlike the relationship between Fidel and the Cuban people, or Chávez and Venezuelan people. In many ways, Bishop could be considered as the Hugo Chávez of his time. The Cuban government’s statement on the day after his death sums him up nicely: “Bishop was one of the political leaders best liked and most respected by our people because of his talent, modesty, sincerity, revolutionary honesty and proven friendship with our country.”  In addition to leading the fight for economic, political, social, racial, gender and cultural justice in Grenada; and in addition to working tirelessly to improve the lot of ordinary Grenadian people; Bishop was also a great friend to the socialist and anti-imperialist world. Fidel Castro saw him as a true brother and comrade, and Cuba embraced Grenada whole-heartedly, giving desperately-needed aid and expertise. Grenada built up close relations with (Sandinista) Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, East Germany, DPR Korea, Mozambique, Libya and Syria. Grenada also became a pole of attraction for black power activists from the US. Little wonder it was considered such a threat by the forces of imperialism. An example had to made of the first English-speaking country in the western hemisphere to walk the road of socialism. Hugh O’Shaughnessy writes: “[Washington’s] rage reached paranoiac proportions when Grenada started close co-operation with Cuba and the USSR. Grenada’s action challenged the hegemony that Washington was expecting to extend throughout the Caribbean after the withdrawal of the British who had dominated it for two centuries.” (‘Grenada – Revolution, Invasion and Aftermath’) The arrest and murder of Bishop and his close comrades by members of the Grenadian armed forces created a favourable context for the US to enact its invasion plans, which had been “nursed in secret at the State Department and the Pentagon for four and a half years” (O’Shaughnessy). The assassination was carried out by army officers acting under the instructions of the NJM faction centred around Bernard Coard. This group considered itself the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ trend to counter Bishop’s ‘petit bourgeois’ trend; however, its supposedly revolutionary actions were to set Grenada back by decades. Fidel commented on this issue in some detail at the time: “Today no one can yet say whether those who used the dagger of division and internal confrontation did so motu proprio or were inspired and egged on by imperialism. It is something that could have been done by the CIA – and, if somebody else was responsible, the CIA could not have done it any better. The fact is that allegedly revolutionary arguments were used, invoking the purest principles of Marxism-Leninism and charging Bishop with practising a personality-cult and drawing away from the Leninist norms and methods of leadership. In our view, nothing could be more absurd than to attribute such tendencies to Bishop. It was impossible to imagine anyone more noble, modest and unselfish. He could never have been guilty of being authoritarian; if he had any defect, it was his excessive tolerance and trust. In our view, Coard’s group objectively destroyed the Revolution and opened the door to imperialist aggression … Look at the history of the revolutionary movement, and you will find more than one connection between imperialism and those who take positions that appear to be on the extreme left.”  The Cuban government’s statement of 20 October 1983 predicted: “Now imperialism will try to use this tragedy and the serious mistakes made by the Grenadian revolutionaries to sweep away the revolutionary process in Grenada and place the country under imperial and neocolonialist rule once again.” A week later, this prediction was proven painfully correct, as Reagan sent tens of thousands of troops to ensure that the Grenadian Revolution was comprehensively wiped out. There is much research still to be done on the Grenadian Revolution, and many lessons to be learned. Such lessons are all the more relevant in today’s context of several Latin American and Caribbean countries pursuing their own roads to socialism. The US and their allies would love to do to Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina what they did to Grenada. Destabilisation continues in a thousand different ways. Meanwhile, the successes of Grenadian socialism – even if short-lived – continue to inspire progressive people around the world. The legacy of Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement must be kept alive. What follows is a selection of interesting quotes from Bishop, sourced from:
On the danger of Grenada’s example “We are obviously no threat to America. Nor is Cuba for that matter. I think Washington fears that we could set an example for the rest of the region if our Revolution succeeds. In the Caribbean region you’re talking about small countries with small populations and limited resources, countries that over the years have been classic examples of neo-capitalist dependencies. Now you have these new governments like Nicaragua and Grenada that are attempting a different experiment. They are no longer looking at development as how many hotels you have on the beach but in terms of what benefits people get. How many have jobs? How many are being fed, housed, and clothed? How many of the children receive education? We certainly believe in Grenada that the people of the English-speaking Caribbean want to see an experiment like that succeed. They want to see what we are trying to build come about. America understands that and obviously if we are able to succeed where previous governments following different models failed, that would be very, very subversive.” On revolutionary spirit and vigilance “Revolutionaries do not have the right to be cowards. We have to stand up to fight for our country because, the country is ours. It does not belong to anybody else” On propaganda, education, cultural imperialism and decolonisation “We hold the truth itself to be revolutionary and we shall stand firm by its side.” On free speech, human rights and democracy “There are those (some of them our friends) who believe that you cannot have a democracy unless there is a situation where every five years, and for five seconds in those five years, a people are allowed to put an ‘X’ next to some candidate’s name, and for those five seconds in those five years they become democrats, and for the remainder of the time, four years and 364 days, they return to being non-people without the right to say anything to their government, without any right to be involved in running their country.” On destabilisation “Destabilisation is the name given to the most recently developed (or newest) method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence. In the old days, such countries – the colonialist and imperialist powers – sent in gunboats or marines to directly take over the country by sheer force. Later on mercenaries were often used in place of soldiers, navy and marines. Today, more and more the new weapon and the new menace is destabilization. This method was used against a number of Caribbean and Third World countries in the 1960s, and also against Jamaica and Guyana in the 1970s. Now, as we predicted, it has come to Grenada. Destabilisation takes many forms – there is propaganda destabilization, when the foreign media, and sometimes our own Caribbean press, prints lies and distortions against us; there is economic destabilization, when our trade and our industries are sabotaged and disrupted; and there is violent destabilization, criminal acts of death and destruction… As we show the world – clearly and unflinchingly – that we intend to remain free and independent; that we intend to consolidate and strengthen the principles and goals of our revolution; as we show this to the world, there will be attacks on us.”  On independence “Grenada is a sovereign and independent country, although a tiny speck on the world map, and we expect all countries to strictly respect our independence just as we will respect theirs. No country has the right to tell us what to do or how to run our country or who to be friendly with. We certainly would not attempt to tell any other country what to do. We are not in anybody’s backyard, and we are definitely not for sale. Anybody who thinks they can bully us or threaten us clearly has no understanding, idea, or clue as to what material we are made of. They clearly have no idea of the tremendous struggles which our people have fought over the past seven years. Though small and poor, we are proud and determined. We would sooner give up our lives before we compromise, sell out, or betray our sovereignty, our independence, our integrity, our manhood, and the right of our people to national self-determination and social progress.” On Chile and the hypocrisy of imperialism “Has Reagan ever been interested in elections and democracy? When did Reagan ever call on Haiti to hold elections? When did Reagan ever call on the butcher Pinochet in Chile or on South Korea to hold elections? Is he calling upon racist South Africa to hold elections? No! Even when Allende in Chile had in fact won power through elections what did the American President – Nixon at the time do? Nixon, Kissinger and Helms sat down the night after Allende won the elections in September 1970 and they worked out their plan of aggression and destabilisation against President Allende. Allende didn’t say no more elections. He didn’t arm working people to try to close down the reactionary paper El Mercurio as he should have done. Allende relied on the parliamentary form that they wanted him to rely on. But because he was a socialist and was independent and was bringing benefits and justice to his people, the American elite went out of their way to crush him ruthlessly. And the criminal they put into power has yet to be told by the so-called democratic United States to call an election.” On Cuba
