It was late April 1952 and the Korean War was nearing its second anniversary with no end in sight. In Canada, newspapers and the Canadian government erupted in fury when it was reported that the Canadian Peace Congress’ chairman implied that Canada may have supplied infected insects to U.S. forces, who were accused of bombing the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) and China with bacteriological or “germ” weapons.

China and the DPRK (also referred to as North Korea) accused the United States, under the umbrella of United Nations intervention, of using fleas, flies and other insects that had been deliberately infected with plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases, to deliver deadly pathogens to Communist troops and civilians.

The charges have long been considered a controversy with perhaps no definitive solution. In 2010, secret Korean War CIA communications intelligence reports were declassified, which described radio intercepts of Chinese and DPRK military units reacting to the biowarfare attacks. These reports have established that a preponderance of the evidence supports the fact the U.S. did engage in biological warfare during the Korean War.

The story regarding possible Canadian involvement in the germ war campaign was broken in a British United Press (BUP) dispatch on 14 April 1952. BUP reported that James G. Endicott, “chairman of the communist-backed Canadian Peace Congress,” claimed he had “‘fully proved’ Communist charges that the Allies are using germ warfare and believes the bacteria may have been produced in Canada.”

The Canadian Press news agency carried a rather larger account the next day. As published on page one of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, a Moscow radio broadcast monitored in London said Endicott, who had been speaking at a press conference in Mukden (Shenyang), China, had “speculated on the possibility that some of the ‘infected insects’ allegedly dropped in northeast China were bred in Canada.”
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Endicott was also quoted “as saying Canada has organizations producing bacteriological weapons for the U.S., including a ‘huge plant’ in Alberta.”

​The CPC chairman, the Reverend Dr. James G. Endicott, was not an unknown figure, nor was he politically naive. He was a famous churchman who spent over two decades as a missionary in China, and was a leader of Canada’s United Christian Church. Endicott was well-known inside Ottawa’s government hallways. In the 1940s he had been an adviser to Soong Mei-ling, aka Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, and China’s New Life Movement; a correspondent of government insider Lester Pearson; and during the final years of World War II, a secret OSS agent, code-name “Hialeah.”

Endicott had tried to convince Chiang Kai-Shek, unsuccessfully, of the importance of implementing land reform. Reporting back to the OSS on Chinese leaders in both the Kuomintang and Communist Party, Endicott found himself more and more drawn to the sincerity and popularity of the Communists, and he came to feel they offered the best hope for the Chinese people.

Endicott and the CPC had incurred the disfavor of many Canadian politicians by opposing the Korean War, and speaking out against the atrocities being committed by U.S. and allied forces there. Canada was part of the United Nations forces involved in the war.

Even before the Korean War, Endicott’s opposition to increasing Cold War government repression had attracted attention. In January 1949, multiple speaking engagements for Endicott in Vancouver were cancelled for overt political reasons.

At a September 1949 “Partisans of Peace” conference in Mexico City, he charged the United States “with organizing in Canada a wide network of spies who are watching the life of the Canadian population.” There followed calls in the press to arrest him as a "traitor to the Motherland."  The notoriety led to Endicott being banned along with other peace activists from entering the United States.
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However, Endicott’s charges about “spies” were not far off. Testimony in the U.S. Congress in January 1950 revealed the RCMP had been keeping files on thousands of “subversives,” which the U.S. used to impede entry into the United States, though Canadian officials denied it. With the controversy over Endicott’s purported statements about Canada’s involvement in the U.S. germ war in China and Korea, Canadian Justice Minister Stuart Gerson publicly told the House of Commons that “’such men’ as Canada’s Dr. James Endicott are kept under constant surveillance by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

​With Endicott’s latest charges about possible Canadian involvement in the “germ war,” there was renewed agitation in the press and in Parliament to charge the Canadian Peace Congress leader with treason.

External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson told the press that the Communists’ charges of a U.S. germ war were a “clumsy hoax.” Anyone who would believe such stories were no better, Pearson averred, than “bait on a Red hook”! Pearson indicated the government was investigating if Endicott had broken any laws.

