T​he last few days have seen the U.S. ramping up its war on domestic political dissent in multiple ways, with U.S. lawmakers petitioning the Biden administration to crack down on anti-genocide protesters it suspects of foreign influence, and a journalist critical of U.S. foreign policy coming under the crosshairs of Washington’s increasingly weaponized Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The FBI has raided the home of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia.

Consortium News reports:

• Federal agents removed Ritter’s electronic equipment and numerous boxes of paper files from his Albany, N.Y. area home Thursday on suspicion that the former U.N. weapons inspector is violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.
• In a video posted to his Substack page, Ritter said that normally in alleged FARA violation cases the authorities send a letter to the subject of the inquiry informing them of the investigation. They do not send numerous F.B.I. agents to the door with a warrant to search and remove potential evidence.
• The warrant, a copy of which Ritter posted, only called for electronic devices to be removed, but the agents, whom Ritter said acted professionally, also removed boxes of paper United Nations files from his days as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. As Ritter says in the video, U.N. documents are never classified and could have nothing to do with the alleged FARA case against him.
• ‘So the idea that, this is normal procedure is absurd in the extreme. I’m not a foreign agent. What I am is a journalist. And this is how we need to couch this entire thing. What the F.B.I. did yesterday, what the United States government did yesterday, was a frontal assault not only on free speech, but a free press,’ Ritter said in the video.

​The U.S. has been getting increasingly aggressive in using FARA to suppress political speech that is critical of U.S. foreign policy, with dissident voices being increasingly targeted by the Department of Justice on accusation of circulating unauthorized ideas in collaboration with governments like China and Russia.

This coincides with a report from Ken Klippenstein about a letter sent to the White House by 22 members of Congress demanding that protesters against the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza be investigated for any unauthorized affiliation with foreign governments, and severely penalized if any ties are found to “the Iranian regime”.

Klippenstein writes:

• Last Thursday, 22 members of Congress sent a letter to the Biden administration demanding the investigation and criminal prosecution as well as financial ruin of Gaza war protesters, whom they claim have received funding from Iran. ‘We write today regarding recent revelations that certain anti-Israel organizations in the United States have received funding from the Iranian regime,’ the letter begins. The revelation originated in a recent statement by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, on top of statements by FBI director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco that Iran is trying to influence public opinion.
• The letter goes on to call for the Justice Department ‘to criminally prosecute and pursue civil forfeiture actions against any individual or entity that violates the law by receiving funding from the Iranian regime.’ It ends by urging ‘the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Treasury to make public all available information, without compromising sources and methods, regarding Iran’s funding of these pro-Hamas organizations so that the American people can see who these groups truly are.’

​Klippenstein notes that the letter demands a list of individuals and organizations that have received direct or indirect support from Iran or any of its “affiliates”, copies of banking information on “anti-Israel groups” believed to have received sanctioned funding, and information regarding what “severe monetary penalties” will be imposed on those found to be in violation.

The U.S. empire has been doing everything it can to restrict the flow of inconvenient information as public opposition to its criminality swells at home and abroad. Propaganda, censorship, the war on the press, banning TikTok, consolidating the collaboration of Silicon Valley with U.S. government agencies, police crackdowns on campus demonstrators, and quashing political dissent are all outward manifestations of the agenda to manipulate the way the public thinks about what’s happening in the world.
​
The leaders of the U.S.-centralized empire understand that real power lies in the ability to control not just what happens in the world but what people think about what happens, because doing so allows them to act however they want to act without the risk of revolution. Our task as ordinary members of the public is to weaken their control of the dominant narratives in our civilization, and wake the public up to the truth of what’s really happening under the rule of this tyrannical power structure.

Author

Caitlin A. Johnstone is a rogue journalist; bogan socialist; anarcho-psychonaut; guerilla poet; utopia prepper. You can read Caitlin’s articles on Medium, Steemit and at her website. Caitlin is proudly 100 percent reader-funded through Patreon and Paypal. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to her mailing list.

Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog

​There has been much discourse on the position of the recently-launched American Communist Party on the unity of both Canada and the United States in one organizational field. There has been no shortage of terms used by both rightists and leftists to describe the ACP; Politsturm International has used the term “social-chauvinists” (albeit in a completely incorrect fashion), while Maoists have usually referred to the ACP in similar terms. Canadian “leftists” are quick to denounce the ACP’s reconstitution “as the official Communist Party of the current territory of both the United States and Canada” as a renewed version of Manifest Destiny, which will be shown to be an exaggeration.[1]
 
Unsurprisingly, these critiques are usually unfounded, restricted to very limited evidence, and based on a limited understanding of Canada’s place within both the class struggle and Marxist history. The objective of this concise article is not to present a comprehensive political history of Canadian-US Marxism, but to elaborate on the undeniable correctness of the current position of the ACP: that the most advanced form of American Marxism will indeed be an organization that encompasses both Canada and the United States.
 
Through an analysis of early Canadian socialism, we find a situation which developed nearly identically to that of the United States. Utopian socialists—Owenite experiments—which can be traced back as early as 1829 in Canada, emerged in the United States just years prior, primarily in the form of the Nashoba Community and Frances Wright.[2] Wright would incidentally be one of the figures who “took a leading part in the early anti slavery agitation,” which often took the form of the Underground Railroad, an escape avenue for slaves from the South to the Northern states and the Canadian border, where slavery was phased out by the 1830s.[3]
 
As the Civil War neared, an early introduction of scientific socialism to the United States appeared, which laid the foundations for an American understanding of the postbellum labor movement which engulfed both Canada and the United States. German immigrants in New York City, usually political refugees from the 1848 Revolutions, first studied Marx in the North American context within the Central Committee of United Trades, with a later Communist Club being formed in 1857.[4] Following the efforts of Joseph Weydeymeyer in the Civil War, who was a contemporary of Marx, socialism further emerged with F.A. Sorge’s management of the First International in New York, and later the formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which later became the Socialist Labor Party of America by 1878.[5] The Great Strike of 1877 is generally regarded as a turning point in American labor history, as it was the first time in which labor organized at the ‘national’ level; it is of no coincidence that the mobilization of the Canadian working-class occurred in the 1870s at the same time, particularly in the form of the strike of the Typographical Union in Toronto.[6] Indeed, just prior to the Great Strikes of 1877, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—an American trade union—had won a strike on Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway.[7]
 
The labor movement which emerged in Canada during the 1880s scarcely distinguished between Canadian and American workers. The Knights of Labor organized in Canada and were particularly active in Ontario, while the American Federation of Labor’s predecessor (1881-1886) was named during its founding 1881 convention as the “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada.”[8] Although many major strikes in the United States—such as the Pullman Strike of 1894—were often limited to the United States, it is equally true to make to argue that said strikes were not present in the U.S. South, and therefore cannot be used as evidence to state that the situation of Canadian labor was isolated along ‘national’ lines. Carlos Garrido has excellently made the observation that American Marxism was not fully developed until the 1930s when W.E.B. Du Bois synthesized the class struggle of African-Americans with the American struggle; perhaps we should go one step further: American Marxism cannot reach its full theoretical insights until the Canadian Question is properly understood.[9] To do this, one must first be introduced to the historical development of scientific socialism in Canada proper.
 
Indeed, Marx and Engels themselves had discussed the Canadian Question. In a 1867 letter from Marx to Engels, discovered by Professor Mark Leier in 2017, Marx referred to the birth of the formal—but not independent—Canadian state in 1867 as a bourgeois project, therefore mirroring the impact of the Civil War on the United States:

“This centralization will of course give the capitalists the organized state power they require to expand across the entire territory of British North America. We will doubtless see in Canada the same process of primitive accumulation we have seen wherever the capitalist mode of production asserts itself.”[10]

Twenty-one years later, Engels, while visiting Montreal, observed that Canada, through its growing industrialization in the 1880s, was not developing into a national economy, and was instead converging towards its incorporation into America:

“Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation — the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed already socially — hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line.”[11]

The insistence that “the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves” lends credence to the argument that the incorporation of Canada into the American class struggle will indeed be a struggle from below, rather than merely a forced annexation (i.e. through invasion).
 
