International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) President, Sean O’Brien, to mixed reactions spoke to the Republican National Convention (RNC) Monday night. In a much-criticized speech, O’Brien gave a speech aimed more at the Conservative worker watching at home (and some who may be delegates in attendance) and not the ruling class elites in the room.

O’Brien gave a carefully worded speech that show what many class-oriented trade unionists have been saying for a long time, the political system has thrown the American working class under the bus a long time ago. What should grab the attention of workers watching at home is the crowd’s reaction as O’Brien spoke, when speaking in vague, general terms of support for workers it was mostly applause, but when anything that could substantively benefit workers was mentioned the crowd went quiet.

The IBT General President speaking at the RNC is a positive step in reaching Conservative workers who have largely been abandoned by business unionist misleadership. Despite saying things that aren’t usually allowed in mainstream political debate, like telling the American workers the corporate elite only have allegiance to profit, more is needed to bring political power back to the labor movement.

“American workers own this nation” is a quote that received a mixed reaction in person, but should’ve struck a chord with the workers watching at home. There is truth behind this quote, but is simply playing two capitalist parties against each other enough for workers to exercise this ownership? No, it’s not, but Sean O’Brien breaking the Democratic stranglehold on union leadership provides an opening for class-oriented trade unionists to start a campaign to form a political party for the working class.
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We as class-oriented trade unionists must lead the way in shifting workers from a “left-vs.-right” political debate to a “Them vs. Us” class-based politics. The way forward is to build an anti-monopoly working-class party that unites all true progressive forces behind a vibrant and militant class-oriented labor movement. Like O’Brien said, “Most legislation is never meant to go anywhere, and it’s all talk”, the only way to change that is for the labor movement to lead the way out of the capitalist-controlled duopoly.

For many indigenous peoples of Venezuela, the socialist commune is not new at all but resonates with existing and previous social practices that include communal land tenure and self-governance. That is the case for the Pumé community called “Coporo Indígena,” located in upper Apure just outside Biruaca. Due to its small population, this community is registered as a communal council rather than as a commune.

The history of this Pumé settlement, which takes its name from the coporo river fish, parallels that of many Indigenous communities who have been systematically displaced from their land and made victims of structural violence. Although the Bolivarian Revolution brought important reforms and programs that favored the Pumé and other Indigenous peoples of Venezuela, many injustices still persist, awaiting resolution.

The men and women living in the Coporo Indígena community formerly lived in San José de Capanaparo, near the Colombian border. However, in 1980, the family of cacique Mario García settled in the territory of what is now known as Coporo Indígena. Little by little they built houses, wells, and cleared 30 acres of land for growing corn, beans, topocho [small plantain], and planted a diverse medicinal garden.

Last year, the community comprised 32 families. However, in January 2024, a new group of displaced families arrived on foot from San José de Capanaparo, having fled that region due to violence from irregular groups crossing the border. Today, Coporo Indígena is home to some 50 families who maintain their language and many of their traditions. In the following testimonies, three spokespeople discuss the community’s organization and economy, along with the impact of the U.S. blockade on their daily lives.

SHORT HISTORY OF A PUMÉ COMMUNITY

Mario García: Criollos [non-indigenous people] often ask us where we come from and we always tell them that we are from here, from this land that you and I call Apure. We were here before the invaders came; this was our home before they took our land and our wealth by violent means; we lived here before they tried to strip us of our culture and our cosmovision.

The colonial system attempted to snatch life away from the Pumé people. Still, we have preserved and nurtured the cornerstones of our culture: our belief system, which is integrated with the earth; our organizational structure, which is centered on the community; our crafts, which were passed on to us by the elders; and our language, which is key to the integrity of our people.

I was born in a Pumé community in San José de Capanaparo. In fact, everyone living in Coporo Indígena hails from Capanaparo. Some of us, myself included, came here in 1980, while others arrived just a few months ago. They are the victims of irregular groups of Colombian origin that penetrated the community and forced 17 families to quietly flee their homes on the night of December 24, 2023.

COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION

Mario García: Maintaining a close-knit community in which the land is not individually held but instead sustains everyone who works is integral to the Pumé way of life. Thus, the commune is nothing new for us. In Coporo Indígena, we are organized as a communal council because we are a small Indigenous island in a territory settled by criollos, but we live communally.

Why do I say this? The 30 hectares of land we inhabit are cared for collectively: anyone who works the land will benefit from it, and nobody in our community will go to bed hungry if the land yields its bounty.

Years ago, when this tract of land was assigned to us, the National Land Institute [INTI] wanted to divide it among the families that lived here then. We didn’t like the idea of dividing the land, so we had to confront the authorities. Fortunately, we succeeded, so the only fence that you will see now is the wire around the perimeter of the Coporo Indígena tract of land. We know that fences not only divide the land, but they also divide the community.

In a Pumé community, problems are discussed in meetings and we develop a plan to solve them together. This is what Chávez talked about, but it’s nothing new for us. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t need outside help. In fact, we often do. For example, as a community, we have determined that our priority right now is access to water because our communal council grew overnight when our brothers and sisters from San José de Capanaparo arrived here in January. We need water pumps, which will allow us to increase our production, and we have requested government support to make that happen.

Our ancestors lived in tightly-knit communities or communes, and this kind of organization continues to define our way of life. You may ask, why stick to the old ways? Because we are here to preserve our culture, our language, and our way of life… and there is only one way for this to happen: sharing what we have while living in harmony with nature. This is something that criollo culture has yet to learn.

But we are not only a people of the past. We live in modernity, and that’s why we demand attention from the government: we too need homes, electricity, water, and roads as well as healthcare and education. We don’t shy away from modernity, but we don’t embrace it blindfolded.

Gladys García: In criollo society, what is yours is yours, and what is mine is mine and there’s no two ways about it. In the criollo world, you may not know your neighbor and you aren’t likely to think much about the land where you stand, about nature, about the earth. In Pumé society, we all work together and share the little that we have: shelter, water, and other goods, while the care of the community and the land is everybody’s task.

That’s why, when our brothers and sisters from San José de Capanaparo arrived here in January, we opened our doors to them. What do we expect from them? That they work like us and live like us.

ECONOMY

Mario García: The economic base of Coporo Indígena is farming, while back at home [San José de Capanaparo], the economic base is hunting, fishing, but also subsistence farming as well as craftwork. However, subsistence farming practices have been historically threatened by those who want to commodify the land.

Our agricultural production at Coporo Indígena is hybrid, joining ancestral practices with modern ones. We don’t shy away from mechanization but we also deploy the knowledge passed on by our parents and grandparents. While we are set on preserving our culture, we are not a relic of the past: we aim to technify our production and improve and modernize our living conditions.

We need farm equipment, better roads, and pumps to get water out of the wells. The latter is actually an urgent matter, particularly since a group of displaced families arrived in our community earlier this year. As it is right now, we have enough water to cook and drink, but we don’t have enough water to maintain our production. As an organized community, we are working so that the Consejo Federal de Gobierno [Venezuelan state institution that funds communal projects] finances the digging of new wells and the purchase of pumps.

We have 30 hectares of collective land in Coporo Indígena. Of those, ten are designated for corn production. At the moment, our corn yield is about 1,500 kilos per hectare, but we can bump that up to 4,500 by improving the wells. We could also grow ten hectares of beans with an estimated yield of 1,500 kilos per hectare, amounting to 15,000 kilos per crop. However, this will only be possible if we can solve the water supply issues that we face.

Gladys García: We make many of our own utensils from “tapara” [calabash], from plates to spoons to colanders. We weave our hats and slings to carry the babies out of macanilla [a type of palm] shoots. We make toys such as the trompo [top] and the bobotó [a ball]. We learned the craft from our mothers and grandmothers, and cherish it dearly.

Much of the artisanal production that we sell is made with the “cogollo de macanilla,” which is a bush similar to the coconut palm that grows in San José de Capanaparo. We weave these goods for ourselves, but we also sell some of them so that we can buy rice and sugar.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get “cogollo de macanilla” lately, but we hope to be able to get it soon: when we have stock, we can make three hats in one day, and if we sell them at 5 USD per piece, that’s 15 dollars coming into our household!

Daniel García: In San José de Capanaparo we grew yuca and made our own casabe, we also grew topocho, ñame, and ocumo [root vegetables]. The land there is communal; which means that nobody from the community is kept from working the land.

The land in Capanaparo is less generous than this one, so we worked it for one year at a time and then let it rest. However, in Capanaparo we could hunt and fish all year round. We hunted with bows and arrows and we caught the babas [small caiman] with a harpoon. At night you could hunt them on the side of the river when they are sleepy.

IMPACT OF THE BLOCKADE

Mario García: Here, in Coporo Indígena, we didn’t go hungry even during the worst of the blockade: we make auyama [pumpkin] pancakes and yuca arepas; we also have a conuco [small, diversified plot of land] where we grow corn, beans, and topocho; and we have free-range chickens that lay the best eggs; so our stomachs didn’t go growling. Sometimes we were short on coffee or sugar, but we were able to sustain our community on our own. The blockade helped us re-learn one lesson: we have the tools to break with the outside world if need be.

Our way of doing things is like the bee: we ensure our colony’s wellbeing today and we save part of our production for the winter [rainy season]. Then, whatever is left gets sold or exchanged for whatever we may need.

Daniel García: In San José de Capanaparo we never went hungry: we grew some of our own food, we hunted chigüires [large rodents] and caimans, and the river was there to gift us as much fish as we could eat. What did we need from the outside? Sugar, salt, and little else.

However, we have seen many problems emerge with the blockade and the crisis: in recent years, irregular armed groups have grown in Capanaparo. The phenomenon is an extension of the war in Colombia: I think the economic pressures endured by Venezuela offered good conditions for the expansion of these groups.

This situation is what drove 17 families to leave our homes in San José de Capanaparo on Christmas Eve [2023]. The pressure to join the irregular groups was such that we had to quietly leave town on foot in the middle of the night: we left our houses, our pigs and chickens, everything we had, and walked away! A month later we arrived here, where we were received with open arms.

Gladys García: We have seen the deterioration of our community’s health over the past few years. Now it’s hard for us to get medicines, and it is also hard to get to the hospital. When you go to the doctor, all they can do is give you a piece of paper with the medication you need written on it… but how is one to pay for it?

Before the blockade, things were very different: we were able to get medicines, there were efforts to map the health situation of our community, and pregnant women got vitamin supplements and monitoring.
However, we are not as dependent as other communities. We have our shaman, who visits us regularly while Señora Prudencia, our midwife, brings our children to this world in the Pumé way.

Mario García: The impact of the crisis is indeed noticeable in our community. However, we have something that criollo culture doesn’t have: shamans. Shamans are our maximum authority; they teach us how to live in harmony with the earth and can cure many maladies with leaves and flowers, or with chants and ceremonies.
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That doesn’t mean that we are against what some call “scientific medicine.” Some ailments can be cured by our shaman, while others require conventional treatment.

THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE INDIGENOUS STRUGGLE

Mario García: Before Chávez came to power, state violence against us [Indigenous people] was part of everyday life: the displacement of Indigenous communities with the participation of police and military forces, who were at the service of the terratenientes [large-scale landowners], was not uncommon in Apure.

The Marcos Pérez Jimenez dictatorship [1953-58] was particularly bloody. Back then, in Las Piñas [Guachara municipality, Apure], more than a thousand people were killed. The massacres didn’t end there, however, although they de-intensified. In 1996 or 1997, a large Indigenous family was massacred by the state’s repressive forces. The police and the armed forces have never been our friends.

The revolutionary process saw an important reduction in violence against us [Indigenous peoples]. Additionally, we saw advances in political representation at the national level. Finally, the Bolivarian Process was important in the preservation of our ethnolinguistic practices: in school, many Indigenous kids around the country are learning how to read and write in their mother tongue, and many communities have direct control over the schools in their territory, although this happens with Ministry of Education oversight.

That is the case with the bilingual school in our territory: the Paula Ruiz School has been under our purview since 2015, when we requested that it be transferred from the Ministry of Education to the community.

With the Bolivarian Process, access to higher education also widened for Indigenous people like myself. When I was a kid growing up in San José de Capanaparo, we could only study through 6th grade. If we wanted to go on studying, the only option was a Catholic school. My family, like most Indigenous families, couldn’t pay the fees that the priests demanded, so Indigenous kids saw their education truncated.

When Chávez came into power, I was able to graduate from high school via Misión Ribas. From there I went to Misión Cultura, where I got a degree in education. This would not have been possible without the Bolivarian Process.

We have seen many advances over the past 25 years, but the historical debt of criollo society with us hasn’t been settled: many serious socio-economic problems, from housing to healthcare, persist, while structural violence is still present.
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There is a long road to go: we have many challenges, from historical injustices to the U.S. blockade. We need to be heard, but we stand with President Nicolás Maduro and with the Bolivarian Revolution.

THE Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang is at the geographical centre of Eurasia.

The region borders eight other countries which makes it a vital part of Chinese plans for the greater integration of Eurasia and the westward opening up of this nation of 1.4 billion people.

The Comprehensive Bonded Zone in the city of Kashi is central to co-ordinating the booming trade links that China has established with its immediate neighbours.