In the end, Endicott was not charged with anything. It may have been that Canada was not interested in a trial, where secrets surrounding Canada’s biological weapons program might be exposed. As it was, O.M. Solandt, chief of the Defence Research Board (DRB), which had responsibility for Canada’s biological warfare program, had already gone on the record in October 1950 that Canada’s military was doing far-flung research on biological warfare, including “defence” against insects. According to Solandt, a portion of Canada’s biological research that was conducted at Fort Churchill was “so secret… it can’t be discussed.”

​The isolated site was also the location of the Canadian Winter Warfare School. According to a 2014 article about the history of Fort Churchill, during or just after World War Two, the U.S. Army Air Force built a military base nearby capable of landing large B-52 bombers.

In author Nicholson Baker’s 2020 book about the U.S. biological warfare program, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, Baker reported that Churchill was the site of “Canada’s Defence Research Northern Laboratory, which did cold-weather weapons testing.” The area had been used by Chemical Corps researchers since 1946 and was the site of a U.S. test release of radioactive mosquitoes in 1949. That same year, suspicions fell upon the site after a number of Inuit succumbed to a mysterious illness. (See Baker, pp. 214-215.)

​Quite famously, the first reports of U.S. germ warfare in 1952 came during the dead of the Korean and Manchurian winter. Critics pointed to pictures the Communists released of insects wiggling on mounds of snow. They made much of the fact that it seemed absurd to think insects could be used as weapons in such a harsh climate.

Was the secret work at Fort Churchill related to experiments with insect cold-hardiness or perhaps the breeding of more cold resistant insects and bacteria to be used in germ warfare during the Korean War? It seems likely, especially when one takes into account Canadian (and U.S.?) interest in exploring possible BW insect vectors existing in more northerly latitudes, as discussed more fully below.

Entomology laboratories in Canada and elsewhere already routinely used selective breeding or artificial selection to produce insecticide-resistant insects. The cold hardiness characteristics of insects were also extensively studied. Canadian military researchers were already using selective breeding to increase the virulence of bacterial pathogens.

Biological warfare researchers in the West, as well as in Japan, were interested in how their bioweapons would work in wintry conditions. This was important as from the standpoint of these countries, the Soviet Union, with its vast tracts of frigid countryside, was thought of as their most likely target.

Shiro Ishii, the leader of Unit 731, Japan’s World War Two biological warfare unit, was, according to General MacArthur’s office in postwar Tokyo, an expert on “the use of BW in cold climates.” Ishii’s specialty was use of insect vectors in biological bombs. This specialty was used by MacArthur and scientists from the U.S. Army Chemical Corps at Camp Detrick, to help validate the usefulness of Ishii and his associates to military and political leaders back in Washington D.C. The latter were considering a bargain to provide amnesty for war crimes to Japanese bio-researchers, in trade for what they had discovered in their very active germ warfare program.

Along similar lines, a U.S. Chemical Corps report on its research and development division in autumn 1951 specifically mentioned work on “cold weather agents.” Hence, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Canada’s own scientists assisting with this issue.

Supplying infected insects

In his book, Six-Legged Insects: Using Insects as Weapons of War, entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood wrote about the collaboration between Canada’s biological warfare researchers and their U.S. compatriots at Camp Detrick. “Although Camp Detrick's upper echelon was partial to airborne dissemination of pathogens, the Canadians' progress with rearing and disseminating insect vectors could not be dismissed. Entomologists from the two countries collaborated on a series of field experiments ranging from the banal to the bizarre,” Lockwood wrote. (Lockwood, Kindle Edition, Location 2778.)

For his part, faced with strong public criticism from Canadian politicians and editorial writers, not to mention possible prosecution, Dr. Endicott denied having accused Canada of any cooperation with the United States in biological warfare attacks against China or the DPRK. But, Endicott reiterated his belief in the veracity of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s charges regarding U.S. use of biological weapons. His conviction stemmed from a recent trip to northeast China, where he visited alleged germ war attack sites, and interviewed Chinese scientists, as well as peasant witnesses to the infected insects and feather bomb attacks.