The first organization to lay claim to both the United States and Canada was the North American Federation of the International Working-Men’s Association, though this organization quickly split up, especially in light of the dissolution of the First International in 1876.[12] The Socialist Labor Party did not spread to Canada immediately following the 1877 Strike, though that is of no surprise when considering the fact that the SLP was mostly limited to recent German immigrants; in fact, by 1883, the SLP only recorded 1,500 members in the U.S., and were unable to seriously influence American politics.[13] As the SLP grew in strength during the 1890s, and even endorsed a brief period of activity within the American Federation of Labor, Philips Thompson, who was introduced to Marxism by the American socialist Henry George, established the Labor Advocate newspaper in Toronto.[14] The Labor Advocate’s message spread American scientific socialism among Canadian intellectuals, and eventually led to the introduction of the first socialist organization to run in Canadian elections, which was also U.S.-based: “The U.S.-based Socialist Labor Party (SLP) established the first general network of socialist organizations in Canada, ran the first socialist candidates at  the municipal and provincial levels in Ontario, and even in 1901 adopted a Canadian constitution.”[15]
 
By the late 1890s, the dual unionism of the SLP and its sectarian attitude towards politics resulted in the formation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) at a Unity Convention in 1901; the main benefit of the SPA was its attitude towards trade unions, with Eugene V. Debs, often at the head of the SPA, having contributed to the American Railway Union in 1894.[16] Although the Industrial Workers of the World, founded by segments of the SPA and SPL, also engaged in dual unionism, it was not merely a sectarian trade union center as it engaged in the organization of previously unorganized industries in the West such as the influential Western Federation of Miners. During the first decade of the 19th century, Canada also experienced the birth of its “evolutionary Marxist” party, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). The SPC emerged in 1904—just three years after the formation of the SPA—from similar circumstances; just months prior to the formation of the SPC in December, 1904, the Western Clarion—Canada’s main socialist newspaper at the time—emphasized that Canadian Marxists were taking influence from the development of the American class struggle and system:

“To study the development of this system no better field can be found than this western continent, more especially the United States. With next to no feudal bonds to break, and with a virgin continent possessed with unlimited resources at its disposal this system has grown up through all the stages from tottering infancy to doddering senility almost within the memory of men now living.”[17]

The Industrial Workers of the World, formed at a 1905 convention where Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs were present (multiple Canadians were also at the convention), contributed to the unionization of both American and Canadian unskilled workers on the basis of American working-class solidarity. The “Free Speech Fights,” waged by the IWW against censorship, were conducted not only in Spokane, Washington, but also notably in Vancouver, British Columbia, where IWW organizers would often cross the border while engaging in their work.[18] A renowned and lifelong Canadian Communist, Tom McEwen, later recounted: “In these key industries, each in the process of tremendous expansion, the anarcho-syndicalist ideology was carried widely among the workers first by the IWW and later the OBU.”[19]
 
The revolutionary impact of the end of the First World War served as an enormous impetus for the formation of a working-class movement and Party on a continental scale. Although both the SPA and SPC opposed the First World War, they denied its revolutionary implications, and instead chose to take a far more conciliatory path. Jack Ross has made a serious attempt to defend the mainstream SPA line during the war, though he admits that SPA leaders such as Victor L. Berger were merely the “loyal opposition” to the AFL leadership, including Samuel Gompers. Ross only brushes off the 1914 Colorado Coal Strike, where mainstream unions affiliated to the AFL practically engaged in open battles with the Colorado National Guard, as having “played out tragically for the [right-wing section of the] Socialist Party in Montana,” despite the fact that the strike effectively disproves his position on the implications of “revolution.”[20] In Canada, the situation for Marxists developed in a similar manner: while the Socialist Party of Canada opposed the war,—with the exception of J.H. Burroughs and E.T. Kingsley—they did not accept the implications of the October Revolution, despite having a majority of SPC members vote in favor of affiliation to the Third International.[21] The Communist breakaways from the socialists occurred consecutively; in America, the break occurred at an Emergency Convention of the SPA, where John Reed and his associates formed the Communist Labor Party, while Louis Fraina and his associates—the two parties would later merge—had founded the Communist Party of America.[22] The original section of self-proclaimed Canadian Communists formed a Central Committee in Toronto in 1919, and were in close contact with the main center of American Communist activity in Detroit, where Agnew Swigach had discussed the implementation of Bolshevism in North America.[23]
 
Interestingly, the main leaders of the trade union sections of both the Canadian and U.S. Communist Parties throughout the 1920s were both later the long-time leaders of these parties: namely Tim Buck of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and William Z. Foster of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Born in England and having moved to Canada in 1910, Tim Buck had early conversations with Foster, who convinced him that the ‘North American Syndicalism’ of the IWW was limited as it did not understand the political struggle.[24] As a machinist, Tim Buck had temporarily moved to Detroit, and later recalled that his experiences working in the U.S. were quite formative in his thought:

“I attended two AFL conferences, one in Detroit, and one in Chicago. [...] they did open my eyes to trade unionism as a great social movement rather than just as a movement of tradesmen or a movement that belonged only to the people who belonged to unions.”[25]

In Canada, although there was an early “Central Committee” of Bolshevik sympathizers, the vast majority of Canadian Communists, including Tim Buck, joined the United Communist Party or the Communist Party of America: “we decided to join the Communist Party of America, to set up a Canadian section.”[26] William Z. Foster, a former member of the SPA, IWW, and even a Syndicalist League of North America founder, finally settled with the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), where he would play a fundamental role in massive industrial union organizing campaigns by 1919, especially the 1919 Steel Strike.[27] As the TUEL organized within both the U.S. and Canada, Foster frequently dealt with subjects of the Canadian labor movement, such as the syndicalist One Big Union which sweeped the Canadian West during the time of the 1919 labor upheavals.[28] In 1922, when Foster sent a report to Grigorii Zinoviev who was high up in the Communist International at the time, the report dealt with both the activities of left-wing trade unionists in the U.S. and Canada; in fact, Foster directly referred to both the U.S. and Canadian working-class as “American”:

“The present situation offers a wonderful opportunity for the growth of sentiment in favor of the policies of the Red International of Labor Unions, which in the United States and Canada is represented by our organization, the Trade Union Educational League [...]  If such wonderful headway has been made with such meagre resources it is only a striking evidence of the extreme readiness of the American workingmen for many policies of the Red International of Labor Unions. [...] The winning of such a commanding position in the American labor movement is a goal well worth accomplishing.”[29]

Even the struggle against Trotskyism and the Right-Opposition took on a wider North American dimension. Jack Macdonald, who was the formal leader of the CPC throughout most of the 1920s, conspired with Jay Lovestone (a prominent CPUSA member) and the theory of American Exceptionalism, and arranged a plan to dissolve the CPC into a reformist organization.[30] The fact that Macdonald had accepted the theory of “American Exceptionalism” in the first place signifies the approach of the CPC at the time. It is well known that the Trotskyists, composed primarily of Maurice Spector in Canada, the editor of the Party newspaper, The Worker, were also engaging in a simultaneous campaign across North America. C.E. Ruthenberg, the Secretary of the CPUSA in 1926, traveled to Toronto that year to report on the dangers of Trotskyism, whereafter Tim Buck took the leading role in the expulsion of Maurice Spector.[31]
           
By the late 1930s, the activities of the CPC and CPUSA took on increasingly ‘national’ forms, although the two parties remained heavily intertwined through the organs of the Third International. From 1928 to 1935, revolutionary industrial unions were launched in the United States and Canada; in the U.S., the Trade Union Unity League led the charge in industries abandoned by the corrupt labor bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor.[32] In Canada, the Workers’ Unity League led the CPC to the greatest heights that the Party had ever experienced; from 1935-1939, both the U.S. and Canadian communist parties merged their union organizations into the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the AFL in some cases—both multinational, rather than national, trade union centers. Stephen L. Endicott regards the main accomplishment of the Canadian revolutionary industrial unionism of the Third Period as having been the contribution of the foundations of the CIO in Canada, as an extension of the American trade union movement.[33] As is evident, even by the 1930s with the advent of the CIO, the U.S. and Canadian working-class movement was largely unified in one American struggle. But what changed this, and what has contributed to the current nationalism found within the Canadian left?
 
World War Two forced the Canadian Party into significant compromises with the Canadian state. In 1940, before the Invasion of the USSR, Communists were arrested en masse across Canada under the War Measures Act. Later, once released, the Communist Party of Canada had been officially banned as an organization, and was instead reformed into the Labor-Progressive Party in 1943. Just as Earl Browder had advocated for the liquidation of the CPUSA, many who were pursuing a nationalist line within the Canadian Party—which was heavily pushed by the state in the post-war period—were retained within the Party organizations. Tim Buck himself became convinced of the necessity for a nationalist position in opposition to what they identified as U.S. imperialism; this line was particularly damaging as it led the Party to problematic political stances, such as collaboration with the Liberal Party of Canada, even when in opposition to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s main social-democratic party until the 1961. Ironically, this was a position similar to that pushed by Trotskyist Maurice Spector and Jack Macdonald in the 1920s, which advocated for a national liberation struggle against British imperialism:

“Was Canada still a colony of British imperialism with its ‘made-in-England’ constitution, the British North America Act (BNA) and many other symbols of colonialism, then and now, still intact? If so, argued the MacDonald-Spector leadership, then the co-ordinated struggles of the Canadian working people should be directed against British imperialism per se and not against a subordinated Canadian capitalist class.”[34]

Despite the defeat of a liquidator faction at the 1957 Party Convention under J.B. Salsberg, Tim Buck and the Party never reversed their Canadian nationalist line which had been adopted since the 1940s.[35] One must only look to the publication titles of Tim Buck’s most popular books published after 1945: Lenin and Canada, Canada and Her People, Our Fight for Canada, New Horizons for Young Canada, etc. Another factor which must be considered is the enormous rise of public-sector trade unionism in Canada, at least since the 1970s. Public sector unions tend to be Canadian-only unions, while many blue-collar unions are still organized under the international system (see United Steelworkers, Teamsters etc.)
 
The Declaration of the American Communist Party asserts that the “American nation has objectively entered into contradiction with the form of the United States of America itself.” This is a theoretical development which has consistently been implied through struggle (as has been shown here, through the fact that America transcends the U.S. state boundary), but is only being theoreticized on now. If anything, it’s clear that now, more than ever, theory and history must meet the needs of these new projects, and that discussions of the U.S. and Canadian working-class must be united into one through new research.
​
Citations


[1] “Summary of the American Communist Party,” American Communist Party, July 21, 2024, https://acp.us/info;

[2] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History, (Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines, 2005): 145-146.

