​Last week, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown told the NYT that US/NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine is 'inevitable'.
​
This is despite the fact that Biden has said doing so is ruled out because it would lead to WWIII, which would almost definitively lead to nuclear war and the deaths of millions.

The ruling capitalist class is willing to put the world on the precipice of nuclear devastation before admitting that their status as global hegemon is dwindling and that multipolarity is on the rise.

It is willing to loot $95 billion from American taxpayers under the auspices of furthering the war against Russia and China and the genocide against the Palestinians – when in reality most of that money goes back into the pockets of the military industrial complex who our politicians serve.

The world is changing, and those which benefited from the old order are digging their claws onto humanity trying to prevent it from advancing into a higher, more free, equitable, and democratic, mode of life.

The lives of the American people continue to deteriorate as generations of youth are the first in the country's history to have a worst living standard and prospect of life than their parents. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are drowning in debts accumulated for attempting to do something so ludicrous as survive or access basic education.

Today, we are not only wage slaves to the owners of big capital… but indebted to them for our own enslavement.

The country is collapsing. The infrastructure, like popular trust in the media and politicians, is dwindling. We are in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy and empire like we have never experienced before.

José Martí used to say that a lie can last a hundred years, but the truth catches up to it in a second. Well, those seconds have arrived for millions of Americans, for whom the truth has caught up to the lies they’ve been generationally fed. The power of the lies transmitted by the elite and their media has faded. It has wasted itself in repetition and given way to its opposite: the truth, the mortal enemy of our state’s hegemony.

Americans: things DO NOT have to be this way. They are not divinely ordained to be this way. This is a product of a social system – capitalism – that has developed historically and is currently collapsing before our very eyes.

The frail status of our octogenarian leaders encapsulates perfectly the status of the system.

American workers, the American people, DO NOT have sovereignty. We are an occupied people. Our state and the politicians that uphold it are beholden to only one interest – those of the capitalist elite.

Big corporations, banks, and investment firms are in command. Our rulers are servants of the accumulation of their capital. It is a dictatorship of capital that we live under. And it is high time that the yoke of big capital which oppresses us is thrown off.

The supposed representatives of the people are in reality the representatives of the oppressors and exploiters of the people. They represent those who send our brothers and sisters abroad to lose limbs, scar their souls, and sometimes return in caskets, all to murder people whom they had more in common with than the filthy parasites who sent them there, and who profited from their misfortune.

In 1776 we had a revolution because we recognized that our interests and those of the British empires could not co-exist under the same entity. This contradiction burst into a revolution - the first of many more anti-colonial revolutions in the hemisphere.

Then in 1865, through the general strike of the Black proletariat, we overthrew the Southern planter class and its cotton kingdom, whose very existence undermined the democratic ideals of 1776 and placed the nation in a contradictory predicament.

With the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, the advancements of our second revolution (1865) are rolled back, and a state of fascism and apartheid is installed in the U.S. South, with state sanctioned lynching being the order of the day.

But this counterrevolution did not break the democratic spirit of American workers, and specifically the superexploited and oppressed black proletariat. For decades the civil rights revolution fought to overthrow the apartheid system imposed in the aftermath of 1876.

Finally in 1964, with the guidance of the brilliant and revolutionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., legally sanctioned apartheid would be done away with. A new moment in the struggle would present itself, as the de jure lines which segregated our people and working class were lifted.

Now our people are more integrated than ever. They are ready to fight – together – as a united working class.

Dissent amongst their ranks is taking many forms, but they all are in motion against the system that keeps them poor, indebted, and desperate.

The task of communists today is to give this spontaneous and varied dissent some coherence and direction.

This is not imposed on workers from outside. It is much more immanent. It simply clarifies that which they already know implicitly. It makes explicit what is implicit in their consciousness.

This is why, whenever we talk about the Marxist worldview with our coworkers and community members, a frequent response is "wow, this simply puts words onto what I have been feeling for a long time."

The Marxist worldview is a yeast that allows the spontaneous consciousness that is already present in a dissenting working class to rise to the level of socialist class consciousness – to the understanding that they, working people, can change the world, and, that the movement of history tends towards that direction!

It is only this popular unity of working people, led by an American Communist Party, a genuine peoples party, that can Free America, and through this, Free Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and all other victims of U.S. imperialism!

​Author

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.

As a wrestling coach and athlete living in the Midwest I have plenty of interaction with MAGA supporters. My current wrestling coach, one of the greatest American Wrestlers of all-time, is a Trump supporting MAGA guy who regularly tells me that every single politician on both sides is corrupt, he doesn’t trust the Israeli and Ukrainian Governments, and that it's bullshit that people have to pay money to the banks for housing when banks don’t actually provide anything of substance. My coach wants a political and economic revolution, and because he feels that Donald Trump is the politician who best represents his anti-establishment political leanings, he supports Donald Trump.
      
One might think that as a Communist I would have nothing to talk about with a MAGA supporter, but me and my MAGA coaches and teammates discuss politics frequently, and I openly tell them about my views, oftentimes while rocking my Ivan Drago t-shirt that displays a large hammer and sickle, which one of these teammates told me I NEEDED to buy. When these types of friends ask me for political sources I send them to Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din of the Institute for a Free America, because I know that they will always preach pro-working class and anti imperialist politics without any of the leftist jargon that might be off putting to someone who hasn’t been through four years of liberal arts university courses about intersectionality and become accustomed to the near obsession with liberal identity politics that many leftists have.
      
When I first heard of the MAGA Communism strategy I thought it was a fantastic idea. But after hearing various people I respect say that the strategy was a distraction because tailing a bourgeois politician would get us nowhere, my views changed and I made a video speaking out against the strategy. And this brought me much validation from the liberal online left who was ecstatic to see that I was moving away from the basket of deplorables known as MAGA.

However, now I have watched the strategy in action and I believe in its usefulness, at least for a certain period of time. Two nights ago I spoke at an event coordinated by Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din and I don’t remember them mentioning Trump a single time. Al-Din gave a brilliant speech about the history of European and American political economy and how it has evolved to its current stage today where our entire political and economic system is dominated by a small number of shareholders and banks, and how this differs to Eastern nations like China where socialism and central economic planning has been used to control finance and divert resources towards social ends. Hinkle also gave what I felt was a fantastic and hilarious speech, establishing the connection between US imperialism and the Israeli genocide, calling the US’s undying support for Israel “a costly suicide mission” and saying “we are sending billions to diaper forces.” Hinkle also openly called himself a Communist, advocating for the US to open trade relations with the developing world instead of constantly interfering in their governments, and used a quote from Lenin to make his points, which received a positive reaction from the crowd.

It is clear to me that the purpose of MAGA communism was never to tail Donald Trump around uncritically as recent hit pieces about Hinkle have alleged.(1)The purpose was to reach the working class members of Trump’s base who are discontented with the current political establishment and are desperate for something new. And in doing that they’ve been quite successful. Hinkle has amassed 2.6 million followers on X after being banned from every other major social media platform for repeatedly and unapologetically going against mainstream media narratives. At the event this weekend I met an older lifelong Communist who told me how he brought 15 MAGA people into his Communist organization by focusing on class politics in his conversations with them. Additionally I met dozens of blue collar workers who told me how they’ve used the work of Haz and Hinkle, as well as my organization Midwestern Marx, to push their co-workers towards socialism.

The allegations against Hinkle are endless, he’s a grifter, he’s a fed, he’s a reactionary, he’s a Russian plant. And while I see how people could be suspicious of his meteoric growth, for those who have followed it closely it makes more sense. Hinkle acquired large audiences on multiple social media platforms by posting frequently and going on any large show that would have him. Upon getting banned from all of these social media platforms his fan base would migrate towards X and more attention would be drawn to his account because of the bannings.
      
And while I haven’t agreed with 100% of what Jackson Hinkle has said in the past three years, I do deeply agree with the core of his politics which is anti-imperialist and pro-worker. I can’t help but be excited by someone who accumulates over 2 million followers while openly wearing the title of Marxist Leninist and defending Stalin to the likes of Alex Jones. When I disagree with Hinkle I tell him openly and respectfully, and in the past it has always been a fruitful discussion that allows both of our audiences to learn and refine our rhetoric. And to be honest with you the Jackson Hinkle of today is not the Jackson Hinkle of three years ago, he’s become so much more confident in his positions and refined in his rhetoric when speaking sometimes it's hard to remember that he’s only 24. I would encourage people to avoid the tendency to quickly write others off without giving them the time to grow in their understanding of the world, or without giving them the courtesy of discussing whatever positions you might disagree with.
      
I do not think Communists should be afraid of Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din and I definitely do not think Communists should be afraid of working class MAGA people. It is our duty to advance the struggle of the proletariat regardless of its consciousness at the current moment. If we can speak to the anti-establishment leanings of MAGA workers in order to push them towards supporting socialism then that is an avenue which should be pursued!
      
It was Vladimir Lenin who would send party members to the meetings of the fascist and anti-semetic Black Hundreds peasant groups in order to disrupt them and win people away from their reactionary worldview by teaching them Marxism. If it was worth it for Lenin to reach out to fascistic peasants, surely it is worth it for us to reach out to proletarians who voted for Trump over the butcher of Libya Hillary Clinton and genocide Joe Biden.
      
In my view Hinkle and Al-Din have thoroughly overcome what my colleague Carlos Garrido calls the Purity Fetish (2), which has plagued the American left for decades. The Purity Fetish can be observed by western leftists who see people as static and unchanging entities who can’t change or be reached, which is a belief that is antithetical to Marxist Dialectical Materialism which teaches that the one constant thing in this world is that everything is constantly in flux and subject to change. Much of the Western Left is openly opposed to reaching the Trump’s MAGA base with socialist politics because they see them as too ideologically impure, while viewing themselves as the enlightened leftist who stands above the proletarian Trump supporter because they hold the correct political beliefs. The purity fetish left also falls into the trap of national historical nihilism, viewing America as a settler colonial nation which can never achieve socialism because it is uniquely evil as a country. These leftists fail to see the formation of the American nation which was advanced by the positive aspect of our history which should be celebrated and studied. The revolutionary war, civil war, and civil rights movement, were fought to advance our country forward and place black and white workers on an equal playing field, so that now they might struggle as one against the capitalist ruling class and their corrupt politicians.
      
Hinkle and Al-Din overcome all of these elements that exist within the purity fetish left. They reject national historical nihilism and reach out to working class Americans who are considered impure by much of the Western Left. In the past I have encouraged them to remember that it’s just as important to reach out to workers who vote for Biden (many of whom do so because they believe him to be more supportive of union organizing) as it is to recruit those who vote for Donald Trump. But this is actually one of the reasons why Midwestern Marx has decided to begin working with these two and their Institute for a Free America because their approach is slightly different to ours, but our goals are the same, to advance the class struggle in America and bring an end to US imperialism.

For those who have derided, smeared, and attacked those who want to reach out to working class MAGA folks, or who to those who have been deceived into thinking that Hinkle and Al-Din are reactionary fascists by out of context clips on X, or by straight up fake and doctored posts (which leftists have used to attack Hinkle many times including by the Communist Party USA itself in a now deleted piece) (3) the door will always be open. We will not cancel you like you have canceled so many of us. We will be here building when you decide to overcome the purity fetish and join us in this struggle to create a new and better social system that actually serves the working masses!

​References

1. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/24/2242596/--MAGA-Communism-A-new-flavor-of-crazy-for-the-anti-establishment-nihilist-incel-fringe 
2. Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the crisis of Western Marxism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).
3. Noah Khrachvik, "A Sad State of Affairs: The Decline of the Communist Party USA." Midwestern Marx Institute (May 10, 2024).

​If a colloquium on early entrepreneurs had been convened in the early 20th century, most participants would have viewed traders as operating on their own, bartering at prices that settled at a market equilibrium established spontaneously in response to fluctuating supply and demand. According to the Austrian economist Carl Menger, money emerged as individuals and merchants involved in barter came to prefer silver and copper as convenient means of payment, stores of value, and standards by which to measure other prices. History does not support this individualistic scenario for how commercial practices developed in the spheres of trade, money and credit, interest, and pricing. Rather than emerging spontaneously among individuals “trucking and bartering,” money, credit, pricing, and investment for the purpose of creating profits, charging interest, creating a property market and even a proto-bond market (for temple prebends) first emerged in the temples and palaces of Sumer and Babylonia.
​
The First Mints Were Temples

From third-millennium Mesopotamia through classical antiquity the minting of precious metal of specified purity was carried out by temples, not private suppliers. The word money derives from Rome’s temple of Juno Moneta, where the city’s coinage was minted in early times. Monetized silver was part of the Near Eastern pricing system developed by large institutions to establish stable ratios for their fiscal account-keeping and forward planning. Major price ratios (including the rate of interest) were administered in round numbers for ease of calculation1.

The Palace Forgave Excessive Debt

Instead of deterring enterprise, these administered prices provided a stable context for it to flourish. The palace estimated a normal return for the fields and other properties it leased out, and left managers to make a profit—or to suffer a loss when the weather was bad or other risks materialized. In such cases shortfalls became debts. However, when the losses became so great as to threaten this system, the palace let the agrarian arrears go, enabling entrepreneurial contractors with the palatial economy (including ale women) to start again with a clean slate. The aim was to keep them in business, not to destroy them.

