Introduction

The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself.

Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle.

Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.

The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself. 

The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth

Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population).

Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect.

Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints.

The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.”

False equivalences between different social systems

But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts.

The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world.

Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism?

Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” 

We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class.

Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:”

“Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12].

Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism

Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits.

Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. 

The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” 

Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. 

Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.?

Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world.

Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste!

In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism.

Degrowth and building the class struggle

In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should.

From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action?

Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better.

Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class.

Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:”

“Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine…

“Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17].

References

[1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976). Capital Vol 1 (New York: Penguin Books), 742.
[2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.” Viewpoint Magazine, April 14. Available here.
[3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,” Real-World Economics Review 87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system.
[4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007). An essay on the principle of population (New York: Dover).
[5]Marx, Capital, 784.
[6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018). In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos (UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21.
[7] Ibid., 24.
[8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 30, no. 2: 189.
[9] Ibid., 194.
[10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015). Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff (Washington: Zero Books).
[11] See Karl, Marx. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98. 
[12] Marx, Karl. (1991.) Capital Vol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180.
[13] Kallis, In defense of degrowth, 21.
[14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Available here.
[15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” In Materialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517.
[16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’” Monthly Review, June 17. Available here.
[17] Ibid.

It is now established that the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency is eroding. When corporate western media begins to attack the multipolar world’s de-dollarization narrative in earnest, you know the panic in Washington has fully set in.

The numbers: the dollar share of global reserves was 73 percent in 2001, 55 percent in 2021, and 47 percent in 2022. The key takeaway is that last year, the dollar share slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

Now it is no longer far-fetched to project a global dollar share of only 30 percent by the end of 2024, coinciding with the next US presidential election.

The defining moment – the actual trigger leading to the Fall of the Hegemon – was in February 2022, when over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves were “frozen” by the collective west, and every other country on the planet began fearing for their own dollar stores abroad. There was some comic relief in this absurd move, though: the EU “can’t find” most of it.

Now cue to some current essential developments on the trading front.

Over 70 percent of trade deals between Russia and China now use either the ruble or the yuan, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

Russia and India are trading oil in rupees. Less than four weeks ago, Banco Bocom BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which is the Chinese alternative to the western-led financial messaging system, SWIFT.

China’s CNOOC and France’s Total signed their first LNG trade in yuan via the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange.

The deal between Russia and Bangladesh for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear plant will also bypass the US dollar. The first $300 million payment will be in yuan, but Russia will try to switch the next ones to rubles.

​Russia and Bolivia’s bilateral trade now accepts settlements in Boliviano. That’s extremely pertinent, considering Rosatom’s drive to be a crucial part of the development of lithium deposits in Bolivia.

Notably, many of those trades involve BRICS countries – and beyond. At least 19 nations have already requested to join BRICS+, the extended version of the 21st century’s major multipolar institution, whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, then South Africa. The foreign ministers of the original five will start discussing the modalities of accession for new members in an upcoming June summit in Capetown.

BRICS, as it stands, is already more relevant to the global economy than the G7. The latest IMF figures reveal that the existing five BRICS nations will contribute 32.1 percent to global growth, compared to the G7’s 29.9 percent.

With Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico as possible new members, it is clear that key Global South players are starting to focus on the quintessential multilateral institution capable of smashing Western hegemony.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) are working in total sync as Moscow’s partnership with Riyadh in OPEC+ metastasizes into BRICS+, in parallel to the deepening Russia-Iran strategic partnership.

MbS has willfully steered Saudi Arabia toward Eurasia’s new power trio Russia-Iran-China (RIC), away from the US. The new game in West Asia is the incoming BRIICSS – featuring, remarkably, both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose historic reconciliation was brokered by yet another BRICS heavyweight, China.

Importantly, the evolving Iran-Saudi rapprochement also implies a much closer relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole and the Russia-China strategic partnership.

This will translate into complementary roles – in terms of trade connectivity and payment systems – for the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia-Iran-India, and the China-Central-Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, a key plank of Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Today, only Brazil, with its President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva caged by the Americans and an erratic foreign policy, runs the risk of being relegated by the BRICS to the status of a secondary player.

The de-dollarization train has been propelled to high-speed status by the accumulated effects of Covid-linked supply chain chaos and collective western sanctions on Russia.

The essential point is this: The BRICS have the commodities, and the G7 controls finance. The latter can’t grow commodities, but the former can create currencies – especially when their value is linked to tangibles like gold, oil, minerals, and other natural resources.'

Arguably the key swing factor is that pricing for oil and gold is already shifting to Russia, China, and West Asia.

In consequence, demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing. Trillions of US dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate.

The fall of a weaponized currency will end up smashing the whole logic behind the US’ global network of 800+ military bases and their operating budgets.

Since mid-March, in Moscow, during the Economic Forum of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI) – one of the key inter-government organizations in Eurasia formed after the fall of the USSR – further integration is being actively discussed between the CSI, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS.

Eurasian organizations coordinating the counterpunch to the current western-led system, which tramples on international law, was not by accident one of the key themes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at the UN earlier this week. It is also no accident that four member-states of the CIS – Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – founded the SCO along with China in June 2001.

The Davos/Great Reset globalist combo, for all practical purposes, declared war on oil immediately after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. They threatened OPEC+ to isolate Russia – or else, but failed humiliatingly. OPEC+, effectively run by Moscow-Riyadh, now rules the global oil market.

Western elites are in a panic. Especially after Lula’s bombshell on Chinese soil during his visit with Xi Jinping, when he called on the whole Global South to replace the US dollar with their own currencies in international trade.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently told the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – the heart of the US establishment matrix – that “geopolitical tensions between the US and China could raise inflation by 5 percent and threaten the dominance of the dollar and euro.”

The monolithic spin across western mainstream media is that BRICS economies trading normally with Russia “creates new problems for the rest of the world.” That’s utter nonsense: it only creates problems for the dollar and the euro.

The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025.

And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the GCC represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner.

The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018. Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan.

The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves.

This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU.

Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan. That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar.

US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers.
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The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself.

CPRF rebuts ahistorical assertion that Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine war is as an aggressive imperialist power.

The following article was written in reply to remarks by the Communist Party of Greece’s international department: ‘On the imperialist war in Ukraine and the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’ by the international department of the CPRF in May 2022.

The video above shows communist fighters in the Donbass in 2015 raising the Soviet flag over the liberated city of Debaltsevo in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Many Russian communists have died helping to defend the antifascist regions in the Donbass since 2014.

*****

On 23 April 2022, the newspaper Risospastis, the press organ of the Communist Party of Greece, published an article by the international department of the central committee of the KKE: ‘On the imperialist war in Ukraine and the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’.

The article assesses the actions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in connection with the special operation carried out by Russia in Ukraine, and openly accuses the party of a pro-government, ie, pro-imperialist, position. We categorically disagree with such a mechanical assessment.

The quintessence of the article lies in the fact that, from the point of view of the Greek comrades, an imperialist war is going on in Ukraine in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie and, by supporting a special operation, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is thus “pursuing a line of solidarity with the ruling United Russia party and President Putin”.