[3] Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, (New York, United States: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1903): 69.

[4] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 160-170.

[5] Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” Saothar 3, (1977): 21.

[6] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, (New York, United States: Pathfinder, 1977): 10-11.

[7] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 24.

[8] Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” 23.

[9] Carlos L. Garrido, Why We Need American Marxism, (Carbondale, Illinois: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024): 2, 7, 39, 40, 44.

[10] Karl Marx to Engels, London, England, July 21, 1867, in Karl Marx reflects on the subject of Confederation, ed. Mark Leier, https://activehistory.ca/blog/2016/09/09/karl-marx-reflects-the-subject-of-confederation/

[11] Engels to Sorge, Montreal, Canada, September 10, 1888, in Marx-Engels Correspondence 1888: Engels to Sorge, ed. Leonard E. Mins, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_09_10.htm

[12] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 199.

[13] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 214; Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” 22.

[14] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 148.

[15] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 150.

[16] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, (Lincoln, United States: University of Nebraska Press, 2015): 49-59.

[17] “Modern Industrial and Political Institutions,” The Western Clarion, June 18, 1904.

[18] Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia, (Vancouver, Canada: New Star Books, 1990).

[19] Tom McEwen, He Wrote For Us: The Story of Bill Bennett, Pioneer Socialist Journalist, (Vancouver, Canada: Tribune Publishing Company, 1951): 105.

[20] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America, 152.

[21] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada, (Trafford Publishing, 2004): 1-24.

[22] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America, 225-229.

[23] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 40.

[24] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle: Reminiscences of Tim Buck, (Toronto, Canada: NC Press Limited, 1977), 38-39.

[25] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 50-52.

[26] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 91.

[27] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism: Principles, Organization, Strategy, Tactics, (New York, United States: International Publishers, 1947), 33-50.

[28] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, 68.

[29]William Z. Foster to Zinoviev, Unknown location, December 16, 1922, in Report on the Labor Situation in the United States and Canada, ed. Tim Davenport, https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1922/1216-foster-reporttoci.pdf

[30] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 131.

[31] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 178-179.

[32] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, 174-180.

[33] Stephen L. Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936, (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2012): 300-327.

[34] Tom McEwen, The Forge Glows Red: From Blacksmith to Revolutionary, (Toronto, Canada: Progress Books, 1974).

[35] Karen Levine, “The Labor-Progressive Party in Crisis, 1956–1957,” Labour/Le Travail 87, (2021): 161-184.

Author

Jude Gamache is a History student attending the University of British Columbia. He is not a member of any political organization, and specializes in the study of both the American and Canadian working-class and political left in history. He is always looking for peers to engage in new projects, specifically areas of labor and left history. Contact: [email protected]

Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.
​
When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.”

The anti-democratic organization of capitalist firms also conveys to employees that their input is not genuinely welcomed or sought by their bosses. Employees thus mostly resign themselves to their powerless position relative to the CEO at their workplace. They also expect the same in their relationships with political leaders, the CEOs’ counterparts in government. Their inability to participate in running their workplaces trains citizens to presume and accept the same in relation to running their residential communities. Employers become top political officials (and vice versa) in part because they are used to being “in charge.” Political parties and government bureaucracies mirror capitalist enterprises by being run autocratically while constantly describing themselves as democratic.

Most adults experience working at least eight hours for five or more days per week in capitalist workplaces, under the power and authority of their employer. The undemocratic reality of the capitalist workplace leaves its complex, multilayered impacts on all who collaborate there, part time and full time. Capitalism’s problem with democracy--that the two basically contradict one another—shapes many people’s lives. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family (descendants of Walmart’s founder), along with a handful of other major shareholders, decide how to spend hundreds of billions. The decisions of a few hundred billionaires bring economic development, industries, and enterprises to some regions and lead to the economic decline of other regions. The many billions of people affected by those spending decisions are excluded from participating in making them. Those countless people lack the economic and social power wielded by a tiny, unelected, obscenely wealthy minority of people. That is the opposite of democracy.

Employers as a class, often led by major shareholders and the CEOs they enrich, also use their wealth to buy (they would prefer to say “donate” to) political parties, candidates, and campaigns. The rich have always understood that universal or even widespread suffrage risks a nonwealthy majority voting to undo society’s wealth inequality. So, the rich seek control of existing forms of democracy to make sure they do not become a real democracy in the sense of enabling the employee majority to outvote the employer minority.

The enormous surpluses appropriated by “big business” employers—usually corporations—allow them to reward their upper-level executives lavishly. These executives, technically also “employees,” use corporate wealth and power to influence politics. Their goals are to reproduce the capitalist system and thus the favors and rewards it gives them. Capitalists and their top employees make the political system depend on their money more than it depends on the people’s votes.

How does capitalism make the major political parties and candidates dependent on donations from employers and the rich? Politicians need vast sums of money to win by dominating the media as part of costly campaigns. They find willing donors by supporting policies that benefit capitalism as a whole, or else particular industries, regions, and enterprises. Sometimes, the donors find the politicians. Employers hire lobbyists—people who work full time, all year round, to influence the candidates that get elected. Employers fund “think tanks” to produce and spread reports on every current social issue. The purpose of those reports is to build general support for what the funders want. In these and other ways, employers and those they enrich shape the political system to work for them.

Most employees have no comparable wealth or power. To exert real political power requires massive organization to activate, combine, and mobilize employees so their numbers can add up to real strength. That happens rarely and with great difficulty. Moreover, in the U.S., the political system has been shaped over the decades to leave only two major parties. Both of them loudly and proudly endorse and support capitalism. They collaborate to make it very difficult for any third party to gain a foothold, and for any anti-capitalist political party to emerge. The U.S. endlessly repeats its commitment to maximum freedom of choice for its citizens, but it excludes political parties from that commitment.

Democracy is about “one person, one vote”—the notion that we all have an equal say in the decisions that affect us. That is not what we have now. Going into a voting booth once or twice a year and picking a candidate is a very different level of influence than that of the Rockefeller family or George Soros. When they want to influence people, they use their money. That’s not democracy.

In capitalism, democracy is unacceptable because it threatens the unequally distributed wealth of the minority with a majority vote. With or without formal institutions of democracy (such as elections with universal suffrage), capitalism undermines genuine democracy because employers control production, surplus value, and that surplus value’s distributions. For capitalism’s leaders, democracy is what they say, not what they do.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called the current post-electoral situation in Venezuela a “cyber coup.”

“We are facing a cyber-fascist and criminal coup attempt,” President Maduro said at the start of the main event celebrating the 87th anniversary of the creation of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) on Sunday, August 4, at the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense.

“An imperialist coup d’état, with fascist characteristics, filled with hatred against institutions,” added the president, and praised the exemplary conduct displayed by the GNB when it took to the streets to defend the people and their right to peace.

President Maduro explained that he called the coup attempt “cyber-fascist” “because we are experiencing cyberattacks from all social media platforms to fill Venezuela with hatred and divide it.” As for the fascist label, he said that “its main characteristics are hatred, violence, irrationality, and it is criminal because it is being carried out by a significant group of criminals trained abroad, paid and brought here to attack hospitals, schools, universities, and police stations.”

The president also expressed his condolences to the families of the two GNB agents killed in the violence that occurred after the far-right refused to recognize the results of the presidential election announced by the CNE in the early hours of July 29.

In his opening remarks, President Maduro congratulated the GNB “because you have been and you are the backbone of peace and the defense of the constitutional rights of the people.”

The Venezuelan president said that we are going through a time when the struggle is for peace. “To say peace is to say future, to say peace is to say the right to independence, to self-determination,” he said. He referred to what he said on June 24 at the Carabobo Field on the occasion of the anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo. “This baton of command that I have in my hands will remain in the hands of patriots; this baton of command will never fall into the hands of traitors, oligarchs, fascists, never, I swear to you,” said the commander-in-chief of the Bolivarian National Armed Force at that time.
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He added that it was President Hugo Chávez who gave constitutional status to the GNB and gave it a Bolivarian character. “It was no longer just going to be the National Guard, but the National Guard of Bolívar, for Bolívar, with Bolívar. A National Guard at the service of a people, of a country,” he said.

​Medals for the wounded

During the ceremony, the president awarded medals to several GNB service-people who were injured during the violence carried out by hooded individuals, allegedly members of the violent cells organized by Vente Venezuela, the political party headed by María Corina Machado.

​One of those who received a medal was Sergeant Major Anderson José Duque Lucena, assigned to Detachment 122 GNB-Lara. Interviewed by Últimas Noticias, he said that his group went on Monday, July 29 to contain a violent protest in the vicinity of the GNB-Carora where about 300 individuals attacked them with fireworks, blunt objects and stones, among other things. “I have a fracture in my right ankle and complicated polytrauma in my right shoulder,” he said.

First Sergeant Carlos Olivero Machado, assigned to the 43rd District Capital Command, also recounted how he was injured. “We were injured while defending kilometer zero of the Pan-American Caracas-Los Teques highway. I have a wound in my fibula and a fracture,” he said.
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At the GNB anniversary event, several GNB officials were promoted, including Ministers Ramón Velásquez Araguayan (Transport) and Jorge Eliezer Márquez Monsalve (Electric Energy).