Xinjiang, one of the largest regions in China, is a gateway to Russia, India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.

It occupies around 643,000 square miles of China–a space larger than six Britains.

Its sparse population of approximately 25 million is mainly Muslim and made up of around 65 different ethnic groups including Chinese Han, Uighurs, Kazakhs and Hui, among others.

I lost count of the number of mosques that I saw during my recent trip.

I visited a thriving Islamic Centre in the city of Urumqi–which has received millions in funding from the Chinese government for its development to teach its around 1,000 students.

I had the honour of sitting in the mosque’s main hall attached to the centre alongside the imam and hearing him talk about the support the centre had received from the government.

I also visited the magnificent and extremely busy Id Kah Mosque in the city of Kashi.

Both times the imams took the time from their busy schedules to speak about how grateful they and worshippers at the mosque are for the support provided by the government.

They told me about how the right to worship any religion is considered a private matter in China and protected in law.

That’s why it provides funds to a wide range of religious bodies representing Muslims, Buddhists and Christians among others.

None of this is recognised in the West. Instead tall tales are told about supposed widespread religious persecution.

In particular Western politicians and their stenographers in the corporate media continue to spin untruths about the treatment of religious minorities.

To be crystal clear: at no time did I witness any attempt to block anyone from being able to worship according to the Islamic faith or, for that matter, any other religion.

I heard no criticism of the government over religious persecution from senior religious figures or anyone else I met during my visit.

I was never stopped from speaking with anyone in any of the large crowds of people that I found myself in across the region.

Having made the effort to actually visit five cities in 10 days in the region rather than pontificate from thousands of miles away, I can honestly say that for a country that supposedly routinely oppresses ethnic minorities China seems to spend an inordinate amount of time celebrating them.

By that, I don’t mean the half-arsed patronising so-called celebration of diversity that now appears customary across Britain.

Leading figures in Britain trip over themselves to take a knee and say how much black lives matter to them but continue to do nothing about racism in their organisations.

It doesn’t look to me like a Black History Month-type gig where a big show is made for a short tokenistic period and then ignored for the rest of the time.

Talking up the richness of the region’s cultural diversity wasn’t just an isolated thing in Xinjiang–it was everywhere. Celebrations of the Islamic culture were everywhere for anyone to see.

I can already hear some saying that either I wasn’t looking hard enough or I was having the wool pulled over my eyes. I did look hard and I don’t believe an elaborate hoax was being played on me.

I spoke with lots of people in private with no restrictions placed on me whatsoever. In fact, my dreadlocks, and I dare say, the colour of my skin, meant I was a target of curiosity, especially among the young, many of who wanted to come and chat and have a photo taken with me.

That was frankly the most uncomfortable thing about the trip!

What I saw was lots of people going about their business in much the same way as I have seen people trying to do in many parts of the world.

I met many Communist Party officials who were questioned over the allegations made against them and their country. All of them said the only way to counter the propaganda war being waged against them was for people to come and see for themselves.

They told me how hard they were working to open up the region to more tourism so that people could experience this beautiful area but also so more people could bear witness to the truth about them.

So why is this propaganda war being waged against China in general and in particular against Xinjiang?

The geographical position of the region provides the answer. As the centre of the Silk Road renaissance, the region will be the focal point of Chinese trade and its economic heartbeat.

It means the continuing economic growth of China is disproportionately linked to Xinjiang.

Its trade routes through its eight neighbours to its wider partners will be critical to sell Chinese-made goods as well as to buy the resources needed to continue to power the country’s economy.

The U.S. is the world’s leading economy and wants to keep it that way. Its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance asserts that it will use any means necessary to maintain the pre-eminence of U.S. capital.

I think we can take this to mean that the U.S. will not hesitate to spread misinformation about China. After all, it’s not as if the U.S. does not have form for this type of behaviour.

They have been doing it for years, particularly across Africa and Central America where they buy organisations to ferment internal dissent against governments deemed not to be compliant.

Sprinkled with an always unhealthy dose of sinophobia the move by the U.S. to undermine the reputation of China has largely economic foundations and false allegations of mistreatment against ethnic minorities–particularly the Uighurs–are completely without foundation.

On the contrary, there seems to me to be far more evidence of the Chinese at a national and regional level actively celebrating cultural diversity as well as striving to put in place the economic prosperity that looks as though it is undermining attempts by terrorist groups–likely funded by the West–to sow discontent in Xinjiang.

I will talk about this and the allegations of forced labour in some detail in the second part of this three series about my visit to China. In the meantime, to anyone reading this article in disbelief and who believes that either I am lying or have been the victim of what would be a truly elaborate hoax my suggestion is: go and see for yourself.

It’s a long way away but I honestly believe you will be surprised by the wonderful vibrant people and cities that will greet you.

This is the first of three eyewitness articles from Morning Star international editor Roger McKenzie on his recent visit to China.

Honoré de Balzac is renowned as a prolific literary genius and was one of Marx and Engels’ favourite authors. He was a pioneer of the Realist style that would be taken up by such famous authors as Émile Zola and Charles Dickens. In this article, Ben Curry explores Balzac’s Realist method, the predominant themes of his vast body of work, known collectively as The Human Comedy, and the fascinating paradox that lies at its heart.
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You’re deluding yourself, dear angel, if you imagine that it’s King Louis-Philippe that we’re ruled by, and he has no illusions himself on that score. He knows, as we all do, that above the Charter there stands the holy, venerable, solid, the adored, gracious, beautiful, noble, ever-young, almighty, Franc!

The period between the great revolutions of 1789 and 1848 was one of unprecedented upheaval in France. This was the epoch of the galloping advance of the French bourgeoisie. At its outset, this class formed part of the oppressed ‘Third Estate’ under the absolutist Bourbon regime; by its close, it was the undisputed ruling class and had begun to transform French society in its own image.

Contemporary with this era of storm and stress, at one and the same time its historian and the artist who best depicted its moving spirit, lived one of the giants of world literature, the father of the Realist novel, Honoré de Balzac.

Balzac, a favourite of Marx and Engels, was no revolutionary. Quite the contrary. And yet, Engels was able to say of his immense literary output:

There is the history of France from 1815 to 1848… And what boldness! What a revolutionary dialectic in his poetical justice!

A lifetime of furious nocturnal work, fuelled by immense quantities of coffee (it is estimated that he drank 500,000 cups in his lifetime!), sent Balzac to a tragically early grave at the age of just 50. In two decades of work, however, Balzac penned no fewer than 90 novels, novellas and short stories—60 of them full-length novels, and dozens of them masterpieces in their own right.

But Balzac’s novels, great as they are taken singly, cannot be fully appreciated other than in connection with each other. His tremendous opus, known collectively as The Human Comedy, represents a single, masterful panorama of French society from the fall of Napoleon until 1848: Paris and the provinces; soldiers, police spies and politicians; aristocrats and peasants; bankers, artists, journalists, bureaucrats, criminals and courtesans—all are expertly depicted with strokes that cut straight to the heart of their world.

More than a portrayal of French society, it portrays bourgeois society as it was and as it is: petty, grasping and brutal.

The Realist novel

Balzac was born in 1799, the same year that Napoleon overthrew the Directory, marking the closing chapter of the French Revolution that had aroused and dashed such immense illusions among the downtrodden masses of France.

One form of exploitation had been exchanged for another. In the words of Marx and Engels, “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions,” the bourgeoisie “substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

With the victory of the bourgeoisie, the authors of The Communist Manifesto explained how man was “at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” In the volumes of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s art acted like powerful smelling salts, assisting in sobering up this world whose illusions were crashing down around it, forcing it to look reality in the face.

Instead of a retreat into an idealised past in the Romantic style then all the rage in France, we find the present, with its sores and all, fully on display. Balzac’s method was wholly materialist. Under the banner of ‘Realism’, it represented a new departure in literature and the arts at large.

Stefan Zweig, in his essay on the genius of Balzac, gives a vivid description of his method:

The idea—which he christened ‘Lamarckism’, and which Taine was later to petrify into a formula—that every multiplicity reacts upon a unity with no less vigour than does a unity upon a multiplicity, that each individual is a product of climate, of the society in which he is reared, of customs, of chance, of all that fate has brought his way, that each individual absorbs the atmosphere by which he is surrounded as he grows to adulthood and in his turn radiates an atmosphere which others will absorb; this universal influence of the world within and the world without upon the formation of character, became an axiom with Balzac. Everything flows into everything else; all forces are mobile, and not one of them is free—such was his view.

Although Balzac explicitly rejected the label ‘materialist’, what is this but a clearly materialist method? And, what is more, it is an extremely dialectical method.

Balzac intended The Human Comedy to be a complete, living representation of all the “social species” that inhabit the world, not simply a dry accumulation of ‘facts’. No art can ever hope to chronicle every one of society’s details; nor does it need to. The real purpose of art is to reach beyond the accidental in order to grasp deeper, more essential truths. Balzac didn’t need to portray 30 million Frenchmen and women to give a portrait of France. It was enough to capture the essential types of the age. With his pen, the 2,000 or so characters of The Human Comedy sufficed for this task.

In The Human Comedy—perhaps counterintuitively for a work of Realism—we find men and women painted in bold, exaggerated colours, as Renaissance painters used the method of chiaroscuro, the bold opposition of dark and light, to highlight the drama in human expressions and motion. Balzac’s characters are frequently depicted as unusually singular in their passions. But they are all the more real for that fact: they form archetypes of their class and of their motivating passions.

Baron de Nucingen stands in as the archetype of the whole class of millionaire bankers; Grandet plays the same role for misers; Gobseck for usurers; Crevel for bourgeois parvenus; Madame Marneffe for the bourgeois courtesan; de Rastignac and de Rubempré for ambitious provincials; and Vautrin for the whole criminal underclass of Paris.

Just as the chemist breaks down for analysis the innumerable compound substances of nature into their purified constituent elements, so Balzac sought to “analyse into its component parts the elements of that compound mass which we call ‘the people’”.

Balzac’s ability, as he put it, “to rise to the level of others”, “to espouse their way of life”, “to feel their rags on his shoulders” was something unequalled:

I looked into their souls without failing to notice externals, or rather I grasped these external features so completely that I straightaway saw beyond them.

In the earliest novel in The Human Comedy, Les Chouans set in 1799, we meet the aristocratic leaders of the Chouannerie—a reactionary guerrilla rising in Brittany. In Les Chouans the Republican army is a disciplined fighting force, consisting of peasants who earnestly imagine their First Consul Napoleon to be the defender of the land they actually gained thanks to the Revolution. On the other hand the Chouan guerrillas, consisting of Breton peasants, are depicted as having joined the Royalist ranks merely to rob stagecoaches and the bodies of dead Republican soldiers—a practice solemnly sanctified at clandestine forest Masses by the Church.

As for their aristocratic leaders, we get their full measure when they confront their leader to greedily press their demands for titles, estates and archbishoprics as reward for their continued allegiance to the King.

In Lost Illusions and Père Goriot, we find the old nobility: petty, bigoted, two-faced and egotistical, restored once more in the saddle, thanks to the reactionary armies of Europe. But it was one thing for Louis XVIII to re-establish his Court and for the aristocracy to re-establish their salons in Paris, it was quite another to establish the old property relations on which the Ancien Régime once stood.

France had been changed irrevocably, and money formed the new axis around which it now turned. The rising bourgeoisie pressed against the old aristocracy in every sphere: in the theatre box, in politics, in the press. The faded nobles might scorn admitting the upstarts to their salons, but it was to the Stock Exchange that they entrusted their fortunes. It was to the bourgeois timber agents that they sold the wood felled from the forests of their manors, and it was to the bourgeois usurer that they turned to fund their marital infidelities.

In the provinces, where the nobility found itself on a slightly firmer footing, Balzac describes the most worthless rabble:

All the people who gathered there had the most pitiable mental qualities, the meanest intelligence, and were the sorriest specimens of humanity within a radius of fifty miles. Political discussions consisted of verbose but impassioned commonplaces: the Quotidienne was regarded as lukewarm in its royalism; Louis XVIII himself was considered to be a Jacobin. The women were mostly stupid, devoid of grace and badly dressed; every one of them was marred by some imperfection; everything fell short of the mark, conversation, clothes, mind and body alike… Nevertheless, comportment and class consciousness, gentlemanly airs, the arrogance of the lesser nobility, acquaintance with the rules of decorum, all served to cloak the void within them.

What is this if not a class that was doomed to extinction and deserving of its fate?
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Balzac’s beloved Catholic Church is depicted as little better. Like all the last bastions of the old order, it found itself besieged from all directions and forced to become bourgeois itself: “It stoops, in the house of God, to a disgraceful traffic in pew rents and chairs… although it cannot have forgotten Christ’s anger when he drove the moneychangers from the Temple.” In birth, marriage and death, we find the representatives of the Church, with their palm extended, collecting their fee at every stage.

Throughout The Human Comedy we can read fictitious accounts of the numerous, real tragedies of what family life in particular becomes under capitalism. We find fathers swindling sons; men wooing women for dowries; adulterous fathers ruining families to support mistresses; daughters placed on bread and water by rich and ‘thrifty’ miser-fathers; husbands aiding their wives’ infidelities for career advancement; children treated as chattel by parents.