On the role of repression under socialism “All revolutions involve temporary dislocations and, for a period, it is always necessary to restrain the abuses and excesses of a violent or disruptive minority in the interests of consolidating the revolution and bringing concrete benefits to the long-suffering and formerly oppressed majority.” On the long path towards socialism “It took several hundred years for feudalism to be finally wiped out and capitalism to emerge as the new dominant mode of production and it will take several hundred years for capitalism to be finally wiped out before socialism becomes the new dominant mode.” AuthorCarlos Martinez is the author of The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse, co-founder of No Cold War and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. He also runs the blog Invent the Future. This article was republished from Invent the Future. Archives May 2023  Aymeric Monville, French philosopher, director of the Les éditions Delga publishing house in Paris, deputy editor-in-chief of La Pensée magazine, in an interview with the Pravda correspondent in Western Europe, Andrei Dultsev, about the problems of perception of the historical and theoretical legacy of J.V. Stalin in Western European historiography. Andrei Dultsev [AD]: You have just published a book about Stalin, And For a Few More Canards: Counter-inquiry on Stalin and the Soviet Union. What do you think is the problem of the perception of Stalin in the West today? Aymeric Monville [AM]: In the West, historical analysis, if you can call it that, is based on a comparison of Hitler and Stalin, which is necessary above all to justify Western democracy. The vision of World War II is based on the fact that an objective collusion between Western capitalism and Nazism, which are in fact two sides of the same economic formation at different stages of political development, is being pushed into the background, and the term ‘totalitarianism, itself ill-founded, is used as a propaganda and ideological tool to show that Nazi Germany and “Stalinism” are the main threats to the society of Western values’. With my book, I want to return the Marxist view of things to the public space. That is, a conspiracy between Western democracies and Nazism, the perception of which suffered in the West under the influence of the ferocious anti-communism of the post-war era, which was also implanted in France, which is the weakest link in the political structure of the West. After all, France is the country of the Commune, a country of a very strong workers’ movement, a country where (along with Italy) there was the most powerful Communist Party outside the socialist community. Therefore, it is interesting to analyse the development of the vision of the USSR and the Stalin era here. The Black Book of Communism, which was imposed on us, received extremely negative international reviews from the scientific community, due to its intellectual fatuousness. But it was in France that this book was written, to begin to change the way things are viewed in the scientific community. If in the countries of Latin America there is a coup d’état and the coming to power of a military junta, then universities are surrounded by tanks and professors are killed. But in France Marxists are tolerated even in universities. Here there is a different revolutionary tradition, which some time ago was once again confirmed by the example of the movement of ‘yellow vests’; therefore intellectuals are waging a fierce struggle, trying to change minds by ‘soft methods”, from within. This intellectual battle for minds is being waged by the infantile method of demonising such an ordinary phenomenon as the cult of personality’; and, judging by the result, this method has so far been effective in deforming consciousness. Demonisation is part of the construction of a picture of the apocalypse, with Stalin as a ‘red tyrant’ and Katyn executioner. In fact, all this serves anti-Soviet propaganda, denigrating the USSR and deepening modern Russophobia. It is here that the friendly attitude of the French people towards the Soviet people, their gratitude, is a lump in the throat of anti-communists of all stripes, because, as Maurice Thorez once said, “France will never enter a war against the USSR.” This statement by Thorez is primarily associated with the sacrifices made by the Soviet people on the altar of victory in the struggle for the liberation of Europe from fascism. When the representative of the Russian Federation was not invited to the May 8 celebration in France last year, the memory of the Soviet feat, the memory of the 27 million victims of the Soviet people in this massacre unleashed by Hitlerite Germany, was spat upon for the first time. The demonisation of Stalin certainly contributes to the whipping up of this hysteria. This is reflected in the results of opinion polls: while, at the end of the war, the majority of French people were convinced that it was the