Insisting on the ‘imperialist’ nature of this war, the Greek comrades rely on the well-known statement of VI Lenin that “A struggle for markets and for freedom to loot foreign countries, a striving to suppress the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and democracy in the individual countries, a desire to deceive, disunite, and slaughter the proletarians of all countries by setting the wage-slaves of one nation against those of another so as to benefit the bourgeoisie – these are the only real content and significance of the war.” (August 1914)

However, the comrades did not mention that this statement is contained in the article of VI Lenin ‘The tasks of revolutionary social democracy in the European war’. And in it he was talking quite specifically about the first world war – really a purely imperialist, predatory one. But if we do not take a stand on the ground of dogmatism, then we must admit that any war has its own specific features.

The task of a Marxist in determining his position in relation to war is, first of all, to determine precisely its specific character. Indeed, in addition to imperialist wars, there are also national-liberation and antifascist wars, which gained a particularly wide scope in the middle of the 20th century, when fascism and Nazism arose as political phenomena, and the national-liberation struggle intensified under the influence of the October Revolution.

Developing its political position on the issue of the special operation, the party analysed the specific historical conditions that objectively caused the crisis in Ukraine.

Before the October Revolution in Russia, Ukraine, which was part of the Russian empire, was a purely agrarian country. In order to strengthen its industry, at the suggestion of VI Lenin, six industrial regions from the Russian Soviet Republic in the east and south, which had never been part of Ukraine, were transferred to Ukraine, including Donetsk and Lugansk. In 1939, Galicia (western Ukraine) was annexed to Ukraine, previously part of Poland.

So, the current territory of Ukraine is the result of its entry into the USSR. And it is ‘sewn together’ out of very disparate pieces, from Galicia (Lviv) with a strong influence of Poland, Austria and Hungary, to eastern Ukraine, strongly gravitating towards Russia.

Socialist Ukraine developed very powerfully. Aviation and rocket-building, petrochemistry, the electric power industry (four nuclear power plants) and defence industries were added to the extraction of metal and coal. It was as part of the USSR that Ukraine received not only the bulk of its current territory, but also its economic potential, and became one of the ten largest economies in Europe.

The destruction of the Soviet Union in December 1991 caused, at the same time, the destruction of the centuries-old economic integration of Ukraine with Russia, the rupture of all economic, political and cultural ties.

Now it is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Its manufacturing industry, with the exception of metallurgy, is practically destroyed. The economy of Ukraine now rests on loans from the west and income from people who left for Europe and Russia in search of a job. The people’s living standards fell catastrophically, and emigration increased sharply. About 10 million people (out of 45 million) left the country, the most qualified specialists.
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The level of corruption and social differentiation has reached one of the highest levels in the world. The country is on the brink of a national catastrophe.

In February 2014, a coup d’état was carried out in Ukraine with the direct assistance of the United States and other Nato countries. Legitimate power in the country was overthrown. Neo-nazis came to power. Subsequently, the United States publicly announced that it had invested about $5bn in preparing for the change of power in the country and the “development of democracy”. It is quite obvious that, just like that, no one will spend such a gigantic amount of money.

As a result of the coup d’état, people from western Ukraine, from Galicia, where extremely nationalist, antisemitic, anti-Polish, russophobic and anticommunist sentiments are historically strong, seized power.

The forced assimilation of the Russian-speaking population began. The ban on the Russian language and the decision to transfer school education from Russian to Ukrainian gave rise to strong resistance in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. People took up arms.

On 11 May 2014, in a popular referendum, 87 percent of citizens voted for independence. So, not at the direction of the Kremlin, but at the initiative of the masses, the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics arose.

After several unsuccessful attempts to seize the LNR-DNR, the nazis from Kiev switched to terror. During eight years of incessant shelling from large-calibre guns, almost 14,000 civilians were killed and tens of thousands maimed. Serious damage has been done to the infrastructure there.

At the same time, European countries and the United States were extremely indifferent to the eight-year-long genocide of the Russian people in Donbass, in fact, justifying the actions of the Kiev regime.

Today, the European Union and the USA, showing unprecedented hypocrisy, talk about the suffering of people during the fighting, but they remain silent about the fact that using civilians as human shields has become a common tactic of those whom they call “freedom fighters”.

Our comrades, considering the situation in Ukraine, only grudgingly mention the danger of the country’s fascisization. But one of the main goals of Russia’s military operation in this country is its denazification. After all, even according to US congressmen and US intelligence agencies, Ukraine has become a centre of international neo-nazism.

Here are some facts. After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, in western Ukraine, where, as we have already noted, extremely nationalist, antisemitic, russophobic and anticommunist sentiments were initially strong, SS divisions were formed to fight against the Red Army. Local nationalists, led by Hitler’s admirer Stepan Bandera, began to exterminate the jewish population.

In Ukraine, about 1.5 million jews were killed at the hands of Bandera. This is one-quarter of all victims of the holocaust. During the Volyn massacre in 1944 in western Ukraine, about 100,000 Poles were brutally killed. Bandera massacred partisans and burned alive the population of hundreds of villages in Belarus.

Already after the war, anticommunist and anti-Soviet rebels and western Ukraine, with the support of the United States and Great Britain, launched terror against the civilian population from 1945-53. During these years, Bandera killed about 50,000 people in Ukraine.

The descendants and followers of these killers came to power after the 2014 coup. The traditions of anti-Polish, antisemitic and anti-Russian terror are very strong among the neo-nazis who now really control Ukraine.

Nazi ideology is being implanted in Ukraine. Ukrainian fascists – the organisers and participants in the atrocities of the war – are officially recognised as national heroes. Their symbolism became that of the state. Every year, solemn marches are held in honour of fascist criminals. Streets and squares are named after them. The Communist Party of Ukraine has been driven underground. Intimidation and political assassinations of politicians and journalists have become a regular occurrence. Monuments to Lenin and everything related to the memory of life in the USSR are being destroyed.

At present, the Bandera-ites, like the SS stormtroopers of Nazi Germany, serve as a shock detachment of big business. They tightly control every movement of state power, constantly blackmailing it with the threat of a coup.

The nature of the current Ukrainian state is an alliance of big capital and the highest state bureaucracy, supported by fascist elements, under the full political and financial control of the United States.

Based on Marxist theory, the military conflict in Ukraine cannot be regarded as an imperialist war, as our comrades are trying to prove. By its nature, this is a national-liberation war of the people of Donbass. And from the point of view of Russia, this is a fight against an external threat to national security and fascism.

It is no secret that the people’s militia of Donbass was not able independently to resist the many thousands-strong Ukrainian army, armed with foreign weapons. The defeat of the militias would inevitably have led to the total annihilation of the Russian-speaking population, many of whom were Russian citizens. In accordance with the constitution of the Russian Federation, in order to protect its citizens and ensure national security, Russia took the actions provided for by the law, since it was impossible to do this in any other way.

The negotiation process within the framework of the Minsk agreements was deliberately sabotaged by Kiev with the support of the United States and the European Union.

By this time, Ukraine had concentrated 150,000 troops and nazi battalions in the Donbass. Kiev, with the support of the United States, was preparing to regain control of the Donbass by military means.

With the blessing of its American directors, Ukraine was preparing in early March of this year to launch a military operation to seize Donbass, and then Crimea. Today, there is plenty of data to support this assertion.

The Bandera regime has been preparing for war for eight years. The ideological indoctrination of military personnel has been systematically carried out in the spirit of outright russophobia, the most powerful fortified areas have been created, and the army has been saturated with the latest weaponry.

Following its imperialist geopolitical goals, the United States systematically included Ukraine in the sphere of its military interests and turned the country into a Nato spearhead, intending to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian soldier”.