This article was produced by Orinoco Tribune.

BANGLADESHI Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country today as thousands of protesters stormed her official residence.

Ms Hasina, who has been prime minister since 2009 and held the office previously from 1996-2001, was seen boarding a military helicopter with her sister as weeks of protests came to a climax. She reportedly landed in India.

Head of the army General Waker uz-Zaman addressed the nation, saying he had met opposition politicians and civil society leaders and would seek guidance from the president on forming an interim government.

He also said the military would investigate the deadly crackdown on student protesters of recent weeks, with an estimated 95 people killed on Sunday, 14 of them police officers, as violence reached a crescendo, and that he had ordered troops not to fire on crowds.

“Keep faith in the military, we will investigate all the killings and punish the responsible,” he said.

But crowds continued to ransack the palace, many seen removing furniture and fridge-loads of food. Her family’s ancestral home — her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led the independence struggle against Pakistan and was Bangladesh’s first leader until his assassination in 1975 — was also ransacked, as was her own house in the capital and that of the chief justice.

Two offices of her ruling Awami League party were torched.

Protests against a quota system for government jobs, that reserved a proportion of Civil Service roles for relatives of independence war veterans, swelled week after week after being met with violence and mass arrests, with over 11,000 people detained in the last month.

The government insisted it was seeking to end the quota system, and Ms Hasina was offering as recently as yesterday morning to meet protest leaders, but they insisted her resignation was now their key demand.

The Communist Party of Bangladesh praised the student movement which had continued to mobilise in the face of lethal repression.

“The students have given courage to the people to revolt against the reign of fear by standing up with their blood,” said a party statement.
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The party, together with most of the opposition, had boycotted January’s general election in which Ms Hasina won re-election, advising voters to stay at home rather than take part in a “joke” with a predetermined outcome.

And so I went to Sardinia, searching for Gramsci’s phantom. An hour’s fight from Rome’s Ciampino took me to Cagliari, Sardinia’s principal city, to its small airport on the island’s southernmost tip. Then I drove a little Mitsubishi rental one-and-a-half hours northwest, chugging along a largely empty central E25 highway, battling a stiff cross wind, onward toward the twelfth century town of Santu Lussurgiu. Santu Lussurgiu is a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets, many scarcely wider than my tiny car. With a couple of modest supermarkets, a butcher’s store, a few sad, lonely cafés, a population of around 2,500, it felt more like a large village, the sort of place where any strange car, unfamiliar to locals, provoked incredulous stares, as if an alien had landed from another planet.
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I’d come excitedly to Santu Lussurgiu. I’d found inexpensive bed and breakfast accommodation in the same building, Sa Murighessa, where a teenage Gramsci lodged during his junior high school years. With its thick stone walls, wooden beamed ceilings, and granite staircase, Sa Murighessa today is one of a group of beautifully renovated buildings belonging to the Antica Dimora de Gruccione, a so-called “albergo diffuso,” a special kind of traditional inn. Room and board are provided in assorted historic buildings scattered around one another (hence diffuse); an old family house typically forms the heart of the albergo’s hospitality, for guests’ meals and collective conviviality.

Sa Murighessa has a plaque on its outside wall, memorializing Gramsci. He himself, though, remembers it as a “miserable pensione.” “When I attended junior high school at Santu Lussurgiu,” he told Tatiana (September 12, 1932), “where three professors quite brazenly made short shrift of Instruction in all five grades, I used to live in a peasant woman’s house (I paid five lira a month for lodgings, bed linen, and the cooking of the very frugal board) whose old mother was a little stupid and forgetful but not crazy and was in fact my housekeeper and who every morning when she saw me again asked me who I was and how it was that I had slept in their house.”
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The actual school, Ginnasio Carta-Meloni, at via Giovanni Maria Angioi 109, was a few minutes’ walk away. It no longer exists. These days, it’s a private residence, smartly maintained with an ochre-colored façade, with another brown plaque on the outside wall, announcing “I passi di Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu” [the steps of Antonio Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu], which, in three languages (Italian, Sard, and English), says: “Here was located the Gymnasium Carta-Meloni during Antonio Gramsci’s Studies, 1905-1907.” Underneath is a citation from Prison Notebooks: “culture isn’t having a well-stocked warehouse of news but is the ability that our mind has to understand life, the place we hold there, our relationship with other people. Those who are aware of themselves and of everything, who feel the relationship with all other beings, have culture…So anyone can be cultured, can be a philosopher.”

Gramsci hated his junior high school; they were wretched years, he said. Even as a young lad he could see through his teachers, didn’t respect them, knew their inadequacies. A precocious intelligence was already manifest. In another letter to Tatiana (June 2, 1930), he writes: “one day I saw a strange little animal, like a green grass snake yet with four tiny legs. Locally, the small reptile was known as a scurzone, and in Sardinian dialect curzu means short.” At school, he asked his natural history teacher what the animal was called in Italian and the teacher laughed, saying it was a basilico, a term used for an imaginary animal, something not real. Young Antonio must be mistaken because what he described doesn’t exist. His school chums later made fun of him, too. “You know how angry a boy can get,” he tells Tatiana, “being told he is wrong when he knows instead that he is right when a question of reality is at stake; I think that it is due to this reaction against authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance that I still remember the episode.” He’d already from an early age developed a nose for sniffing out authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance.

Nino had a set routine in those school years, leaving Ghilarza early Monday morning, on a horse-drawn cart, traveling the twelve-miles over the tanca (pastureland) on a dirt track, returning either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, often on foot. The area could be hairy, bandit and cattle-thief country. Years later he remembered an incident walking with a friend, coming back from school one Saturday morning, plodding along a deserted spot when, all of a sudden, they heard gun shots and stray bullets whistling by. Quickly they realized it was they who were being shot at! The duo scrambled into a ditch for cover, hugging the ground for a long while, until they were sure the coast was clear. “Obviously,” he tells Tatiana, “it was a bunch of fellows out for a laugh, who enjoyed scaring us—some joke, eh! It was pitch dark when we got home, very tired and muddy, and we told nobody what had happened.”
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Back then, getting to and from school on foot would have taken Gramsci most of the day, even without being fired upon, and several hours by horse-drawn cart. In more modern times, on Sardinia’s surprisingly smooth, well-maintained country roads, you can zip along the SP15 in a shade over twenty-minutes. Though if you motor too fast, you’ll miss much of what’s noteworthy about the island’s landscape. Not least its stones. John Berger is right when he says that “in the hinterland around Ghilarza, as in many parts of the island, the thing you feel most strongly is the presence of stones.” “Sardinia is first and foremost a place of stones.” “Endless and ageless dry-stone walls separate the tancas,” Berger says, “border the gravel roads, enclose pens for the sheep, or, having fallen apart after centuries of use, suggest ruined labyrinths. Everywhere a stone is touching a stone.” Berger reckons that stones “gave Gramsci or inspired in him his special sense of time and his special patience.” Stones are silently there, stoic and solid, resistant to time, enduring the passage of time, unmoved, knowing that life on earth goes on over the long durée. This notion was surely not lost on its native radical son.

Like most nuraghi, Zuras has a single entrance, low and narrow, with an interior staircase. Zuras looked so forlorn that I was reluctant to crouch and enter the pitched darkness. What lay inside? An animal’s lair? A bees’ nest? Masses of cobwebs? Snakes? I didn’t fancy finding out. Nobody knows the precise function of nuraghi, excepting that they weren’t, like ancient Egyptian pyramids, burial grounds, places of the dead: nuraghi were very much structures for the living. Most likely they mixed protective and defensive activities, offering shelter to shepherds during inclement weather, and lookout posts for military surveillance; once ascended, they afford dramatic vistas across the whole countryside.

Stones figure prominently in Sardinian imagination and meant a lot to Gramsci; he’d touched many, collected many scattered around the surrounding tanca. At home, he spent hours with a chisel smoothing those stones down, shaping them into pairs of spheres of commensurate sizes, as big as grapefruits and melons, hollowing out little grooves inside each rock. Once ready, he’d insert into the holes pieces of a broom handle he’d cut up, foot-long lengths. He’d then join the spherical stones together, forming homemade, makeshift dumbbells. Gramsci used six stones to make three sets of dumbbells of varying weights, and with them, every morning, as hard as he could, as disciplined as he was, he did exercises to strengthen his weak body—his arms, shoulders, and back muscles, making himself more robust to confront the great and terrible world he knew lay beyond.

***

The Gramscis lived in the center of Ghilarza, at number 57 Corso Umberto I, still the town’s main drag. The house was built in the early nineteenth century, with two floors, divided into six rooms: three on the ground floor, with an inner courtyard, and three on the upper floor. From the age of seven until twenty, Gramsci shared the abode with his mother, father, and six siblings—Gennaro, Grazietta, Emma, Mario, Teresina, and Carlo. In what would become a life of lodgings, hotel rooms, clinics, and prison cells, the Ghilarza house was the only place he’d ever call home, always remember affectionally; a haven he’d return to nostalgically in his prison letters, cherishing it as a site of Gramscian collective memory. The plain, white-walled stone building, with a little upper-floor iron-grilled balcony, is today fittingly preserved as Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci, exhibiting a small yet significant array of Gramsci memorabilia for public viewing.