Flexible Pricing Beyond the Palace

Rather than a conflict existing between the large public institutions administering prices and mercantile enterprise, there was a symbiotic relationship. Mario Liverani2 points out that administered pricing by the temples and palaces vis-à-vis tamkarum merchants engaged in foreign trade “was limited to the starting move and the closing move: trade agents got silver and/or processed materials (that is, mainly metals and textiles) from the central agency and had to bring back after six months or a year the equivalent in exotic products or raw materials. The economic balance between central agency and trade agents could not but be regulated by fixed exchange values. But the merchants’ activity once they left the palace was completely different: They could freely trade, playing on the different prices of the various items in various countries, even using their money in financial activities (such as loans) in the time at their disposal, and making the maximum possible personal profit.”

Mesopotamian Institutions Boosted the Commercial Takeoff

A century ago it was assumed that the state’s economic role could only have taken the form of oppressive taxation and overregulation of markets, and hence would have thwarted commercial enterprise. That is how Michael Rostovtzeff3 depicted the imperial Roman economy stifling the middle class. But A.H.M. Jones4 pointed out that this was how antiquity ended, not how it began. Merchants and entrepreneurs first emerged in conjunction with the temples and palaces of Mesopotamia. Rather than being despotic and economically oppressive, Mesopotamian institutions and religious values sanctioned the commercial takeoff that ended up being thwarted in Greece and Rome. Archaeology has confirmed that “modern” elements of enterprise were present and even dominant already in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, and that the institutional context was conducive to long-term growth. Commerce expanded and fortunes were made as populations grew and the material conditions of life rose. But what has surprised many observers is how much more successful, fluid, and more stable economic organization was as we move back in time.

Ex Oriente Lux

Growing awareness that the character of gain-seeking became economically predatory has prompted a more sociological view of exchange and property in Greece and Rome (e.g., the French structuralists, Leslie Kurke5 and Sitta von Reden6, and also a more “economic” post-Polanyian view of earlier Mesopotamia and its Near Eastern neighbors. Morris and Manning7 survey how the approach that long segregated Near Eastern from Mediterranean development has been replaced by a more integrated view8,9 in tandem with a pan-regional approach to myth,  religion,10,11 and art works.12 The motto ex oriente lux now is seen to apply to commercial practices as well as to art, culture, and religion.

Individualism Was a Symptom of Westward Decline

For a century, Near Eastern development was deemed to lie outside the Western continuum, which was defined as starting with classical Greece circa 750 BC. But the origins of commercial practices are now seen to date from Mesopotamia’s takeoff two thousand years before classical antiquity. However, what was indeed novel and “fresh” in the Mediterranean lands arose mainly from the fact that the Bronze Age world fell apart in the devastation that occurred circa 1200 BC. The commercial and debt practices that Syrian and Phoenician traders brought to the Aegean and southern Italy around the eighth century BC were adopted in smaller local contexts that lacked the public institutions found throughout the Near East. Trade and usury enriched chieftains much more than occurred in the Near East where temples or other public authority were set corporately apart to mediate the economic surplus, and especially to provide credit. Because the societies of classical antiquity emerged in this non-public and indeed oligarchic context, the idea of Western became synonymous with the private sector and individualism.

References

1. “Das Palastgeschäft in der altbabylonischen Zeit.” In Interdependency of Institutions and Private Entrepreneurs: Proceedings of the Second MOS Symposium (Leiden 1998), ed. A.C.V.M. Bongenaar, 1998, pp.153–83; “Royal Edicts of the Babylonian Period—Structural Background.” In Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, ed. Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop, 2002, pp. 139–62.
2. “The Near East: The Bronze Age,” The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, ed. J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, 2005, pp. 53-54.
3. The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 1926.
4. The Later Roman Empire, 284–610: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, 1964.
5. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, 1999.
6. Exchange in Ancient Greece, 1995.
7. The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, ed. J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, 2005.
8. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel (author) Sian Reynolds (translator), 1972.
9. “Did the Phoenicians Introduce the Idea of Interest to Greece and Italy—and If So, When?”, Greece between East and West, ed. Gunter Kopcke and I. Tokumaru, pp. 128–143.
10. Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur by Walter Burkert, 1984.
11. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth by M.L. West, 1997.
12. Greece between East and West: 10th-8th centuries BC by (G.) Kopcke and (I.) Tokumaru, ed., 1992.

​In the apartment of my friends in Baghdad (Iraq), they tell me about how each of them had been impacted by the ugliness of the 2003 U.S.-imposed illegal war on their country. Yusuf and Anisa are both members of the Federation of Journalists of Iraq and both have experience as “stringers” for Western media companies that came to Baghdad amid the war. When I first went to their apartment for dinner in the well-positioned Waziriyah neighborhood, I was struck by the fact that Anisa—whom I had known as a secular person—wore a veil on her face. “I wear this scarf,” Anisa said to me later in the evening, “to hide the scar on my jaw and neck, the scar made by a bullet wound from a U.S. soldier who panicked after an IED [improvised explosive device] went off beside his patrol.”
​
Earlier in the day, Yusuf had taken me around New Baghdad City, where in 2007 an Apache helicopter had killed almost twenty civilians and injured two children. Among the dead were two journalists who worked for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. “This is where they were killed,” Yusuf tells me as he points to the square. “And this is where Saleh [Matasher Tomal] parked his minivan to rescue Saeed, who had not yet died. And this is where the Apache shot at the minivan, grievously injuring Saleh’s children, Sajad and Duah.” I was interested in this place because the entire incident was captured on film by the U.S. military and released by Wikileaks as “Collateral Murder.” Julian Assange is in prison largely because he led the team that released this video (he has now received the right to challenge in a UK court his extradition to the United States). The video presented direct evidence of a horrific war crime.

“No one in our neighborhood has been untouched by the violence. We are a society that has been traumatized,” Anisa said to me in the evening. “Take my neighbor for instance. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind because of another bombing.” The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has experienced the kind of warfare faced by the Iraqis, and now by the Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is hard to recover from such violence.

My Poisoned Land

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point to the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations. The U.S. dropped at least 74 million liters of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land.

A Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma terre empoisonnée (My poisoned land) in 2016 as a way to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the U.S. lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how as a journalist in 1966 she was sprayed by a U.S. Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy from the impact of Agent Orange on Trân Tô Nga. “The people from that village over there,” my guides tell me, naming the village, “birth children with severe defects generation after generation.”

Gaza

These memories come back in the context of Gaza. The focus is often on the dead and of the destruction of the landscape. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and of cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now, 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly.

Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organization recognized a phenomenon called “sick building syndrome,” which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighborhoods. There is now over 37 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

Every war zone remains dangerous years after ceasefires. In the case of this war on Gaza, even a cessation of hostilities will not end the violence. In early November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that the Israelis had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (although, as they pointed out, Hiroshima sits on 900 square meters of land, whereas Gaza’s total square meters are 360). By the end of April 2024, Israel had dropped over 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which would be the equivalent of six nuclear bombs. The United Nations estimates that it would take 14 years to clear the unexploded ordnance in Gaza. That means until 2038 people will be dying due to this Israeli bombardment.

On the mantle of the modest living room in the apartment of Anisa and Yusuf, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a small piece of shrapnel that struck and destroyed Yusuf’s left eye. There is nothing else on the mantle.

THE media has been full of claims by the World Bank and by governments that millions of people in the global South have been lifted out of poverty during the last three decades that saw neo-liberal economic policies. The Niti Aayog in a press release earlier this year claimed near zero poverty for India by 2022-23, affecting only 5 per cent of the population. The hard data on nutritional intake show however that hunger has risen greatly over the last three decades, with more than two-thirds of its rural and urban population unable to spend enough to satisfy minimum needs of calorific and protein intake; India’s very low ranking (111 out of 125 countries in 2023) on the global hunger index continues, and while some health indicators have improved, others have worsened.
​
Those who believe the official claims say, ‘how can hunger have increased when poverty has declined?’ The question should be the opposite, namely ‘how can poverty have declined when hunger has increased?’ The information on rise in hunger is direct, based on readily available and verifiable statistics, compared to official poverty estimates that are based on illogical and non-transparent calculation methods, rendering quite spurious the claim of massive poverty decline. The illogical method has the blessings of the World Bank which repeats the spurious claim of poverty decline.

Why is the official method illogical, and the conclusion of poverty decline spurious? Because its method has meant repeatedly under-estimating poverty lines over time, leading to a lowering of the nutritional intake that can be accessed at these poverty lines.The poor have been counted below a standard that itself has been allowed to decline; but for any valid comparison over time, the standard must be held constant. If a school claims great success in lowering over a period of 30 years the proportion of failures among students taking examinations, from say initially 55 per cent of all students failing to only 5 per cent failing, we are hardly likely to believe the claim when we find out that over the same period the pass mark has been quietly lowered from 50 out of 100 in the initial year, to 15 out of 100 by the terminal year. Applying a constant 50 out of 100 pass mark, we find the failure percentage has risen.

Similarly official claims of poverty decline carry no conviction when we see that compared to the official nutrition norms of 2,200 calories rural and 2,100 calories urban actually used to obtain poverty lines in the initial year 1973-4, in a large number of states over the next four decades the energy intake accessible at official poverty lines had declined to 1700 calories or less and protein intake which is highly associated with energy intake has also declined. According to the Tendulkar committee poverty lines (being followed at present by the Niti Aayog) in rural Gujarat in 2011-12 the poverty ratio was 21.9 per cent at its per head monthly poverty line of Rs 932. But we find that energy intake at this level was only 1,670 calories, while obtaining 2,200 calories required spending Rs 2,000 or over double the official poverty line, and 87 per cent of persons fell below this level. Official poverty at 21.9 per cent and real poverty at 87 per cent is no mean order of difference. In rural Punjab, the low 7.71 per cent official poverty ratio was at a sum that gave 1,800 calories daily while the true poverty line at which 2,200 calories could be reached was much higher with 38 per cent of persons falling below it. In 2009 in rural Puducherry the official poverty ratio was near-zero at 0.2 per cent solely because the very low poverty line allowed only 1,040 calories per day—a starvation level, whereas the actually poor unable to reach the 2200 calorie norm, comprised 58 per cent. Here the official poverty line was pitched so low that below it there were no observations, since people were dead. Urban poverty similarly shows high and rising poverty compared to decline in official estimates.

The Niti Aayog’s claim of only 5 per cent in poverty in 2023-24, relies on the 2011 Tendulkar poverty lines price-indexed to 2023-24. Taking the highest consumption spending under the Modified Mixed Recall Period, and using the price index data in the official Fact Sheet, the poverty lines when brought forward to 2023-24, are Rs 57/69 daily per head for rural/urban areas. The food part accounts for Rs 26.6/27 and the non-food part for Rs 30.4/42 rural/urban respectively taking the average shares spent on food and non-food. The food part would have bought 1.3 litres of the cheapest bottled water, with nothing left over for food (the poor do not actually buy bottled water, the example is to illustrate how paltry the food sum is).

To think that minimum non-food daily needs of a person however poor on account of rent, transport, utilities, healthcare, and manufactured goods (leave alone education and recreation) could be met by Rs 30.4 rural to Rs.42 urban per day, requires a degree of disconnect from objective reality that no rational individual can display, only the official estimators seem to be capable of it. Their so-called poverty lines are destitution-cum-starvation lines, with 6.6 per cent of rural and 1.6 per cent of the urban population still somehow surviving at sub-human existence levels, producing the 5 per cent overall average claimed to be in poverty. The true poverty lines at which minimum nutrition could be obtained were at least 2.5 to 3 times higher. In another three years at most, officially ‘zero poverty’ is likely to be claimed, because the official poverty lines would have been further lowered to a level where there will be no survivors. If an examination pass mark reaches zero, there are zero failures.

Far from declining, the share of the actually poor in both rural and urban population has risen noticeably over the last three decades. In 1993-4, the poor comprised 58.5/57 per cent in rural/urban areas since they could not reach nutrition norms of 2200/2100 calories per day, while by 2004-5 the respective rural/urban poverty ratios had risen to 69.5/65 per cent. After a large spike in the drought year 2009-10, there was a decline by 2011-12 to 67/62 per cent.
The 2017-18 nutrition intake data were not released but the intakes can be conservatively approximated (by deflating food spending in the later year to 2011-12 and applying the food cost per unit of nutrients) and this shows a sharp rise in rural poverty to over 80 per cent of the population, while urban poverty remained at about the same level as in 2011-12. The full data for 2023-24 are still to be released but in view of the pandemic-induced economic slowdown and rising unemployment, the true poverty levels are likely to have remained high.

The conceptual muddle that governments and the World Bank have created for themselves, and their resulting false claims of declining poverty, is the outcome of a simple logical mistake. They first correctly defined the poverty lines on the basis of nutrition norms in the initial year, and then for every succeeding year improperly changed the definition, de-linking it from nutrition norms; and they have done this for every country. In 1973-4 in India, the monthly spending per head required to access daily 2200 calories in rural and 2100 calories in urban areas, were Rs 49 and Rs 56.6, giving the respective official poverty ratios of 56.4 per cent rural and 49.2 per cent urban. This definition of the poverty line directly using nutrition norms was never again applied even though the needed current data on nutritional intake, has been available every five years.