Back in December 2021, Russia turned to the United States with a proposal to hold talks on the non-expansion of Nato eastwards. The Americans evaded a direct answer. In light of this, in January 2022, Russia warned that in such a situation it would be forced to take additional measures to protect its national security.

At the same time, things were moving towards the deployment of US tactical weapons in Ukraine. Ukraine, which has four nuclear power plants and great scientific and technical potential, has begun the preparations for building its own nuclear weapons.

Under the patronage of the Pentagon, more than 30 laboratories for the development of bacteriological weapons were created in Ukraine. There are documents confirming the work in these laboratories with especially dangerous bacteria of deadly diseases, as well as the study of methods for their distribution, taking into account a person’s race.

All this poses a threat not only to Russia, but to all mankind.

It is argued that this is exclusively a question of interimperialist contradictions; the struggle for markets and raw materials. The inability to see the national component of class questions and the class component of national questions leads one into the realm of dogmatism.

In an effort to prove that the war is being waged in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie, in the interests of seizing the natural resources and taking over the industrial potential of Ukraine, our Greek comrades use VI Lenin’s statements about the nature of wars outside of the historical context in which he made them.

However, the assertion that the Russian leadership was preparing a military takeover of Ukraine in advance contradicts the facts.

From the very beginning, the leadership of the Russian Federation did not support the idea of a referendum on the formation of the people’s republics of Donbass.

Following the agreements under the Minsk 2 process, Russia a priori assumed that the Donbass would remain part of Ukraine, although with a certain degree of autonomy. And the Russian leadership, until the very beginning of the military operation, insisted on the implementation of Minsk 2 – that is, on the integration of Donbass with Ukraine.

So where is the preparation for an imperialist takeover?

In reality, Ukraine, its industry and resources, has since 1991 been the object of superexploitation by the US and European monopolies.

The Russian oligarchy did not participate in ‘dividing the pie’, which was in the sphere of western interests.

Moreover, the Russian oligarchy was against the military operation in Ukraine. It was striving with all its might to integrate into the world oligarchy and was already under strong pressure from the west, which demanded more energetic influence on the government in order to maintain Russia’s pro-western orientation.

In addition, Russian oligarchs have suffered greatly from the Russian military operation in Ukraine. They are included on the sanctions lists, their palaces and yachts have been confiscated, their bank accounts are frozen.

We do not feel the slightest sympathy for those who plundered Russia for three decades, and who are now losing their loot. We only want to emphasise that the Russian oligarchy was not only not interested in the military operation, but also suffered from it. By refusing to support this operation, big business lost not only property and money, but also much of its influence on the Russian ruling elite.

Pay attention to which class forces opposed Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in the first place. That is, first of all: large monopoly capital. Their political representatives are in the liberal environment, and they have many ‘creative’ servants among the so-called intelligentsia.

Of course, we recognise the existence of interimperialist contradictions, of the desire of imperialist predators to seize the natural and energy resources of other countries. Russia is a victim of the west’s plans to turn our country into a source of cheap raw materials. And we have been fighting against such plans for many decades.
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But we by no means believe that Russia, for all the depravity of its current political system based on the power of big capital, has suddenly turned into the same predator. The struggle in Ukraine has a fundamentally different character that does not fit into these dogmas.

It was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that was the first to define the essence of the regime that seized power in Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan. Thus, all the subsequent activity of the party was built precisely on the basis of the class essence of the ongoing political processes.

We have been very critical of the foreign policy of the Russian leadership. We have always condemned the disregard for the interests of the peoples who until recently were part of the unified Soviet state.

If anyone closely follows our actions (and it seemed to us that the Greek comrades were well acquainted with our documents), they will inevitably see that it was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that, since 2014, has been persistently putting forward a demand for the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics by Russia. No other political party in Russia has done so much to support the population of Donbass. We supported the return of Donbass to Russia from the beginning.

It is not that the CPRF “shows solidarity with United Russia and President Putin”, but that they, as a result of historical imperatives, are now being forced to take the path that the CPRF has stubbornly insisted on for three decades.

In such a situation, is it fair to say that we blindly support Putin’s policy in Ukraine?

The Communists of Russia take an active part in the defence of the LNR-DNR. Hundreds of communists are fighting the nazis as part of the troops of the people’s republics. Dozens of communists have died in this struggle. Over those eight years of fighting, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation sent 93 convoys of humanitarian aid to the republics, with a total weight of 13,000 tons, and brought thousands of children for rest and treatment in Russia.

Throughout these years, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation demanded that the Russian leadership recognise the independence of Donbass.

It is frankly unpleasant for us to hear how our Greek comrades speak with an element of contempt about the “so-called” people’s republics of Donbass, since these are precisely the people’s republics that emerged as a result of the real will of the masses.

Citizens of the LPR-DPR defended them at the cost of the lives of thousands of civilians and soldiers of their armies during the hardest eight years of resistance to the creeping aggression of neo-nazi Bandera-ites.

Of fundamental importance is the fact that not only the Russian army, but also volunteer units of the Donbass itself, in which there is a very large stratum of communists and miners, are fighting against the Bandera-ites.

Where in all this is the “protection of the interests of the oligarchy”? Are our comrades, who put their lives in mortal danger every day, also defending the interests of the Russian oligarchy? Or are they protecting ordinary people who have fallen victim to the neo-nazis who seized power in Ukraine?

One must have a strong unwillingness to see the real state of affairs in order to assert that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is merely showing solidarity with the ruling elite.

The intensity of the class political struggle in Russia has not abated at all. The persecution of communists and party supporters, even after the start of the military operations in Ukraine, show that there is no class harmony between the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the current ruling group. One can list very many cases when our comrades are subjected to repressions. And we react harshly to the persecution of our comrades.

At the same time, we continue to subject the socioeconomic course of the current government to harsh criticism. No party in Russia can claim to have been more vocal in its criticism of the government.

In the 30+ years since the 1991 anticommunist coup, we have provided countless evidence of our determined struggle against the ruling faction. That is why our party enjoys broad support from the masses.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation received almost 19 percent of the vote in the elections to the state duma in September 2021. And this is in the conditions of a well-established and long-established machine of electoral fraud. We are sure that the real level of support for us among the people is much higher. And this is because we are guided, in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, by the desire to carefully study the interests and moods of the people.

By the way, by supporting Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, the Communist party has expressed the will of the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens.

As for the allegations of “flirting with nationalist sentiments and nationalist forces”, we are proud to say that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is the leading left-wing patriotic force in Russia.

And we consider the protection of the interests of the Russian people and other peoples for centuries living together with the Russians, primarily Ukrainians and Belarusians, as our international duty. And to deny the historical significance of the ‘Russian world’ or Russian civilization, in our opinion, is just as absurd as to deny the great significance of the ancient Greek civilization.

When Manolis Glezos tore down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis, he was guided not only by class interests, but also by the national pride of the Greeks, who resolutely joined the fight against the German occupation.

Although western politicians and their media, arrogantly pretending to be ‘world public opinion’, openly participate in the war on the side of the neo-nazis, the largest countries in Asia and Africa, the middle east and Latin America, who know first-hand what European and American neocolonialism is, quite rightly view what is happening in Ukraine as Russia’s struggle against the unipolar world led by the United States.