Months prior, I’d corresponded with the museum to arrange a visit. They’d welcomed me yet said: “the Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci is closed for major restauration works. But you can visit a temporary exhibition in the premises of Piazza Gramsci, right in front of the museum house. The temporary exhibition contains a chronological journey through the life of Gramsci and preserves a large part of the objects, photos, and documents present within the museum itinerary. The exhibition is accompanied by captions in Italian and English…We await your e-mail to plan your visit. See you soon!”
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And now I was parking my car along Corso Umberto I, headed for Piazza Gramsci. To the left, looking spick and span, I recognized from photographs Gramsci’s old house; the adjoining properties, at numbers 59 and 61, were covered in plastic sheeting, concealing the building works going on within, the said renovation of the museum complex. Almost opposite, on the other side of the street, I noticed something that would have doubtless thrilled Gramsci: the offices of a small, independent publishing house, a radical Sardinian press whose name sets the tone of its politics: Iskra Edizioni, after Lenin’s fortnightly socialist newspaper, produced in exile in London then smuggled back into Russia where it became an influential underground paper. Iskra Edizioni, founded in Ghilarza in 2000, tries to keep alive Sardinian folk traditions and dialect, and deals with translations of academic books and reissuing of militant texts “that can no longer be found on the market.”

Around the corner is Piazza Gramsci. Two young women welcomed me into the museum’s makeshift store, full of everything Gramsci: tote bags and tee-shirts, posters and notebooks, magazines and books, modestly for sale, all tastefully displayed. Then I was led into two temporary exhibition spaces where, left to myself, I was alone with Gramsci, overwhelmed because he was everywhere. What initially struck was his bed, a little single divan—a very little iron-framed divan, with two walnut wood panels serving as the head and end boards. It was its size, its smallness, that most affected me. If Gramsci slept here until the age of twenty, you get a sense of his diminutive stature—it was like a kid’s bed, not much bigger than a cot.

Nearby, a pewter washbasin and a glass cabinet containing a red and blue plaid shirt, worn by Gramsci in prison, together with toothbrush, comb, shoehorn, and shaving blade. Another glass cabinet had two grapefruit-sized stones, with two little grooves, the remains of Gramsci’s dumbbells, overlaying a series of family photos, Gramsci’s birth certificate, and a telegram Tatiana sent Piero Sraffa, dated April 26, 1937: “GRAMSCI COLPO APOPLETICO GRAVISSIMO, TATIANA.” [“GRAMSCI SUFFERED SERIOUS STROKE, TATIANA”] Above it something even more disturbing: dressed in a dark suit, a photo of Gramsci on his deathbed, taken by Tatiana.

Tatiana did several things for her dead brother-in-law: besides taking care of his notebooks and arranging his burial, she had two-bronze casts made, one of his right hand, his writing hand, the other a death mask, the most haunting object of all the museum’s exhibits. Gramsci looks unrecognizable—bloated, with puffed up round cheeks, far removed from the youthful images of him with flowing locks of curly black hair and those famous rimless spectacles. It was a far cry indeed from how he was remembered at High School: “he may have been deformed,” old school chum Renato Figari recalled, “but he wasn’t ugly. He had a high forehead, with a mass of wavy hair, and behind his prince-nez I remember the bright blue of his eyes, that shining, metallic gaze, which struck you so forcibly.”

Why bloated? It’s hard to say. Poor prison food? Medication for his illnesses? Sedentary life in a cell? Before incarceration, Gramsci was a great walker, covering vast distances on a foot, as a child and adolescent in Sardinia, and as a student in Turin, where he seemed to know old backstreets intimately; and even immediately prior to his arrest, he’d take long strolls around Rome, encountering comrades in cafés, hoofing around town to attend one meeting or another. Yet now I was looking at the cast of a man who’d aged dramatically, gained weight, and looked well beyond his forty-six years. Maybe Tatiana wanted to retain the image of her brother-in-law, whose metallic, piercing gaze was no more. Maybe she wanted to demonstrate to the world what the fascists had done to him. Lest we forget.
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It was difficult not to be stirred by the exhibit, not to be affected; but I knew I had one other thing to do in Ghilarza: I had to go and see his mother, whose remains lay on the edge of town in the municipal cemetery. An attractive arched stone entrance led you into a magnificent Cypress tree paradise, aglow in gorgeous late afternoon light. Giuseppina Marcias Gramsci’s grave has a prime site in the cemetery, with little around it, marked by a horizonal marble headstone, still bearing the flowers of the small commemoration of a few weeks earlier, on April 27. A Gramsci citation is chiseled into the foot of the marble, words taken from a letter he’d written his sister Grazietta (December 29, 1930), expressing concern about his mother’s health: “Ha lavorato per noi tutta la vita, sacrificandosi in modo inaudito.” [“She had worked for us all her life, sacrificing herself in unimaginable ways.”] Gramsci’s actual letter continues: “if she had been a different woman who knows what disastrous end we would have come to even as children; perhaps none of us would be alive today.”

Over dinner that evening, back at my albergo, I leafed through a publication I’d picked up during my museum visit, “Mandami tante notizie di Ghilarza.” Its title is a quote from another Gramsci letter to his mother (April 25, 1927): “Send me lots of news about Ghilarza”; a glossy magazine produced by the Fondazione Casa Gramsci Onlus, centering on “Paesaggi gramsciani: il santuario campestre di San Serafino”—“Gramscian Landscapes: The Rural Sanctuary of San Serafino.” San Serafino was one of his favorite boyhood stomping grounds, in a childhood much more adventurous out of school than in, a little village four miles from home, a journey Antonio would have doubtless made on foot.
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The village and its chapel overlook Lake Omodeo. The lake runs into River Tirso at the Tirso River Dam and the magazine reproduces a facsimile of a postcard of the “Diga del Tirso” not long after its construction, one Tatiana had sent Gramsci on August 2, 1935, presumably when she was visiting his family in Ghilarza. Three other large-sized facsimiles feature in the magazine, letters Gramsci sent to his mother. One, from October 19, 1931, is worth citing at length:

I went on foot. Crossing a main road bereft of any traffic, the signage reminded me, if I ever needed reminding, that I was in Gramsci country. I took a photo. At the roadside, an old hand-painted sign indicated, in yellow, “Lago,” with an arrow pointing its direction. I followed it, descending a little gravel path. Not a sole in sight. Soon the lake came into view, Lago Omodeo, and finding a rock to sit on at the water’s edge, I wondered whether perhaps I’d discovered Gramsci’s actual rock, where he’d sat for hour upon hour. It was May and baking hot, 100 degrees, without shade. So I knew my visit needed to be brief, imbibing the atmosphere, getting some sense of what Gramsci experienced, of what he’d loved, and what he might have loved again.

***

In truth, I had no real idea what I was searching for, here or anywhere else in Sardinia. I was embarked on a peculiar research project, very unmethodological, impossible to conceive in advance, having little inkling what I’d expect to find, let alone how I would go about trying to find it. And what was this it I sought anyway? I knew that part of it was wanting to see Gramsci’s family house and museum, that I wanted to see some of the more tangible remnants of Gramsci’s Sardinian world, artefacts and documents; but there were other things I was after, too, less tangible aspects of this world, more experiential aspects, things subjective rather than objective, sensory rather than strictly empirical. Or, at least, the sort of empirical that’s hard to qualify and impossible to quantify: a smell, a texturing of the cultural and natural landscape, of Gramsci’s environment, the look on people’s faces, the region’s light and warmth, its dusty aridness, the sun beating down, the sun setting, the sun rising, the faint ripple of the lake below San Serafino, the buzzing of insects, the sound of silence, the presence of stones.
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I suppose I was accumulating impressions, and what impressions I’d accumulated I was now trying to recapture on the page back in Rome, where I write, reconstructing my trip from memory, realizing how much of it seemed to pass in a haze. I remember the day after San Serafino, going to Ales—I had to go to Ales (pronounced “Alice”): it was Gramsci’s birthplace, after all, an hour’s south of Ghilarza, a town of 1,500 people that never lets you forget it is his paese natale; it was home only for a matter of months (the family upped sticks shortly after Antonio’s birth to Sorgono, before permanently moving to Ghilarza). Another scorchingly hot afternoon, a fierce sun beating down. God knows how it’s possible that the thermometer could rise even more in July and August. Little wonder Gramsci always felt cold in prison.

There was no shade in Ales, nowhere open, no place to eat, to buy food, to drink anything—and hot, hot, hot. Yet I was there for Gramsci, and it was endearing how much due care and attention Ales devoted to him. His actual birthplace—a two-story, yellow-façade house at Corso Cattedrale, 14—is now a cultural center hosting talks, book launches, and movie-showings, and still keeps the Gramscian red flag flying: one poster in the window read: “STOP ALL EMBARGO CONTRO CUBA.” Gramsci’s life and thought crops up everywhere in Ales, almost on every street corner, by way of a novel series of plaque-posters detailing his lifeline and different aspects of his work. It had all been lovingly curated and presented, and proclaimed Ales as a “laboratorio di idee,” a laboratory of ideas, inviting visitors “conoscere Antonio Gramsci camminando nel suo paese natale”—“to know Antonio Gramsci by walking in his hometown.”