As Marx and Engels put it,

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Criminals and capitalists

Balzac’s critique touches in turn upon all aspects of bourgeois society, only a few of which can be mentioned here.

In Père Goriot, a retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear in the bourgeois age, the real hero of that story, if he can be called such, is Eugene de Rastignac, an impoverished provincial nobleman. A new arrival in Paris, he is drawn between two ways to make his fortune: the ‘honest’ method, of seducing one of Père Goriot’s daughters, made wealthy through marriage to the banker de Nucingen; or through a shortcut involving the shedding of blood, offered by the branded criminal Vautrin.

What is the difference? In the opinion of Vautrin, who counsels de Rastignac through his pangs of conscience, the difference is little more than moral and legal hypocrisy:

There’s not one article [of the law] that does not lead to absurdity. The smooth-tongued man in his smart yellow gloves has committed murders without bloodshed, but someone has been bled all the same; the actual murderer has jemmied open a door; two deeds of darkness!

The capitalist kills just as surely as the murderer, although without spilling a drop of blood himself. The words of condemnation thrown in the face of the whole of bourgeois society do not fail to hit their target on account of being placed in the mouth of a branded miscreant:

Are you any better than us? The brand we bear on our shoulders is not as shameful as what you have in your hearts, flabby members of a putrid society.

Ultimately, de Rastignac is forced to agree with Vautrin:

He saw the world as it is: laws and morality unavailing with the rich, wealth the ultima ratio mundi. ‘Vautrin is right, wealth is virtue,’ he said to himself.

[The] only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

In his day, the cause of the bourgeois republic as yet represented progress relative to the outworn, lingering relics of feudalism. In the years depicted in The Human Comedy, the class that would come to challenge bourgeois rule, the working class, remained as yet a largely unorganised mass; only just becoming conscious of its own interests; scattered throughout small and medium-sized workshops. It is undistinguished from the general mass of the urban poor in Balzac’s novels.

But with his piercing insight, Balzac saw that the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ that the revolutionary republicans aspired to was a chimera that could only end in the naked rule of the bourgeoisie. In this assessment he was correct, and was proven so in the revolution that broke out in 1848, the same year that Balzac put down his pen for the very last time.

This was also the year in which the working class of Paris rose up for the first time, arms in hand, under its own banner. Reciprocally, the bourgeoisie recoiled in fear from its revolutionary tasks, stooped down and allowed itself to be yoked by the adventurer Louis Bonaparte, and demonstrated all the decadence, cowardice and paltriness that Balzac had shone a piercing light on.

What is left when we leave aside the reactionary dreams contained in Balzac’s work is a withering critique of bourgeois society and its hypocritical morality. The Realist method that he pioneered would inspire other great writers, like Charles Dickens and Emile Zola, to take up the task of depicting the conditions of the industrial proletariat. And it would also exert a fructifying influence on the authors of The Communist Manifesto, whose pages first saw the light of day in 1848, just as Balzac’s great literary career was drawing to a close.

In The Communist Manifesto—much like in The Human Comedy—we see the unstoppable wheels of history in motion. For the backward-looking Balzac, it was a matter of deep regret that this onward motion destroyed his idealised old society, with its deference to the King, God and the Family. But Marx and Engels, on the contrary, looked ahead and saw how this same destructive power that Balzac depicted was also a tremendous creative power. It was laying the basis for a new, classless society, in which all the vices of class society that capitalism had brought to their apex would be done away with forever.

“The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole,” writes the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” What he has described are the nodal points where, after the contradictions within totalities intensify, conditions are created for great ruptures for qualitative leaps into new worlds.

This is what multipolarity signifies. It is a geopolitical revolution, a qualitative leap into a radically new world. It is premised on the intensification of the contradictions inherent in the Western imperialist system, especially the unipolar form it took since 1991 when it had free reign to dominate the world after the fall of the Eastern socialist bloc. That was a time when the West proclaimed, laughably, that we had arrived at the “end of history.” The subject for this proclamation, of course, was Francis Fukuyama – but he spoke on behalf of the arrogance and hubris of the Western world as a whole. The West’s short-lived fantasy of the end of history has itself come to an end. As Vladimir Putin said in a seminal speech of September 2022, “The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation.”

In proclaiming the end of history, the West showed an ignorance of the best insights its thinkers have provided to the world. How absurd is it that the civilization that gave birth to Heraclitus and Goethe and Hegel and Marx could come to naively accept such a static and historical position? It was Heraclitus who taught us that “everything flows and nothing abides” and that “everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” It was Goethe, speaking through Mephistopheles in Faust, the greatest work in the history of German literature, who wrote that “all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.” The unipolar world, dominated by the US and its NATO junior partners, came to be in the last decade of the 20th century. But, as Mephistopheles might have predicted, three decades later, we are seeing it perish wretchedly.

We are in a period of transition where the drive, as Pepe Escobar has written, “towards a multipolar, multinodal, polycentric world” is evident. Putin, in his speech at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), called it a “harmonic multipolar world.” Here too, Putin is developing insights that should not be foreign to the West. “The world’s virtue,” wrote the great Pythagoras, “is harmony.” It is one that contains within it a relational complementarity between the many. It is a world, as Mexican economist Oscar Rojas has written, where nations and civilizations can function as Free Associated Producers – sovereign, unhindered by external powers seeking to unilaterally impose their will on the world.

Putin is also here following in the footsteps of the insights developed by China’s civilizational state, as Zhang Weiwei calls it, which has always emphasized “building a harmonious society” and a “harmonious world” (the latter popularized by Hu Jintao), phrases developed from the ancient Chinese concept of taihe (overall harmony). It is a worldview in line with China’s constitutional commitment to “work to build a community with a shared future for mankind,” a frequent expression used by Xi Jinping and top Chinese leadership. This future is premised on developing a world that breaks from the unilateral imposition of one nation’s will over another and instead centers itself on win-win relations between sovereign nations and civilizations.

The expansion of multipolar institutions such as BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, and others are beginning to build the skeleton for the new world. The proposals for a new BRICS+ payment infrastructure and an “apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments,” called The Unit, which is “anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%),” signifies significant steps toward de-dollarization – an integral component of breaking US global dominance and building a multipolar world.

As an American, I inhabit a world that is crumbling wretchedly. While I look cheerfully upon the development of the new world (what I have called a post-Columbian, post-1492 world), I recognize that it is the elite of my country, those who our politicians represent, who are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their global system and abort the birth of the new world.

The leaders of the West are right to assume that they are fighting an existential struggle. However, they’re wrong in postulating that what is at stake is "democracy" or Western values and civilization. Instead, what is actually at stake is their colonial and imperialist dominance over the whole world. What is actually at risk of perishing wretchedly is not the West per se, but the system – erected more than 500 years ago – which elevates the accumulation of capital to the level of supremacy, over and above the community, the individuals and families, and civilizational traditions. It is the system that brought forth the genocide of the natives, the enslavement of the Africans, the looting of the world, and the impoverishment, oppression, and indebtedness of working people within the West itself, it is this system, which stands as a vampire sucking the lifeblood of humanity, which is finding an end to its reign.

Where does this leave America? Where does this leave Americans?

​We must recall the famous words of Peruvian indigenous politician Dionisio Yupanqui, uttered in his 1810 speech to the Cortes de Cádiz, “A people that oppresses another cannot be free.” The American people have not been benefactors of the global dominance of their imperialist government. For all their government’s talk of democracy, freedom, and government of, by, and for the people, what the American people have actually experienced has been an oligarchy, dictatorship, and government of, by, and for the owners of big corporations, banks, and investment firms. The so-called representatives of the American people have, all along, been in reality the representatives of the exploiters, oppressors, and parasitic creditors of the American people.

What we have seen, as American political theorist Michael Parenti has written, is how the American empire has “fed off the republic.” In the words of Tupac, the American hip-hop sensation, the imperialist state has always had money for war but never to feed the poor. There are always hundreds of billions that can be scrambled for Neo-Nazis in Ukraine and for the Zionist entity to continue its genocide in Palestine, but never for infrastructure, for fighting poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance, and for guaranteeing housing and healthcare – there is never money for lifting the living standards of the hard-working people upon whose backs and labor the existence of the country is premised.

If multipolarity means an existential threat to the American elite, what does it mean for the American people? Quite simply – HOPE.

The real enemies of the American people are those who wish to colonize Russia, China, and Iran… those who sanction a third of the world’s population and who seek to loot the resources and super exploit the labor of foreign lands. It is those – currently being defeated by Russia and the Axis of Resistance in multinodal frontlines – who send our countrymen 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.

The real enemies of the American people are those who keep us poor, indebted, and desperate, and it is this same enemy – and the system they’re a personification of – that the multipolar world is challenging.

The interests of the American people, therefore, are in line with the interests of the Russian struggle against NATO encroachment, of the Axis of Resistance’s struggle against the Zionist entity, and of China’s struggle against US encirclement, delinking, and provocations in Taiwan.

The interests of the American people, in short, are aligned with the bourgeoning multipolar world. It is in the interests of America to be a pole in the multipolar world.

America, as a young civilizational project, is in many ways similar to China. China’s ancient (yet highly modern) civilization emphasizes, as Zhang Weiwei writes, the “Confucian idea of unity in diversity.” But so does the American project, at least its best parts – the parts the people are most fond of. The Confucian idea of unity in diversity is captured in E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), the motto of the United States. Here we find an acknowledgment of the importance of pluralism that is contained within monism, that is, of particulars that are contained within a totality through which they obtain their meaning, and reciprocally, influence its general trajectory.

The premises for accepting America as a pole within the multipolar world are, therefore, already present in the values the American people accept as common sense. We would be a part of that complementary many, of that multiplicity, which would both be conditioned by the new relations of a multipolar world but reciprocally capable of playing a constructive role in its development.

This could be the future the American people are incorporated in once the world dominated by their parasitic leaders is brought down. However, this transition will never be offered to us by those same interests who threaten humanity with a global holocaust via a third, nuclearized, World War to sustain their decrepit hegemony and global power.

America’s incorporation into this bright new future can only be, as was our revolution in 1776, a product of a deep struggle against the old, decaying world of our oligarchs and political class. It is a world that has to be won by the fighting spirit of the American people. As the cleavage in our country between the elite and the people becomes more pronounced than ever before, it will be the forces that can give the people’s varied forms of dissent some coherence, unity, and direction, which will ultimately win out. Only then can America be incorporated as a constructive partner in the building of a multipolar world. Only then, when our society is actually of, by, and for the people, will the impetus of global dominance be squashed, and America find itself as a participant in building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Much of the world is tired of monsters and seeks not a "re-set" but a rebirth of its original identities and historical legacies… which have been held too long hostage by a ruthless all-devouring Empire.

Since the early 1900s, Mackinder's "Heartland doctrine" dominated the geopolitical mindset and actions of the West (primarily the British, but also Nazi Germany adopted this obsession). The strategy initially envisaged the undermining, dismantling and total takeover of the "Russian Empire"… the domination of the entire European and Asian continents would follow… and then the rest of the world. As Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Friedmann of Stratford pointed out, it was always about controlling the rich resources and geopolitical position of Russia and Asia.

But following WW2, during the ensuing Cold War, this essentially British agenda no longer seemed to be the order of the day, as the imperial and colonial centre of power had shifted away from the UK to the US… and the US had already begun pursuing its many imperial ambitions in other parts of the world to expand its own influence (through various wars, proxy wars and conflicts around the world (Vietnam, Korea, West Asia, Africa, Central, and South America).

For a while (in historical terms: 1945-1989) it seemed as though the "Heartland Doctrine" no longer had any relevance. In reality, it led a shadowy existence, as no one spoke about it openly… because a certain group – the neocons – did not yet have enough sway over the politics and public opinion of the US… But we know now that they remained engaged in this agenda behind the scenes.

The global geopolitical situation began to shift in the late 1980s. (And the big change came abruptly in 1989 with the Fall of the Wall in Berlin and the end of the Soviet Union.) The haste and zeal with which first Gorbachev and then Yeltsin sought to bring about and implement changes and "reforms" in the giant Soviet empire proved later on to be counterproductive, if not fatal, and not only led to the collapse of the USSR but also severely debilitated Russia. This was compounded by the Soviets' ingenuous belief that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the enmity and the ideological conflict with the West would also disappear… and that "normality" would take its place. (Yeltsin to Jeffrey Sachs, from 1:19:08: "We want to be normal.") But exactly what the Russians (or the Soviets) understood back then by "normality" (with regards to capitalism/US imperialism) remains unclear to this day.

Following this dramatic downfall, Russia was economically, militarily, politically, culturally and socially devastated. 

The Western elites around the neocons, intoxicated with the unexpected "victory" over their "enemy", set out to devour Russia and the rest of the former USSR. They saw themselves as the undisputed autocrats of the world according to the motto: "winner takes all". Now nothing stood in the way of the true "American dream", namely the domination of the entire world –  excepting perhaps those few smaller states that had not yet recognised this paradigm shift or were not prepared to accept it. To deal with those pesky obstacles, neoliberal tools came to the rescue: infiltration, the corrupting of governments and their elites, colour revolutions… and, if those didn't help, bombing and terror.