Countries whose population make up 60 percent of the world’s population either support the Russian operation or take a neutral position.
​
An aggressive position is taken only by those who in 1941 came to us with a war as part of the Nazi coalition. These are the countries of Europe, as well as the USA and Great Britain, which did a lot to revive the German military machine after its defeat in the first world war. Today, Russia is again fighting against fascism and against those who support it in Europe and the United States.

“U.S. imperialism is declining because the parasitic system of capitalism upon which U.S. imperialism is built on, is running out of resources and nations to consume,” Funez says.He also says “the de-dollarization” is happening because nations see the effects of U.S. imperialism on their nation.
​
Here is the text of interview with Ramiro Funez:

Q: Why is U.S. imperialism declining?

U.S. imperialism is declining because the satanic system of neoliberalism, capitalism, usery, debt and the global religion of money is declining because it is a parasitic system that constantly needs a new host in order to continue to grow.

Imperialism and capitalism as economic systems constantly need to expand. They are parasitic that constantly need new flesh, new hosts, bodies to consume and thrive. Just like any other parasite in the natural world.

Once there are no longer any healthy thriving host to bite into, suck the energy, money and resources out of it, then it begins to die.

U.S. imperialism is declining because the parasitic system of capitalism upon which U.S. imperialism is built on, is running out of recourses, nations to consume. It is losing power as no people around the world want to do business with the U.S. anymore, the de-dollarization is happening because they see the effects of U.S. imperialism on their nation. So, it is running out of hosts, thus the system, it is rotting from the inside out. This is the reason why U.S. imperialism and hegemony are declining. It is economic but it is also spiritual as well.

Q: What has the U.S. committed to lose it clout across regions in the world?

Nations across the world have recognized what happens when the U.S. invades a country. We’ve seen throughout history, that whenever the U.S. enters a region, with its vague promises, vague slogans of liberal democracy, freedom and human rights, whatever that means! Those nations end up becoming worse.

“This is a major threat to Western Atlanticism, which is concerned and worried about any unity between Russia, China and Iran.” After the U.S. enters a region with the promise of freeing the people, bringing them prosperity and democracy, we see that things actually get worse.

Look after the 2011 murder of Muammer Ghaddafi and the subsequent invasion of Libya. Look at Iraq after 2003, look at Afghanistan and so many nations around the world. Latin American and Caribbean nations, African nations, Asian nations.

Same thing happened in the former Soviet Union by the way with Russia. When the U.S. had its Western backed candidate Yeltsin who ushered in neo-liberal economics into Russia, things got horrible for the Russian people. It wasn’t until Vladimir Putin took power and was able to bring order, stability and growth back to Russia and things got better.

So the U.S. is losing clout across regions across the world because the people of the world are waking up and seeing that it is a horrible empire that actually brings the opposite of what it says it does. The U.S. says it brings democracy it actually brings dictatorship. The U.S. says it brings economic freedom, it actually brings economic stagnation and slavery. The U.S. says it brings human rights, it actually brings human rights violations.

​Q: Is new world order moving to the East?

There is currently a shift in a new world order moving to the East, led by the nations of Russia, China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is very important because this represents a new world order in which we have nations benefiting the masses of people around the world at the helm of leadership.

What we’re seeing is resemblance of the 5th century. You’ll recall that in the 5th century AD, you had the fall of the Roman empire. As the Roman empire was collapsing, it was also in a decadent period. You had people who were gorging themselves with food and vomiting in order for them to have more food. You had the spreading of illicit material, really disgusting sexual images and practices that were being promulgated in the Roman empire. Decadence, vice and an aspect of ‘do as that will’ satanic ideology was prevalent in ancient Rome at this time.

“The official religion of the United States empire is not Christianity, it is capitalism and imperialism. And its God is the dollar.”

Horrible practices, so it was not only an economic collapse of the Roman empire, it was a spiritual and moral collapse. The Roman people were having less kids. They were becoming more decadent. They were becoming more unpure in their practices.

At the same time, with the rotting and decay of the Roman empire, you had the rise of the East and Islam. In the 600s, you had the rise of the eastern civilizations of China, the original Silk Road. There is a saying that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but history rhythms’.

And in a way, what we’re seeing now is rhythms of the 400’s and 500’s. We are seeing a cycle being a new cycle, just like in that time period, but on a newer and higher level.

In this case, the Roman empire is the U.S. empire and European powers, and now the rise of Islamic civilization again led by all the heroic Muslims resisting empire in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq.

Then you have China and Russia and this is important because all three nations (Iran, Russia, China) are under Eurasian land mass. This is a major threat to Western Atlanticism, which is concerned and worried about any unity between Russia, China and Iran.

There is also a shift in a new world order moving to the East, because Russia, China and Iran have amazing, tremendous relationships with Africa, Latin America and South Asia which are historically the more underdeveloped regions of the world. Russia, China and Iran have never invaded Africa or Latin America. Their cooperation is based on a win-win cooperation, it is based on friendship, trade as equals and not forcing values, religion or money onto the people. It is brotherly growth and development. This is why the shift is happening to the East.

Q: Have countries in West Asia realized that their security cannot be guaranteed by Washington?

Most definitely. Not only because the U.S. and the West fall back on their promises, or they fail to do so, but because they do the exact opposite.

Whenever West Asian countries trust the U.S., it actually betrays them and brings violence and chaos. Instead, they’re choosing to normalize ties with Iran, Syria and Yemen. Iran is at the forefront of bringing peace and stability in the region. In Syria, the government has resisted so many coup attempts, color revolutions, attacks and wars. It  is still standing strong and defending its people who are people of all religions. The Yemeni people are now stronger than ever. Even in occupied Palestine, heroic people resisting Zionist occupation for decades, since 1948 have gotten much closer to the resistance axis because they have realized the liberation of Palestine will not happen through the U.S.

Q: How much has the U.S.-led NATO military support for Ukraine backfired?

It has tremendously backfired. Just here in the United States, people are not wanting to fund a government tens of thousands of miles away in Ukraine, when there are so many problems at home. How can you have trillions of dollars going to the other side of the planet, when there is mass homelessness, unemployment, poverty, infrastructure that is decaying.

There are so many reports out explaining that so much of the infrastructure, bridges tunnels, railroads are collapsing in the United States because they haven’t been updated in almost 100 years. Yet you have trillions of dollars going to fight “Russia”, so it’s a horrible contradiction. All the U.S. brings and promotes is chaos and nonsense wherever they go.

The people want order, the people want traditional values, civilization and peace.

This is why more and more people are beginning to support Russia. What we are seeing now within Europe and the U.S. is rising inflation, strikes, protests. There is growing disdain for funding Ukraine because there are so many problems that already exist within these empires.

​Q: How has Washington weaponized the U.S. dollar?

The official religion of the United States empire is not Christianity, it is capitalism and imperialism. And its God is the dollar. It has the world under a spell. The people who create the U.S. dollar and who run the financial institutions are able to convince the masses that these pieces of paper, these magic money squares, have some sort of value. Intrinsic value. And they do not. They have no value.

It has manipulated the system with these little pieces of papers that they can print at will, however they like, to convince the masses to buy up all the resources and build a huge military to control its system.

The U.S. dollar has been used and weaponized to control all international monetary institutions because countries around the world have been subjected to the dollar.

As long as countries are forced to adopt the dollar, then they become slaves to U.S. imperialism.
But now thankfully with de-dollarization, you have people who are beginning to see this for what it is, which is a magic trick of spell and they are no longer falling for this and this actually very good news.