Instead these particular 1973 poverty lines were simply updated to later years using price indices as has been explained, without ever asking whether nutrition norms continued to be reached or not. To start thus with one definition of poverty line and quietly switch to another completely different definition means committing a logical fallacy, the fallacy of equivocation. This fallacious method meant that the particular basket of goods and services available and consumed in 1973-4 was held fixed—by now it is 50 years in the past—with only its cost being price-indexed to the present.

In reality however the actually available basket of goods and services has been changing especially rapidly over the last three decades of neo-liberal market-oriented reforms (much more rapidly than the weights assigned to different items in price indices can be changed) because of increased privatisation and market pricing of goods and services. A basket being fixed for 50 years assumes away real trends in poverty, for whether people remain at the same level of poverty, get worse off or get better off, depends crucially on whether and in what ways the initial basket of goods and services is changed. Historically, poverty was reduced greatly or eliminated entirely by State policies in those countries where healthcare, education, and to a large extent housing and utilities were removed from the sphere of market pricing and were instead treated as public goods, using the budget to provide entirely free health care and compulsory free education for children, or only nominal charges were imposed. State-financed construction of affordable low-cost housing with low rents, and nominal charges for public transport and for utilities (water, energy for lighting and cooking), freed up a larger share of the family budget for buying food, manufactured necessities and spending on recreation. Such provision of public goods was not only typical in the socialist countries in Asia and Europe; it was also undertaken in the post-WWII period in almost all the West European capitalist countries.

The converse happened, the available basket of goods and services changed drastically to the detriment of consumers, with the introduction of market-oriented economic reforms in the countries of the global South  because these measures substantially or entirely removed healthcare, education and utilities from the category of public goods and into that of market pricing.  The resulting spike in these charges impacted adversely the income available to the majority of the population for spending on food and manufactured necessities, pushing more people into nutritional stress. Unwise specific policy measures like the 2016 currency de-monetisation, or the impact of the 2021-22 pandemic-induced recession, have aggravated the poverty problem no doubt but are not the basic causes of rising poverty, which long predates these events.

It is not a difficult proposition to substantially reduce poverty through redistributive measures. About one tenth of India’s GDP would need to be devoted to providing adequate food for the population, basic and comprehensive healthcare, compulsory free education, employment guarantee and old age pension; for which additional taxation of 7 per cent of GDP that the rich and super-rich can easily bear, would be needed. Combined with vigorous implementation of the existing National Food Security Act 2013 and the MG National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, genuine large-scale reduction of poverty would result. But an essential precondition for this lies in the realm of concepts that guide empirical work and the inferences based on them: the incorrect measurement of poverty that has been prevalent not only nationally but internationally has to be abjured, and the false claims of poverty reduction replaced by factually and logically correct estimates.

Note: The author’s book ‘Exploring the Poverty Question’ is in press. ​

​Author

Utsa Patnaik 

Originally published: Peoples Democracy

Victory Day In Chicago

On May 12th, a special Victory Day concert was organized in Chicago to celebrate 79 years of victory of fascism in the Second World War. The opening ceremony gave recognition to the historic contributions made by every single constituent republic of the Soviet Union, which stood shoulder-to-shoulder in common struggle; Russian SFSR, Belarusian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Armenian SSR, Georgian SSR, Uzbek SSR, Turkmen SSR, Tajik SSR, Kazakh SSR, Kirghiz SSR, Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Moldavian SSR, & Ukrainian SSR. ​

​The concert’s musical program featured a myriad of classic Soviet songs, both from the WWII period and later productions intended on immortalizing the memory of Soviet victory. These include A Hilltop With No Name (На безымянной высоте), From the Heroes of Yore (От героев былых времен), and, of course, Day of Victory (День победы) among others. 

You can watch the full concert here:

​Therefore, it comes as little surprise that the local Ukrainian nationalist community showed up to protest an event memorializing the Soviet victory over fascism, once they had discovered it on social media. Neither the fact that these Ukrainians were free to participate in what was supposed to be a non-politicized event, nor the historical truth that Ukraine had overwhelmingly fought alongside Russians in WWII, were enough to keep these pawns of US imperialism from making fools of themselves on that day. 

At any rate, the majority of people around the world remember the Soviet Union’s sacrifice in The Great Patriotic War. Every year since 1945, people have paid their respects to victory, they have done so this year, and they will continue to do for as long as the history books stay true to the actual events that make up the Second World War.

Author 

Donald Courter

Republished from the Revolution Report

​The principal question for any socialist movement today, be it in the U.S. or outside, is where it stands on issues of war and peace – what will be its position regarding American imperialism. As the great W. E. B. Dubois had long ago noted, “the government of the United States and the forces in control of government regard peace as dangerous.” The foundation of American society, as it exists under the tyranny of capital, is war. They have built up a grand machinery of lies, pumping out through all mediums the twisted facts and invented realities needed to support their topsy-turvy narrative of world events – and thereby, obtain consent for their crimes. They have slaughtered people and allowed whole populations to face the meat grinder of war to defend the right of accumulation for the owners of big capital – the monopoly-finance capitalist class. To defend the ‘rights’ of those who have pillaged the world for centuries. Those who make a killing out of killing. Who trade in the annihilation of life for profit.
​
As everyone knows, wherever there is oppression and immiseration there will be, sooner or later, resistance. This is a universal law of all human societies fractured by class antagonisms. It is this dialectic of class struggles which pushes humanity forward, often producing the births of whole new social systems from the ashes of a previous one. But these moments of societal renewal, where a new class comes into a position of power and creates a world in its own image, are not guaranteed – even if the conditions for producing it are. There is always the possibility, as Marx and Engels had long ago noted, of a general societal dissolution. To put it in terms fitting with the contradictions of the capitalist mode of life, it isn’t only socialism which stands as a possibility within the embryo of capitalism, equally capable of actualizing itself is, as Rosa Luxemburg long ago noted, barbarism.

The human element, what in traditional communist literature is called the subjective factor or the subjective conditions, are indispensable. It does not matter how bad things get, how clearly revolutionary the objective conditions are, without the subjective factor all is nil. It is the organized masses, led by the most conscious within their ranks, that make, out of the objectively revolutionary conditions, the revolutions.

For Lenin and the communist tradition, objectively revolutionary conditions require the presence of a few key factors: 1- the worsening of the masses’ living conditions, 2- their inability to go on in the old way, 3- their willingness to act (and not just passively accept dissatisfaction), and 4- a crisis in the ruling class itself, where even they cannot continue on in the old way. These objective conditions are present, and intensifying daily, in American society. I chronicle them in detail in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

We are faced with the first generations in American history to live lives worst than their parents. Precarity has become a general reality for working people, the majority of whom are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people. Debt slavery has also become, in our highly financialized capitalism, a generalized reality drowning most working-class Americans. Hundreds of thousands die yearly for lacking the financial means to access medical services or overdosing on opioid drugs pushed by the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with the government, the universities, and NGOs. Social decay is evident as former industrial powerhouse cities are plagued by zombified humans and rusted remains of the industries that once were the basis of decent working-class communities. The American dream has become a joke for working-class people who have more and more come to realize what the comedic-critic George Carlin once said: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

But these conditions, although functioning as the prime matter for building a revolutionary movement, are not enough. Why is that? I turn to Lenin, who says that “it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Like Sisyphus, the left of the last two decades seems condemned to roll the rock up simply to see it fall… rinsing and repeating continuously every few years. Since the protest movement against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Bernie Movement, to the Black Lives Matter Protests, to the current protests against the Zionist Genocide, the left has seen itself condemned to pull hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions, into the streets to express anger with whatever injustice is latched onto, only to then, after a few weeks or months, have everything return to square one.

I genuinely hope that the protest for a permanent ceasefire breaks this trend.

But if we are honest with ourselves, what fruit has borne out of the last two decades of protests? Did the Iraq protests stop the invasion and further destruction of the middle east? Did the occupy wall street protests stop financial speculation and overthrow the 1 percent? Did the Bernie movement win political power and bring with it the much-promised political revolution? Did the BLM protests actually challenge policing, the prison industrial complex, and the system which has made them necessary? The answer is not only No. The answer is, besides not achieving their desired ends, they have often accomplished quite the contrary. Movements such as Bernie’s and BLM, whatever still remains of it, were clearly just absorbed into the liberal, frankly most dominant, wing of the ruling class. They became what I’ve called a controlled form of counter hegemony, presenting a veneer of radicality on what is essentially a bourgeois politics that serves to reinforce the status quo with radical sounding language.
Giving up is, of course, not an option. The necessity for struggle is in the air. What do we do then?

I think we must start with being open to self-critique. Far too often even the attempt at doing so will receive backlash from those who are more comfortable with continuing the failures. Marxism is to dogma as water is to oil. If one is present the other cannot be, or at least not for long. If the tactics of the past have not worked, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask: why have the working masses not been won over to our side? Why have all the movements we’ve led this century ended in disappointment? It is okay to fail, but what is insane is to continue to fail in the same way while expecting a different outcome.

When questions such as these are tackled by the dominant left, the blame is almost always placed upon working people. Working people are not enlightened enough, too brute to realize how bourgeois ideology manipulates them, etc. While components of the narrative are true, the question is, so what? What is the point of communists if not precisely to piers through that, to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people – to rearticulate the rational kernels of the spontaneous common sense they’ve developed within the bourgeois order towards socialism, either producing active militants in the process or the sympathetic mass which it leads. In my view, the chunk of the blame for our failures lies on the left itself. On its middle-class composition and the purity fetish outlook it operates with.

Therefore, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department's attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class "radical recuperators," as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a "controlled counter-hegemonic left," a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism.

This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society.

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn't live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it's rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States:

1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or "backward" for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a "fascist threat." Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on.

2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them.

3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers' struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism.

This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must socialist in content and national in form. Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism.  etc.  Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do.

Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride, it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.

To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be – contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy – abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don't take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context.

In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement.

In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview – the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling class, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party. 

​Hundreds of college student encampments across the country against the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza have now spread to Europe, South America and the world. The acts of mass solidarity have seized the frontpages of mainstream tabloids for almost a month now. It all started on Wednesday March 17th at my alma mater, Columbia University, thanks to the leadership and solidarity of hundreds of student and faculty leaders. Mayor Eric Adam’s impressive squandering of our taxpayer money to harass and repress peaceful student protests will not soon be forgotten by voters.
​
I was one of the alumni and professors arrested for opposing this disgraceful holocaust of human life in Gaza that even the corporate media describes as a threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families. The two-week encampment was a magical time of love, movement building and collectivity. While the NYPD arrested hundreds of us on the night of Tuesday April 30th, there were constant threats throughout the duration of the two-week encampment. As NYPD helicopters and drones circled overhead and hundreds of riot police prepared to invade Columbia for a second time in two weeks, here is a view from the inside of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 

A Second Sweep?

On the night of Tuesday, April 23rd tensions reached their highest point. An NYPD helicopter hovered above, low enough to make sure no one slept on the sixth night of occupation. A drone moved 10 feet every 5 seconds above hundreds of camped-out students who cried out for warmth and a Palestine free of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

After midnight, there were movements and adjustments by the hundreds of student protestors in expectation of the second sweep by the riot police. Or would it be the National Guard , as the administration was threatening? The heavy specter of the Kent State , Jackson State and Orangeburg student massacres towered over us. On the second day of the camp the previous week, Columbia’s president, the Baroness Manouche Shafik , had sent the NYPD in to arrest students and destroy the first Butler lawn encampment. After the one hundred plus arrests, a second team swooped in and occupied the adjacent East Lawn.

In the swirl of rumors, there was the temptation to run around in confusion, like chickens with our heads cut off. The Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish student leadership’s calm confidence checkmated the untested fears. This is the unity Zionism most fears.

On East Lawn, the protests of past epochs hung heavily over the hallowed grounds in front of the beams and columns of the towering neoclassical-structured Butler library. The names Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle and others were written above in bold letters on the imposing imperial structure. Before the pending showdown below, these names meant nothing more than a Literature Humanities or Art Humanities paper deadline for the multitude below determined to halt the gears of genocide. Timidity and academia have never inscribed themselves into the pages of history. Emboldened by the examples of Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, Muna El Kurd, Ahed Tamimi, Shireen Abu Akleh and so many other anti-colonial Palestinian fighters and martyrs, this was their moment. To even utter the names of Palestinian people’s soldiers was an act of rebellion. The corporate media was in overdrive to dilute and pervert the anti-genocidal message of the student occupations across the U.S. The students repeatedly say Palestine has a right to live and prosper; the mainstream media repeatedly misreports , in subtle and forthright ways, that "the movement is anti-Semitic."

On the other end of every one of our anxious breaths, Palestine remained the compass and heartbeat of the encampment.