The first bombs fell on Iraq in 1990; in 1999, NATO, helmed by the US, bombed Yugoslavia; then followed the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria… According to US General Wesley Clark (link), seven countries were to be invaded within five years and subjected to "regime change": Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

In the meantime, the unstoppable eastward expansion of NATO began, despite the promises made to Russia. Russia's offer of a partnership between equals and even its participation in NATO was rejected. Instead, the US demanded Russia's subordination to its hegemony… but this was rebuffed by Yevgeny Primakov (1999 – "the U-turn across the Atlantic") and again by Vladimir Putin… who has now set Russia on a whole other set of sovereign tracks.

Today, while the neocons remain "stuck behind at the Mackinder station" of an outdated, festering British imperialist agenda… the locomotive of The Grand Eurasian Project is speeding ahead on newly laid tracks - not seeking hegemony but harmonic partnerships in a new and multipolar world.

The descent into irrationality

The centuries of imperialist hegemony of the Western elites, which had secured a life of progress and prosperity for themselves and their subjects at home by deliberately preventing these very advantages for others - a key principle of colonialist ideology that guaranteed them success - led to the moulding of their psyche, general mindset, personality and ultimately their identity, the effects of which can be seen in their supremacy, racism, fascism, and hubris.
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However, the Western elites began to fear that their liberal capitalist system would collapse sooner or later, with the consequence that they (the elites) would be confronted with serious and dangerous economic, political and social upheavals, revolts, revolutions at home, and a loss of power and hegemony on a global scale.

Their wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the bellicose tensions created by them in the South China Sea, as well as the actions, statements, and reactions of Western politicians and their media, clearly demonstrate their desperation.

In the face of resistance and opposition from other nations, Western elites have always responded with threats, sanctions, and the corruption of their leaders, and if these were not effective they resorted to covert terror ops, proxy wars, and ultimately hot wars.

But now they are standing on the edge of their own abyss, and the abyss is gazing back into them. The mere thought of losing power and prestige is fuelling their insanity.

Their growing panic led them to become increasingly irrational in their decisions, leading them to make reckless misjudgements and grave errors.
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Their own states became saturated with Russophobia, Islamophobia, cancel culture, the arming of police and security agencies for counter-insurgency purposes, detrimental immigration policies, the defamation and persecution of opposition figures, the synchronisation of the media, the breakdown of infrastructures, of education, of society itself, a general erosion of morals and ethics… and a Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, who are concocting deranged plans for the future of mankind.

The agony of the Empire: it cannot win, and it cannot walk away…

The "Cold War" was "cold" because a kind of military balance was created between "East" and "West", as both sides consisted of territories with nuclear powers. Today, not much has changed from a nuclear-military point of view with regard to the possession of nuclear weapons. However, the situation back then (during the Cold War) required politicians and elites in the West to think and act realistically and rationally, which is no longer the case today – and that is the critical point at which we find ourselves.

The point has been reached where the West can only decide in favour of a retreat… or a fight to the finish, as it is ultimately an existential battle for them. And - seeing as there are currently too many insane people, contemptuous of human life, in political and military leadership positions in the Western camp who operate according to the motto "all or nothing" and "if we don't get to have it, no one else should get it either" - it seems they are deciding in favour of fighting to the bitter and final end, which could lead to nuclear Armageddon.

With such a mindset, the West has led itself into an extremely desperate situation that is typical of people who are suicidal, with one difference: the West has chosen to play the role of suicide bombers.

But a third potential option for the Western elites might be - if they still refuse to admit their defeat but were at least able to finally feel deterred by a nuclear threat - that they create a new division in the world between "the West and the Rest" by erecting sine Iron Curtain of their own and … a kind of new "Cold War", during which they would go on living in a bubble where they could remain under the illusion of preserving their supremacy in a delusional manner… like a patient in a psychiatric clinic who cannot be cured but has at least been pacified.

This sorry state of affairs is best manifested in the figure of the "most powerful man in the world" (as promulgated by the Western propagandists): Joe Biden (aka Genocide Joe). The figure of Biden – almost by some "cosmic coincidence" - embodies today's Western world. He is in fact its icon... moribund and rotting... with a zombified view of the world, clinging not to life but only to ruthless power… and completely out of touch with reality.

Without realising it, Tucker Carlson just described in this video (in which he says: "Biden is dying in real time") not just Biden's condition, but the condition of the entire Western hegemony.
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The Hegemony has nearly reached its end… but it is not going quietly.

The other side… entering an era of new global perceptions and visions for harmony and cooperation

The decaying state of the West has led to the empowerment of more and more non-Western states, starting with China, Russia, Iran, India, South Africa, Brazil… all of whom already had their own bitter historical experiences with the supremacist and violent nature of Western colonialism. Following the formation of BRICS and other such alliances, other non-western countries have begun to turn away from the West and seek more opportune alliances and harmonious partnerships.

In Asia and elsewhere in the world, a multi-nodal, poly-centrist, multipolar system is now emerging, spearheaded by a resurgent Russia, that is not per se "anti-West", but rejects its several centuries old colonial hegemony and its "rules-based order" and yearns for a new world founded on justice and equality.
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Much of the world is tired of monsters and seeks not a "re-set" but a rebirth of its original identities and historical legacies… which have been held too long hostage by a ruthless all-devouring Empire.

When they push to automatically assign you for the draft, it means they will try to force you to fight for them if you don't want too.

Record Low Recruitment:

It is no secret that the US among many western nations is facing record low recruitment levels. So it is no surprise why the US would, as global tensions rise, push a bill that would make any adults between 18 to 26 years old be automatically added to the selective service military draft. Meaning when you turn 18, or you are between the ages of 18-26, your name will be automatically listed and pulled if the draft is ever initiated for war. With the exception if you are mentally or physically incapable. This has sparked nation-wide anger as it completely removes the choice millions of Americans wanted; since many, with the increase of technology, have seen how utterly useless most of these wars are, as many of these wars was for profit and hegemonic power/influence.

​Global Tensions Rising:

Global tensions are beginning to rise as nations around the world are getting tired of us sticking our nose into other nation’s business, and worse creating a crisis that didn’t exist prior because the country we hate decided to take charge of their own destiny. As BRICS rises and multipolarity becomes a new reality with major nations like Russia, China, Iran, Palestine, DPRK and others deciding how they want to rule their nations and space; the US is acting more belligerent as the global south begins moving away from doing business with the US and US Dollar. Now, as the tensions rise, the US aims to prepare for war with either Russia, China, Iran, DPRK or others who continue to rule without US corporate domination or US geopolitical bullying. Especially and most likely with China. Which is no surprise as China is overtaking the US economy and military.

You Don’t Owe the US Government a Damn Thing:

Americans, your government has abandoned you; they’ve increased your prices while letting your wages suffer. They have increased tracking on you and placed 2 million of you on a watchlist for questioning them. They have taxed you several times in several ways to cover the cost of a over bloated military budget to abuse foreign nations. They have let corporations find new ways to rob us of every penny with not a single one of those corporations being properly punished. They divided you with propaganda to make you hate each other, they gaslit you to believe two parties owned by the same corporations and hedge funds will have your interests at heart, and that the US election will save us. This year of 2024 there is 37.9 million Americans suffering poverty and in 2023 78% of the entire population lives paycheck to paycheck while 3 men own as much wealth as half the nation and 3 million Americans have as much wealth as 291 million Americans.

You do not owe this backwards, hateful, and violent government a damn thing. They have abandoned you, it is your turn to abandon them.

The only solution at this point, if the US wishes to force us to fight their corporate war to maintain a imperialist global bully, is to turn on the imperialist machine. Revive the anti-war movement, revive the labor movement, revive the socialist movement. Rebel in all ways that bring the machine to a grinding halt.

​In the year of the Russian presidency of BRICS, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) had to deliver something special.

And deliver it did: over 21,000 people representing no less than 139 nations – a true microcosm of the Global Majority, discussing every facet of the drive towards a multipolar, multinodal (italics mine), polycentric world.

St. Petersburg, beyond all the networking and the frantic deal-making – $78 billion-worth clinched in only three days – crafted three intertwined key messages already resonating all across the Global Majority.

​Message Number One:

President Putin, a “European Russian” and true son of this dazzling, dynamic historic marvel by the Neva, delivered an extremely detailed one-hour speech on the Russian economy at the forum’s plenary session.

The key takeaway: as the collective West launched total economic war against Russia, the civilization-state turned it around and positioned itself as the world's 4th largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Putin showed how Russia still carries the potential to launch no less than nine sweeping – global – structural changes, an all-out drive involving the federal, regional, and municipal spheres.

Everything is in play – from global trade and the labor market to digital platforms, modern technologies, strengthening small and medium-sized businesses and exploring the still untapped, phenomenal potential of Russia's regions.

What was made perfectly clear is how Russia managed to reposition itself beyond sidestepping the – illegitimate – sanctions tsunami to establishing a solid, diversified system oriented towards global trade – and completely linked to the expansion of BRICS. Russia-friendly states already account for three-quarters of Moscow’s trade turnover.

Putin’s emphasis on the Global Majority’s accelerated drive to strengthen sovereignty was directly linked to the collective West doing its best – rather, worst – to undermine trust in their own payment infrastructure.

And that leads us to…

Glazyev and Dilma rock the boat.

Message Number Two:

That was arguably the major breakthrough in St. Petersburg. Putin stated how the BRICS are working on their own payment infrastructure, independent from pressure/sanctions by the collective West.

Putin had a special meeting with Dilma Rousseff, president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). They did talk in detail about the bank’s development – and most of all, as later confirmed by Rousseff, about The Unit, whose lineaments were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik: an apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments, anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%).
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The day after meeting Putin, president Dilma had an even more crucial meeting at 10 am in a private room at SPIEF with Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Macro-Economy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.​

​Glazyev, who had previously provided full academic backing to the Unit concept, explained all the details to President Dilma. They were both extremely pleased with the meeting. A beaming Rousseff revealed that she had already discussed The Unit with Putin. It was agreed there will be a special conference at the NDB in Shanghai on The Unit in September.
This means the new payment system has every chance to be at the table during the BRICS summit in October in Kazan, and be adopted by the current BRICS 10 and the near future, expanded BRICS+.
Now to…

Message Number Three:

It had to be, of course, about BRICS – which everyone, Putin included, stressed will be significantly expanded. The quality of the BRICS-related sessions in St. Petersburg demonstrated how the Global Majority is now facing a unique historical juncture – with a real possibility for the first time in the last 250 years to go all-out for a structural change of the world-system.

And it’s not only about BRICS.

It was confirmed in St. Petersburg that no less than 59 nations – and counting – plan to join not only BRICS but also the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
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No wonder: these multilateral organizations now finally have established themselves on the forefront of the drive towards the multimodal (italics mine) – and to quote Putin in his address – "harmonic multipolar world".

​The Top Sessions for Further Reference

All of the above could be followed, live, during the frantic two and a half days of forum’s sessions. This is a sample of what were arguably the most engaging. The broadcasts should be very helpful as references going forward – all the way to the BRICS summit in October, and beyond.

On the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and Arctic expansion. Best motto of the session: “We need icebreakers!” The essential discussion to understand how the current global trade supply chains are not reliable anymore and how the NSR is faster, cheaper and reliable.

On the BRICS business expansion.
On the BRICS goals for a true new world order.
On the 10 years of the EAEU.
On the closer integration between EAEU and ASEAN.
The BRICS+ roundtable on the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

This session was particularly crucial. The key actors of the INSTC are Russia, Iran and India – all BRICS members. Actors on the margins which will profit from the INSTC – from the Caucasus to Central and South Asia – are already interested to be part of BRICS+. Igor Levitin, a top Putin advisor, was a key figure in this session.

The Greater Eurasia Partnership (GEP).

This was an essential discussion on what is eminently a civilizational project – in contrast with the collective West’s exclusionary approach. The discussion shows how GEP interlinks with SCO, EAEU and ASEAN and stresses the inevitable complementarity of transport, logistics, energy and payment structure all across Eurasia. Glazyev, Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk and former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl – always ultra-sharp – are key participants. Extra – astonishing – bonus: Adul Umari, acting Minister of Labor in Taliban Afghanistan, interacting with his Eurasia partners.

On the philosophy of multipolarity.

Conceptually, this session interacts with the GEP session. It offers the perspective of a concise inter-civilizational dialogue under the framework of BRICs+. Alexander Dugin, the irrepressible Maria Zakharova and Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University are among the participants.
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On Polycentricity. That involves all Global Majority institutions: BRICS, SCO, EAEU, CIS, CSTO, CICA, African Union, the renewed Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Glazyev, Maria Zakharova, Senator Pushkov and Alexey Maslov – director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University – discuss how to build a polycentric system of international relations.

​As Project Ukraine Faces Doom…

Finally, it’s inevitable to contrast the – hopeful, auspicious – mood at SPIEF with the collective West’s hysterics as Project Ukraine faces doom. Putin made it quite clear: Russia will prevail, no matter what. The collective West may rekindle “the Istanbul solution”, as Putin noted, but modified “based upon the new reality” in the battlefield.