On April 18, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of four leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) along with three Russian nationals for allegedly working on behalf of the Russian government and Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in a “malign influence campaign” designed to “sow discord” and “advance Russian propaganda.”
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The Department of Justice claims that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed APSP Chair Omali Yeshitela and three other APSP members (Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus C. Romain, Jr.—aka Gazi Kodzo)—to act as unregistered (and therefore illegal) agents of the Russian government and that they covertly funded and directed candidates for local office in the U.S.

According to prosecutors, one of the Russians charged, Aleksandr Ionov, operated an entity called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which recruited U.S.-based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was strong support in the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and backed efforts such as a 2015 United Nations petition to decry the “genocide of African people” in the U.S, and a reparations tour by the APSP.

​Aleksandr Ionov [Source: bbc.com]

Yeshitela allegedly traveled from Tampa to Moscow in May 2015 on an all-expenses paid trip to a conference on separatism and to meet with Ionov and other Russians in order to “communicate on future cooperation,” according to an Ionov email.

​Omali Yeshitela [Source: typworld.com]

Ionov is allegedly close with accused Russian agent Maria Butina and Yevgeny Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef,” who is under U.S. sanctions for the Kremlin’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, and promoted California’s secession by paying for posters advertising a pro-secession rally that took place in Sacramento on Valentine’s Day in 2018.
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What followed from Yeshitela’s 2015 meeting with Ionov in Moscow, according to the indictment, was covert Russian funding and support for various activities in the U.S. until the summer of 2022, including demonstrations at the California and Georgia state capitals and at an unnamed social media company in San Francisco, which had placed restrictions on posts that supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

​Jesse Nevel [Source: uhurusolidarity.org]

In August 2016, Ionov is said to have directed the APSP to publish a statement of support of Russia’s Olympic team as it faced a doping scandal. The article published in The Burning Spear, the APSP’s newspaper, was titled: “Imperialists Ban Russia from 2016 Olympic Games!” APSP says ‘let Russia play!’”

​The APSP is said to have taken around $7,000 from Russian government sources overall, although it is not clear from the indictment how Yeshitela or anyone in the APSP would have known that Ionov’s group was a front for the FSB—if that is indeed the case.

After Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, Yeshitela appeared at two web conferences with Ionov (“Live with Russia” and “Negating Colonial Lies”).
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Ionov’s group additionally allegedly provided clandestine funding to an APSP candidate who ran for St. Petersburg City Council in 2019, Eritha Akilé Cainion, who held a news conference in 2022 in which she said—accurately—that “world colonial powers have been collaborating against Russia” for more than a century.

​Eritha Akilé Cainion [Source: floridapolitics.com]

Mr. Ionov denounced his indictment on Facebook, saying that “I have never met such nonsense and deception. There are no specific names of officials, there is no evidence of funding and there are no intelligible arguments.”

He went on: “The Ukrainian crisis has driven American officials crazy! Comrades, now you see what kind of ‘democracy’ exists in the USA!”
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Grayzone Project founder Max Blumenthal tweeted after the announcement of the indictment: “this fake and racist case [against the APSP] flows from the Russiagate hysteria that convinced millions of Americans that Russia was paying dissident groups to destabilize the U.S. political system. The FBI was unable to find anything real, so it went after the African People’s Socialist Party.”

​Max Blumenthal [Source: dailynorthwestern.com]

Blumenthal appears to be correct but there is another possibility that Ionov is a double agent or asset of U.S. intelligence services, or was subjected to blackmail by them, and that Yeshitela and the APSP were lured into a trap.
​
Why otherwise would the Russians court, or prey on, an obscure African-American socialist organization in a decidedly capitalist country with little influence over anything? And support causes with no chance like California secession, or political candidates with no hope in a city council race?

As a prelude to the April 18 indictments, the FBI mounted a violent pre-dawn raid on Yeshitela’s home in the eastern part of St. Louis on July 29. Combat-clad agents equipped with automatic weapons smashed windows, broke down the door, and set off deadly military-grade flash-bang explosives (aka “concussion grenades”).
​
The FBI made a big show of the raid before the entire community, occupying a neighbor’s yard and smashing down his door as well.

Then they humiliated Yeshitela and his wife by forcing them outside at gunpoint, handcuffing them in front of their neighbors, and forcing them to wait as the FBI agents ransacked their home and removed computer equipment, APSP files, and other electronic devices.

The July 29 spectacle was not Yeshitela’s first experience being targeted by police for his political activism. Working as an organizer with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s when he went by Joe Waller, Yeshitela was arrested for tearing down a racist mural on the St. Petersburg, Florida, city hall building during a demonstration.

When Yeshitela got out of prison, he organized a Black Power organization that became a victim of the FBI’s notorious counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO).

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, the APSP was officially founded in 1972 with the goal of liberating Black people from the scourge of white supremacy, colonialism and neo-colonialism in the U.S. and around the world.

In the 1980s, the group set up successful African-American-controlled economic institutions such as the Uhuru Bakery Café in Oakland, and established the first tribunal demanding reparations for people of African descent.

The group has also built basketball courts, and established a program to train African-American women as midwives to try to help offset high infant mortality rates in the northern part of St. Louis along with other job training programs to help former Black prisoners reintegrate into society.

Akilé Anai is the APSP leader in St. Petersburg named in the indictment as having received Russian money when she ran unsuccessfully for the city council in 2019 on a reparations platform (she received 18% of the vote). Having her car seized during the FBI’s July 29 raid, she said that the APFP “can have relationships with whomever we want to,” and that the FBI’s actions were part of a “propaganda war being waged against Russia every single day throughout the news.”

Ajamu Baraka, leader of the Black Alliance for Peace, tweeted after the July raid that Black radicals were being targeted again for “not falling in line with the U.S. imperial agenda on Ukraine.”

Attorney and organizer Kamau Franklin stated: “This is a COINTELPRO operation, one meant to destroy Black organizations.”

[Source: loveancestry.com]

The COINTELPRO operation has included the issuance of sanctions on the APSP, which has had loans withheld by Regions Bank, been blocked by Facebook from doing crowd-funding, had more than $9,000 in donations frozen by GoFundMe, been blocked from processing payments by Stripe, and had $36,801 in funding revoked by the Pinellas County Commission that had previously been approved for a Black community radio station.

Noting that, during the raid, the police targeted him with a laser beam and that his wife was nearly knocked over by a drone, Yeshitela pointed to a plan in the 1970s, promoted by St. Louis city leaders such as future House Majority leader Richard Gephardt (1989-1995), that aimed to build up the southern part of St. Louis, where Whites lived, and demolish thousands of homes in the northern part of St. Louis, where the Blacks lived. The rehabilitation of decaying buildings there was considered “uneconomical.’”

Besides shooting down Black youth like Michael Brown, the city has since taken over more and more of the Blacks’ land, Yeshitela said. They destroyed whole communities by driving up taxes to levels Blacks could not afford, building such monstrosities as the National Geospatial-Intelligence agency, a military installation involved in U.S. wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.
The government today very clearly, Yeshitela noted, is trying to create fear in the White population by linking Blacks to the Russians so as to discredit their efforts to fight back. “By defining us as enemies of the state,” they could justify “seizing our communications and computers [of the APSP] and stealing forty years of our archives, which wipes out part of our history.”

Yeshitela posted a video on Facebook after the FBI’s raid in which he acknowledged meeting Ionov in 2015 in Moscow at a conference involving questions of self-determination and colonialism.