The Importance of Leadership and Centralism

In the inflection points of this struggle, there was a higher probability of deeper police infiltration. The student leadership broke us into smaller units to minimize the impact of snitches. Our camp security used tactics of restraint and patience with Zionist provocateurs. Student leaders reminded us that under-covers most often arrive under the amorphous cover of anarchy. Any new face at this eleventh hour was deeply suspicious.

Before the asymmetrical show of force , there was no vacillating. There was no doubt. One student posed the million-dollar question to her brigade: “Why are they treating us like this? We are a bunch of geeks with books and disgust for Zionist genocide.”

Best friends, new friends and veteran comrades squeezed each other’s hands in the brisk spring air. Those April days from 56 years earlier hung frozen in the balance.

Every instruction from our trusted leadership emerged from a high degree of collaborative reflection and centralism. The highly democratic, representative student body came together through 7 months and 76 years of organizing against Israeli apartheid. We organized ourselves into brigades. A student team evacuated dozens of tents in a lightning-quick logistical move. Brigade Red tossed them over a fence, along with any cautions that persisted. We packed up all of our food and collectivity. Was this the end of the Gaza encampment, the end of our commune of stubborn tears and raised fists? The concerns from hours ago over sunscreen and tent flies to stay dry dissipated into the observant night. The moon was our only front-line witness, as the Baroness had closed the citadel’s gates. Alumni complained about not being able to enter campus. A crowd had assembled outside the ivy gates reminding this prison house of nations, that private property is theft. We could hear the chants and drums outside of the protest in solidarity with us on the other side of the police barricades. The support just seventy-five yards away and across the world was the background of our resolve. We were not alone. This encampment symbolized the frustrations of billions of forgotten and voiceless human beings. The Columbia students had started a prairie fire with their fearless spark.

Some three hundred of us sat at assembly in touch with the pulse of the beating earth. A row of rustic lanterns illuminated 76 years of anti-colonial dreams, its sharp light piercing the walls of our humble tents. A frigid, visible breath short of its one-week anniversary, Columbia’s Gaza commune was under threat.

For the Global Palestinian Family, sleep was again the privilege of the colonial enemy and their pets. For in Occupied Palestine, the colonizers’ Doberman Pinschers are considered superior to the Native. And this is what united us all. The revolutionary, in their essence, is the one who no matter the odds, stands up to the bully .

We carry the genocide in our throats and consciences. What would Refaat have written? How did Motaz stand strong? Wael had birthed a new family…the family of humanity.

Hundreds of students were in collective anti-state motion, divided according to the commitments they could make. “The 10’s” prepared for arrest. “The 8’s” assumed their supportive positions. “The 6’s” played their role. “The 2’s” and “the 4’s” were international students or immigrants who could not get arrested. We were subdivided into rank-and-file cells of civil disobedience. Bodies scattered in one thousand directions. Endless beams of celestial light bounced around the football-field sized grass encampment.

                                   The cold, irate ground shook below
                                            the hopeful grass
                                                    the unwashed gravity
                                                                 braced the selflessness
                                                                               the internationalism…

Building on the legacy of the protests against the colonial slaughter in Vietnam in 1968, the ant-apartheid struggle of 1985 and the ethnic studies fight of 1996, Columbia’s offspring of past struggles demonstrated that the order of student revolt is anything but chaos.

Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism

The New York Times, CNN and Fox, The New York Post and their ideological cousins prepared their “anti-semitic” headlines divorced from material reality.

In the sea of keffiyehs, hundreds of “journalists” came and went, hunting for anything that could be twisted into an anti-semitic trope. Undercover informants and provocateurs infiltrated the outside rally engaging in an anti-semitic skit in front of the drooling cameras. In a scene totally alien to the essence of the Palestinian movement, two pretend students demanded money from a “Jewish student” in return for not further destroying a tattered, burnt Israeli flag. It was a disgusting scene meant to further demonize the burgeoning mass movement. The Atlantic took cheap shots at the liberated zones. Proud of their liberal arrogance, they surely knew better than anyone else how to stop seven and a half decades of colonial dispossession, humiliation and massacres. Entitled Zionists insisted on making it all about them and their colonial narcissism. Anything to distract from Gaza. The historic Jewish soul is trapped between two holocausts.

Two journalists tried to keep up with the lightning-quick, unified crowd but tripped over their self-seeking motives, sliding headfirst into the second base of sensationalism. The restive scene knocked the microphone out of their hands. This wasn’t about them. It was about the ancient Palestinian people whose only desire was to live as all nations aspire to live, free of foreign fetters.

“Stay Focused on Gaza!”

The censorship, the fascism and the holocaust of human life steeled the collective resolve. All thoughts were with Gaza. “Stay focused” was the silent prayer shared by all. “Staying Focused! We do not engage with instigators! (with a Why? And an explanation below).” was[1]  a poster that sat as the third eye of the people’s occupation.

Imagine trying to engage in dialogue with Nazis who had been so thoroughly indoctrinated in hatred of all things socialist, Jewish and Slavic. The Zionist is a sociological reality who despises all things true, native and self-determining. The Zionist fashions himself superior to his neighbors. The camp insisted on not relinquishing control of the narrative to the genocidaires. Not engaging with Zionist provocateurs was tactic number one for the encampment populated by hundreds of tents.

Everyone had a task that was completed. Composed of some 300 ants, the ant colony acted as one body. Half-stepping was not an option. Was the National Guard about to enter? The negotiating team texted encrypted updates. Had the administration compromised? The Baroness and her minions wanted to talk about repealing suspensions if the students gave up; we were focused on the genocide.

The sea of keffiyehs had parted. The symbol of the most despised has united us like no other. To wear the keffiyeh in New York City is to remind ourselves every second that we are human and Zionism will not vanquish us. The flag that flew so high that April 17th is not just the flag of the Palestinian people, it is the flag of humanity.

Before the site of the SWAT teams, a sophomore majoring in English thought of calling her parents on Long Island to tell them she loved them. That thought quickly moved to the outer recesses of her mind. This was an inside moment among comrades who no one in the outside world could ever quite understand. Camaraderie was the watchword. A generation removed from the protagonists, I looked around at the beautiful leaders. Their passion compelled them forward. Who would one day write memoirs and make documentaries about this moment?

The roar of the helicopter and the silence of the drone above mocked us and our principles. The riot police, phalanxes of armed men and women, awaited orders to crack “the geeks’” heads open. The NYPD had all of the identity politics boxes checked. Black, Bengali, Dominican, women, LGBTQ+, young Asian cops etc. It mattered little. They formed a blue wall of repression armed with ignorance, self-interest and guns. All of mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams’ diversity trainings boiled down to plain fascism.

The Passive U.S. Masses vs. A Restive Humanity

Hundreds of other students gathered on all sides of us to watch the unraveling of history.

A would-be stirrer of the masses yelled to the crowd of hundreds of journalists and onlookers who stood behind our occupied East Lawn: “Are you all with us?” No one dared to respond. The crowd looked around dazed and confused, unaware of the import of this moment. Had they even paid their admission? They refused to make eye contact with anyone, least of all their own soul. The mass agitator egged them on: “Will you stand against a genocide?” He chanted the cry of our epoch: “Free Free Palestine!” There was no reply. Expectations in the blind, colonial Western world are a resentment in construction, but he insisted. “Free Free Palestine!” There was silence. In the ideological void, a student yelled back: “Dude, we’re just spectators.” The neutral mass was again a wet hen before the anti-genocidal momentum of history.

To be a part of this night and these two weeks of unity, resistance and love for Palestine at the Columbia encampment has been an honor. It felt like I was back in the mid 1990’s when we waged struggles for Ethnic Studies and labor rights.

To the anti-colonial fighters who are the age of our children across the world: Keep going! Keep fighting! It is right to rebel! Columbia Administrators can go to hell! Seize the time! Keep leading the way! Gaza sees you! “Palestine is our moral compass!”

​In early April 2024, the navies of four countries—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States—held a maritime exercise in the South China Sea. Australia’s Warramunga, Japan’s Akebono, the Philippines’ Antonio Luna, and the United States’ Mobile worked together in these waters to strengthen their joint abilities and—as they said in a joint statement—to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight and respect for maritime rights under international law.” A few weeks later, between April 22 and May 8, ships from the Philippines and the United States operated alongside Australian and French naval troops for Exercise Balikatan 2024.
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For this Balikatan (“shoulder-to-shoulder”), over 16,000 troops participated in an area of the South China Sea that is outside the territorial waters of the Philippines. Alongside the navies of these nations, the Coast Guard of the Philippines took part in Exercise Balikatan. This is significant because it is the boats of the Coast Guard that most often encounter Chinese ships in these international waters, part of which are disputed between China and the Philippines. Although the official documents of these exercises do not mention China by name, they are certainly designed as part of the increasing military activity driven by the United States along China’s maritime border. 

During the Balikatan exercise, the navy vessels from the Philippines and the United States jointly attacked and sank the decommissioned Philippine Navy BRP Lake Caliraya. The ship—which was made in China—had been donated to the navy by the Philippine National Oil Company in 2014. The fact that it was the only ship in the Philippines’ navy that was made in China did not go unnoticed within China. Colonel Francel Margareth Padilla-Taborlupa, a spokesperson of the armed forces of the Philippines, said that this was “purely coincidental.”

During Balikatan, the defense ministers of the four main nations met in Honolulu, Hawaii to discuss the political implications of these military exercises off the coast of China. Australia’s Richard Marles, Japan’s Kihara Minoru, the Philippines’ Gilberto Teodoro, and the United States’ Lloyd Austin met for their second meeting to discuss their collaboration in the region that they call the Indo-Pacific. It was at the edges of this meeting that the public relations teams of these ministers began to float the term “Squad” to refer to these four countries. While they did not formally announce the creation of a new bloc in East Asia, this new nickname intends to provide a de facto announcement of its existence.

From the Quad to the Squad

In 2007, the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States met in Manila (Philippines) to establish the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad) while their militaries conducted Exercise Malabar in the Philippines Sea. The Quad did not initially include the Philippines, whose President at the time—Gloria Arroyo—was trying to improve relations between her country and China. The Quad did not develop because Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was unhappy with Washington’s growing belligerence towards Beijing. The Quad revived in 2017, once more in Manila, with a more forthright agenda to work against China’s Belt and Road ambitions in the region (which U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called “predatory economics”).

Over the course of the past two years, the United States has been frustrated with India’s discomfort with the kind of pressure campaign that the U.S. has been mounting against China and Russia. India refused to stop buying discounted Russian energy, which was a pragmatic decision during an election period (although India’s purchase of Russian energy has declined over time). When asked if India will consider being a NATO+ member, India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar said that India does not share the “NATO mentality.” India’s reluctance to join in the full-throated New Cold War against China annoyed the U.S. government, which therefore decided to set aside the Quad and assemble the Squad with the more pliant and eager government of Philippines president Bongbong Marcos. It is important to note, however, that in April India delivered a batch of supersonic BrahMos cruise missiles to the Philippines (sold for $375 million and produced by a joint venture between arms manufacturers in India and Russia). That these missiles might be part of the new pressure campaign against China is not something buried in the fine print of the deal.

Provocations

Since its “pivot to Asia,” the United States has sought to provoke China. The U.S. trade war that began in 2018 largely fizzled out due to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its attempt to build the advanced production lines to circumvent U.S. trade restrictions (for instance, when the U.S. tried to prevent China from importing semiconductor chips, the Chinese developed their own manufacturing capacity). The U.S. attempt to make Taiwan into the frontline of its pressure campaign has not borne fruit either. The inauguration of Taiwan’s new president Lai Ching-te on May 20 brings to the helm a man who is not interested in pushing for Taiwan’s independence; only 6 percent of Taiwan’s population favors unification with China or independence, with the rest of the population satisfied with the status quo. Unable to create the necessary provocation over Taiwan, the United States has moved its gunsights to the Philippines.

While the Philippines and China dispute the status of several islands in the waters between them, these disagreements are not sufficient to drive either country to war. In April 2024, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte recalled that when he was president (2016-2022), “there was no quarrel. We can return to normalcy. I hope that we can stop the ruckus over there because the Americans are the ones pushing the Philippine government to go out there and find a quarrel and eventually maybe start a war.” In March, President Marcos said that he is “not poking the bear” and does not want to “provoke” China. However, the formation of the Squad two months later does indicate that the Philippines has now replaced Taiwan as the frontline state for U.S. provocations against China.

China’s vice chair of its Central Military Commission, Zhang Youxia, warned against “gunboat muscles.” “Reality has shown,” he said, “that those who make deliberate provocations, stoke tensions, or support one side against another for selfish gains will ultimately only hurt themselves.”