Putin also deftly defused all the pre-fabricated, nonsensical nuclear paranoia infesting Atlanticist circles.
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Still, that won’t be enough. On the packed corridors at SPIEF, and in informal meetings, there was total awareness about the Hegemon’s desperation-fueled warmongering masked as "defense." There were no illusions that the current dementia posing as “foreign policy” is betting on a genocide not only for the sake of the “aircraft carrier” in West Asia but mostly to cow the Global Majority into submission.

​That would raise the serious possibility that the Global Majority needs to build a military alliance to deter this – planned – Global War.

Russia-China, of course, plus Iran and credible Arab deterrence – with Yemen showing the way: all of that may become a must. A Global Majority military alliance will have to show up one way or another: either before the – incoming, planned – disaster, to mitigate it; or after it has totally engulfed West Asia into a monstrous, vicious war.
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Ominously, we may be nearly there. But at least St. Petersburg offered glimmers of hope. Putin: "Russia will be the heart of the multipolar harmonic world." Now that’s how you clinch a one-hour speech.

This article was produced by Sputnik International. 

Some more insights into the thinking behind the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (BSW), which is polling at 14 percent.

In October 2023, 10 members of the German parliament (Bundestag) left Die Linke (the Left) and declared their intention to form their own party. With their departure, Die Linke’s parliamentary group fell to 28 out of the 736 members of the Bundestag, compared to the 78 members of the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD). One of the reasons for the departure of these 10 MPs is that they believe that Die Linke has lost touch with its working-class base, whose decomposition over issues of war and inflation has moved many of them into the arms of the AfD. The new formation is led by Sahra Wagenknecht (born 1969), one of the most dynamic politicians of her generation in Germany and a former star in Die Linke, and Amira Mohamed Ali. It is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW) and it launched in early January 2024.
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Wagenknecht’s former comrades in Die Linke accuse her of “conservatism” because of her views on immigration in particular. As we will see, though, Wagenknecht contests this description of her approach. The description of “left-wing conservatism” (articulated by Dutch professor Cas Mudde) is frequently deployed, although not elaborated upon by her critics. I spoke to Wagenknecht and her close ally—Sevim Dağdelen—about their new party and their hopes to move a progressive agenda in Germany.

Anti-War

The heart of our conversation rested on the deep divide in Germany between a government—led by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz—eager to continue the war in Ukraine, and a population that wants this war to end and for their government to tackle the severe crisis of inflation. The heart of the matter, said Wagenknecht and Dağdelen, is the attitude to the war. Die Linke, they argue, simply did not come out strongly against the Western backing of the war in Ukraine and did not articulate the despair in the population. “If you argue for the self-destructive economic warfare against Russia that is pushing millions of people in Germany into penury and causing an upward redistribution of wealth, then you cannot credibly stand up for social justice and social security,” Wagenknecht told me. “If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium, while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe that you would stand up for the millions of employees whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of whole industries brought about by the rise in energy prices.”

Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless his government is able to solve the pressing problems engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse this image. Rather than try to push for a ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine, Scholz’s coalition of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, say Dağdelen, “is trying to commit the people of Germany to a global war alongside the United States on at least three fronts: in Ukraine, in East Asia with Taiwan, and in the Middle East at the side of Israel. It speaks volumes that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock even prevented a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the Cairo summit” in October 2023.

Indeed, in 2022, Thuringia’s prime minister and a Die Linke leader, Bodo Ramelow, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the German federal government must send tanks to Ukraine. When Wagenknecht calledGaza an “open-air prison” in October 2023, the Die Linke parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch said that he “strongly distanced” himself from her (the phrase “open-air prison” to describe Gaza is used widely, including by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967). “We have to point out what is happening here,” Dağdelen tells me, “It is our duty to organize resistance to this collapse of Die Linke’s anti-war stance. We reject Germany’s involvement in the U.S. and NATO proxy wars in Ukraine, East Asia, and the Middle East.”

Controversies

On February 25, 2023, Wagenknecht and her followers organized an anti-war protest at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that drew 30,000 people. The protest followed the publication of a “peace manifesto,” written by Wagenknecht and the feminist writer Alice Schwarzer, which has now attracted over a million signatures. The Washington Post reported on this rally with an article headlined, “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in Germany.” Dağdelen tells me that the bulk of those who attended the rally and those who signed the manifesto are from the “centrist, liberal, and left-wing camps.” A well-known extreme right-wing journalist, Jürgen Elsässer tried to take part in the demonstration, but Dağdelen—as video footage shows—argued with him and told him to leave. Everyone but the right-wing, she says, was welcome at the rally. However, both Dağdelen and Wagenknecht say their former party—Die Linke—tried to obstruct the rally and demonized them for holding it. “The defamation is intended to construct an enemy within,” Dağdelen told me. “Vilifying peace protests is intended to put people off and simultaneously mobilize support for repugnant government policies, such as arms supply to Ukraine.”

Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration, but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says, must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD. “Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me, “we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone to that party out of frustration and in protest at the lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.”

The point of her politics, Wagenknecht said, is not anti-immigration as much as it is to attack the AfD’s anti-immigrant stand at the same time as her party will work with the communities to understand why they are frustrated and how their frustration against immigrants is often a wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said, “that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus to pro-working-class politics.
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Polls show that the new party could win 14 percent of the vote, which would be three times the Die Linke share and would make BSW the third-largest party in the Bundestag.

​Last month, I went to Cuba as part of a 20-person delegation to deliver USD 60,000 in critical life-saving cancer medications and medical supplies to two pediatric hospitals there. This delegation was organized by Hatuey Project, a volunteer-run organization that regularly brings medical and humanitarian aid to Cuba. As part of the 10-day trip, we met with representatives of different Cuban organizations, institutions, and even members of Parliament. Through these exchanges, we learned about how the people of Cuba are engaged in its ongoing revolutionary process, their project of building socialism, and the impacts of US policy on everyday life.
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Here are three key lessons I drew from our delegation.

1. All of Cuban society has been impacted by the US blockade

The US blockade on Cuba, in place since the 1960s, is an act of economic warfare. The political motivations behind it have been clear since the very beginning: to make life so miserable on the island that the Cuban people will direct their frustrations against the Communist Party and overthrow it, making way for US business interests to take hold again. This has been US policy toward Cuba for over 60 years.

As representatives we spoke to emphasized, there is no sector of society that the blockade does not touch. Conditions are now worse than ever: The blockade has led to extreme shortages in food, flour, and fuel. Electrical blackouts are becoming more and more frequent.

Meanwhile, farmers cannot grow food on a mass scale, because the blockade denies them the pesticides, fertilizers, and equipment to do so. Many have relied on countries such as Mexico donating tractors, hoes, and other farm supplies.

When receiving our medical delivery, a doctor at a children’s hospital in Santa Clara relayed to us that medicine is what is most needed and yet most affected by the blockade. The blockade not only prevents crucial medications from reaching the island, but also the raw materials and science and technology needed to produce them. And as the most effective cancer treatments are often US-produced and doctors do not have access to those, they often seek alternative treatments that are not as effective. This has an obvious impact on survival rate.

The doctors also lamented that fuel scarcity makes it extremely difficult for families of patients to travel back and forth from their homes to the hospital. On top of that, food scarcity creates even more hardship for these families. As we came to understand, the blockade doesn’t just affect individual things in isolation; it creates overlapping crises with which everyday Cubans must contend.

This is the cruel price that the Cuban people continue to pay for their socialist project.

2. Cuba shows us that another world is possible

Cuba is an example that a future exists beyond capitalism, and that future is worth fighting for.

Cuba’s government represents a democracy virtually unknown to us in the United States. On our last day, we met with several members of Parliament, or the National Assembly of People’s Power—the country’s highest political body. Unlike in the US, these government representatives do not receive a salary nor do they represent any groups with certain political interests. Nor do they have election campaigns or receive campaign funding.

As one member of the Assembly told us, “Policy is not a business. It’s a responsibility of the revolutionary project we have built.”

Popular consultation between government officials and community members is an important democratic principle in Cuba. Every new potential law is debated and refined through this process, including the new Families Code passed in 2022. The high level of political participation among the Cuban people can likely be attributed to their faith in this democratic consultative process.

And in spite of the blockade, Cuba mobilizes what scarce resources it has in service of its people, especially its most vulnerable. We were constantly in awe with how much Cuba did with so little. At the hospitals we visited, our delegation—accustomed to navigating the byzantine for-profit US healthcare and insurance systems—was immensely impressed at the dedication of staff to provide comprehensive and quality care to patients despite the extreme hardships brought by the blockade.

We also visited the Quisicuaba Agricultural Camp in Artemisa Province, an assisted living center for the homeless, as well as the elderly who need support in their later years. Since landlordism was abolished in Cuba after the revolution, the conditions which drive homelessness there are different than in the US In Cuba, homelessness is usually caused by mental health issues, alcoholism, or loss of family support, rather than eviction.

Quisicuaba provides residents with accommodation, clinical and psychological treatment, three meals a day, along with workshops and daily programming. There is a farm on the camp where, together, residents grow bananas, sweet potatoes and cassava, along with livestock. The camp fosters a community setting among residents, and its primary goal is protection and rehabilitation in order for them to be reincorporated back into society. Assisted living centers like Quisicuaba are subsidized by their provincial governments.

Meanwhile in the US, over half a million people experience homelessness with no government support, and faced with the substandard conditions of most homeless shelters, they often choose to remain on the streets rather than seek refuge. This is an unconscionable reality of living in the US—our government spends billions of dollars on war and to bankroll Israel’s genocide in Gaza while homelessness skyrockets, people can’t afford basic necessities, and infrastructure crumbles.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Cuba shows us that another world is possible, one that centers humanity and dignity of life over profit.

3. We must firmly reject despair in fighting for this new world

Yet despite the hardships created by the blockade, we were struck by how warm the Cuban people were toward us, the pride they exuded when talking about their revolution, and their steadfast commitment not to kneel to US policy. One of my favorite parts of the delegation was a trip to the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, a research institute in Havana.

The scientist we spoke to there recalled that one of the proudest moments of his life was contributing to Cuba’s COVID-19 vaccine. They named that vaccine “Abdala,” after a poem written by Cuban national hero José Martí in which the titular character defends his homeland of Nubia against Spanish occupiers. Martí wrote that poem during Cuba’s Ten Years’ War against Spain. At the forefront of people’s minds is their struggle for sovereignty and national liberation, always.

The scientist told us, “When your idea is correct, you must fight to the end.”

This was a key takeaway for me as someone living in the US, especially given the level of cynicism and pessimism among some sectors of the Left here. The US blockade has now been in place for over 60 years. Most Cubans alive now have lived their entire lives under blockade. If the Cuban people remain so determined to defend the gains of their revolution, if they maintain their sense of revolutionary optimism even under the most severe of conditions, what excuse do we have to feel despair about what we are up against? About fighting US imperialism?

I believe that type of pessimism is a luxury afforded to us, but we must reject it. Despair is a shirking of our collective responsibility as those living in the heart of empire. Our own government has robbed the Cuban people of so much over the course of centuries, from occupation to the current blockade. It is our responsibility to combat the vicious policies of the US. Only when US imperialism is overturned will countries like Cuba be allowed to breathe and develop to their full potential. We do this first and foremost through getting organized, so that we can build capacity to weaken imperialism from within. That is a responsibility we all share as those living in the belly of the beast. We owe it to people in places like Cuba.

​In the first week of June 2024, the Palestine office of the World Health Organization (WHO) released figures about the atrocious attacks on health care facilities and workers in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Thus far, according to the WHO, the Israelis have attacked 464 health care facilities, killed 727 health care workers, injured 933 health care workers, and damaged or destroyed 113 ambulances. “Health care,” the WHO’s Palestine office argues, “is not a target.” And yet, during the past seven months, health care workers have faced relentless attacks by the Israeli military. Each of the stories about the deaths is heartbreaking, the names of the dead are too long to list in any article (although a group called Healthcare Workers for Palestine did read the names of their dead colleagues as a protest against this war). But some of the stories are worth reflecting on because they tell us about the commitment of the workers and the great loss to humanity from their murder.
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Dr. Iyad Rantisi, who was 53 years old, ran the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, which lies in the northern part of Gaza. There are many Rantisis in Gaza, but they are not native to that part of Palestine. Like many Palestinians who live in Gaza, they have roots in other parts of Palestine from which they had been expelled in the Nakba of 1948; the Rantisis come from the village of Rantis, northwest of Ramallah. 

On November 11, 2023, during the Israeli military assault inside northern Gaza, Dr. Rantisi was taken into custody at an Israeli military checkpoint when he tried to leave northern Gaza for the south, following the orders of the Israeli military. Since then, his family had not heard anything about his whereabouts. Now, months later, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that he was taken to the Shikma Investigation Center of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), which is inside the Ashkelon Prison. Dr. Rantisi was tortured and then killed six days into his detention. His family was not informed of this until the Haaretz report. Then, Dr. Rantisi’s daughter Dima wrote of the death of her father, a social media post that she paired with photographs of him in medical scrubs performing surgery on a patient.