Yeshitela said that he supports Russia against Ukraine, as it was the U.S. which provoked the conflict by overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine which, since the coup in 2014, has “killed 13,000 to 14,000 Russians or Ukrainians who supported Russia in eastern Ukraine.”

According to Yeshitela, it was hypocritical to condemn him for going to Russia when Whites were never condemned for going to Israel, which occupies Arab lands in historic Palestine. The APSP “supports Russia in Ukraine just like it supports the self-determination of the Palestinians; and the people of Nicaragua when they made a revolution against U.S. puppets there, and people fighting against oppression everywhere.”

Yeshitela reminded his audience that “it was the U.S. government—and not the Russian government—which overthrew democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, which mounted a coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and which killed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as 30 members of the Black Panther Party—including Fred Hampton—in one year alone.”

The FBI’s July 29 raid, in Yeshitela’s view, was part of a renewed “ideological war by the U.S. government directed against Black people and Russia,” whose purpose was to discredit Black political activism and further U.S. support for its war by proxy against Russia in Ukraine.

Yeshitela said that many Whites across the U.S. had now “come to support the demand for Black reparations,” which has “made people in power nervous,” so they “have to attack us and try to link the leaders of our movement to Russia.”

When “home-grown American Whites—having nothing to do with Russia—tried actively to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6 and threatened to kill the Vice President, the government did not respond by raiding the culprits’ homes with flash-bang grenades and drones like they did mine.”
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Most insulting, Yeshitela said, was the insinuation that Blacks could not lead their own struggle—that somehow, they had to turn to Russia and to “wait for Russia to tell us we’re oppressed,” especially when conditions in their community were so bad. As if Black people “have no agency or will of their own.”

​

1. Johnstone wrote that the indictment “consisted of a lot of verbal gymnastics to obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting U.S. citizens for speech and political activities in the United States which happen not to align with the wishes of the U.S. government.” ↑
   

Timothea is a long-time resident of East Palestine, Ohio and a victim of the Norfolk Southern train derailment. The train transporting toxic chemicals was 150 cars-long, 20-25% longer than the average length of trains in 2017, and it was operated by three conductors, with only 4 paid sick days each– just half of the national average. Of course, the release of 100,000 gallons of chemicals into a town only 3 square miles in size might have been avoided had our so-called “socialist” leaders fought for the rights of the railroad workers to secure a more favorable contract that was already years overdue. Now, Timothea and her community are stuck with the consequences as they navigate serious health and safety concerns under a government that provides little to no support for the poor and working class.

Norfolk Southern’s greed, combined with the apathy of the state and federal governments, has exacerbated the existing failures of a system whose stated purpose is to ensure safe and healthy lives for the people of East Palestine. As PR efforts work to paint a picture of hope with bogus presidential visits and performative water-drinking, Timothea’s accounts of her lived experiences paint a radically different picture.

For example, the Ohio government’s department of health recently received emergency funding from the US Department of Health and Human Services for pop-up health clinics claiming to offer medical examinations. Timothea, who has struggled with chronic headaches since the incident, stated that the clinics provide no real diagnoses or meaningful care: “They just document that you’ve been there.”
​
Meanwhile, the residents of East Palestine who are without jobs and/or in need of food assistance must turn to Ohio’s SNAP program, which mandates employment and training sessions to obtain more than three months of food stamps. This policy is applied to children as soon as they turn 16. Although the government claims that workers with physical and/or mental disabilities may be exempt from work requirements, Timothea reported that letters of verification are hard to come by. “It’s exploitative bullshit,” she said. “A lot of these nurse practitioners think that if you’re not superbly disabled, they won’t give you one of these letters.”

Despite the criminal activity of Norfolk Southern, whose revenue was a record-breaking $3.2 billion in Q4 of 2022 alone, the residents of East Palestine are rising up, taking every opportunity to confront those in power and hold them accountable. “I am super proud of our little town, because they have not shut up. Any time you go to a meeting with the EPA or the city government, shit gets wild.”


Below is a statement from Timothea detailing her experience in East Palestine from February 3rd until today:

My name is Timothea D.  I’m here tonight to tell you that I am broke, I have been broken, and that the entire system is broken.

Back in October, I was struggling with my mental health and lost my job.  I was in bad financial straits.  I didn’t work for four months. I had to apply to Job & Family Services for benefits. I applied for Medicaid and food stamps. The process of getting food stamps is demoralizing. They make you jump through hoops just to live.

In Ohio, if you need food and you don’t have a job and you apply through Job & Family Services for help you have to perform a “work assignment.”  This is where you go to a job where they don’t pay you. 

I lost my job because I was struggling with my mental health and couldn’t go to work, and now they want me to go back to work. I’m still struggling with my mental health, and they’re not even going to pay me. 

A number of weeks after applying, I finally get my food stamps and I have to go with my family to Walmart to use them, which means that I have to spend all day with my family and my dad who is talking about how much he hates gay people for an hour because he knows that will upset me.

It’s ridiculous because my life is super stressful– It’s more stressful than it was when I was working. It took two hours at Walmart to get the groceries. I come home, put the groceries away and lay down for a minute because I’m so fatigued. Then I hear sirens and I’m like, “What’s going on?” and my sister is like, “There’s a train fire,” and I’m like, “What’s a train fire?”

​Russian FM Sergei Lavrov in Havana, Cuba, April 19, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @mfa_russia

Currently, Russia is one of Cuba's top ten trading partners, and both governments define their partnership as "strategic."

On Wednesday night, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Havana for talks that will focus on promoting political, economic, educational and cultural cooperation. Previously, he visited Brazil, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

On Thursday, he is expected to meet with President Miguel Diaz-Canel, whom the Cuban parliament yesterday re-elected for a second five-year term.

"Russia-Cuba relations are excellent since both countries give them priority. They are also based on their peoples' traditional friendship ties," the Granma newspaper commented.

High-level political dialogue "has been valuable, friendly and aimed at promoting bilateral relations in all fields of mutual interest and benefit," it added. 

Currently, Russia is one of Cuba's top ten trading partners, and both governments define their partnership as "strategic."

In 2022, Diaz-Canel traveled to Russia to hold a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, with whom he analyzed the development prospects of the Russian-Cuban strategic association.

In recent months, the Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the Cuba-Russia Business Council President Titov Yurievich, and Rosneft Director Igor Sechin have traveled to this Caribbean country.

On his Latin America tour, Lavrov has met with presidents Lula da Silva (Brazil), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), and Nicolas Maduro (Venezuela).
​
During his stay in Caracas, he also spoke with Saint Vincent & the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves and the Bolivian Foreign Affairs Minister Rogelio Mayta.

This article was republished from teleSUR.

A study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 and older, making it the fourth leading cause of mortality in the country that year, behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

“Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes,” said David Brady, professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and lead author of the study.

“Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in 2019,” Brady continued. “And yet, homicide, firearms, and suicide get vastly more attention.”

The new analysis, co-authored by Ulrich Kohler of the University of Potsdam in Germany and Hui Zheng of the Ohio State University alongside Brady, stressed that the US “perennially has a far higher poverty rate than peer-rich democracies,” which “presents an enormous challenge to population health given that considerable research demonstrates that being in poverty is bad for one’s health.”