But were the charges of Canada supplying the U.S. with infected insects really false? After the Korean War armistice, an October 1955 article in the Calgary Herald profiled the Canadian military’s Suffield Experimental Station in Alberta. “A vast family of insects are reared at Suffield for use in experiments,” the article stated.

Both declassified records and oral histories have been used in recent years to document the fact that Canada was in league with the United States biological warfare program. Endicott, knowing he was walking on thin legal ice – the Canadian government had recently passed a draconian law against anyone speaking out against allied forces fighting in the Korean War – may have pulled his punches to stay out of prison.

The new law stated that a Canadian citizen could be prosecuted for “assisting, while in or out of Canada, any enemy at war with Canada or any armed forces against whom Canadian forces are engaged in hostilities whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are [fighting].”

Endicott, and the press interviewing him in Mukden, had hit a very sensitive topic. Canada had secretly provided major resources for use by the U.S. and British biological warfare programs. As recently as August 1945, Canada had been a secret supplier of infected insects to U.S. scientists exploring their use in offensive bioweapons. Even more, Canada had developed a special expertise in use of insect vectors to deliver infectious agents in warfare, an expertise that was unique to the field. Only Japan’s infamous Unit 731 had explored use of insects to deliver plague, encephalitis, cholera and other diseases to the degree that Canada had.

Today, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), a branch of the Department of National Defence and successor to the DRB, still operates its vast Suffield Research Centre (SRC) in Alberta. In 2003 the U.S. national security journal, Homeland Defense Journal, called the SRC “one of the most effective and innovative research and training centers on chemical and biological warfare in the Western world.”

According to Canada’s 2022 submission to the UN Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) review conference regarding “confidence building measures” relevant to adherence to the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention, Canada’s Biological Defence Program at DRDC spent “approximately $3,365,269 CAD.” Another $4 million was spent on contracts with “external entities” in industry and universities.

Canada’s BWC document states, “No offensive [BW] studies of any kind are permitted by the Government of Canada.” But it notes that military research does continue on “the mode of action and toxicity of toxins and the mode of action and infectivity of biological agents,” supposedly exclusively for defensive purposes. But the Canadian government has made such claims historically before, and has been proven to have lied.

This article will look at:

Canada’s biological warfare program,

How it developed in conjunction with both the U.S. and the United Kingdom’s own BW programs,

Whether or not Canada supplied the U.S. with insects for use in the latter’s large biological weapons field test program and later full-scale germ warfare operations during the final eighteen months of the Korean War.

Reports from Japan, Fear of Germany

At the very onset of World War Two, some Canadian scientists were advocating for use of biological weaponry. Everitt G.D. Murray, a Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology at McGill University, wrote to famous Canadian scientist Sir Frederick Banting that he favored the use of insects to distribute disease organisms. Banting had won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for his co-discovery of insulin, and now he was consulting with the National Research Council on the feasibility of bacteriological warfare.

Scientists and military officials in Canada were concerned that Italy and Germany would use chemical weapons in the new, then-unfolding world war, as they had, along with Canada and its allies, in World War One. This fear extended to the use of “germ” weapons as well, following reports of Germany’s use of anthrax and glanders in World War One.

Murray was prescient in advocating for the use of insects to deliver a pathogenic payload. According to the account described in John Bryden’s 1989 book, Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret War, 1937-1947, Murray told Banting that lice, fleas, mosquitos and ticks could deliver disease to the enemy. He also foretold the use of rats infected with plague that could be dumped on the enemy as well.

In Bryden’s account, Murray suggested both insects and rats could be dropped using “break-apart containers dropped from aircraft or contaminated letters sent through the mail” (pg. 55). Perhaps not coincidentally, much later, during the Korean War, international investigators would determine (see report pg. 27) that the U.S. dropped plague-infected voles (a small field rodent) on the Manchurian village of Kan-Nan in April 1952 using self-destructive containers.