Soviet Union that played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazism, today the situation is the opposite – most people believe that the United States won the war. This is first of all a consequence of the influence of Hollywood. American films have led the population here to believe that it was the United States who came to liberate France, when in fact they came to impose Operation Overlord, which aimed to make France a vassal of the United States. We owe our relative independence to the strong Communist Party, which actively participated in the struggle against the German fascist occupation. It should also be noted that it was General de Gaulle (few people mention this fact, since they usually write only about his merits) who ordered the destruction of the chapel at Fort Mont-Valérien near Paris, where many Resistance fighters were shot [the walls were demolished, the crypt was preserved -AD]. On the walls of the chapel, the Resistance fighters wrote before their execution: “Long live Stalin!” For General de Gaulle, this was a thorn in the eye, because it became obvious that the role of the communists in the Resistance movement was overwhelming and the traces of this memory had to be erased. AD: Although in the municipalities where the communists remained in power in the post-war years, both squares and boulevards with the name “Stalingrad’ have been preserved …. AM: Undoubtedly, Khrushchev’s report at the XX Congress of the CPSU influenced the French Communist Party. Nevertheless, the PCF remained a party that did not immediately recognise those parts of the report that seemed simply insane (for example, that the USSR was allegedly not ready for war). The French communists refused to renounce Stalin. But in the end, revisionism won out, and today it is very strong. For real communists, the issue has not been resolved. I will cite as an example a collaboration with the wonderful writer, Domenico Losurdo, which is very important for me. I translated Losurdo’s works from Italian into French and facilitated the translation of his books into other European languages, and this is where I ran into censorship. As long as Losurdo criticised liberalism, he was published, including in English publishing houses. Criticism of liberalism is perfectly permitted. But as soon as he came out in defence of real socialism, even China, the British stopped publishing him. This is censorship. It’s not even a matter of the author’s personality, but the fact that a certain theme is rejected – Lenin’s thinking and a clear orientation towards socialism as a social model. Leftists refer to all sorts of Trotskyist stereotypes – “party bureaucracy” etc – but just don’t talk about the construction of real socialism. AD: As a member of the Honecker Committee on the Affairs of Political Prisoners – the leaders of the former German Democratic Republic who were persecuted in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) after the collapse of the Wall – do you think that this battle against Stalin, which is being waged by the European pseudo-leftists (Greens. Social Democrats, the ARTE channel), is a continuation of the historical revisionism to revise the results of the Second World War, initiated by historians and politicians of the FRG? AM: The best example of this is the ARTE channel’s documentary about Katyn, where authoritative European historians in all seriousness rely on the documents transferred to Poland by Yeltsin, on which in 1940 instead of VKP(b)” was written “CPSU”, which testifies to the grossest historical fake. The same is the case with the Mednoye memorial complex, where 6,000 shot Poles were allegedly buried, but whose bodies were never found. Unfortunately, only historians are aware of these inconsistencies. But, far worse than these historical disputes, the film does not recognise the real borders of modern Poland. It is wrong to say that Stalin ‘invaded Poland after the German-Soviet pact. These were the Belarussian and Ukrainian lands captured by the Poles after the Civil War in Russia. The problem of Poland’s borders is important for the Germans. This means that for the Germans Poland should be pushed to the east, so Germany could lay claim to the territory of today’s western Poland, which would open the door for the new Drang nach Osten [Drive to the East]. One can, of course, argue that current politicians do not know history and are not interested in it, but I think that this is sometimes a trick, because among them there are those who know it very well. I think that responsible politicians knew what they were doing on 22 June 2021, when Europe announced sanctions against Belarus. Considering the brazen financing of Nazi movements in Ukraine, one can safely assert there are plans for a new ‘fourth Reich’, hence solidarity with the German communists is urgently needed. We see the extent to which the German Communist Party (DKP) is persecuted, and the same applies to Junge Welt, which for me, like Pravda, is