​The researchers analyzed US citizens’ income data from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and death data from household surveys from the Cross-National Equivalent File. They then cross-checked the deaths using a database kept by the US National Center for Health Statistics.

Poverty, which the study defined as making less than half of the median US income, was “associated with greater mortality than many far more visible causes in 2019—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as many deaths as drug overdose.”

“Because the US consistently has high poverty rates, these estimates can contribute to understanding why the US has comparatively lower life expectancy,” the researchers reported.

The researchers argued that their results indicate that “poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the US,” which has seen life expectancy decline since 2015 and fall sharply in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
​
“The mortality associated with poverty is also associated with enormous economic costs,” they continued. “Therefore, benefit-cost calculations of poverty-reducing social policies should incorporate the benefits of lower mortality. Moreover, poverty likely aggravated the mortality impact of COVID-19, which occurred after our analyses ended in 2019. Therefore, one limitation of this study is that our estimates may be conservative about the number of deaths associated with poverty.”

​The onset of the pandemic in 2020 brought about a sharp increase in poverty in the United States as millions of people fell ill, were fired from their jobs, and lost health insurance.

However, government relief initiatives enacted in response to the economic and public health crisis, from stimulus checks to increased unemployment benefits to enhanced nutritional assistance, ultimately led to a significant drop in poverty, reinforcing the case that “poverty is a policy choice.”

Nevertheless, many of those poverty-reducing aid programs have since lapsed or been terminated, threatening to reverse any recent progress.

Poverty should get more attention from policymakers, said Brady, director of University of California Riverside’s Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty.

“If we had less poverty, there’d be a lot better health and well-being, people could work more, and they could be more productive,” Brady said. “All of those are benefits of investing in people through social policies.”

(Misión Verdad) with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune

On Dec. 2, 2022, the international working-class movement lost an organizing and literary giant, Gary Graham Hicks.

Comrades and friends gathered at the Marxist Library in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 25, for a memorial to remember the diverse contributions of a beloved poet, theorist, and internationalist.

We write this tribute so that future generations can draw from the deep well of Gary’s knowledge, verse, sharp-witted humor, and struggles.

The Recruiter

Black Panther Party member Gerald Smith, who hosted the tribute in Oakland, asked “Who will replace Gary Hicks?” Smith reminisced about the many back-and-forths over the decades about the question of Black America, about the struggle for Black self-determination.

Black liberation and class struggle were the two legs Gary walked on. Who else could go into Newark armed with the Black Panther newspaper and interrupt Ron Karenga to remind him that “Marx was a Black man”?
​
Smith went on to talk about the Panthers’ commitment to “pass it on” to the up-and-coming generations. One organization even experimented with the idea of only allowing members a vote if they attempted to bring young people to events.

He encouraged all of us who knew him to follow George Jackson’s immortal words: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Through it all, Gary worked to build the Communist Party.

​The Mentor

Gary was our living encyclopedia. If he was around, young comrades were sure to have a notebook close by. His knowledge of German, Chinese, Cuban, Yiddishland, South African, and Irish history—and any global struggle—was seemingly boundless. We anticipated the next book recommendation Gary might pick off the shelves of his mind’s library. When I visited the international working class’s ancestral grounds at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, it was like he was there with me.

Friday nights were a cause for celebration. Once, there was a new Malcolm biography that had dropped. And there we were at 3 AM, coast to coast, critically picking apart every page by Professor Marable or Les Payne.

On another occasion, a Saturday night, Gary was plotting. He called me up well past midnight: “Hey how are we going to get this lousy, philistine scoundrel of a social democrat to join the p’aty?” (Remember he is from Roxbury and I am from Brockton.)

Then, on a Sunday night, a group of us were scheduled to finish the final chapter of Black Reconstruction. Every word rose to the occasion. It felt like the 7th game of a playoff series between the Sox and the Yankees.

I teased Gary that he got younger every day because he never stopped. The paratransit in San Francisco, a socialist gain fought and won by the people, brought him everywhere and anywhere around town. And when he wasn’t here, we knew he was on a train headed somewhere—to a Progressive Lawyers Guild conference in California, a folk music event in Oregon, a poetry reading in Cambridge, or the Left Forum in New York City.

When I called him on the phone, I always anticipated which of the 50 states he might be in this time—flipping off every state trooper as he went. The student of Lenin that he was, I jested that this was his sealed train.

In 2020, he introduced me to give a talk at the Marxist Library entitled “Capitalism + Dope = Genocide,” a Panther formulation—and how it was relevant five decades later. Boy was I proud; the student had become the teacher.

A brilliant wordsmith, a magical story teller, and a perennial ballbreaker, Gary gravitated gracefully between the gravest and most humorous of topics. Whenever he was around his comrades, his eyes lit up and he locked in on the most pressing international topics of the day.

He often answered the phone by saying “This is Murphy’s Poolhall. Eight Ball speaking.” Always principled, he put many backwa’d workers in their place if they were guilty of any act of racism or sexism. He could hug you, but if he had to, he could stand you down, too. He knew the primary contradiction that existed and who the real enemy was but was never shy to check any of us, “on our bullshit.”

One young communist, Drew King, picked up the torch and recited the following tribute on March 25th:
Gary Hicks 

Immortal thinker  
Fearless philosopher 
History’s restless wanderer 
Proud Black Bolshevik 
Lenin’s native son 
Uncle Ho of Roxbury 
Southie’s resident Marxist-Leninist 
Berkeley’s Berlin Wall that will never fall 
Intellectual giant 
Gary, 
Your mind was my portal through history 
For 17 years, I traversed the infinite shelves of your mind’s cosmic library 
As you showed me the ways of the force 
You took me on tours through antiquity, time and space 
All of pharaoh’s armies never stood a chance against your cunning wit 
You teach us that the struggle for people’s power is the struggle for memory and against forgetting 
And since I first asked you what time it was 17 years ago 
You slowly taught me to realize that it is the same time that it was when those two young men in London put out that clarion call for the workers of the world to unite, 175 years ago  
I swear on my soul, Gary, they will unite after all and we will win 

The Revolutionary

Gary was a former political prisoner. In March 1966, just before his 20th birthday, the Roxbury native joined fellow war resisters in burning his draft card on the steps of a Boston courthouse in opposition to the U.S. war in Indochina. These pioneers, shoulder to shoulder with Muhammed Ali, were some of the first in the movement that soon shook the country as thousands followed.

On that day, the group was beaten up by a crowd of mostly high school students from South Boston. Still, he never expressed any personal bitterness towards workers robbed from our ranks by fascism.

Because of his resistance to the genocidal war of aggression against Vietnam, the U.S. government sentenced him to three years in Lewisville penitentiary. There were many chapters and addendums to these stories that could only be understood as poetic license.

But they could never cage you, Gary.

Born Again Red
Fundamental Marx
He wrote it. 
And I read it.
And that settles it. 

When he got out, Gary was determined to pursue higher education, which he did at Penn State, Brown University, and Antioch College, ultimately receiving his Master’s Degree from UMass, Boston in “American Studies.”

He spent the rest of his life devoted to the fight for equality and for the interests of the international working class. The coup in Chile in ’73, the Christmas bombing of Panama, the continuation of Communist leadership in China, Gary was on it. From any hospital or nursing home bed, he was getting on the phone to check in with his political fellow travelers.