It’s not clear how early Murray was reading reports of Japan’s own biological warfare attacks on China, which utilized a number of specially designed biological bombs, including fragile glass or porcelain bombs, as well as some with parachutes similar to what Murray described. The extent of Japan’s deadly research on human subjects, including thousands of fatal experiments, was not known to U.S. scientists (and likely Canadian and British scientists as well) until a few years after the war.

But as Bryden’s research confirmed, by 1942 Murray’s work was referencing Japan’s Unit 731 research, as he followed reports of Japan’s use of fleas and other materials carrying bubonic plague.

Indeed in a Boston Globe article on 27 February 1942, journalist Fletcher Pratt wrote, “In December, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes appeared over Chinjua, Chin and Chiu, in Chekiang Province... trailing behind them what appeared to be white fumes... [which] proved to be living fleas, infected with cultures of bubonic [sic] and typhus, and fish eggs with the same."

At the same time, Canadian researchers working for Canada’s top secret M-1000 Committee were being recruited to bring Canada’s extensive field testing apparatus and expertise for the purpose of assisting England in its crash program to develop a biological bomb using anthrax as agent fill. The U.S. would be brought on board as well, and a pilot plant to produce anthrax was set up at the U.S. biological warfare research facility at Camp Detrick, Maryland. Work on a more commercial plant began in Vigo, Indiana, but didn’t reach full status because the war ended before it could become operational.

The insect laboratory

The anthrax project didn’t mean the insect vector idea was abandoned, however. In August 1942, prominent bacteriologist and medical researcher at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario), Professor Guilford Reed asked Murray, now chief of the M-1000 Committee, to hire an entomologist. Reed wanted to establish a flea breeding colony at his biological lab at Queen’s, with the intention of developing a way to combine plague bacteria with flea-borne typhus as an offensive weapon. (See Bryden, pg. 111.)

Reed’s insect laboratory in Kingston was, as Bryden put it, “a Canadian innovation,” where there was a “special media” unit for infecting insects with deadly pathogens. During these dark days of world war, Reed concentrated on experiments with house flies, fruit flies, fleas and ticks. There were special projects to produce toxins from botulinum and gas gangrene bacteria, as well as experiments to increase the virulence of various types of germs via use of selective breeding. (Critics of today’s “gain-of-function” biological experiments may be surprised to know that attempts to produce more deadly pathogens in the laboratory go back many decades.)

According to Bryden, up until 1944, Canada alone of the Western allies was working on insect vector biological weapons. Reed had farmed out the breeding of the insects to Dominion Parasite Laboratory in Belleville, Ontario (Dominion was a site that researched “biological control” of insects). The bugs were then fed and infected with bacteria at Reed’s lab in Kingston, and further shipped to the Suffield experimental proving grounds in Alberta.

Opened in 1941, the Suffield complex extended over 2600 square kilometers (1000 square miles). This was likely the “huge plant” in Alberta Endicott was referring to in his April 1952 Mukden press conference.
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In November 1944, Reed met with officials from the U.S. Chemical Corps’ Special Projects Division (SPD). The Chemical Corps, a division of the U.S. Army, had been given responsibility for the development of the U.S. biological weapons program. In doing so, it worked closely with the U.S. Air Force, including its Air Materiel and Strategic Air commands, the Navy, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Reed told SPD officials there had been good results with biological warfare field trials using houseflies at the Suffield Experimental Station. But experiments with fruit flies had proven disappointing. He suggested some experiments be moved to the U.S. biological weapons proving ground at Horn Island, off the coast of Mississippi. The U.S. researchers agreed, and so Canada joined Camp Detrick’s Project ONE – “ONE” being a strained acronym for the Army’s “Joint Insect Vector Project,” utilizing the second letter from each word.

The Horn Island tests were supervised by the U.S. Navy. The Canadians supplied the flies. Project ONE tests included the examination of insects native to Polynesia, and tested strains of salmonella, shigella, and tularemia, as well as botulinus toxin. The tests ran well into 1945. (See Bryden, pg. 214.)