the standard of Marxist thought today. But Junge Welt in Germany is actually under threat of extinction. Last year, even the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime was attacked in Germany under the pretext of “extremism.” Undoubtedly, our creation of the Honecker Committee in France was symbolic, because it was this communist that the West German authorities imprisoned in the early 1990s in the same Moabit prison in which the Nazis threw him in the 1930s. West German justice knew perfectly well what it was doing. We must defend communists everywhere, all over the world in the face of anti-communist repression. AD: One of the books that came out recently in your publishing house is a book by Italian historians Daniele Burgio, Massimo Leoni and Roberto Sidoli about Trotsky’s collusion with the Nazis, about previously unknown documents of the second ‘Moscow trial’ (against Pyatakov and Radek). AM. This book seems to me absolutely necessary, because it talks about the second ‘Moscow trial’ in January 1937 and provides irrefutable evidence of the collaboration of Trotsky and the Trotskyist centre in the USSR with the Nazis. I insist on the word “irrefutable”, given that Khrushchev’s report cast doubt on this entire period. Undoubtedly, the period of party purges had its dark spots, but it is necessary to distinguish between the activities of the People’s Commissar Yezhov and ‘Yezhovism’ and the Moscow trials. The problem is that “Yezhovism”, and later the very report of Khrushchev at the XX Congress, defamed the “Moscow trials”: this term has become in Europe a synonym for a falsifed trial. Through this publication, I want to demonstrate that the second “Moscow trial”, in particular, was justified. This is confirmed by the state of the sources of the case, which cannot be denied; this is the problem of Trotsky’s archives, which the inconsistency of his texts of that period, his statements before the Dewey Commission. The book carefully compiles Trotsky’s lapses, his previously unknown letters that were found in the archives which prove, for example, that he was in con tact with Radek, although both denied this, The main subject of the investigation of the historians was the secret flight of Yuri Pyatakov to Trotsky in Oslo in December, 1935. We have all the evidence that the Norwegian authorities lied by denying it. To meet with Trotsky, Pyatakov took advantage of an official mission: in December 1935, he flew to Berlin on the instructions of the Party in order to search for suppliers of industrial goods (after the Nazis came to power, economic relations between the USSR and Germany which at the end of the 1920s were more than intense, and remained so for some time). Then, from Berlin, Pyatakov flew to Oslo lo see Trotsky for a one-day meeting, which could not be done without the complicity of the German authorities, who gave him a visa. The question is, rather, why did Pyatakoy undertake such an action, knowing that he was under the supervision of the Soviet embassy? Because Trotsky presented him with the fait accompli of an alliance with the Nazis. And because Pyatakov decided to meet with Trotsky at any cost and with such a risk, since from their point of view there was a possibility of a coup d’état in the USSR. AD: Do you agree that behind the attack on Stalin lies an attack on anti-fascism and the ideas of socialism in general? AM: Further in 1939, Trotsky took a position in support of the independence of Ukraine, publishing four articles in which he passionately stood for it, supporting nationalists and knowing full well that Ukraine was the key for the Germans to the Caucasus and the oil rigs of Baku. These facts must be matched with the positions of today’s Trotskyists and Western leftists. Being anti-Stalinists, and following Trotsky’s line, they side with the social democrats in defending the European Union. Take, for example, the Dimitrov trial in Nazi Germany in the face of absolute lawlessness and the Nazi terrorist regime, Dimitrov courageously defended himself, and Goering could not prove anything against him. So why did Pyatakov and Radek, who had all the means of defence, in the face of socialist democratic justice, not do something like this? Of course, the Stalinist period is controversial, but considering it, one must understand that Stalin was a man endowed with the greatest political responsibility for the fate of the world in the twentieth century. Yes, Stalin is a man of contrasts, who sometimes had to make difficult political choices. But it is a shame that the books of this ‘wonderful Georgian’, as Lenin called him, are not being published in Europe today. AD: In your book A Few More Canards you also return to the real number of repressions in the USSR, rejecting the nonsense about “hundreds of millions murdered”. To what extent is your book capable of making a breakthrough in changing the balance of power in the battle for historical truth? AM: I like to participate in debates