Gary was in the streets putting his training to good use. He was involved in the housing rights movement, beginning in Boston with the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants, in which he played a key organizing role. Tenants of the last place he lived—Redwood Gardens in Berkeley—benefited from Gary’s knowledge and experience standing up for their rights. No human suffering or triumph was foreign to him.

The Scholar

If there was a new book out by a leftist author, Gary raced to pick it up. There was nothing he enjoyed more than a good crisp read. He led and participated in many reading groups. Among other classics, we read The Seventh Cross together. Line by line, page by page, he broke down the ins and outs of resistance to the Nazis.

He read entire books out loud with study groups, no matter how big or small. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson were but a few of his ideological forefathers and foremothers.

Students of the movement visited him in the hospital to keep study groups going. When he called, we gathered around the phone. He approached life with a love for it. As his comrade Juan Lopez remembers, he never sought fame or accolades.

A true dialectician. A revolutionary optimist who found the silver lining everywhere. A wit sharp like a whip with prose, rhythmic like Amiri Baraka’s Blues-words. A biting sense of humor and a dead seriousness that reminded you no matter what personal challenges you always keep fighting.

Comrades remembered: “You can’t talk about Gary without talking about books. His own memorial program was printed on a red bookmark. He was a living example for young communists of Lenin’s quote, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

The Poet

His poetry—especially his books, Itching for Combat and A Pen is Like a Piece, You Pick it Up, You Use It—reflected what he was thinking and feeling about political struggles.

Lincoln Bergman, Gary’s close friend from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, remembered that despite any personal health issues, Gary’s “pan-socio political brilliance was undimmed.”

At the memorial, Bergman shared “45 Years Later,” one of Gary’s poems that went:

Look at these kids 
on tanks of victory 
My Peeps 
Children of Uncle Ho
My hero
Today I am 74
The kids on the tanks
Roughly my age
The kids who I
Inmate 33602-133
Prayed for victory
Every day of my imprisonment
Yes
They won
And we won, too.

The final goodbyes came in the form of affirmations of a radiant future. You brought us together, Gary. We laughed. We cried. We told stories. We listened to poetry. Just as you would have wanted it.

Farewell, kindred spirit. Farewell, comrade. These tears are made of knives and machetes. Aimee Cesaire’s redemption. Fanon’s baptism. Algeria’s boomerang. Vietnamese tanks roll forward. We will end as Gary lived, poetically, with the words of Langston Hughes:
​
I loved my friend. 
He went away from me. 
There’s nothing more to say. 
The poem ends, 
Soft as it began--
I loved my friend.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the tragic second United Nations secretary general, once said the organization “was created not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.”
​
Of course, this depends very much on what kind of hell you had in mind.

The fallout from Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps must have dominated Hammarskjöld’s world during his tenure from 1953 until his sad death in a plane crash in 1961. So must have the shadow of possible nuclear annihilation arising from the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

What he may have been able to say, even back then, is that the U.S. saw itself as the predominant world power, prepared to unleash its own version of hell whenever and however it wanted.

Hammarskjöld must have known that the UN was completely powerless to reign in the U.S. and it could, and usually did, do pretty much anything that it wanted on the world stage.

The UN is, and has been for some time, a pretty meaningless institution that merely acts as a useful idiot when the White House decides it has some role to perform in protecting U.S. interests.

The proxy war being conducted by the U.S. against Russia in Ukraine and the ramping up of tensions against China with no meaningful sign of life from the UN to stop what’s happening is a clear example.

The UN, based in the belly of the beast itself in New York, is a body devoid of any worthwhile criticism of the U.S.

The fact that for the last 30 consecutive years, the vast majority of countries at the UN General Assembly have demanded the lifting of the illegal embargo by the U.S. on Cuba is completely ignored. But every country is expected by the U.S. to follow its instruction to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

In 2003 Colin Powell told the UN Security Council, supposedly the organization’s key body, that the U.S. had evidence that Iraq had clear weapons of mass destruction and this was a justification for going to war.

Of course, President George W. Bush was going to invade Iraq anyway but the White House clearly felt it was important to send their top diplomat to the UN to tell what everyone in their administration knew to be a lie to get international support for their misadventure.

Even the U.S. Congress found that the administration had lied but at the UN there has been a deafening silence about any sanction against the U.S. for lying to the world so it could kill hundreds of thousands of people in the name of regime change.

While China and Brazil appear to be making efforts to bring about peace in Ukraine, there are no meaningful peace moves from the UN.

It took the Chinese to bring Saudi Arabia and Iran together to broker a deal that looks as though it might bring about peace in the nearly nine-year-old conflict in Yemen. The UN failed.

Just this week the U.S. tried unconvincingly to insist that after originally bringing the Saudis and the Iranians together the Chinese had done nothing to bring about peace in Yemen.

That, apparently, was done by a junior official from the U.S. State Department making a phone call to the Saudis.

One can only presume that the UN knows that the U.S. and the military-industrial complex it administers are deeply woven into both conflicts, making any attempt to go against its will futile.

There seems little chance that the US will ever have to face the music even when its wrongdoing is universally acknowledged.

When, in 2010, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks demonstrated clear breaches of international law through leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, there was never the remotest chance that the U.S. would be held to account.

For the U.S., this was in fact a signal to go after Manning and Assange rather than be held accountable.
Its diplomats even had the gall to walk out of a UN meeting recently when a Russian representative, accused of war and human rights violations alongside President Vladimir Putin, began to speak.

The UN is reduced to being a mere conference organizer on important issues such as the climate emergency, water, and a range of other issues.

The fact that these conferences take place is important. But there are rarely real outcomes that make any difference from the marathon “negotiation” sessions that are usually highlighted from these conferences.

When observers believe that there are real outcomes, the reality is that the UN has no teeth or desire to hold the most difficult nations, such as the US, to account for anything they choose to do or not do as a result of the conference.

I am not arguing that bringing all the nations of the world together under one roof to debate the challenges facing the planet is not important. Far from it—it is vital. But it is only important if the organization has the teeth to hold everyone equally to account.

This has led countries of the Global South to look for new ways to do business.

Within the UN system, for example, the African Union is demanding permanent representation on the Security Council. It will likely achieve that as the scramble for influence over the still abundant natural resources of the continent continues.

But many countries of the Global South are now seeing much more value in creating structures that take their interests into account—not just as pawns of the U.S.

The BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is attracting major interest from other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The BRICS nations are also set to trade among themselves in their own currencies as a prelude to developing their own common currency for the Global South. This will smash the dominance of the dollar over the vast majority of the world’s population.

The message for the UN is that you can be relevant to the Global South or you can sit in your rocking chair smoking your pipe, chatting about the good old days with the U.S. while large swathes of the global population go about their business to make a real difference to their people.

​When we talked about the differences between the experiences at the end of the first year of the UP and the first year of Chile’s current President Gabriel Boric’s progressive government, Lawner pointed out that, in Chile “we have effectively been fed for 50 years the neoliberal doctrine of a formation contradictory to what you require in a progressive government. Imperceptibly, generations were formed that are, in my opinion, corrupted by the model. It is incomprehensible to them any other way.”
​
The current president of Chile’s Senate is Juan Antonio Coloma, a man of the extreme right. “When the 50th anniversary of the coup comes this September,” Lawner told me, “Coloma will be the country’s second most important political official.” Fascism’s rise, he said, is a global phenomenon, not only taking place in Chile. But Lawner does not despair. “You cannot determine when there is a spark that lights the fire again, but there is no doubt that it is going to happen.”