The last of the major World War Two era field tests at Suffield, in the weeks just before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, concerned transmission of disease to food from flies released from 500 lb. cluster bombs. It’s not known what the results were. But this last experiment puts the lie to claims that Canada was not involved in offensive biological weapons research, and demonstrates its manifest interest in the development of munitions based on release of infected insects.
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“Considerable study has, of course, been made”

An excellent snapshot of the state of Canada’s study of use of insect vectors for biological warfare can be discerned from an August 4, 1949 “Secret and Personal” report from the Defence Research Board’s Scientific Intelligence Division (SID). Signed by SID’s director, A.J.G. Langley, the report looked at “Possible use of insects as BW vectors,” particularly use of flies, fleas, lice and ticks.

​The document clearly shows that in the immediate years post-WW2, the plans surrounding use of BW was aimed primarily at the Soviet Union. Hence, the report’s focus on areas north of latitude 45º North.

The beginning of the Langley report clearly shows that work on living BW vectors, including insects and “rodents, etc.” had already been long underway.

“Considerable study has, of course, been made,” the report begins, “in the dissemination of BW agents via insects, rodents, etc. in special localities, i.e. the propagation of lice-borne typhus fever, flea-borne bubonic plague, tick-borne encephalitis, etc., but it appears that further studies of such possibilities are required….”

Langley described recent activities by Canada’s Bacteriological Warfare Research Panel:

At the 5th meeting of the B.W. Research Panel held on 20th January, 1949, Dr. Reed raised the point that the major effort on B.W. dissemination is on air-borne infections and that other methods should not be ignored. He referred to work on ground contamination, the use of containated fly baits, and the use of flies as vectors. Dr. [Charles A.] Mitchell said it would be valuable to have information on the insect pests found in the larger populated areas of likely enemy countries, with a view to testing them as possible carriers. The Secretary of the B.W. Research Panel, wrote to the Entomological Research Panel for the above information.

Reed’s own work on insects and biological warfare has already been described above. Charles A. Mitchell was chief of the Department of Agriculture’s Animal Diseases Research Institute in Hull, Quebec. He was also a member of the DRB’s Bacteriological Warfare Research Panel.

The Langley report showed that there was ongoing cooperation on BW matters between the BW Research Panel, the Entomological Research Panel, and three other divisions with the Defence Research Board, namely the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence (DSI), the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB), and Arctic Research.

​The intelligence work on determining insect vectors of interest were sometimes carried out by covert means. One example was masking exploration of possible Soviet and East European (“satellite”) BW-associated entomological research behind exchanges of interest with other scientists on butterfly and moth distribution (Lepidoptera).

The report ended with a terse item re the “possibility of the existing more or less innoxious biting flies being used as B.W. vectors.” The idea that Canada had no interest in using insects as vectors of biological warfare had no basis in actual fact.

The Tripartite Agreement and the Korean War Years

As the late Canadian historian Donald Avery described in his 2013 book, Pathogens for War: Biological Weapons, Canadian Life Scientists, and North American Biodefence (University of Toronto Press), after the drawdown in military spending in the immediate aftermath of the end of World War Two, by 1947, Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom had resumed their wartime research collaboration on biological warfare.

A year earlier, Canada’s chemical and biological warfare programs were organized under the newly baptized Defence Research Board. Dr. Omond Solandt, who was Superintendent of Operational Research for the British Army during the war, was put in charge.

In August 1946, the Canadian, British, and American Tripartite Military Agreement on Chemical and Biological Warfare was formalized, and the first of what would be annual meetings between the three countries began the next year. Back in the United States, also in August 1946, the World War Two era U.S. Chemical Warfare Service was reorganized as the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.

As historian Albert J. Mauroni described it in “America's Struggle with Chemical-biological Warfare”, “The annual ABC (America-Britain-Canada) conferences combined British expertise, American resources, and Canadian testing grounds” (pg. 20).

Avery, now deceased, was one of the few historians to write in detail about this history, much of the documentation for which still remains classified to this day. He described in Pathogens for War how in summer 1947, Kingston’s Reed was asked to prepare a report “on major trends in offensive BW development” (e-page 1948).