​In Cairo, representatives from Hamas held indirect negotiations with Israel for a ceasefire. The sticking point for several of the rounds was the order of events. Israel wanted the hostages to be released before it would stop the bombing, while Hamas said that the bombing must stop first. Israel has called for the disarming and dismantling of Hamas, which is a maximalist demand unlikely to be met. Hamas meanwhile would like not only a ceasefire but an end to the war. Both sides blamed each other, which made the task of the Egyptian and Qatari negotiators more difficult.
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The best outcome possible from the Cairo talks is an end to the current genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The negotiations to end the war took on an extra urgency as Israel bombed the edge of Rafah, the only city in Gaza not yet decimated by Israel. With no place to flee, the Palestinian civilians in Rafah cannot be sheltered from any attack, even if it is not as violent as conducted by the Israeli army against Gaza City and Khan Younis. Those attacks have created 37 million tons of rubble, which are filled with contaminants and an immense number of unexploded bombs (which will take 14 years to disarm). Israel believes that the last organized remnants of Hamas exist in Rafah, and that it will either bomb the millions who live there to destroy it, or it will have to agree to destroy itself through negotiations. Both are unacceptable to the Palestinians, who neither want more civilian casualties nor the break-up of one of the fiercest defenders of the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

Despite Hamas’s agreement with the ceasefire proposal, Israel launched violent attacks on Rafah and seized control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt (thereby cutting off the main access route for aid into Gaza). The talks continue but Israel is simply unwilling to take them seriously.

Palestinian Unity

Israel’s disregard for the negotiations and the level of its violence can be measured based on two political realities. It does not take negotiations with the Palestinians seriously and it feels that it can bomb with impunity. This is so because, firstly, Israel is backed fully by the Global North states (mainly the United States and Europe) and secondly, it does not regard Palestinian political views as vital because it has succeeded in breaking the political unity amongst Palestinians and it has succeeded in politically disorienting the various factions by the arrest of their main leadership. This does not entirely apply to Hamas, whose leadership was able to set up operations in Damascus and then later in Doha, Qatar. While it is impossible to imagine a rapid about-face from the Global North countries, it has become entirely clear to the Palestinian factions that absent their unity there will be no way to compel Israel to end its genocidal war, and then of course its occupation of Palestinian lands combined with its apartheid policies inside Israel.

In late April 2023, Hamas met with Fatah, the other major Palestinian political force, in China as part of a long process to create common ground between them. Relations between these two major political parties broke down in 2006-07, when Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza and when Fatah—in charge of the Palestine Authority—contested these results; indeed, the two factions fought each other militarily in Gaza before Fatah retreated to the West Bank. During Israel’s genocidal war, both Fatah and Hamas sought to bridge the gap and not to permit their differences to allow both the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the defeat of Palestinian political aims in general. High representatives of these two parties met in Moscow earlier this year, and again in China in May.

For this meeting in China, Fatah sent its senior leaders, including Azzam al-Ahmad (who is on the central committee and leads its Palestinian reconciliation team), while Hamas sent equally senior leaders, including Mousa Abu Marzouk (a member of the party’s Political Bureau and its de facto Foreign Minister). The negotiations did not result in a final agreement, but—as part of a long process—it has deepened the dialogue and the political will between the two parties to work together against the Israeli genocidal war and the occupation. Further meetings at this high level are being planned, with a joint statement to follow later regarding a call--encouraged by China’s President Xi Jinping—for an international peace conference to end the war and a joint Palestinian platform regarding the way forward.

Gaps

Fatah, the anchor of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was founded in 1959 by three men, two of whom came from the Muslim Brotherhood (Khalil al-Wazir and Salah Khalaf) and one of whom who came from the General Union of Palestinian students and would eventually become the main leader (Yasser Arafat). The PLO established itself as the core of the Palestinian struggle against the catastrophe of 1948 that lost them their lands, made them second-class citizens inside Israel, and sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into decades of exile. The Muslim Brotherhood imprint did not form within the PLO, which took on a national liberation tone that was sharpened by the various left factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, formed in 1967) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP, formed in1968).

The PLO became hegemonic in the Palestinian struggle, coordinating the political work in the camps of the exiles and the armed struggle of the fedayeen (fighters). The factions of the PLO faced concerted attack from Israel, which invaded Lebanon to exile the leadership and its core to Tunisia. With the fall of the USSR, the PLO began to negotiate earnestly with the Israelis and the United States, both of which imposed a form of surrender on the Palestinians called the 1993 Oslo Accords. Fatah took charge of the Palestinian Authority, which operated partially to maintain the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Angered by what appeared to be a Palestinian surrender at Oslo, eight factions formed the Alliance of Palestinian Factions in 1993. Within this Alliance, the largest groups belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. They included Palestinian Islamic Jihad (formed in 1981) and Hamas (formed in 1987). The PFLP and DFLP initially joined this alliance but left in 1998 over differences with the Islamic parties. The Islamist parties won the parliamentary elections in Gaza with a slim margin (Hamas’s 44 percent against Fatah’s 41 percent), a result that angered Israel and the Global North states who then tried to undermine them.

The path to political power through the ballot box having been denied them, and then facing sustained Israeli suffocation and bombardment of Gaza, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad strengthened their armed wings and defended themselves against humiliation and attack. Every attempt at peaceful protest--including the Long March of Return in 2018 and 2019—was met with Israeli violence. There has never been a moment when the people of Gaza have experienced a year of peace since 2007. The current bombardment, however, is at a different scale than even the worst of the previous attacks by Israel in 2008 and 2014.

The main political disagreements between the factions include their different interpretation of the Oslo Accords, their respective ambition for political control, and their separate aspirations for Palestinian society. That their political leaders have been imprisoned for decades and that they have been prevented from normal, democratic political activity (such as maintaining their political structures and as canvassing the people) has prevented them from bridging their distances. However, in prison the leadership have had sustained dialogues on these issues. Right after the parliamentary elections in Gaza, the leaders of the five major factions imprisoned in Israel’s Hadarim prison wrote a National Conciliation Document of the Prisoners. Marwan Barghouti of Fatah, Abdel Raheem Malluh of the PFLP, Mustafa Badarneh of the DFLP, Abdel Khaleq al-Natsh of Hamas, and Bassam al-Saadi of Islamic Jihad.

The Document of the Prisoners, which was widely circulated and discussed, called for Palestinian unity and an end to “all forms of division that could lead to internal strife.” The text did not lay out a new Palestinian political agenda, but it called for the various factions “to formulate a Palestinian plan aimed at comprehensive political action.” The development of this plan, now almost 20 years later, is a major objective of the talks between the various Palestinian political organizations.

There is agreement that the first task is to prevent the attack on Rafah and to end the genocidal war against the Palestinians. However, soon thereafter, the sense is that the political malaise that has befallen the Palestinian people must be overcome and a new political project must be used to motivate a new political atmosphere amongst the Palestinians within Israel’s borders, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, and in the 6 million strong Palestinian diaspora.

​The Communist Party USA was once a serious and powerful political force in this country. This is the Party of W.E.B. Dubois we’re talking about, the father of American Marxism himself. The Party of William Z Foster, whose health was waning and still came out of retirement to fight against the revisionism and liquidationism of Earl Browder and his wild theories about imperialism being progressive. The first integrated political organization in the entire country; the Party that fought for the death penalty for lynching during Jim Crow and organized the defense of the Scottsboro Boys; who fought for the 8-hour workday, the end of child labor, and the weekend. The Party that built the CIO from nothing into the most powerful body of organized labor in the United States. The Party that struck such fear into the hearts of the ruling class that they arrested its leaders without a single crime being committed.
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And so it is with tremendous sadness that we see what it’s turned into now in 2024. At a time when it is needed more than ever, as revolutionary conditions come upon us with a rapidity that could make your head spin, the once mighty Communist Party USA seems to have degenerated into a chaotic and contradictory clique of social chauvinism, revisionism, anarchistic ultra-leftism, and right opportunism. The theoretical rigor of Herbert Aptheker, Henry Winston, and W.E.B. Dubois has lapsed into hollow sloganeering and obligatory mouthing of Marxist language, devoid of anything approaching the dialectical logic of Marxism.
           
And this is an utter tragedy, in our opinion. It seems, however, that such things happen from time to time. J.V. Stalin himself explains a previous example of this same sort of degeneration in his seminal text, Foundations of Leninism (a book that is nowhere to be found within the educational curriculum of the modern “party”, which seems strange for an organization claiming to be guided by Marxist Leninism, to not have the text that introduces people to it), where he says:
           
… The Second International was headed by "faithful" Marxists, by the "orthodox" Kautsky and others. Actually, however, the main work of the Second International followed the line of opportunism. The opportunists adapted themselves to the bourgeois because of their adaptive, petty-bourgeois nature; the "orthodox," in their turn, adapted themselves to the opportunists in order to "preserve unity" with them, in the interests of "peace within the party." Thus the link between the policy of the bourgeois and the policy of the "orthodox" was closed, and, as a result, opportunism reigned supreme.

This was the period of the relatively peaceful development of capitalism, the pre-war period, so to speak, when the catastrophic contradictions of imperialism had not yet became so glaringly evident, when workers' economic strikes and trade unions were developing more or less "normally," when election campaigns and parliamentary groups yielded "dizzying" successes, when legal forms of struggle were lauded to the skies, and when it was thought that capitalism would be "killed" by legal means - in short, when the parties of the Second International were living in clover and had no inclination to think seriously about revolution, about the dictatorship of the proletariat, about the revolutionary education of the masses.

Instead of an integral revolutionary theory, there were contradictory theoretical postulates and fragments of theory, which were divorced from the actual revolutionary struggle of the masses and had been turned into threadbare dogmas. For the sake of appearances, Marx's theory was mentioned, of course, but only to rob it of its living, revolutionary spirit.

Instead of a revolutionary policy, there was flabby philistinism and sordid political bargaining, parliamentary diplomacy and parliamentary scheming. For the sake of appearances, of course, "revolutionary" resolutions and slogans were adopted, but only to be pigeonholed.

Instead of the party being trained and taught correct revolutionary tactics on the basis of its own mistakes, there was a studied evasion of vexed questions, which were glossed over and veiled. For the sake of appearances, of course, there was no objection to talking about vexed questions, but only in order to wind up with some sort of "elastic" resolution.

We have been silently watching this organization we have held in such high esteem become the thrift store version of Kautsky and the Second International over the last few years. Where they arose out of the period of the relatively peaceful development of capitalism, ours arises during the period of the middle classes. Where they were dizzy with success, we are dizzy with forgetting what success even looks like. Whereas Kautsky and his ilk believed they would need no revolution, our Kautskys have given up on the idea of revolution altogether. The effects are the same. The organization is completely divorced from the struggles of the working class, pathetically scraping and bowing to be included with institutions of the financial capitalists like the Democratic Party, repeating threadbare dogmas but using them in service of the precise roles the ruling class wants us to play. Liberals vs conservatives. For the sake of appearances, of course, they mention Marx and Lenin, mouth words they believe sound revolutionary, but only to rob Marxism of its dialectical and materialist, revolutionary spirit. Instead of the party being trained and taught correct revolutionary tactics on the basis of its own mistakes, its speeches and slogans are the same as those of thirty years before now, the same scraping and bowing before the Democratic Party, and those who would return to Marxist analysis and attempt to rectify such errors are black-balled, smeared, and campaigned against harder than the people responsible for currently funding a genocide in Palestine.
           
In fact, they have even gone so far as to attack with the most heinous and disgusting of lies the most prominent Communist in the country, who is one of the leading voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement, Jackson Hinkle, along with us and the rest of the new Communist movement that is quickly forming in our new era of revolutionary potential. And in doing this, they are materially aligning themselves with the forces of that genocide and Zionism.
           
And this is where we get to the meat and potatoes, my friends.
           
Recently, the Party posted a rather telling article on its official website called “Against Patriotic Socialism”. Yes, you read that correctly. The article, part of the pre-convention discussions (or, really, we should put “convention” in scare quotes, and the National Board knows why - maybe they can explain to the various clubs why that is, before we have to do so), which can be found on the Party’s main website, maliciously, falsely, and childishly attacks the most prominent Communists in the entire country, who have done more for the cause of class struggle in a single year than the Party has managed in 20. Hinkle alone has exposed millions of people not only to a more positive view of Communism and fought Zionism and imperialism at every turn, but even gone so far as to do what these so-called “old heads” thought impossible, and gotten people to reconsider their views on J.V. Stalin, the most lied about Communist in history. The Infrared Collective has created new slogans that have gotten parts of the working class the Party gave up on long ago to begin getting interested in Communism, and its slogans are featured in mainstream media frequently.

When was the last time anyone outside of the tiny little niche of professional activists in America spoke of the Communist Party? Unfortunately, one of the reasons for that may be that they seem to have allowed any old liberal who can’t tell a dialectic from a diuretic to pollute their organization and website with hollow sloganeering and buzzwords, advertise for bourgeois NGOs, and directly attack the Midwestern Marx Institute, the only educational institution for Marxism Leninism currently teaching the Marxist worldview in the entire country with the kind of childish and silly lies and rumor-mongering one comes to expect only of the worst type of Trotskyists and anarchists. Not a single word of it had been verified or fact checked. We’re not even sure the Party has cadre assigned to this. (To be fair, the Party got rid of the notion of cadre years and years ago, as it now believes a “mass party” to filter people into voting Democrat is somehow a better move than Lenin’s theories.) We’re not even sure its leadership is aware of the content it put up on its official website, and the libelous accusations it’s put out there, as it seems oblivious to the childish antics of its more ultra-left and petty rank and file most of the time. But we are here to do that, and we are done silently taking abuse. We would like to invite the members of the Communist Party USA, who we know are mostly good and dedicated people, to simply keep an open mind, and maybe think about why and how things always seem to end up in support of the forces funding a genocide in one country, and allied to doctrinaire Nazis in another. We do not mean to criticize all of the rank and file membership, but instead the fact that anti-communists are allowed to run wild, disgracing not only the organization that demands so much more respect than that, but the word “Communist” itself with their public antics.
           