Dr. Adnan Al-Barsh, also 53, trained in Romania before he returned home to Gaza to head the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital. He has a reputation of being a very loved doctor, whose office was crowded with his diplomas (from Jordan, from Palestine, from the United Kingdom). When the Israeli military attacked al-Shifa, Dr. Al-Barsh was forced to leave his post, but he did not leave his work. He first went to Kamal Adwan Hospital, where Dr. Rantisi worked, and then to Al-Awda Hospital in the area east of the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, which was also attacked several times by the Israelis. On December 18, 2023, the Israeli military raided Al-Awda and took Dr. Al-Barsh and other hospital personnel into custody. Included among those arrested was the manager of the hospital and another very popular doctor, Dr. Ahmed Muhanna. On October 15, 2023, Dr. Muhanna made a video—which went viral—in which he pleaded to the world for help and for an immediate ceasefire. It is now reported that on April 19, 2024, Dr. Al-Barsh was killed by the Israelis in Ofer Prison. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, said, “Dr. Adnan’s case raises serious concerns that he died following torture at the hands of Israeli authorities.”

Dr. Hammam Alloh, age 36, was killed when an Israeli missile struck his home near his ward in Al-Shifa Hospital on November 12, 2023. Trained in Yemen and Jordan, Dr. Alloh was Gaza’s only nephrologist, a kidney specialist. Concerned about his patients who were on dialysis, particularly with the lack of electricity and the constant attacks, Dr. Alloh—who was known as “The Legend” during his residency in Jordan—refused to leave the hospital. On October 31, Dr. Alloh was asked why he did not abandon his post and go to southern Gaza. “If I go,” he replied calmly, “who would treat my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper health care. You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?” This was the caliber of Dr. Alloh. Less than two weeks later, when he left his post to have a rest at home with his parents, his wife (pregnant with a child), and his two children, the Israelis struck his home. He died alongside his father.

At the International Court of Justice in January 2024, the Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh made the closing arguments for South Africa’s claim of genocide against Israel. In the course of her statement, Ní Ghrálaigh showed an image of a whiteboard with the following written on it: “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.” These lines had been written by 38-year-old Dr. Mahmoud Abu Najaila, who worked as a physician for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza. On November 21, 2023, the Israeli military bombed the third and fourth floors of the hospital, where Dr. Najaila worked with Dr. Ahmad Al-Sahar and Dr. Ziad Al-Tatari. All three of them were killed.

On her LinkedIn page, Reem Abu Lebdeh, a physiotherapist who was an associate trustee on the board of MSF’s UK branch, wrote, “Such a devastating loss for the medical community and humanity.” These doctors, whom she knew, she said, “were true embodiments of selfless service and humanitarian dedication, tirelessly saving lives in the most urgent conditions.” Then a few weeks later, sometime in December, the Israelis attacked a residential area in Khan Younis and killed Reem Abu Lebdeh, whose own messages of solidarity now sit on the web like Dr. Najaila’s whiteboard note: Remember us.

Acute Lyme disease is a tick-borne illness caused by the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. Acute Lyme is well understood by the medical community. The disease can be tested for via blood sample and most cases are resolved within less than 28 days of taking antibiotics. Chronic Lyme disease on the other hand is an illness which is sometimes diagnosed in patients who experience long term symptoms after being treated for acute Lyme disease, or who experience the symptoms without ever testing positive. The CDC found that 5-20% of Lyme patients experience long term symptoms after being treated for an acute form of the disease. They experience fatigue, joint pain, bell’s palsy, and cognitive issues for months and even years in some cases. Some doctors who claim an expertise in Lyme disease label themselves as “Lyme literate” to attract patients with these long-term symptoms. Other medical professionals have criticized these Lyme literate doctors, claiming they belong to the ‘chronic Lyme industry’ and utilize the disease to make money. (Combatting Lyme Disease Myths).
           
​Much of the research on Chronic Lyme disease has been inconclusive. Some studies say that the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria could potentially be protected in a biofilm, allowing symptoms to persist, but causing blood tests for Lyme to come up negative. (Lacout). Some doctors prescribe increased doses of anti-biotics to kill surviving bacteria. However, one thing Lyme related studies agree on is that over prescription of antibiotics is harmful to the gut and causes symptoms of its own. Research into Lyme is complicated by the fact that so many patients have previously been prescribed large doses of antibiotics, making it difficult to identify if long term symptoms are coming from bacteria, or damage caused by antibiotics. Recently scientists have focused efforts on developing an antibiotic which targets the bacteria without causing patient side effects. (Leimer 2021). This shows promise in the effort to understand and treat the thousands of people suffering from long term Lyme disease symptoms, but much more research is needed to fill in the gaps of our knowledge about the chronic form of Lyme disease, how it differs from acute Lyme, and how it can be treated without harmful side effects.
 
Quantitative Research into Chronic Lyme
           
In 2019 the Canadian Medical Association published a journal to counter myths from what they call the ‘Chronic Lyme Industry’ (CMAJ). In the journal is a survey taken among students at Alberta Medical School which found that 30% of doctors felt pressured to prescribe antibiotics for Lyme disease and 90% felt unprepared to handle patients with chronic Lyme. This highlights the lack of education and training mainstream medical professionals are given surrounding Lyme, even though a chronic form of the disease effects an estimated one million people. (Lyme Disease facts and Statistics).
           
The Canadian Medical Association has begun providing clinical toolkits for healthcare providers in areas where Lyme is highly prevalent. The toolkits provide educational information on the most up to date Lyme research, and clinical guidelines for how to treat patients experiencing symptoms, or who were diagnosed with chronic Lyme by a separate provider. The Association suggests giving only one dose of antibiotics then closely monitoring changes in the patient’s symptoms even after the dose has ended. While it is far from a solution for those who suffer from chronic symptoms, the educational efforts should decrease the prevalence of antibiotics being over prescribed and causing side effects worse than the disease itself.
           
The journal’s recommendations to doctors may be a positive step, but it also highlights the need to increase both what we know about the chronic form of Lyme, and how it can be treated in patients. A 2021 study was conducted using 127 kids with a history of Lyme, 47 of whom were suffering symptoms worthy of a Lyme diagnosis. The study found that for most patients their symptoms dissipated proportionally as time passed. Others however, remained symptomatic well after treatment. The study concluded that more diagnostic research will be needed to discern between novel cases of Lyme, and previous cases which are followed by ongoing symptoms. (Lantos, 2021).  The study shows the need for increased research to help medical professionals discern between acute and chronic Lyme disease. A stricter definition needs to be developed for Chronic Lyme and what specifically characterizes the condition.
 
Modern Methods of Treatment.

 MD Paul Lantos was involved in conducting the previous study also helped craft the CDC guidelines for Lyme treatment in 2020. The CDC guidelines are like those from the Canadian Medical Association in suggesting doctors refrain from administering a second dose of antibiotics to treat lingering symptoms. The debate surrounding Lyme Treatment has largely been over whether more than one dose of antibiotics should be administered to to treat lingering symptoms beyond the acute stage. Some doctors argue that multiple cycles of medication are needed to kill resistant bacteria. On the other hand, most medical professionals argue the antibiotics themselves will end up being more harmful than symptoms of chronic Lyme.

A study from 2001 tested two different control groups of people who had been treated for acute Lyme but were now experiencing chronic symptoms. Those conducting the study administered antibiotics to one control group, while giving the others a placebo. The study concluded that 90 days of additional antibiotic treatment did not result in any significant increase in health outcomes for the control group vs the placebo. (Klempner, 2001). A cohort study in 2010 found similar results after conducting follow up surveys with patients treated for chronic Lyme. The surveys found no difference between patients treated for less than ten days compared to patients treated for longer. (Kowalski et al., 2010). The studies are conclusive in that increased doses of antibiotics do not appear to be effective in combatting symptoms of chronic Lyme.

The studies agree that increased medication is not the solution to treating chronic Lyme, but they are also in agreement that chronic Lyme needs to be treated. Both studies report a lower baseline standard of health and wellness for patients with chronic Lyme symptoms. Alternative treatment methods need to be researched and developed to help those suffering from the disease. New research in 2021 attempted to create an antibody which targets the Lyme bacteria exclusively, while preventing gut damage that often accompanies standard medication. (Leimer,2021). Those who suffer from the symptoms of Lyme are counting on the development of new forms of treatment, or revolutionary innovations in older methods.

Criticism

A 2007 an article titled A Critical Appraisal of “Chronic Lyme Disease” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine arguing that Chronic Lyme Disease does not exist as it has no concrete scientific definition. Instead, the article divides patients into groups based on how long they have experienced lingering Lyme symptoms. Those experiencing symptoms for less than six months have post-Lyme disease symptoms. Those whose symptoms go on past 6 months have Post-Lyme Disease Syndrome. (Feder, 2007).  Similarly, those with Lyme who are being studies are divided into four categories based on their history with the disease. Dividing the chronic Lyme into separate stages, and those who suffer from it into categories, appears to be a positive step in the development of Lyme research. Many future studies built from these categories which added specificity to who and what is being researched.

Despite making advancements in how we think about Chronic Lyme, the study is outdated, and highlights the need for additional modern research into chronic Lyme. The article claims that post Lyme-disease symptoms are “mild and self-limiting subjective symptoms.” The authors go on to say that many who are diagnosed with chronic Lyme do in fact have post-Lyme disease Syndrome. However, many others have never been infected by the bacteria and were simply misdiagnosed by doctors masquerading as experts on chronic Lyme. Additionally, they add that 40% of chronic Lyme patients show improvement when given a placebo. The implications of these statements are clear when read within the context of the full article. The authors are not only arguing against chronic Lyme as a scientific concept, but they are also implying that a substantial portion of those diagnosed with the disease are essentially faking their symptoms. Near the end of the article the researchers give there “Advice to Clinicians” for Doctors handling patients with chronic Lyme. The section urges clinicians to tell their patients that scientific evidence has shown chronic Lyme disease likely does not exist, to check the patients for other issues, and then to abandon treating the disease to offer emotional support.

In many ways the 2007 article exemplifies an advancement in our understanding of chronic Lyme disease, which influenced future research and what we know today. The authors argue that there is no scientific evidence showing a connection between the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria and the complex of symptoms associated with chronic Lyme. This claim is important to our overall understanding of Lyme disease and is backed up by evidence. The implication that a substantial portion of patients are imagining their symptoms is not.

It’s encouraging to see that since 2007 there has been a mountain of new research done on chronic Lyme disease. Identifying that an increased dose of antibiotics is not helpful in treating long term Lyme symptoms, does not mean giving up on treatment for those suffering from these symptoms. Perhaps alternative care methods to medication would be helpful, or changes in nutrition and diet. Any method of treatment will likely be an improvement over telling patients their disease doesn’t exist and providing vague emotional support. The healthcare system should adapt to the needs of patients, and not turn away those whose illnesses don’t fit into the framework of existing medical theory.

Conclusion

The existing research on chronic Lyme shows that there have already been years of debate surrounding chronic Lyme. The disease’s prevalence, its diagnosis, how it should be treated, whether it should exist at all? These are all debates that have been waged by medical professionals when discussing chronic Lyme disease. Even though many professionals don’t recognize the label ‘chronic Lyme disease’ itself, all studies on the subject recognize many people who suffer from symptoms associated with it.

The debate to determine whether long term suffering from symptoms should labeled as ‘post-Lyme symptoms’ or ‘chronic Lyme disease’ is mostly an argument among academics practicing medicine. While good information has come from these debates, from the outside looking in it often appears that some medical professionals are more concerned with arguing their own preferred stance on Lyme, rather than collaborating with other professionals to find innovative solutions. Going forward medical professionals should do their best to rid themselves of preconceived biases about chronic Lyme. Collaboration and innovative thinking is needed to investigate the root causes of these long term symptoms, and develop new and effective methods of treatment for the thousands who suffer symptoms.
 
 Works Cited

Association Journal (CMAJ), 191(50), E1389–E1389. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.191616

Lacout, A., El Hajjam, M., Marcy, P.-Y., & Perronne, C. (2018). The Persistent Lyme Disease: “True Chronic Lyme Disease” rather than “Post-treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome.” Journal of Global Infectious Diseases, 10(3), 170–171. https://doi.org/10.4103/jgid.jgid_152_17

Leimer, N., & Xiaoqian, W. (2021). A selective antibiotic for Lyme disease. Science Direct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421010588

Chronic symptoms. Lyme Disease. (2018, April 16). Retrieved October 10, 2021, from    https://www.columbia-lyme.org/chronic-symptoms.  

Lyme disease facts and Statistics. Bay Area Lyme Combatting Lyme disease myths and the “chronic Lyme industry.” (2019). Canadian Medical Foundation. (2021, January 20). Retrieved October 10, 2021, from https://www.bayarealyme.org/about-lyme/lyme-disease-facts-statistics/.  