using the slightest opportunity and platform. But given the West’s strategy against the USSR and Stalin, I have little hope. In the case of our new book, Pyatakov’s Flight, we prove to our opponents the historical correctness of the Moscow trials. Moreover, if you familiarise yourself with the materials of those trials, you will see that such an amount of evidence is impossible to fake. However, what, in fact, to prove? If in December 1935 Trotsky boasted that Pyatakov had come to him in Norway, then later Trotsky perjured himself before the Dewey Commission in saying that he, while in Norway, fell on skis and could not meet with anyone. Yes, there was a fall, but it happened ten days later, after Pyatakov’s visit. We also proved the inconsistency of the reports of the Oslo airport, where the words “not a single foreign plane arrived” were played up. But Pyatakov flew in from Berlin on a Norwegian plane. Further: Trotsky’s diary up to 1935 has been published, but his notes of the last years of his life were never published…. We are pleased to disclose all these facts. Our main task is to restore historical justice with an approach open even to non-Marxists. I believe that in the long run, we will prevail. AM: At the same time, Stalin’s texts are extremely important and modern: it is necessary to study his works on linguistics, on the national question, on the problems of socialism in the USSR. It is necessary to study Stalin precisely as a theoretician. I read the book by Viktor Trushkov, Stalin as a Theorist, with great interest and I have great respect for the tremendous work he has done. In France, we are far from this, we must first study the historical role of Stalin, understand the organisation of the Land of Soviets, the architecture of the economic breakthrough of the first five-year plans, the role of market mechanisms in the transition from capitalism to socialism. This is all part of the analysis we need in France. AD: This year in France Hitler’s book Mein Kampf was republished, with commentaries by historians, in a circulation of 55,000 copies, which is a record today. At the same time, no one publishes Stalin’s works, and Lenin and Marx are extremely rare on the shelves …. AM: In les Éditions Delga we do not publish the classics of Marxism-Leninism, this is not our format, but we are going to publish, for example, the transcripts of the “Moscow trials” in order to expose the lie in the West that they were falsified. Many people here have a false opinion that, after the assassination of Kirov, Stalin, like a crazy tyrant, pressed all buttons on all floors. That’s bullshit. AD: Why is Stalin the first target for anti-communists of all stripes? AM: Jean-Paul Sartre once said that, after the Hungarian events of 1956, the bourgeoisie breathed a sigh of relief: they found something to criticise behind the Iron Curtain”. Until 1956, the bourgeoisie was constantly under attack unilaterally due to the injustice of capitalist society, its internal disorder, and in 1956 they saw that a conflict was brewing within the socialist bloc – and they played this card. This is the whole tragedy of the XX Congress. For the bourgeoisie, after the war, Stalin became a kind of monolith that had to be destroyed at any cost. They promoted tales of the horrors of the Gulag to justify their own crimes – while the Soviet penitentiary system based on re-education, in which there were libraries, independent activities of prisoners and treatment (the same Solzhenitsyn was cured of cancer), is incomparable with the Nazi death camps, in which lampshades were covered with human skin. In the same way, it is wrong to call Stalin the red tsar – he never was, he remained until the end of his days a Bolshevik. a Leninist. Stalin is a collective image of what the anti-communists cannot accept. The Soviet experience, Stalin, and to some extent the success of today’s China, are causing headaches for the capitalists. For them, this is an incomprehensible matrix. They are unable to comprehend the reasons for the economic and military miracle of the Stalinist USSR. Hatred of Stalin gives us Marxist Leninists the key to realising the hatred of the imperialists for any form of social organisation more modern than capitalism. Interview published in Russian in Pravda No 140 (31200). 21-22 December 2021, and available online at https://tinyurl.com/2p9xhk6f. This article was https://tinyurl.com/2p9xhk6fpublished in Communist Review (Britain) Spring 2022, with translation into English by the CR editor, using online facilities. Aymeric Monville’s book, Et pour quelques bobards de plus (And for a Few More Canards) was published by les Éditions Delga in 2020 and 2021 [pbk, 106 pp. €10+ p&p, ISBN: 978-2-37607-189-1] and may be ordered from https://editionsdelga.fr/produit/et-por-quelques-de-bobards-de-plus/. AuthorMarxism-Leninism Today This article was republished from Marxism-Leninism Today. Archives May 2023 |
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