In doing this, we will be going point by point through the ridiculous sloganeering of the article linked in the footnote, explaining why it is not only against the historical position of the Communist Party when it was guided by Marxism Leninism, but self-contradictory, arriving from bourgeois theory and not Marxism, and amounts to nothing more than anti-Communist whining that brings everyone down to a level of such childishness that no one in their right mind would take the people involved in it seriously (which could be what its author intended; but who knows? The Communist Party doesn’t even bother vetting its members anymore. There is no probation period for recruits, people are kicked out on a whim, and their “education” program coming out of the so-called “Claudia Jones School”, which is not an actual school like the Party’s old “Jefferson School”[1] was, but instead simple branding for mostly liberal classes on some okay empirical facts, and specifically does not provide anything close to teaching new people the Marxist Leninist worldview).
           
The article begins by immediately invoking one of the radlib buzzwords that came around last year. Strange how these things are nowhere, then suddenly everywhere overnight, isn’t it? It speaks of a phenomenon of so-called “PatSocs” or “patriotic socialists”. First and foremost, its author, a Mr. Elijah Jones, should look into the history of the Party he has joined, as he will find that patriotism has always been a very big part of Communists in the USA. Or he could look elsewhere in the world, maybe to Mao for advice, who said, “Can a Communist who is also an internationalist at the same time be a patriot? We hold not only that he can, but that he must.” Mao goes on to explain that the formal expression of patriotism is determined by particular conditions, as any Marxist with a basic grasp of the dialectic of form and content would. Or perhaps back home to Paul Robeson, who stood up at the HUAC and said that Communists were the most patriotic Americans he knew, and that it was the HUAC that were the anti-Americans, and the HUAC who were the anti-patriots, that they should be ashamed. Or possibly Lenin’s 1914 essay On the National Pride of the Great Russians, where he speaks of the essential content of patriotism. Or Georgi Dimitrov, who emphasizes the importance of giving socialist content a national form, especially in a period of emerging fascism, where the people’s heroes of the past have to be wrested away from the fascists. Or literally any Communist in history, who understands the importance of rejecting historical and national nihilism and embracing the best of their people’s traditions. Mr. Jones and the CPUSA website seem to be blinded by what Carlos L. Garrido calls a “liberal tinted American exceptionalism,” which holds that America is somehow an exception to the laws of development governing society, especially the form the class struggle must take in the bourgeois epoch. This is very childish ultra-leftism mixed with hollow sloganeering, devoid of Marxist analysis altogether. More similar to the falsifications and rants of “J Sakai” than anything else.

Mr. Jones then absurdly claims that patriotism is “Browderism” and mentions that William Z. Foster fought against it. This is the extremely low level of theoretical understanding and historical knowledge that is all too common in the CP these days. “Browderism” was not patriotism at all. It refers instead to Earl Browder’s turn towards liquidationism (similar to that of Sam Webb) and his book that claimed imperialism still maintained some progressive aspects of industrial capitalism. Foster, of course, did argue against Browder, and saved the Party from liquidation. You can read about this in the book he wrote dedicated to it called Marxism Leninism Vs Revisionism, along with Jacques Duclos, Eugene Dennis and John Williamson. The book’s table of contents should tell anyone curious that patriotism is not so suspiciously absent from the text. Its foreword gives a general overview. Unfortunately, this is not common knowledge in the Party anymore, as the “PatSoc” and “Browderism” labels are filtered through the radlib rumor mill and the truth falls out somewhere along the way.

To be clear, Mr. Jones and the CPUSA website want to use William Z. Foster to critique American patriotism, calling it Browderism. What does Foster himself say of patriotism, though? In a 1939 issue of The Communist, Foster writes:

“On their own part, the progressive forces in the mass organizations have made considerable appeal to American patriotism and traditions for constructive ends. But this appeal has usually been weak, spasmodic, and ineffective. The workers, farmers, professionals, have not understood how to bring forth in their agitation the basically constructive role they have played historically in building American democracy.
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In this respect the revolutionary movement has been especially weak. From the foundation of the Socialist Labor Party in the 1870’s, down through the life of the Socialist Party and the IWW, and during the early years of the Communist Party, there was a dominant tendency to ignore and to scorn American tradition and love of country. This arose out of a narrow, sectarian conception of internationalism, and it did much to weaken the position of the revolutionaries in the organizations of the patriotically minded toiling masses. Here again, a better study of Marx and Lenin would have prevented this grievous error. Only during the past few years, notably since the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International and through the writings of Comrade Browder, is real progress being made by our Party in correcting this costly mistake and in basing itself upon a correct Leninist line.

The cultivation of the democratic, revolutionary American traditions among the mass organizations is one of the most important tasks in the building of the democratic front. We must not permit the reactionaries to steal and distort the national traditions and aspirations of the people. The great democratic masses must be taught by constant reference to American history that it was their struggles in the past that built our republic, that the democratic front movement of today is the continuation of all the fights for liberty in the history of our own country; that in the achievement of the current demands of the masses lies the fruition of all that is progressive and glorious in American history; that socialism is the climax toward which the entire historic struggle of the democratic American people inevitably tends.

So not only does Foster congratulate Browder when he was correct on the question of patriotism, but ruthlessly criticizes him when he was incorrect on the position of liquidationism. (Though, to be fair to Browder, he claimed until he died that Moscow had ordered him to act in such a way.) This is precisely the line of the prominent Communists of the USA, that it is the American toiling masses who are the revolutionary agent, and the material that makes up our country, that we have a deep and rich revolutionary tradition that these hollow sloganeers tarnish, along with the name Communism, with their ignorant bleating.

It’s incredibly sad that such lies and silliness is published directly on the CP’s website. And we’re only getting started.

The next group of lies is even more fun, calling this made up “movement” of “PatSocs”, quote, “transphobic, ableist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Indigenous.” It gives no actual proof of any of these lies, which is suspiciously similar to the tactics used by agent provocateurs all through the history of the Party - accuse, accuse, accuse. Whenever explanations or proof is demanded, they either make something up or throw disjointed things together (tin foil hat style) that won’t survive even slight prodding, or toss out another baseless accusation to distract from the previously questioned one. In the very same breath, its silliest of accusations is made, saying all of these dreaded “PatSocs” are inspired by Lyndon Larouche, an irrelevant name in 2024 if ever there was one. It supposedly connects this through the journalist Caleb Maupin, who has no connections to any of the other organizations or people it names as its supposed “PatSocs”. It does provide a nice link to the Midwestern Marx Institute featured in In These Times afterwards, which is fine, as we were featured there, and it talks about the following we’ve acquired, which is also fine, but linking us or the others with such things is downright silly and shows how out of touch with prominent Communists the Party has become.

The next one, however, absolutely takes the cake. It is possibly the silliest and most absurdly childish and uninformed thing I’ve read in 42 years on this Earth. And that’s saying something, as I spend time on social media in order to help build up the Midwestern Marx Institute, so I see childish and uninformed things all day long. Let’s quote it verbatim, so there’s no mistaking what the Party has actually allowed on its website (almost certainly without knowing, as no one is this dumb other than terminally online college kids). “We have yet to call out ‘Patriotic Socialism’ for what it is, which is so-called ‘National Socialism’ in new garb.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Your brain didn’t just melt, and your eyes still work. Mr. Jones has not only conflated standard Communist principles like patriotism based on the Marxist understanding of what constitutes a people and the form class struggle takes during the bourgeois epoch, but he then conflates THAT with nationalism, and then conflates THAT with Nazism. All in two paragraphs. It would be amazing if it weren’t so tragic and sad.

So let’s explain why this is silly. In case you are living under a rock or something.

Nationalism, or organization along a national basis, as Lenin and Stalin teach us, can be either progressive or reactionary, based on the conditions that give rise to it. A colonized country fighting against a foreign occupier, for example, can give rise to progressive nationalism, as it did the early KMT in China (though Lenin and Stalin both qualify this, saying not all of these struggles are necessarily progressive - they are only progressive when they bring society forwards, in whatever way, towards socialism). Organized within, say, an imperialist country, it is, instead, a call to work against class struggle in favor of preservation of national structures and unity between the classes. Which is not only impossible, but base reaction. It has very literally nothing to do with patriotism. The Nazis used the term “National socialism” because they used the word “socialism” the way everyone did back then, as a general category meaning a society serving a social end, rather than the way I’m assuming our friend Mr. Jones tries to use it after simply assuming things about language, as a form of new utopianism, ideas for future society pulled from his head and tried to force on society from without. The Nazis loathed Marxism and claimed we were all evil and tyrannical, and that our basic observation that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, is wrong. They said instead that the only way to arrive at this society serving a social end was for the classes to collaborate (nationalism in the bourgeois epoch), meaning that if you were a land-owning parasite, you owned your land, collected your rent, and served society. If you were an exploited proletarian, you went to work, sent your kids to work, and served society. This could only be done, they said, on a national basis (with an emphasis on antagonisms between nations - something Marxism proves is not essential to nations and peoples, but instead based on class relations). This is obviously a very silly idea, and it was clearly not socialism. But not for the childish reasons Mr. Jones and the CPUSA website tell us.

After the absurd Nazi lie, Mr. Jones goes on with other various vague liberal sloganeering without mentioning the proletariat a single time, even shouting out the NDN Collective’s slogans, which makes sense once you begin looking into who participates in this bourgeois NGO that received over 12,000,000 dollars from none other than Jeff Bezos’s foundation, and pretends this is some mass movement of Native Americans. He then claims “PatSoc forces” stole documents from somewhere in New York City, and vaguely claims Jackson Hinkle is some kind of federal intelligence agent, saying, “And the possible federal connections, such as those with Jackson Hinkle, are also noteworthy,” while providing no actual evidence for such an absurd accusation. (Catching a pattern yet?)
He suggests editing the Party’s program, which is supposed to be a concrete statement of plans and goals, to “call out” (a favorite buzz word of liberals) the scary MAGA Communists and “PatSocs”, and engages in the most ironic sentence in the entire thing, saying that “sloganeering” should be a grounds for expulsion from the Party, along with “explicit PatSoc talking points”, which he gives only one example of, a very obviously fake image that was made to look like Jackson Hinkle, who has met with the grandson of Nelson Mandela and all sorts of Pan-Africanists at the conference on Multipolarity, was quoting Hitler. (I don’t know if Mr. Jones is oblivious to the obvious fake, or not, but I can’t decide if knowing or not knowing it’s fake is worse. They’re both completely disgusting. Either he knew it was fake and did not care, or did not know, in which case he should be given much more training and education before being allowed to speak publicly as a representative of any organization). Which is, by the way, legally libel and we would recommend the Party immediately remove the libel from its website and issue an apology to everyone involved, especially Mr. Hinkle, before they are taken to court for it.

Mr. Jones ends his piece by deciding it is his place to say what is the “okay” patriotism and what is not, telling Native Americans they are allowed to love their homes, but no one else is (and I’m sure they were dying to get his permission), and again conflates the word with nationalism. He says that waving the American flag, the flag waved by W.E.B. Dubois, William Z. Foster, Martin Luther King, and all great American revolutionaries, is actually “not okay”. He says that invoking “American symbology” is “not okay”. He begrudgingly says that saying Communist Party USA is “one thing”, meaning it’s mostly fine, but ONLY if it’s taken in the geographical sense (whatever that means), and then ends by invoking the names W.E.B. Dubois and Claudia Jones while completely ignoring everything they ever said and getting in one last weird lie about Jackson Hinkle. An utter tragedy.

I want to make it clear that we did not want this fight. We’ve gone out of our way to reach out a hand to every single person who will aid the class struggle. Every time we’ve extended that hand to the Party, it’s been shoved aside and we’ve been told we think crazy things we’ve never remotely thought, and then scolded with dozens of liberal buzzwords that made it seem like we’d gotten in trouble on the jobsite and were in some kind of meeting with HR. Regardless, we still don’t want this fight. If this nonsense persists, however, the forces who are trying to wreck the new Communist movement will quickly find out that we will finish it. We are peaceful people, like all Communists, willing to live and let live. But we will not hesitate to finish a fight if you bring it to our doorstep.

For those rank-and-file members of the party who are actually committed to Communism and not just to reiterating ultra left narratives stemming from the bourgeois academy, or right opportunist ones which come from the Webbite liquidationist period, we urge you to think long and hard about the tragic state of our once mighty party. Ask yourself: at a time when this country needs nothing more than a real Communist Party, when peoples’ living conditions are bad and getting worse, what are real Communists to do in the face of the pitiful condition our Party has fallen into? How can real Communists just stand by as the only force that can free our people from the strangling hold of capital is sequestered by servants of hegemony and the liberal wing of the ruling class? All things in this world are subject to change, this is a basic principle of dialectical materialism. Ask yourself: are you courageous enough to side with the rising forces of a new Communist movement, one that is driven by necessity and reaching the hearts and minds of millions of working class people? Or will you throw your lot in with the dogmatist distorters of Marxism, who always find a way to give support of hegemony a radical veneer, making excuses why this time we need to support capitalism, rather than fight it? It is this question which today separates the forces tying themselves to a fossilized past and those which seek to move our revolutionary tradition forward, helping the dissenting attitudes of our masses gain coherence and direction, showing our working people how we can make history together, and fulfill the promise of a society actually of, by, and for the people. This form of society has a name - Communism.