Lantos, P. M., Balamuth, F., Neville, D., Garro, A. C., Levas, M. N., Bennett, J., Thompson, A. D., Kharbanda, A. B., Branda, J. A., & Nigrovic, L. E. (2021). Two-tier lyme disease serology in children with previous lyme disease. Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1089/vbz.2021.0030

Klempner, M. S., Hu, L. T., Evans, J., Schmid, C. H., Johnson, G. M., Trevino, R. P., Norton, D. L., Levy, L., Wall, D., McCall, J., Kosinski, M., & Weinstein, A. (2001). Two controlled trials of antibiotic treatment in patients with persistent symptoms and a history of lyme disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 345(2), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm200107123450202

Kowalski, T. J., Tata, S., Berth, W., Mathiason, M. A., & Agger, W. A. (2010). Antibiotic treatment duration and long‐term outcomes of patients with early lyme disease from a lyme disease–hyperendemic area. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 50(4), 512–520. https://doi.org/10.1086/649920

Feder, H. M., Johnson, B. J. ., O’Connell, S., Shapiro, E. D., Steere, A. C., & Wormser, G. P. (2007). A Critical Appraisal of “Chronic Lyme Disease.” The New England Journal of Medicine, 357(14), 1422–1430. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra072023
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Rumbaugh, J., & Lantos, P. (2020). Lyme disease. IDSA Home. Retrieved October 10, 2021, from https://www.idsociety.org/practice-guideline/lyme-disease/.  

​The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once called Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara the “most complete human being of our age.” Today, 96 years after his birth, it is still difficult to find a better example of the socialist human being than the one who proclaimed courageously with his unforgettable last words, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Che was for Fidel Castro “the most extraordinary of [the] revolutionary comrades;” a man with an infectious character who organically lifted those around him to emulate his revolutionary virtues of “altruism,” “selflessness,” and the “immediate [and] instantaneous willingness” he had towards “carrying out the most difficult missions” for the socialist struggle. Although carried by a Herculean courage and a spartan attitude in the face of difficulties, in the speech Fidel gives in memory of Che he says that it is
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In the field of ideas, in the field of feelings, in the field of revolutionary virtues, in the field of intelligence, apart from its military virtues, where we feel the tremendous loss his death has meant for the Revolutionary movement.

The bourgeois Ideologues who serve as the theoretical and rhetorical mouthpieces of the capitalist ruling class will pile garbage on the reputation of any historical figure who successfully advances the struggle for socialism, Che Guevara is no exception. As he had already eloquently noted in a 1961 speech in Santa Clara, “it is the nature of imperialism which bestializes men, turning them into wild blood thirsty beasts willing to behead, to kill, to destroy the last image of a revolutionary, of a partisan, of a regime that has either fallen under its boot, or still fights for freedom.” However, Che lived his life in a way that made him exceedingly difficult for the bourgeois imperialist media to criticize. How can you, after all, criticize someone who fell defending “the cause of the poor and the humble of this Earth,” and that, as Fidel noted, did so in such “an exemplary and selfless way” that “not even his most bitter enemies dare to dispute?”

Che believed that a necessary component in the construction of a socialist society is the creation of a ‘new socialist man,’ free of the selfish and individualistic traits that are common among individuals existing within capitalist relations of production. For Che, every revolutionary should strive to exemplify the new socialist man in their actions, through being honest, hardworking, incredibly studious, and willing to labor for the good of the collective society. This marks a radical transition away from the capitalist notion of growth centered on an individual’s accumulation of capital and commodities, and towards a socialist notion of growth centered on human flourishing – towards a notion of the human being as the unique expression of the ensemble of relations they are embedded in as individuals dialectically interconnected to the social. As Che told the Union of Young Communists (UJC) in a 1962 speech, “the young communist must strive to be the first in everything…to be the living example and mirror through which our companions who do not belong to the young communist see themselves.” This meant that young communists must

be essentially human. To be so human you become closer and closer to perfecting the best attributes of being human. To purify the best attributes of man through work, studies, and the exercise of continual solidarity with our people and all people around the world. To develop to the maximum his sensibilities, to the point of feeling anguished when a man is assassinated in another corner of the world, and enthusiastic when in some corner of the world, a new flag of freedom is raised.

Che himself became increasingly disciplined as he got older and serves as a shining example of the socialist virtue-ethic he hoped would shape the next generations of Cuban communists. Since his death, generations of young Cubans have exerted themselves in the process of constructing the new socialist human being through the maxim: “pioneers for communism; we will be like Che.”

For Che, the transition to socialism could not just be reduced to changes in political economy, a fundamental transformation of the human being through the development of socialist culture was necessary. As Michael Löwy notes, Che held “the conviction that socialism is meaningless and consequently cannot triumph unless it holds out the offer of a civilization, a social ethic, a model of society that is totally antagonistic to the values of petty individualism, unfettered egoism, [bourgeois] competition, [and] the war of all against all that is characteristic of capitalist civilization [and] this world in which ‘man eats man.’” Not only was it necessary to raise the intellectual and cultural life of the mass of working people by developing “a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values,” but this transformation should not be limited to the ideological-political superstructure; it must also embed itself in the economic foundation of society through what he prescribed as the need for “a complete spiritual rebirth in one's attitude toward one's own work.” As Vijay Prashad notes, “it was this new moral framework that motivated Guevara’s agenda to build socialism… if a new society had to be created, it had to be created through a new moral fiber.”

Like any successful historical revolutionary, Che stressed the importance of reading and intensive study. Guevara himself was known to read incessantly throughout the entire course of his life. As a young boy playing soccer in Argentina, he would read Marxist theory while waiting to play on the bench, especially when horrific asthma attacks would pull him from the games. As the Cuban guerrillas waged their revolutionary struggle in the Sierra Maestra, Che would teach classes on Marxist economics and philosophy to the revolutionaries who would be tasked with managing Cuban society after the gangster dictator Batista was toppled. When he was in Africa at the forefront of anti-colonial struggles, he was reading none other than G.W. F. Hegel. In this manner, in the germs of the Cuban revolutionary process Che had already planted the seeds for the creation of the new socialist man, and the elevation of the people’s intellectual and moral life. The embryo of the proclamation Che made in Socialism and Man in Cuba, to have ”society as a whole…converted into a gigantic school,” was already being realized even under the extraordinarily difficult circumstances guerilla warfare entailed.

Che understood that the education of the Cuban masses had very practical implications for the long-term success of the Cuban revolution. When he was young, he had thought the US empire was controlled by evil wizards and dark princes who wanted to rule the world and cared not who they slaughtered in order to do so. It was after reading books like Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that Che came to understand that it was capital who perpetrated the violent imperialism he saw all around him in Latin America, rather than a diabolical cabal of evil wizards. It was the will of capital which dictated the murderous actions of the American Government in Guatemala, from which Che barely escaped with his life. If the people of Latin America could be made to understand this, it would be far more difficult for the US imperialists to convince them that it’s in their benefit to reinstate capitalist relations of production – which the US often tries to do via propaganda and other techniques to foment color revolutions.

After six decades of internationally denounced sanctions and hybrid warfare on Cuba, the blood soaked hands of the American empire have been unable to overthrow the construction of socialism in the country. Even in the periods where the U.S.’s warfare on Cuba has produced the most formidable of challenges in attaining the necessary materials to ensure the subsistence of the Cuban people, the mass of Cubans have brazenly continued the revolutionary process, with the slogan of their Bronze Titan Antonio Maceo engraved on their chest – “Whoever tries to take over Cuba will only collect the dust of their blood-soaked soil, if they do not perish in the fight.”

The Cuban people, in the face of a battle against Goliath, have understood the proclamation the revolution’s Apostle José Martí had made in Nuestra America – that “Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone,” that the revolutionary ideals Cuban socialism strives for are infinitely preferrable than the hardships Goliath’s war might provide. It is in part these revolutionary ideals and ethics embedded in Cuban culture and consciousness which have allowed a socialist nation with limited resources to survive right under the nose of the U.S. empire; while other projects with far more resources and material potential went down the road of capitalist restoration, plunging millions of people into poverty and conditions unseen since before the October revolution. It is in great part thanks to the emphasis Che laid in the construction of a new man, of a new culture and set of ideals and practices, that the Cuban revolution continues to be a beacon of hope for revolutionaries around the world, and a thorn in the nose of imperialists who would want nothing more than to pillage Cuban resources, superexploit Cuban workers, and use Havana as the sin-city vacation spot they once did.

By studying the emphasis Che laid on developing the new socialist human being and the new socialist culture, we give ourselves the ability to understand the success of Cuban socialism more concretely. Additionally, for those of us in countries currently fighting for the seizure of power by the working masses, studying Che’s life and work reminds us of the necessary role the intellectual and moral leadership of the revolutionary vanguard plays in disarticulating working people away from bourgeois hegemony, and towards the new set of socialist ideals, passions, desires, and ethical life necessary for the attainment of a society free of alienation, oppression, exploitation, and war.  

​The Classical Marxist View of the State
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Today* we hear libertarians speak at length about the problems of ‘big government,’ which they often equate with socialism. The question of the state is, in their minds, reduced to a quantitative discussion. What matters is how much state? Big state or small state? Small state good, big state bad. Silly as it may sound, assumptions such as these are pervasive in the American political horizon. It is a theoretical childishness that, while taken to the extreme by libertarians, is far from being limited to them.

The idea of the state as an abstraction, as an entity that is ideally and substantially the same, with differences reducible to degrees (quantity) and accidental properties, has pervaded the vast majority of bourgeois political philosophy. The theorists of the “universal class” in civil society, i.e., the bourgeoisie, have considered the state they have fought for (in, for instance, feudal Europe) and the states they have created, as the state. They have always projected the particularities of their state into a universalized abstraction of the state in general, categorically bemusing the particular for the abstract universal. The bourgeois state is, in their hands, treated as the state qua state. While some of their best theorists, like Rousseau and Hegel, entertained a serious level of historical self-awareness with regard to this question, they still formulate a theory of the state that is abstract, i.e., disconnected from an awareness of the state’s interconnection with historically evolving modes of production (even though, in comparison with the others, it is much more concrete).

The concrete understanding of the state would first be formulated by Marx and Engels in the middle of the 1840s, from texts like “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” to The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, and the Manifesto. In these works the modern state is understood as “the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests”…“the real basis of the state” is the “material life of individuals… their mode of production and forms of intercourse, which mutually determine each other.” The question of the state qua state, or of an absolute idea of the state in general, is meaningless. The state is “a product of society at a particular stage of development.” The state does not exist as a transhistorical entity over and above human history. The state becomes a historical necessity, as Engels would write after Marx’s death, because “at a definite stage of economic development,” owing to and influencing the development of the monogamous family, private property, and the “cleavage of society into classes,” the state presents itself as the means of the economically dominant class keeping “class antagonisms in check.” The state is, Engels writes,

The admission that society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state. (229).
As was further concretized with the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx and Engels in their writings came to understand that all state institutions (both the ideological and coercive ones) have to be made anew in each new form of life. The state exists as a concrete universal, that is, its universal existence is premised on its ability to take a variety of different particular forms in accordance with different historical contexts. It is not sufficient, for instance, for the working class to take up the ready-made state of the bourgeoisie and rule. The institutions themselves are crafted to reproduce the order of the ruling capitalist class. It is not enough to change what class is now to ‘rule’. For the working class to rule, for the dictatorship of the proletariat to function, the whole bourgeois state and its institutions have to be destroyed and replaced by a new working-class state and socialist institutions. The bourgeois state has to be dialectically sublated. This means that the state as an instrument of dictatorship and hegemony for the dominant class is sustained, but that the dominant class will now be (for the first time in the history of the state) the majority – workers, peasants, professionals, etc. In other words, the state (universal), has to be given a new particular form (dictatorship of the proletariat). As V. I. Lenin would later write in State and Revolution, where he masterfully and comprehensively outlines the views of Marx and Engels, “the supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of “withering away".”

The next major advancement in the Marxist theory of the state would arise from the imprisoned Italian Communist Party leader, Antonio Gramsci, who would develop the understanding of the emergence of the integral state. Far from being a break from the relationship of state and civil society expressed in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (as some “Gramscians” in the bourgeois academy hold), what Gramsci observed was a development in Europe (and eventually spreading elsewhere) where civil society would itself be integrated under the leadership of the state. This meant that the direct frontal attack that allowed the Bolshevik revolution to succeed in a peripheral country with no integral state could not be replicated in Europe. Instead of the war of maneuver taking primacy, the war of positions, that is, the battle for hegemony, the war for the hearts and minds of the people (the subaltern) would be primary. Consent, not coercion, was the dominant form through which the European states sustained the dominant order. Coercion, i.e., the armed bodies of men of the state which Lenin tells us about, or the repressive state apparatuses Althusser would later on, was, of course, always in the background ready to show itself wherever consent dwindled, and people started rocking the boat. But in general, the fabric which sustains the dominant order was consent – i.e., the hegemony of the ruling class, exerted and sustained through their ideological institutions.

The crisis of capitalism would not only be understood in the traditional terms of Marxist political economy, as the crisis of overproduction where we see, on the basis of the contradictory value production at the foundation of the cell-form of the form of life, the “manifestation of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.” A sign of the system in crisis is also seen in the collapse of the hegemony so central to reproducing the existing state of affairs. It is when a crisis of legitimacy ensues (usually, of course, a product of the objective economic developments of the general crisis-prone system), when people’s trust in the ruling institutions and ideas dwindle, that the ruling order is shaken to its core. It is these moments, when the people are no longer willing to continue on in the old way, where objectively revolutionary conditions can be said to be present. It is this crisis of legitimacy, this dwindling of hegemony in the American integral state, that I wish to explore here. How can the American state be said to be in crisis? What does this mean for the U.S. socialist left? Why have we failed? How can we succeed? All of these are central questions in my work, and I will try to address them briefly below.