In 1949, Reed undertook a study on “Possible Use of Insects as BW Vectors — Scientific Intelligence Aspects.” The project had the backing of DRB’s Bacteriological Warfare Research Panel. While supposedly advancing public health and insect abatement issues, the work also was “for [the] purpose of B.W. attack in areas outside Canada having an insect infestation similar to certain Canadian areas.” (Avery, e-page 1951). Reed hoped the Tripartite team would work together gathering a comprehensive list of insect vectors. Avery states this didn’t happen, but one wonders if that changed over the next few years.

According to Avery, “The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 produced intensified interest in Canada’s biological warfare program. As a result, the Defence Research Board once again asked Guilford Reed to provide an update of the major scientific and technology developments that had occurred in the biowarfare field, based on open and classified sources.” (Avery, e-page 1945-1946).

Reed complied. The Tripartite group had made decent progress and conducted field trials – presumably at Suffield – on anthrax, Brucella suis, Francisella tularensis, Yersinia pestis and botulinum toxin. According to Avery, “DRB had not yet developed an effective BW dispersal system, although several options had been explored…” including bombs, sprays, and insect vectors. “Reasonable accurate estimates [had] been made of the rate at which house and fruit flies distribute bacteria of the enteric and dysentery group of bacteria from contaminated baits to human or animal foods.” (Avery, e-page 1948-1949).

The bait idea was of unique Canadian origin. The breeding and storage of insects in the amounts needed for use in insect-vector munitions was a problem. Reed and his associates had hit upon the idea of utilizing native insect populations, infecting them by widespread use of infected baits dropped in the area under BW attack.

From an operational standpoint, Reed told the DRB, there were still issues in vaccine supply – an essential aspect of operational use of biological weapons – as well as “problems in surveillance and detection.”

Working with both U.S. and British scientists, Canadian BW research extended far beyond insect vectors. Ft. Detrick researchers used the DRB’s Grosse-Île facility for research on anti-animal pathogens because facilities to work with “exotic and dangerous animal pathogens… were not available in the United States.” The pathogens included “African Swine Fever, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, Newcastle dicers, fowl plague, hog cholera, rabies, and Rift Valley Fever.” (Avery, e-page 1952)

The large Suffield Experimental Station in Alberta had by this point “assumed a major role in carrying out biological weapons trials for American and British military planners” (Avery, e-page 1953). Biological field tests were conducted on pathogens such as botulinum toxin [code name X], Francisella tularensis, and Brucella suis, the latter a particular favorite of the U.S. Chemical Corps because its high infectivity meant greater facility in the incapacitation of enemy troops.

According to Avery, scientists at Suffield, Detrick, and the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah worked together on various joint projects: “Fort Detrick had a large number of chambers to do highly specialized operations. Suffield had a rather exclusive wind shed with a facility for doing other specialized operations. Dugway had not chambers or wind shed but they had a large amount of available space” (ibid.).

“Collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals…”

On 22 February 1952, the Foreign Minister of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Bak Hon Yong, released a statement charging the U.S. with waging biological warfare. Two days later, Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai), Foreign Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, also publicly charged the U.S. with similar attacks in northeast China.

Bak’s statement read in part:

According to authentic data available at the Headquarters of the Korean People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers, the American imperialist invaders have, since January 28 this year, been systematically spreading large quantities of bacteria-carrying insects by aircraft in order to disseminate contagious diseases over our frontline positions and our rear….

In perpetrating these ghastly crimes, the American imperialists have been openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals, the former jackals of the Japanese militarists whose crimes are attested to by irrefutable evidence. Among the Japanese war criminals sent to Korea were Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu and Masajo Kitano.

Presumably the DPRK and the Chinese had intelligence regarding the presence of Japan’s former Unit 731 personnel among U.S. military units associated with biological warfare. It would take another long article to document what is known about Ishii and Japan’s biowarfare project’s links to components of the American military, such as the U.S. Army Medical Corps or the U.S. Far East Medical Section’s Unit 406 Medical Laboratory.