“In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.” - W. E. B. Dubois (1961)

Notes

[1] We wonder why the ultra-left “Sakaiists” think of the fact that the Communist Party’s old school was named after Thomas Jefferson, as American revolutionary history is now to be ignored by members at the best of times and cancelled at the worst via bourgeois lifestyle politics and sloganeering. This is called “Browderism” which is an absurdity and a joke, but the letter itself gets to that. No need to put it in the footnote.

​CUBA'S PRESIDENT IS ALREADY ON THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST PLATFORM

The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, is at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune to "celebrate with our beloved people the #1DeMayo," as he wrote on the social network X.

Army General Raúl Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution, is also there, along with other leaders of the country.

Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, member of the Political Bureau and general secretary of the Cuban Workers' Confederation (CTC), also participates in the traditional event.

More than 1,000 people from 200 solidarity organizations around the world are present alongside the Cuban workers.
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Darian Oramas Campo, a young worker in the electricity sector, spoke during the central national event for International Workers' Day, in Havana. In his speech, he pointed out the challenges of the current context for our people, who are experiencing a tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States on the island.

​The general secretary of the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), in the main speech of the event, pointed out that today thousands of workers demonstrate in rallies throughout the country that we remain firm and united around the Revolution, defending its ideals of independence, sovereignty and social justice.
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He also addressed the particularities of the Cuban socio-economic context, marked both by the U.S. blockade and by our own internal insufficiencies.

All this has had an impact on food shortages, the loss of purchasing power of salaries and pensions, limits access to inputs and raw materials for industries and restricts trade and foreign investment... which, derived from the impact of the U.S. measures, has a reflection on the lives of the country's workers.

We have dedicated this day, therefore, to the heroism of Cuban workers, he said.

Guilarte de Nacimiento pointed out that there are good experiences in all territories of the country, demonstrating that it is possible to achieve productive efficiency, despite the limitations of material and financial resources. At the heart of these good experiences are the people, who show us that human material is the safest and most solid resource we have today and that we are not allowed to waste it.

He emphasized the urgency of consolidating the socialist state enterprise, as well as ensuring the growth of the supply of goods and services, which allows reducing prices and ensuring investment efficiency, in a process of permanent linkage with the non-state sector of the economy, which requires us to pay greater attention to and protect the rights of the workers who make it up.

We take on this urgent challenge, in the midst of the government's projections to correct distortions and reboost the economy in 2024, which coincides with the organic process to the XXII Congress of the CTC.

The Cuban workers, in the conviction of owners of the fundamental means of production, must go to an ever greater control and inspection of resources, as well as an incessant fight against corruption, indiscipline and illegalities.

International Workers' Day coincides with the persistence of the crime against the Palestinian people, from Israel. Cuban workers condemn the attacks against thousands of children and people from Palestine, he added.

He also added that the global trade union movement can always count on Cuba's support in the battle against desinguality and for the establishment of a more just and equitable international order.

The more complex the circumstances, the stronger the unity must be, Guilarte recalled, quoting the Army General, whose permanent call for social cohesion was the invitation with which he concluded his speech.

​CUBA MULTIPLIES IN THE SQUARES

Once again, the dawn of the first day of May overflows the island with colors, joys and shared certainties. Once again, the date summons and unites, encourages and commits; It exalts the truth of a country.

This is how Cuba dawns today, made into a "sea" of people in avenues, towns and squares where the festival of the proletariat is celebrated, which is also a way of defending the reasons of our people to continue building the future, sovereignly.

In this beautiful landscape of multitudes that also include children, young people, grandparents and families, it is possible to see the greatness of a nation that has been forged in the stoicism and heroic resistance of its children in the face of the continuous imperial stumbles of those who oppose the existence of the Cuban Revolution.

In order to maintain these gains and support the urgent need to revive the national economy from collective creation, this 1st. On May Day, the archipelago is once again lit up in every tribune full of posters, banners and slogans that say a lot about the commitment and drive of those who love and found, of those who do not give up, despite adversity.

And in each parade that embellishes the horizon from one end of the country to the other, friends from other latitudes merge in the mass of the Cuban proletariat, who join their voices to ours, in just demands against the criminal blockade of the Greater Antilles, and the Zionist genocide that destroys thousands of lives in Palestine.
To these motivations that embrace solidarity, in the midst of so much deep-rooted hatred, are added the essences of a working people who parade out of conviction and attachment to their history.
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That is why – which has become a benchmark for many countries in the world – our celebration of International Workers' Day is a living reflection of the Cuba we want; united and multiplied today, in every square. (Mailenys Oliva Ferrales)

Author

​Lianet Rojas

Republished from Granma.

​The U.S. Labor movement has been making monumental strides in its “union boom” campaigns across the nation since its uptick in 2022 . As labor continues to gain a newfound momentum, it is important to critically analyze its ideological inconsistencies and the dire need for militant restructuring of national unions in principles and guidance. Unprincipled peace and corrosive liberalism has been the trend for union bureaucrats since the Cold War, and so far little to no change has been made to reverse this trend of upholding the inherent tenants of American exploitation. That is, no radical political struggle is being waged within union campaigns beyond temporary and arbitrary protections for the working-class. Of course, the dedicated work of the rank-and-file who have been the primary agitators in ushering this new wave of modern labor movements cannot go unrecognized.

​Yet, this era of election victories and historic contracts can easily dwindle without implementing strategic militancy in political education, organizational structure, and most importantly — international solidarity. This is for the overall purpose of upholding political consciousness amongst the poor in regards to class contradictions, its relation to capital, and its overarching exploitation of workers outside of the core imperialist countries. For the most part, rank-and-file members and their union leadership don’t grapple  or internally connect their struggles with their boss in the international arena. They fail to make the connections between their local campaigns against their employer and the overall global struggle waged against the international bosses of the world: the capitalist class. 

Before I continue diving into this history —- this topic became apparent to me after I left my teaching job in Miami and moved to join the country’s largest public-sector collective bargaining campaign for educators and operational staff. Even though I am a relatively new union organizer, I’ve personally witnessed this philistine attitude and outright opportunism from the bureaucrats and leadership I’ve worked under. Ideology was incoherent (outside of the organizers), internationalism was non-existent — and in the midst of an anti-imperialist epoch amongst the American working-class — this particular national union was utterly spineless when it came to solidarity outside of the bargaining unit we were organizing.  

The history of colonialism by U.S. unions remains an ignorant and undisclosed topic among the working-class they allegedly represent. It is not the fault of the worker, but the history of colonialism and imperialism that was sown into national union leadership since the wake of McCarthyism in the 1950s. To this very day, national unions — a sector of American politics that is generally well-received amongst the working-class — are viciously and proudly contributing to the imperialist machinations of U.S. foreign policy.  The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), for example, has been one of the leading unions to push for privatization of education in Puerto Rico. The island’s working class have fought tirelessly for decades against both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFT against their encroachment on la Federación De Maestros de P.R. (FMPR) since the 1970s,  a conglomerate of one the most radical, rank-and-file centered teacher’s unions in the island’s history. The AFT and the SEIU have threatened increased educational privatization, complete overtake of local unions in the island, and engaged in several closed-door negotiations with La Junta to decimate pensions for Puerto Rican teachers. 

This is the work of a Colonial union — one that legitimizes the illegitimate debt of colonial subjects and risks the struggles of the actual working-class by putting their own neoliberal interests on a pedestal. This is especially severe to me, considering that the national union I work under is the AFT. Randi Weingarten, the current president of the AFT, is a smug and narcissistic zionist whose politics are nowhere near ideologically practical or for the benefit of the exploited —  and this same critique is applicable to most union leadership across AFT’s locals. FMPR was founded in 1966 as a militant alternative to pro-management unions in PR — namely, the AMPR (Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico) —- which is an extended wing of the colonial government.  Labor colonialism is real and thriving, and it is up to the rank-and-file to combat this. If teachers and workers represented by the AFT knew about the inner-workings of colonialism and AFT’s contribution towards it, such a betrayal would inevitably be reversed through an internal, popular struggle against leadership — but that is entirely dependent on the level of political education brought forth by this new labor movement. 

Another union in Puerto Rico — UTIER (Puerto Rico Electric and Irrigation Industry Workers Union) faced an eerily similar crackdown by none other than the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). Prior to LUMA energy’s privatization contract in 2020, UTIER leadership met with IBEW leadership to discuss methods of solidarity and support against their fellow workers.  This ask for solidarity was silent and unresponsive by U.S. unions and was met instead with a load of IBEW Local 222 Floridian scabs to break an UTIER strike. In fact, the scabs were actually guarded by private LUMA police when UTIER workers fought back against this clear attempt to side with colonialism. Why must the call for internationalism be met with hollow selfishness? Where is the comradery? Where is this alleged commitment to help the working-class? It seems that national unions are neither committed to the struggles in their own country or abroad — and these systemic policies and imperialist allyship exist as a way to appease the class divisions. Imagine if a strike against LUMA or the government encroachment on public education in the oldest colony of the world was met with international solidarity and coordinated movements by U.S. unions? Uncle Sam would never tolerate a global unification of workers, so it concentrates power in those that specialize in inoculation and political theater. 

The CIA and other intelligence sectors unsurprisingly has an ample history of sabotaging progressive labor movements, and the largest federation of unions in the U.S. (AFL-CIO) has contributed greatly to U.S. intervention schemes in Guyana, Brazil, Dominican-Republic, Haiti, and Venezuela. In fact, the AFL-CIO works closely under the policies of the National Endowment for Democracy, the monetary wing of U.S. foreign policy . The AFL-CIO actually operates under the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The irony speaks for itself: one of the only constituencies for “international labor solidarity” that exists within national unions is indeed one that aims to overthrow democratic movements in the global south with the aim of replacing them with capitalist economies. The philosophy of U.S. unions rests upon the protection and acceptance of capitalism not only domestically, but internationally.    

Further proof of the colonial betrayal can be seen in the spineless stances regarding Palestine through the release of vague statements in support of a ceasefire but no clear position against the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. In fact, during the most recent Labor Notes conference that had over 4,000 attendees from unions all across the nation — I witnessed direct push-back from individuals against the spontaneous protest that was held in solidarity for Palestine and against Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s betrayal. In spite of its inherent progressiveness, these negative reactions serve as extended proof that labor in the U.S. has yet to answer the vital call for global struggle. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the labor movement — its organizers, its rank-and-file, and its leadership — remain steadfast supporters of the colonial structures of their country. The labor movement must reconnect with its anti-imperialist roots and once and for all lock in arms with the working movements of the world — chiefly with the people being bombed by the same imperialist powers that economically exploit them. 

As organizers, we commend the leadership of FMPR and their continuous battle to take back complete representation of their people! May 1st will be a strategic date for a labor strike in the colony, and we must retain and amend the criticisms of U.S. unions by taking ownership in its decision-making. We combat liberalism by pressuring and overtaking ignorance, and I urge all rank-and-file members to take charge of the necessary militant political education and organizational structure to reverse the Mccarthyism of unions that expels international solidarity. Liberation is possible through a harmonious attempt of international demonstrations to combat the crisis of American imperialism — and as always, for the eventual downfall of the United States government and full sovereignty of her colonies.

In Solidarity,
Dailyn B.

Author

Dailyn B.

​In his early writings against censorship, Karl Marx proposed that it is insufficient to simply criticize censorship on the basis of how it depicts a limitation of our freedoms and rights. Far more important, he held, was the critical inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of censorship. Censorship, clearly, does not arrive out of thin air. It is produced by certain conditions which call it forth as a necessity for the dominant order.
​
In our age, where censorship is the order of the day, and expresses itself in diverse forms, we too must ask – what are the conditions which make this censorship necessary? While it is, indeed, essential to call out the hypocrisy of the enunciated values of the capitalist ruling class and the violation of these in reality, simply doing this is insufficient to help us understand, explain, make sense of, why it is that that censorship is so prevalent in the first place.

I think it is clear, when we observe the decaying trust in ruling institutions, in the media (which, for instance, only 11% of the population trusts), in politicians, etc., that the ruling elite have on their hands a crisis of legitimacy.

Censorship is, then, a clear product of a failure of bourgeois ideology, a deterioration of their hegemonic control over the spontaneous worldviews of the mass of people. The narratives produced by the ruling institutions of the capitalist class are no longer uncritically and spontaneously accepted by the mass of people.

Most regular Americans, especially the youth, intuitively understand that the media and other ideological apparatuses of the ruling class are not there to tell us the truth. Quite the opposite. Their whole purpose is to distort the world in such a way that it allows us to make sense of it through the narratives upheld by the ruling elite.