The Crisis of Legitimacy in the U.S.

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. The famous phrase of Nazi ideologue Joseph Goebbels applies aptly to the U.S. state, “truth is the mortal enemy of lies, and by extension, the greatest enemy of the state.” 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 worse 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 the American people are waking up. All around the country militant union struggles are being waged like we haven’t seen in many decades. Workers are coming to see themselves more and more as a class, one that produces the fruits society enjoys, but which is impoverished and indebted by parasitic capitalist overlords and the politician class that represents them. Across the country concepts like the ‘deep state,’ the ‘swamp,’ ‘the globalists,’ and others have been popularized to describe the oligarchic forces that control the state and all institutions without the slightest semblance of democratic accountability. While these terms are somewhat foreign to the Marxist lexicon, the concepts they represent are not. What is the globalism dissenting workers speak off of not imperialism? What is it if not the need of the capitalist class to export capital abroad to have cheap resources handy and cheap labor to superexploit? How are these conditions created today if not through dollar hegemony and international financial organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, who debt trap countries of the global south and impose structural adjustment programs on them that guarantee privatization of public property, austerity for the people, deregulations for the Western multinationals coming in to loot, and liberalization, all under the auspices of ‘free markets.’ We must recall Lenin’s question – free for whom? To do what?

What is the deep state, for instance, if not the dictatorship of the capitalist class, in whose development any semblance of democratic accountability fades away? While not using the term deep state, key Marxist thinkers in the 20th century, such as Georg Lukács, would describe the development of the deep state in the following manner:

Whoever pursues the historical development of capitalist society knows that the power of elected public bodies continuously declines in comparison to its military and civilian bureaucrats working under "official secrecy.''

Working people, therefore, are expressing various forms of dissent in the only language and conceptual framework available to them. What communists should do is help give these varied forms of dissent the systematic coherence and direction only the Marxist worldview can provide – not, as most of the institutional left does, shame workers for not using the right terms and being ‘backwards’ with regard to fringe social issues.

But the crisis of the American state is not limited to the conditions it has put its people into, and the dissent, on the basis of this, that the public expresses. It is also seen in the fact that the U.S. state, which is fundamentally the heart of capitalist imperialism, is seeing its global hegemony crumble right before its very eyes. China has become the epicenter of the world economy – a non-imperialist great power, as Hugo Chavez once called them. Russia is developing into one of the most impressive productive economies in the world, and has been able to successfully fight off the Western encroachment and proxy war while strengthening its economy and military and weakening NATO (for instance, look at the spiral of deindustrialization Germany, the economic powerhouse in Europe, has been subjected to after their going along with the U.S.’s sanctioning of Russia and after Mr. Biden’s blowing up of the Nordstream Pipelines – the main energy source of their industries). The genocide carried out against the Palestinians couldn’t be a clearer indication that the almost global approval the West received for its crimes in previous eras is now gone. The world is watching as the U.S. funds and equips the Zio-nazi state’s genocide. All across the globe the device on people’s pockets have allowed them to follow the chronicling of Israel’s colonial savagery. While the fact that it has continued for more than seven months shows that in some important ways U.S. imperialism still reigns, the mass discontent it is created in the global majority is objectively intensifying the process of its decline – and this decline, conjoined with the rise of BRICS+ and the emerging multipolar world order, is visible right before our very eyes.

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.”

Repeating the Failure: The Crisis of the Activist Left in the U.S.

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?

The Need for Self-Criticism

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.

Professional-Managerial Composition of the Left

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.

The Purity Fetish and the Three Central Forms it Takes

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from the 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 be socialist in content and national in form. Or, as it is stated in the great José Carlos Mariátegui’s work, socialism cannot be a “carbon copy, it must be a heroic creation. We have to give life, with our own reality, in our own language, to socialism.” 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.

Conclusion

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. 

Notes

* This was a presentation given at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City for the International Seminar on Law and the State in Marxist Thought. 

​Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the wealthiest and most aggressive families grabbed such land for themselves in violation of early law.
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Cassius’ Indecent Proposal

The die was cast in 486 BC. After Rome defeated the neighboring Hernici, a Latin tribe, and took two-thirds of their land, the consul Spurius Cassius proposed Rome’s first agrarian law. It called for giving half the conquered territory back to the Latins and half to needy Romans, who were also to receive public land that patricians had occupied1. But the patricians accused Cassius of “building up a power dangerous to liberty” by seeking popular support and “endangering the security” of their land appropriation. After his annual term was over he was charged with treason and killed. His house was burned to the ground to eradicate memory of his land proposal (Livy, History of Rome 2.41).

Patricians Versus Plebs

The fight over whether patricians or the needy poor plebians would be the main recipients of public land dragged on for 12 years. In 474 the commoners’ tribune, Gnaeus Genucius, sought to bring the previous year’s consuls to trial for delaying the redistribution proposed by Cassius (Livy 2.54 and Dionysius 9.37-38). He was blocked by that year’s two consuls, Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius, who said that decrees of the Senate were not permanent law, “but measures designed to meet temporary needs and having validity for one year only.” The Senate could renege on any decree that had been passed.

A century later, in 384, M. Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul (in 392) was murdered for defending debtors by trying to use tribute from the Gauls and to sell public land to redeem plebian debts, and for accusing senators of embezzlement and urging them to use their takings to redeem debtors. It took a generation of turmoil and poverty for Rome to resolve matters. In 367 the Licinio-Sextian law limited personal landholdings to 500 iugera (125 hectares, under half a square mile; see Livy 6.35-36). Indebted landholders were permitted to deduct interest payments from the principal and pay off the balance over three years instead of all at once.

Gifts of Land

Most wealth throughout history has been obtained from the public domain, and that is how Rome’s latifundia were created. The most fateful early land grab occurred after Carthage was defeated in 204. Two years earlier, when Rome’s life-and-death struggle with Hannibal had depleted its treasury, the Senate had asked families to voluntarily contribute their jewelry or other precious belongings to help the war effort. Their gold and silver were melted down in the temple of Juno Moneta to strike the coins used to hire mercenaries.

Upon the return to peace, the aristocrats depicted these contributions as having been loans, and convinced the Senate to pay their claims in three installments. The first was paid in 204, and a second in 202. As the third and final installment was coming due in 200, the former contributors pointed out that Rome needed to keep its money to continue fighting abroad, but had much public land available. In lieu of cash payment they asked the Senate to offer them land located within fifty miles of Rome, and to tax it at only a nominal rate. A precedent for such privatization had been set in 205 when Rome sold valuable land in the Campania to provide Scipio with money to invade Africa.

The recipients were promised that “when the people should become able to pay, if anyone chose to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the state.” Nobody did, of course. “The private creditors accepted the terms with joy; and that land was called Trientabulum because it was given in lieu of the third part of their money” (Livy 28.46).

Latifundia Changed Rome’s Economy Forever

Arnold Toynbee2 describes this giveaway of Rome’s ager publicus as the turning point polarizing its economy by deciding, “at one stroke, the economic and social future of the Central Italian lowlands.” Most of this land ended up as latifundia cultivated by slaves captured in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia and imported en masse after 198. This turned the region into “predominantly a country of underpopulated slave-plantations” as the formerly free population was driven off the land into overpopulated industrial towns. In 194 and again in 177 the Senate organized a program of colonization that sent about 100,000 peasants, women, and children from central Italy to more than twenty colonies, mainly in the far south and north of Italy. Some settlers lost their Roman citizenship, and they must have remained quite poor as the average land allotment was small.

The Gracchi and Civil War

In 133, Tiberius Gracchus advocated distributing ager publicus to the poor, pointing out that this would “increase the number of property holders liable to serve in the army.” He was killed by angry senators who wanted the public land for themselves. Nonetheless, a land commission was established in Italy in 128, “and apparently succeeded in distributing land to several thousand citizens” in a few colonies, but not any land taken from Rome’s own wealthy elite. The commission was abolished around 119 after Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus was killed.3

Appian (Civil Wars 1.1.7) describes the ensuing century of civil war as being fought over the land and debt crisis.

“For the rich, getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands, and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbors’ allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force, came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army. At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in number and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service.”

How Land Changed Rome’s Army

Dispossession of free labor from the land transformed the character of Rome’s army. Starting with Marius, landless soldiers became soldati, living on their pay and seeking the highest booty, loyal to the generals in charge of paying them. Command of an army brought economic and political power. When Sulla brought his troops back to Italy from Asia Minor in 82 and proclaimed himself Dictator, he tore down the walls of towns that had opposed him, and kept them in check by resettling 23 legions (some 80,000 to 100,000 men) in colonies on land confiscated from local populations in Italy.

Sulla Steals Estates and Sells Them for Support

Sulla drew up proscription lists of enemies who could be killed with impunity, with their estates seized as booty. Their names were publicly posted throughout Italy in June 81 BC, headed by the consuls for the years 83 and 82, and about 1,600 equites (wealthy publican investors). Thousands of names followed. Anyone on these lists could be killed at will, with the executioner receiving a portion of the dead man’s estate. The remainder was sold at public auctions, the proceeds being used to rebuild the depleted treasury. Most land was sold cheaply, giving opportunists a motive to kill not only those named by Sulla, but also their personal enemies, to acquire their estates. A major buyer of confiscated real estate was Crassus, who became one of the richest Romans through Sulla’s proscriptions.

By giving his war veterans homesteads and funds from the proscriptions, Sulla won their support as a virtual army in reserve, along with their backing for his new oligarchic constitution. But they were not farmers, and ran into debt, in danger of losing their land. For his more aristocratic supporters, Sulla distributed the estates of his opponents from the Italian upper classes, especially in Campania, Etruria, and Umbria.

Battle of Generals

Caesar likewise promised to settle his army on land of their own. They followed him to Rome and enabled him to become Dictator in 49. After he was killed in 44, Brutus and Cassius vied with Octavian (later Augustus), each promising their armies land and booty. As Appian (Civil Wars 5.2.12-13) summarized: “The chiefs depended on the soldiers for the continuance of their government, while, for the possession of what they had received, the soldiers depend on the permanence of the government of those who had given it. Believing that they could not keep a firm hold unless the givers had a strong government, they fought for them, from necessity, with good-will.” After defeating the armies of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony, Octavian gave his indigent soldiers “land, the cities, the money, and the houses, and as the object of denunciation on the part of the despoiled, and as one who bore this contumely for the army’s sake.”

 Imperial Estates

The concentration of land ownership intensified under the Empire. Brown4 notes that by the time Christianity became the Roman state religion, North Africa had become the main source of Roman wealth, based on “the massive landholdings of the emperor and of the nobility of Rome.” Its overseers kept the region’s inhabitants “underdeveloped by Roman standards. Their villages were denied any form of corporate existence and were frequently named after the estates on which the villagers worked, held to the land by various forms of bonded labor.”

A Christian from Gaul named Salvian5 described the poverty and insecurity confronting most of the population ca. 440:

“Faced by the weight of taxes, poor farmers found that they did not have the means to emigrate to the barbarians. Instead, they did what little they could do: they handed themselves over to the rich as clients in return for protection. The rich took over title to their lands under the pretext of saving the farmers from the land tax. The patron registered the farmer’s land on the tax rolls under his (the patron’s) own name. Within a few years, the poor farmers found themselves without land, although they were still hounded for personal taxes. Such patronage by the great, so Salvian claimed, turned free men into slaves as surely as the magic of Circe had turned humans into pigs.”

Church Estates

Church estates became islands in this sea of poverty. As deathbed confessions and donations of property to the Church became increasingly popular among wealthy Christians, the Church came to accept existing creditor and debtor relationships, land ownership, hereditary wealth, and the political status quo. What mattered to the Church was how the ruling elites used their wealth, regardless of how they obtained it as long as it was destined for the Church, whose priests were the paradigmatic “poor” deserving of aid and charity.

The Church sought to absorb local oligarchies into its leadership, along with their wealth. Testamentary disposition undercut local fiscal balance. Land given to the Church was tax-exempt, obliging communities to raise taxes on their secular property in order to maintain their flow of public revenue (many heirs found themselves disinherited by such bequests, leading to a flourishing legal practice of contesting deathbed wills). The Church became the major corporate body, a sector alongside the state. Its critique of personal wealth focused on personal egotism and self-indulgence, nothing like the socialist idea of public ownership of land, monopolies, and banking. In fact, the Crusades led the Church to sponsor Christendom’s major secular bankers to finance its wars against the Holy Roman Emperors, Moslems, and Byzantine Sicily.

References  

1. Roman Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 8.77.2.
2. Hannibal’s Legacy by Arnold Toynbee, 1965, II: pp. 250-51 and pp. 341-373.
3. Conquerors and Slaves by Keith Hopkins, 1978, pp. 61-63.
4. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown, 2012, pp. 330, 366, and 327.
5. De gubernatione Dei (“The Government of God”) 5.9.45, paraphrased and discussed in Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown, 2012, pp. 433-450.