And I did walk, headed for another landmark, another Piazza Gramsci, with its modern stone sculpture garden that looked weather beaten, worn away by the sun, nicely done but utterly deserted by day because of so little shade. As I strolled, by chance I spotted one of the most interesting signs of Gramsci, an impromptu sign, unprogrammed, indicating that the man isn’t only remembered but that he’s also somehow alive in people: graffiti on a rusty old door of an abandoned building, which piqued my attention and brought a smile to my face: “SONO PESSIMISTA CON INTELLIGENZA,” all of which presumably implies that the daubers were somehow optimists of the will—“ottimista per la volontà,” as Gramsci said, summing up my own sentiment about our post-truth world.

Not far from the graffiti was the loveliest Gramsci homage I’d ever seen, the loveliest and cleverest: a giant mural painted on the side of a whole building, in bright color, huge and stunning, without any trace of desecration, sparklingly clean and vivid. What was so interesting and clever was its blending of reality and fantasy; illustrating some of Gramsci’s childhood adventures with hedgehogs, apples, and snakes; yet also showing him older, smiling, reunited with his two sons, a family portrait, a what might’ve been image if he’d returned to Sardinia, if Delio and Giuliano had somehow made it out of the USSR, come back to Italy to see dad—big ifs. Where was mom Giulia? The mural was so vast that I had a hard time properly capturing it on camera.

To the uninitiated, the hedgehog-apple imagery might be perplexing. For insight let’s invoke a letter (February 22, 1932) from father to son Delio:

Ales’ mural offered a beautiful pictorial rendering of Gramsci’s beautiful narrative tale of hedgehogs carrying apples on their backs, gathered together, about to chomp away on their harvested feast. The stars twinkle overhead and a glowing moon gives the whole scene a magical milky charm. Gramsci, aged and portly as he was toward the end, is here radiantly alive, neatly attired in suit and tie, a proud father, arms around his two sons either side of him--a what might have been prospect, a Gramsci family romance, a happier epilogue to the tragic story we know really ensued.

That happy image of Gramsci disturbed me for some time. I remember passing a morning in Santu Lussurgiu, strolling around its old center and then around what’s a sort of small outer suburb, a ring of houses built sometime over the past fifty-years, well after Gramsci’s day. I was deep in thought about Gramsci—not about Gramsci the young lad but Gramsci the older man, the person who might have returned to walk the streets where I was walking. In olden times, Santu Lussurgiu was the site of Sa Carrela è Nanti, a folkloric horse race, a tradition held every Mardi Gras. Horses used to gallop through audience-flocked streets at breakneck speeds, with pairs of riders dressed in flamboyant traditional costumes, donned in obligatory Zoro-like masks. The old town’s walls are still adorned with framed photos of this crazy equine event, now defunct, I looked at some showing the spectacle and its crowds as late as the 1980s.
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Perched up on high in Santu Lussurgiu, where you get a sweeping vista of the whole town, is a massive white granite statue of Christ, with placating arms stretched out, and a bright red heart that looks slightly ridiculous, like it’s pulsating, beating for the salvation of the town’s residents. (It resembles Jim Carrey’s heart in The Mask, beating for Cameron Diaz.) I negotiated Santu Lussurgiu’s streets, climbed upward to get a close up of Christ, and witness that panorama before Him. All the while, I tried to visualize Gramsci back here, living in Santu Lussurgiu, imagining his niece Edmea finding Uncle Nino a room, probably near to where he used to lodge, in the old quarter, in a little stone house where various relatives could come and go, cater for his needs, help him recover, regain his strength, his zest for life.

He might have taken short walks in the fresh air, got himself some false teeth, eaten healthily again, found peace and quiet and maybe resumed his work, his letter writing, reconnecting with the outside world, with all the people and places he’d formerly known. Maybe he would have taken the odd aperitivo in town, with his father Francesco, who might have lived himself had his son also lived. Gramsci Sr. and Jr. might have tippled with the town folk; son would have enjoyed speaking their language, their dialect. It could have been right out of the leaves of Machiavelli, of Gramsci’s hero’s life in exile. For downtime, while working on The Prince, Machiavelli loved to sneak through the secret underground passageway of his Chianti wine cellar and pop-up next door at a raucous tavern (L’Albergaccio). He’d guzzle wine, chinwag with peasants and wayfarers, play cards and exchange vulgarities with the butcher, miller, and innkeeper. “Involved in these trifles,” Machiavelli said, “I kept my brain from growing moldy.”

Gramsci’s post-prison life might have been no less bawdy, a homecoming dramatic and heart wrenching, like a scene from Cinema Paradiso—when, after a thirty-year absence, Salvatore, the famous film director, finally returns to his Sicilian native village, attending the funeral of the old cinema projectionist, Alfredo, whom he’d adored as a kid. But maybe Gramsci’s return would’ve been less mawkish; he wasn’t one for fainthearted nostalgia, would have probably been harder, followed the words of the island’s poet laureate, Sebastiano Satta: “His bitter heart lurches./ He does not cry:/ Sardinians should never cry.”

On the other hand, we might wonder how long Gramsci’s convalescence may have lasted before he’d gotten itchy feet, yearned for contact with the wider world again—for engaging politically again. Could he really accept, as he’d hinted to wife Giulia in 1936, “a whole cycle of his life definitively closing”? He’d spent a decade of sedentary life, cut-off from life within four narrow walls; it would be hard to imagine, as a free man, him wanting to sit around all day, behind a desk or in a bar, leading a quiet, mediative and contemplative existence. He’d surely have gotten bored after a while, a country boy who’d tasted the forbidden fruits of cosmopolitanism—in Turin and Vienna, in Moscow and Rome—a roving journalist, activist, and intellectual, a man who’d met Lenin and Victor Serge, who read in different languages, who’d prided himself on his internationalist outlook. Wouldn’t village life have soon become too stifling, too parochial?

Another question we might pose about Gramsci’s return to Sardinia is: did he really plan on staying long? Or was it just easier for him to flee Sardinia than mainland Italy—as he’d apparently told Tatiana, and as she’d written to her sister Eugenia in Moscow? A month prior to Gramsci’s passing, Tatiana told Eugenia (March 25, 1937): “Antonio believes it would be a lot easier to escape from Sardinia than from Italy. We can’t mention it, or rumors will start.” From what would he be fleeing? The Italian fascist authorities? The Russian Communist Party and its apparatchik, suspecting Gramsci as a closet Trotskyite? The Nazis, who’d soon be jack-booting across Europe? And where else might he go?

Gramsci never knew anything about the German bombardment of the Basque town of Guernica; it took place after he’d had his stroke, on April 26, 1937, the day prior to his death. And yet, maybe Gramsci had anticipated a darkening of Europe, was fearing the worst, knew something was brewing, that fascism was not only alive and well but would soon brazenly expand its reach, morph into Nazism? Maybe he feared what was in store for his beloved island should war break out. Mussolini saw Sardinia as a stepping-stone for enlarging his Mediterranean empire. Because of its strategic positioning—only 8 miles from French Corsica—and the importance of Cagliari for launching attacks on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, Sardinia suffered heavy bombing.

At the same time, the island also had a strong anti-fascist resistance movement, which supported the Allies, and played a significant role in eventual Italian liberation in 1943. If he’d stayed in Sardinia, what role would Gramsci have assumed? A leader of the underground resistance movement? A free man yet a communist enemy of the Nazis, a man who would need to battle on three fronts—against the German Nazis, the Italian fascists, and the Russian Stalinists. Whatever the case, it’s clear his Sardinia peace would have been short-lived, lasting a couple of years only.

On the other hand, would he have opted to join the dissident exodus from mainland Europe? It’s fascinating to consider that the northern Sardinian port of Porto Torres had a direct ferry line to Marseille; from Porto Torres Gramsci could have eloped to the southern French city. Although under German occupation, Marseille’s shady underworld of crime and opportunism, its rowdy bars and back alleys around the Vieux Port, its seafaring and immigrant culture, meant it slipped through the tightening grip of the Gestapo. The city’s cracks offered elicit protection for assorted refugees, dissidents, and Jews, while becoming a wartime waystation for the passage out to the new world. (One of Gramsci’s contemporaries, Walter Benjamin, born 1892, famously didn’t make it out, crossing the Pyrenees from Marseille in September 1940 only to find the Spanish border closed. Stranded, without the right exit visa, he preferred suicide to being sent back, overdosing on morphine in a cheap Portbou hotel.)

Might Gramsci have shacked up with the celebrated artists and intellectuals on the outskirts of Marseille, at the Villa Air Bel, before setting sail in March 1941 on Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, a converted cargo boat, for Martinique? What a mesmerizing proposition that would have been. Onboard were 350 refugees, as well as a glitterati of creative dissents, castaways of old Europe, including anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, photographer Germaine Krull, surrealist painter Wifredo Lam, the “Pope” of Surrealism himself, André Breton, his wife, the painter-dancer Jacqueline Lamba, together with their six-year-old daughter Aube. The anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary Victor Serge, himself no stranger to political persecution and imprisonment, was another passenger, accompanied by his twenty-year-old son, Vlady, a budding artist.
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Serge and Gramsci were kindred spirits, contemporaries who knew each other in Vienna in the mid-1920s. (There’s a touching photograph of them together, a group shot on a Viennese street, with optimism in the air and a grinning Gramsci.) Serge was remorselessly scathing about people he didn’t like or rate—his Notebooks, 1936-1947 are full of selected character assassinations—yet was generous about those he knew and/or admired, like Gramsci.