To employ a technical term we use in the Marxist tradition, their whole purpose is to systematically reproduce a form of false consciousness – a consciousness which turns the world on its head on the basis of superficial one-sided facts, distortions, and lies. Somehow Israel is the victim, China the imperialist, and Cuba the state sponsor of terrorism.

This is not simply a problem of epistemic hygiene, as the scholar Vannessa Wills has called it, but an objective social reality of the capitalist form of life. It is a system that, in order to reproduce itself and obtain the consent of the governed, requires that people understand the world in topsy-turvy ways. It is an order that requires a distorted refraction of itself in the realm of ideas, not an accurate, corresponsive reflection.

Working class Americans, and even some dissidents from more privileged classes, are beginning to intuitively understand this reality – even if it is not, or at least not yet, comprehended with the concreteness and systematicity a Marxist worldview can provide. Nonetheless, even these spontaneous and often incoherent forms of dissent find themselves under the boot of censorship by a ruling elite too fragile to allow any form of dissent on the principal issues of empire. They much prefer, and frankly need, a compatible form of dissenters (whether from the right or left) who might criticize politicians, capitalism, ‘the matrix,’ etc. but who on issues of imperialism fall faithfully in line with the narratives of the ruling class.

These issues of empire, corresponding to the Neo-imperialist stage of capitalism we find ourselves in, are the Achilles heel for the contemporary elite. The vast majority of those who have been censored over the last few years have been attacked and maligned precisely because of their challenges to the imperialist narratives. No one, that I know of, has been censored on the basis of calling for the raising of the minimum wage, for Medicare for all, or for loan forgiveness – important though these issues are for the vast majority of working-class Americans.

The voices which are censored are those that have challenged the narratives of empire on key issues such as the proxy war against Russia, the New Cold War against China, the unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others, and of course, the most pivotal issue of our day, the genocide of the Palestinians by the fascist state of Israel, the U.S.’s colonial outpost in West Asia.

I speak today not as an outsider simply interested in issues of censorship, but as the director of an institute that has had to battle tooth and nail against censorship for the last few years.

Three years ago, when the July 11 color revolution “protests” in Cuba were occurring, we used our institute’s TikTok to dispel the imperialist myths aimed, as always, at regime change. Our following at the time was nearing 300 thousand, and the videos we were making were reaching millions of people. Within a couple videos discussing the situation our account would get temporarily suspended, a reality we faced throughout the whole summer. As is often the case, because they could not beat us at the level of ideas, their only option was censorship.

Within months the special military operations would occur, representing a new moment in the imperialist West’s battle against Russia. At the time, we used our Institute’s TikTok platform to push back against the NATO imperialist narratives painting Putin simply as a blood thirsty maniac. We contextualized the SMO in the long history of U.S./NATO expansion towards Russia, the war on the people of the Donbass since 2014, the expansion, backed by the West, of Nazi-Banderism and its incorporation into the Ukrainian state amongst other factors necessary to properly access the actions that occurred in February 2022 – all factors which in previous years the imperialist media, and various U.S. officials, themselves accepted.

For exposing these truths, challenging to the imperialist narrative, our account (this time nearing 400 thousand followers) would be permanently banned. In the subsequent year we would create seven new accounts, a few which also surpassed the 100 thousand follower mark, only to be banned as soon as we once again were capable of reaching millions.

As the investigative work of Alan Macleod showed, the year the censorship against the Institute started the Biden administration would force ByteDance (the Chinese company with the people-centered algorithms that allowed us to grow) to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. It was revealed in Macleod’s report that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. TikTok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as our Institute.

The censorship we have faced, however, has been far from limited to TikTok (an app that, although managed by the state department, has been unable to fully control the dissenting attitudes to imperialism the youth put out – the real reason why they have been moving to ban the app, and why, even though we’ve been banned more than seven times, we’ve been able to rebuild a new account with well over 200 thousand followers and with millions of views on various videos).

In the middle of February of this year, while we were covering the death of the West’s beloved far-right racist Navalny, we received news that our YouTube was demonetized. This was one of the central sources of revenue for the Institute – a place people would donate through and ask questions in our live broadcasts. This, of course, was a unique form of censorship – a targeting of the financial foundation which allows us to do the work we do.

This is merely the tip of the iceberg of censoring attacks we, and many others like us, have faced when our ideas not only challenge the dominant narrative, but do so in a way that reaches hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of people.

Social media has, as I have tried to outline in my recent writings, become one of the central ideological fields where the war of position, i.e., the war of ideas for the hearts and minds of people, has to be waged. It is an area people spend 3-4 hours a day surfing, and which is central to spontaneously developing the views people come to hold on relevant political issues. Despite its tubular character and the leakages of dissenting views that spring up here and there, it has become the most important apparatus of narrative control for the ruling class – a space where they can boost their narratives (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through bots) and shut down the dissenting ones (again, sometimes directly through bans, sometimes indirectly through demonetization, and sometimes more insidiously, through shadowbans, as has occurred to various other directors at our Institute).

In the face of this censorship, it is the duty of Marxists to contextualize its emergence in the crisis of legitimacy and empire we have before us. It is also our duty, if we wish to win the war of positions, to use to our favor the gap between the lofty enunciated values of the ruling class (most of which are accepted in the common sense of our people) and the reality their order creates. The fact that, on one hand, the elite proclaim the right to free speech, media, etc., and that on the other, they censor all voices which challenge the dominant narrative (especially on issues of war and peace) is an objective contradiction we must explain to the American people, and exploit in our favor. We must help them achieve coherence in the dissenting attitudes they already hold – aid them in understanding why the ruling class and its institutions ought to be distrusted and challenged.

Lenin’s question – freedom (or freedom of speech) for whom and to do what? – must always be asked. Freedom, of speech or of any other kind, is an abstraction that contains an obscured class content. Freedom of speech for the elite is the freedom of their speech, their freedom to distort reality and keep us ignorant cogs in a machine they own, profit off of, and hope to continue to keep running.

Freedom of speech for us, the vast majority of people, is fundamentally rooted in the ability to speak truth to power, to challenge the narratives of those who cloak themselves under the auspices of ‘fighting misinformation’ while it is they who are the great liars, deceivers, and misinformers. 

This requires that we stand against censorship of all kinds, not just of those who already hold our Marxist worldview. Anyone challenging empire, regardless of how anachronistic their views might be, ought to have their rights to free speech and media protected. As Marxists, that is, as the ultimate enemies of the ruling order, we cannot stand in favor of the state’s cracking down of dissenting voices on issues of empire, even if, outside of those issues, we find some of these dissenters’ views abhorrent.

In our era of blatant censorship, us Marxists ought to defend the right to free speech endowed to us in our bourgeois constitution – even if we are able to understand, and explain to others, the systematic reasons why the capitalist ruling class will always, in times of crisis, have to violate the democratic rights it enunciates with its emergence on the historical scene.
​

​Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations in 1955, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961 and signed a pact with the European Economic Community in 1972. The United States and Europe worked closely with the Salazar and Caetano governments, turning a blind eye to their atrocities.
​
Over a decade ago, I visited Lisbon’s Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom, which was a torture site for political prisoners from 1928 to 1965. During this time, tens of thousands of trade unionists, student activists, communists, and rebels of all kinds were brought there to be tortured, and many were killed – often with great cruelty. The ordinariness of this brutality permeates the hundreds of stories preserved in the museum. For instance, on 31 July 1958, torturers took the welder Raúl Alves from Aljube Prison to the third floor of the secret police’s headquarters and threw him to his death. Heloísa Ramos Lins, the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Portugal at the time, Álvaro Lins, drove by at that moment, saw Alves’ fatal fall, and told her husband. When the Brazilian embassy approached the Portuguese Interior Ministry to ask what had happened, the Estado Novo dictatorship responded, ‘There is no reason to be so shocked. It is merely an unimportant communist’.

It was ‘unimportant communists’ like Raúl Alves who initiated the revolution of 25 April, which built on a wave of workers’ actions across 1973, beginning with the airport workers in Lisbon and then spreading to textile workers’ strikes in Braga and Covilha, engineering workers’ strikes in Aveiro and Porto, and glass workers’ strike in Marinha Grande.

Around this time, the dictator Caetano read Portugal and the Future, written by General António de Spínola who was trained by commanders of the fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, led a military campaign in Angola, and was formerly the Estado Novo’s governor in Guinea-Bissau. Spínola’s book argued that Portugal should end its colonial occupation since it was losing its grip on Portuguese-controlled Africa. In his memoirs, Caetano wrote that when he finished the book, he understood ‘that the military coup, which I could sense had been coming, was now inevitable’.

What Caetano did not foresee was the unity between workers and soldiers (who themselves were part of the working class) that burst through in April 1974. The soldiers were fed up with the colonial wars, which – despite the great brutality of the Estado Novo – had failed to quell the ambitions of the people of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The advances made by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were considerable, with Portugal’s army losing more soldiers than at any time since the eighteenth century. Several of these formations received assistance from the USSR and East Germany (DDR), but it was through their own strength and initiative that they ultimately won the battles against colonialism (as our colleagues at the International Research Centre on the DDR have documented).

On 9 September 1973, soldiers who had been sent to Guinea-Bissau met in Portugal to form the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In March 1974, the MFA approved its programme Democracy, Development, and Decolonisation, drafted by the Marxist soldier Ernesto Melo Antunes. When the revolution erupted in April, Antunes explained, ‘A few hours after the start of the coup, on the same day, the mass movement began. This immediately transformed it into a revolution. When I wrote the programme of the MFA, I had not predicted this, but the fact that it happened showed that the military was in tune with the Portuguese people’. When Antunes said the ‘military’, he meant the soldiers, because those who formed the MFA were not more senior than captains and remained rooted in the working class from which they had come.
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In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the ‘necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestation’. This position was rejected by the Estado Novo regime. On 3 August 1959, Portuguese colonial soldiers fired on sailors and dockworkers at Pidjiguiti at the Port of Bissau, killing over fifty people. On 16 June 1960, in the town of Mueda (Mozambique), the Estado Novo colonialists fired on a small, unarmed demonstration of national liberation advocates who had been invited by the district administrator to present their views. It is still not known how many people were killed. Then, on 4 January 1961, a strike at Baixa do Cassange (Angola) was met with Portuguese repression, killing somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 Angolans. These three incidents showed that the Portuguese colonialists were unwilling to tolerate any civic movement for independence. It was the Estado Novo that imposed the armed struggle on these parts of Africa, moving the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO to take up guns.

​Agostinho Neto (1922–1979) was a communist poet, a leader of the MPLA, and the first president of independent Angola. In a poem called ‘Massacre of São Tomé’, Neto captured the feeling of the revolts against Portuguese colonialism:

It was then that in eyes on fire
now with blood, now with life, now with death,
we buried our dead victoriously
and on the graves recognised
the reason for these men’s sacrifice
for love,
and for harmony,
and for our freedom
even while facing death, through the force of time
in blood-stained waters
even in the small defeats that accumulate towards victory
Within us
the green land of São Tomé
will also be the island of love.

That island of love was not just to be built across Africa, from Praia to Luanda, but also across Portugal. On 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro, a forty-year-old waitress, was working at a self-service restaurant called Sir in the Franjinhas building on Braancamp Street in Lisbon. Since it was the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, the owner decided to hand out red carnations to the customers. When Celeste told him about the revolution, he decided to shut down Sir for the day, give employees the carnations, and encourage the employees to take the carnations home. Instead, Celeste headed to the city centre, where events were unfolding. On the way, some soldiers asked her for a cigarette, but instead, she put a few carnations into the barrels of their guns. This caught on, and the florists of Baixa decided to give away their in-season red carnations to be the emblem of the revolution. That is why the 1974 revolution was called the Carnation Revolution, a revolution of flowers against guns.

Portugal’s social revolution of 1974–1975 swept large majorities of people into a new sensibility, but the state refused to capitulate. It inaugurated the Third Republic, whose presidents all came from the ranks of the military and the National Salvation Junta: António de Spínola (April–September 1974), Francisco da Costa Gomes (September 1974–July 1976), and António Ramalho Eanes (July 1976–March 1986). These were not men from the ranks, but the old generals. Nonetheless, they were eventually forced to surrender the old structures of Estado Novo colonialism and withdraw from their colonies in Africa.

​Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), who was born one hundred years ago this September and who did more than many to build the African formations against Estado Novo colonialism, did not live to see the independence of Portugal’s African colonies. At the 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, Cuba, Cabral warned that it was not enough to get rid of the old regime, and that even more difficult than overthrowing the regime itself would be to build the new world out of the old, from Portugal to Angola, Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. The main struggle after decolonisation, Cabral said, is the ‘struggle against our own weaknesses’. This ‘battle against ourselves’, he continued, ‘is the most difficult of all’ because it is a battle against the ‘internal contradictions’ of our societies, the poverty borne of colonialism, and the wretched hierarchies in our complex cultural formations.
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Led by people like Cabral, liberation struggles in Africa not only won independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo colonialism and helped bring democracy to Europe. But that was not the end of the struggle. It opened new contradictions, many of which linger today in different forms. As Cabral often said as the closing words to his speeches, a luta continua. The struggle continues.

Warmly,

Vijay