A few years after his arrival in Mexico, Serge wrote in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary perhaps the nicest portrait of Gramsci ever written:

Amid an atmosphere of fugitive uncertainty and fear—fear of being torpedoed or detained by Vichy-controlled Martinique—Serge and Gramsci would’ve had plenty to talk about aboard Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, plenty of time to argue, to agree and disagree, to agree about disagreeing. Both had the capacity of conviction, believing in the unity of thought, energy, and life, yet were critical of all forms of fanatism. Both knew every idea is subject to revision in the face of new realities. Both would have agreed that the old world was dying and little was left of what they’d known, of what they’d struggled for (Serge’s own title for his memoirs was originally Memories of Vanished Worlds); both knew the new world had yet to be born and monsters lurked in the interregnum, in the darkness at dawn, in the unforgiving years they were each living out. Both would have shared prison tales of hardship and disappointment, told jokes with an inmate gallows humor they knew firsthand.

They’d have likely discussed the relative merits of anarchism and Marxism, agreed about the disasters of Stalinism, found common ground on the need to rebuild socialism through a Constituent Assembly. (In his Notebooks, Serge said socialists “ought to seek influence on the terrain of democracy, in the Constituent Assemblies and elsewhere, accepting compromise in an intransigent spirit.”) They’d have converged and diverged in their views about Georges Sorel, the French political theorist, agreeing about aspects of his anarcho-syndicalism, particularly on the general strike, about its “mythical” nature, that it was a “concrete fantasy” (as Gramsci called it) for arousing and organizing a collective will; yet would have disagreed about Sorel’s ethical repugnance to Jacobinism, which Gramsci recognized as “the categorical embodiment of Machiavelli’s Prince.” The jury would have been out on Gramsci’s feelings about Sorel’s “moral elite,” which Serge liked, the idea that history depends on the caliber of individuals, on how fit and capable they are for making revolution. Maybe Gramsci might have agreed; perhaps this was just another notion of an “organic intellectual”?

After landing in Martinique, where might Gramsci have gone? Followed comrade Serge to Mexico? Taken André Breton’s route, found refuge in New York? They never let Serge into America; no Communist Party member, existant or previous, was ever granted entry; Gramsci would have experienced a similar fate. Mexico would have been the more likely bet. Serge’s weak heart didn’t last long in high-altitude Mexico City: a cardiac arrest struck him down in the back of a cab in 1947. It took several hours before his body was identified. Vlady recalls finding his father on a police station slab. Son noticed the sorry state of dad’s shoes, his soles full of holes, which shocked Vlady because his father had always been so careful about his appearance, even during times of worst deprivation. A few days on, Vlady sketched dad’s hands, which were, as Serge had described Gramsci’s, very beautiful. Not long after, Serge’s final poem was discovered, drafted the day before he’d died, called “Mains”—”Hands”: “What astonishing contact, old man, joins your hands with ours!”

I know, I know–all of this is idle conjecture about Gramsci, maybe even pointless wish-imaging. It didn’t happen. What really happened happened: Gramsci died, never made it out, was never reunited with Serge. While we can act and should speculate on the future, we can’t change the past, the course of a history already done. That past can be falsified, erased and denied, of course, as people in power frequently do—remember Gramsci’s youthful article from Avanti!, penned in 1917, documenting a common bourgeois trait, prevalent today, of renaming old city streets, of coining new names for neighborhoods where a working class past was vivid. “Armed with an encyclopedia and an ax, they proceed to demolish old Turin,” Gramsci wrote of his adopted city. Streets are the common heritage of people,” he said, “of their affections, which united individuals more closely with the bonds of a solidarity of memory.”
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So we can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the ax. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again. Victor Serge recognized this, somehow knew it was his friend’s powerfullest weapon. Twelve-years after their Viennese encounter, “when I emerged from a period of deportation in Russia and arrived in Paris,” Serge writes in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “I was following a Popular Front demonstration when someone pushed a communist pamphlet into my hand: it contained a picture of Antonio Gramsci, who had died on April 27 of that year.” What should we do with this picture in our own hands? Remember it and pass it on.

All around the country normal working-class Americans are asking themselves one question: why? Why is it that I am struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month? Why is the price I paid for the same groceries a couple years ago doubled today, while my wage or salary has stagnated? Why is it that I was forced to go into drowning debt for getting sick, daring to get an education, wanting a home for my family? Why are the politicians on my screens so keen on waging war on half the world with our tax dollars, but so averse to investing any money on the people and the country’s decaying infrastructure? Why is my day pervaded by stress when I drop my children off at school, not knowing whether they can be the next victim of the horrendous shootings all too common in our country? Why do none of the people who govern the country seem to care about the desperate and deteriorating conditions of those like my family, neighbors, and co-workers?
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Poor, indebted, and desperate, the American working class has begun to organically question the assumptions of the ruling capitalist order. While they have been generationally fed the idea that America is the greatest country on earth, where freedom, democracy, and equality reign, today the desperation they experience in their everyday lives has made critical reflection necessary, spontaneous though it might still be. Can there be any real equality between those in their class and those that benefit from their toil, indebtedness, and instability? Can there be any freedom for the men and women enchained for life to a debt they owe a major bank? Can there be freedom and equality for the millions of children going to sleep hungry every night in America, or the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people? Can there be any democracy in a system where the people who control the major corporations, banks, and investment firms hold power over the state, using it to enforce their will, I.e., the accumulation of capital, as the bottom line and most supreme value in all social relations?

What has emerged, then, is a serious crisis of legitimacy. Faith in the ruling institutions of the capitalist class is rapidly diminishing. Only 11 percent of the American public trusts the mainstream media, the main ideological institutions of the capitalist ruling class. The politicians which enforce the interests of the owners of big capital aren’t doing much better, with just 19 percent of Americans holding that their elected representatives actually represent them. It is clear to the American people, albeit in a form that is still abstract and embryonic, that the media is simply there to manipulate them into consenting to the agenda of the ruling class — twisting facts, lying, and removing context to invert reality on ongoing world events. It is evident to them that their so-called representatives are in reality the representatives of their exploiters, oppressors, and parasitic creditors.

Out of this general and spontaneous rejection of the current state of affairs has arisen various different forms of dissent in the American working class. Some were mobilized by the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016 and 2020, seeing in it the potential for a genuine political, although not social, revolution which could guarantee the basic rights afforded in social democracies but absent in our country. In the same years, some were captivated by Donald Trump and his call to Make America Great Again (MAGA), which for many working-class folks in the country signified a striving to return to an age long gone, where their parents and grandparents could secure comfort in life and a high standard of living with a normal working-class job. Others have taken various apolitical routes, showing antipathy in the face of a political arena where they rightly observe that, as of right now, they have no ability to change anything.

While others are certainly present, these three have been the major channels for working people to express their discontent in the ruling order. Many, many flaws are evidently present in each route. But they all share a common rational kernel — the rejection of the status quo, and in the first two, the faith and willingness to work towards changing it. As it currently exists, however, one route leads to paralysis in the face of the task of constructing something new, while the other two have led to fake prophets being elevated as embodying the interests of the people, while they, in reality, have merely expressed more novel and disguised ways of upholding the same ruling order. We are in the period where it becomes evident that the hopes of 8 years ago are hollow, that a new way of framing and articulating discontent must be sought.

For us, only a communist party can live up to this task. A communist party is, after all, fundamentally the vehicle for the most advanced detachment of the working class to win the faith of the critical mass and guide their struggles to the finish line — the conquest of political power. It is a communist party which has the potential of giving these different forms of dissent some coherence, unity, and direction. Coherence arises out of the systematic understanding of the ills individuals face — ills which are not individual moral failings but systemic in character. Unity is premised on this coherence, on the understanding of our commonality of interests and our shared source of discontent. And direction arises out of the previous two — only when we can coherently understand the social order upon which our troubles are based can we see that in its own contradictions there’s a way forward. In the correct understanding of the problem, we find the premises through which the solution can be sought. When the decaying capitalist system we have before us is comprehended so too is the fact that working people — the producers of all value in society — have it within their power, as a class, to build a world anew in their own image. Once this recognition of our shared fundamental reality is achieved and the varied forms of dissent unified, then the steps forward will show themselves in the process of a struggle clear about its direction.

Lamentably, the historical communist party in our nation has shown itself incapable of living up to the task of the organization which bears that name. It has sought class collaboration in the era where class struggle is an imminent reality. It has sided, under the cynical auspices of ‘fighting fascism,’ with the Democratic Party whilst such organization has sent hundreds of billions in U.S. taxpayer money to neo-Nazis in Ukraine for a proxy war against Russia. It has supported this party through its murderous funding and equipping of the Zionist entity’s genocide in Palestine. It is a “communist” party which objectively has supported fascism and class collaboration under the justification of fighting that which they precisely support. Fascism, for them, is simply the social conservatives who disagree with the more liberal social values recently accepted by the forces of hegemony. For them the fascist threat emanates from our conservative co-workers and not the capitalist state that uses both parties to fund war and genocide. But what can be more fascist than supporting, financing, and equipping a genocide carried out by a white supremacist apartheid state?

The “communist” party USA spits on the legacy of Stalin, Dimitrov, and the great anti-fascist fighters of the world communist movement when it cites them tongue in cheek to support the fascistic American state. It forgets that, as Michael Parenti wrote “the fascist threat comes not from the Christian right or the militias or this or that grouplet of skinheads but from the national security state itself, the police state within the state.”[1] These are the forces which enforce the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” central to the Marxist understanding of fascism, elaborated in the brilliant work of Georgi Dimitrov.[2] The “communist” party USA operates, therefore, with an idealist and anti-Marxist understanding of fascism when it ignores the role of fascism as a form of capitalist governance in periods of crisis. It reduces fascism to a problem of ideas in the mind, and it’s unable to see how, as a form of capitalist governance in crisis, it’s been present here in both parties all along. The basic understanding of the spurious dialectic of Democrats and Republicans, of the unending and performative back-and-forth used to mask the continuity of the imperialist state and serve its continual reproduction, is completely lost on these “communists.” They side with one side of the capitalists, imperialists, and fascists. In doing so they don’t actually fight against the ‘fascist threat’ they so often invoke but reinforce it. They feed into the spectacle of American politicking; they become complicit in its operations.

But errors in party lines are amendable when the operational method of a communist party is upheld. Democratic centralism, when actually present, gives the party the potential to rectify — to improve its understanding of the situation and its failings. It allows the slippages into social chauvinism, opportunism, and ultraleftism (so evident in the cpUSA) to be reeled in and corrected. But here too, the “Communist” Party USA has completely violated its obligations. Ample evidence has shown that at the 32nd National Convention party democracy was thwarted, and democratic centralism tossed out the window.[3] And when those courageous cadres sought to rectify this usurping of the party — this coup of the American working class’s historic organization by a small clique of lifelong bureaucrats — through constitutional means stood up to share a petition requesting the democratic consultation thwarted at the convention, all real communists were purged, often expelling whole clubs themselves. The evidence has been documented and made public. As was made evident, the ruling clique of the cpUSA, then, has completely destroyed party democracy in order to defend its support for class collaboration with a party that supports Nazis and carries out genocidal wars on native peoples.

But no amount of fettering the class struggle would achieve their desired stoppage of the movement of history. An organization of the working class, grounded not in middle class professionals and bureaucrats but in the working class itself, guided by Marxism-Leninism and not the purity fetish, was bound to arise. On July 7th of 2024 this organization was born. It’s birth, as Executive Chairman Haz Al-Din noted, was itself a triumph in deed, not merely in word.[4] It brought together a broad group of different communist forces, stemming from those which were unconstitutionally purged by the cpUSA, to carry forth the struggle together, to reconstitute the American Communist Party our people so desperately need. It is bounded not by abstract and pure doctrines, but by the living science of Marxism-Leninism, which sees truth in the deed, in practical results and organizational achievements. Our standard of success will not be the construction of theory built off of the purest abstract ideas. Our standard of success will be our capacity to fulfill the role history has assigned to the American Communist Party, namely, to provide the coherence, unity, and direction that can get our people out of the perpetual crises which have pervaded our decaying capitalist mode of life, and establish in its place a society of, by, and for working people — Socialism.

Notes

[1] Michael Parenti, America Besieged (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 119.

[2] Georgi Dimitrov, Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 2.

[3] Our Institute has a whole playlist discussing the 32nd National Convention and interviewing around a dozen purged members. You can watch the six videos in that playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk7JuLxXsW8&list=PLxhlh6ux6zSnGUbwuHGusdJTTyYkNie_C&pp=gAQBiAQB

[4] First address to the public from Executive Chairman Haz Al-Din:
https://x.com/ACPMain/status/1815807197806248215

With the surge in popularity of the Democratic Socialists of America since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, it can be argued that there’s likewise been a surge in the successes of municipal socialism. Granted this is only concerning the electoral prospects of a single organization, but at least according to Wikipedia, there are nearly 150 people holding various positions within municipal governments ranging from the Mayoral office to smaller positions such as being members of a school board between 31 different states in the US. To understand the potential of these electoral results, or even the lack-there-of, historical examples need to be studied to absorb the lessons of these experiments. Could Bill Buell’s work “George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady” serve as a lens into the achievements and shortcomings of socialism at the local level?

Published in 2019, the county historian of Schenectady’s book holds the dual purpose of being a biography of George R. Lunn, a minister and politician, as well as more specifically examining his time as the only ever socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York. Lunn is also one of only four people to hold a mayoral office in New York State under some form of the socialist banner, as well as being the first to do so.

The first seven chapters of this book touch upon Lunn’s early life and connections to the pulpit, as well as giving some historical context to the city of Schenectady and the standing of socialism within the United States in the early 20th century. To put it briefly, Lunn was born in Iowa in 1873, served very briefly as a chaplain during the Spanish-American War, and would later become ordained as a Presbyterian minister after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in 1901. In 1904 Lunn would move to Schenectady when he was named as pastor for Schenectady’s First Reformed Church. It was as a minister that Lunn began to gain prominence, being cited as an engaging and charismatic speaker, using his platform in the church to talk not only about religious affairs, but to address corruption within the city and speak of societal ills such as homelessness and child labor. The minister’s rhetoric would result in him leaving First Reformed in 1910, leading him to form his own congregation through the People’s Church and, soon after, officially joining the Socialist Party of America near the end of that year.

Chronicling George Lunn’s entrance to the SPA introduces the real meat and potatoes of this biographical piece, his political career. Buell chronicles Lunn’s quick rise to popularity and his election to Mayor of Schenectady on the socialist ticket, taking office in 1911. The efforts of Lunn and his associates to implement elements of socialism within the framework of capitalism such as introducing free garbage pickup and a protracted effort to improve the city’s parks are laid out, examining how Lunn introduced these as well as displaying the struggles that came with working to implement such programs. Lunn’s administration faced issues with Republicans, Democrats, and the Progressive party trying to block him from following through with such economic and social programs, as well as issues within the Socialist Party itself. Particularly, there were individuals and factions who considered Lunn to be not “socialist enough” in his practices. Famed writer Walter Lippmann for a short time served as part of Lunn’s cabinet, and his reason for leaving stems from that very critique. With Lunn’s politics being influenced more by the Social Gospel and reformism than any sort of scientific socialism, these specific critiques do hold water.

Buell does provide an astute recounting of Lunn’s involvement in the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913, with the Mayor serving as one of the primary catalysts in giving that struggle national attention, and bringing significant figures in labor history to New York’s Mohawk Valley as well as Schenectady, including Bill Haywood, Matilda Rabinowitz, Helen Schloss, Joseph Ettor, and more. Explaining how Lunn balanced his commitments as Mayor, his involvement in the strike, and his potential bid to run for Congress shows just how multifaceted Lunn was in his ability to juggle responsibilities. 

In that same vein, Buell covers Lunn’s struggles within and eventual leaving of the SPA after his second term as Mayor as well as his later career in a concise manner, though one could argue that it was too concise since he only spent three chapters including an epilogue covering Lunn’s career after this leaving the SPA. Given that this book is more specifically about Lunn’s first term as Mayor of Schenectady with some emphasis on his second, this is understandable. That being said, it would’ve been interesting and beneficial to see some more emphasis on Lunn’s third term as mayor and other political actions after leaving socialism.

Bill Buell’s book is informative and is generally well-written and digestible. Buell doesn’t dive very deeply into the major theoretical conflicts between Lunn and other members of the party. Besides a brief mention of Lincoln Steffen’s dissolution with the Soviet Union, there is no explicit political bias being pushed by this book, no upholding of the socialist boogeyman that so many would use a piece like this to demonize. However, there are some shortcomings. 

The first being that since this book is self-published, even with the aid of the Troy Book Makers, a handful of typos managed to slip through the cracks. Though unfortunate to see, these can be forgiven as such typos are few and far between throughout the entire 200+ page book. The biggest problem to be found though is the use of one particular source. Buell utilizes the book The Red Nurse: A Story of the Little Falls Textile Strike by Michael Cooney as a source when introducing Helen Schloss and her role in the strike. For one, this is a piece of historical fiction. There are true elements to the book’s story, but to use a dramatization of historical events as an academic source shouldn’t be acceptable. Additionally, according to others who have studied the strike and the life of Schloss such as playwright Angela Harris, there are various inaccuracies in The Red Nurse. One example being that in the novel, Cooney says that Schloss resigned from a position she held in Little Falls in a rather vitriolic manner, when all actual accounts show that she resigned in a cordial manner.

The story of George R. Lunn’s life and political career is not an unknown one given that there are a handful of academic articles and book chapters about the man and his career, as well as even having his own dedicated Wikipedia page. With that knowledge though, Buell’s piece serves as one of the only books dedicated to the life and times of the minister, the only other one that comes to mind being George Gardner’s The Schenectadians published in 2001. It’s not a perfect book given the aforementioned shortcomings, but George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady is worth reading and analyzing for a look at the popularity of socialism at the time in addition to the benefits and shortcomings of municipal socialism. ​

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.