Readers can follow up this aspect of the history in Japanese historian Takemae Eiji’s book, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (Continuum Publishers, 2002), along with Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman’s comprehensive monograph, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (University of Indiana Press, 1998).

The association between Japan’s World War Two biological warfare program and the kinds of attacks reported against the DPRK and China in 1952-53 was something “which could hardly have been absent from the minds” of members of the International Scientific Commission (ISC). The ISC issued a report in September 1952 validating the Communist charges. Led by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, and six other Western scientists, as well as one Soviet and one Chinese scientist, the ISC began their report with a consideration of the probable Japanese links.

There was nothing in the ISC report, or any other investigation into the alleged biological warfare charges, linking Canadian research on biological weapons and insect vectors to the U.S. biowarfare campaign. This is not surprising as the work was top secret, and even today, seventy years later, much remains classified or lost, and information about Canada’s BW program during the Korean War remains quite thin.

James Endicott may have had connections in government that told him more than he felt safe revealing. In his pamphlet, I Accuse, written in summer 1952 at the height of the controversy over the germ warfare charges, there is only one mention of Canada’s biological warfare program.

“In South Alberta, on a vast area . . . the Suffield experimental station has gained world-wide renown for its field experiments in Chemical and biological weapons” (ellipses in original). This quote, however, is not from Endicott himself, but he cites it in the pamphlet, and indicates it appeared in Reader’s Digest magazine in January 1951. This was the safe way to reference material that otherwise Endicott’s enemies might have used to prosecute him.

The repression and legal and bureaucratic obstacles to investigating Canada’s biological and chemical warfare research, as well as its tripartite cooperation with similar programs in the U.S. and the UK, has long prevented historians and journalists from knowing the full impact of that research, even if the occasional article surfaces. Only very recently has the extent of U.S. governmental covert operations against proponents of the germ warfare charges in the West been more fully revealed.

But given the close cooperation of Canadian scientists with their peers at Ft. Detrick and Porton Down, including research concerning insect vectors and dissemination of same in offensive biological weapons, it seems highly likely that when governmental archives are finally fully opened, the world will see that Canada played an important, and possibly essential role in the planning and implementation of the covert biological warfare program run by the United States during the Korean War.

Endicott speaks before thousands

On Sunday 11 May 1952, Dr. Endicott appeared before approximately eight to eleven thousand attendees at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. He was the featured speaker at a rally commemorating the close of a three-day session of the Canadian Peace Congress. According to Endicott’s biographer, son Stephen Endicott, in his 1980 book, James G. Endicott, Rebel Out of China (University of Toronto Press), the meeting was threatened by Endicott’s “opponents [who] arrived at Maple Leaf Gardens with eggs, tomatoes, firecrackers, stink-bomb, and placards” (pp. 295).

In response to the threat, Peace Congress officials had called upon five hundred “peace supporters, seamen, auto-workers, steel and electrical workers, miners from Sudbury, and other trade unionists” who volunteered to protect the meeting. In the end, there was no significant disturbance (p. 296). The Canadian government intervened to the extent it could by preventing black scholar W.E.B. DuBois from crossing the U.S. border to address the meeting.

Speaking to the crowd, Endicott ridiculed the attempts to legally silence him. “Their charges came in like a lion and went out like a lamb,” he said (p. 297). He noted that he had volunteered to appear before his governmental accusers, but they had refused.

As early as 1 April, 1952, Endicott had cabled External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson: “PERSONAL INVESTIGATIONS REVEAL UNDENIABLE EVIDENCE LARGE SCALE CONTINUING AMERICAN GERM WARFARE ON CHINESE MAINLAND URGE YOU PROTEST SHAMEFUL VIOLATION UNITED NATIONS AGREEMENTS."

But Canada’s government did nothing, except make threats against Endicott. For his part, Dr. Endicott continued to make his germ warfare charges. In July, before an audience of 400 at the Dreamland Theatre in Edmonton, Endicott lambasted a report by three Canadian scientists whose criticism of the BW charges was being used by the Allies to discredit the Communist BW charges internationally. Endicott also accused the Americans and their allies of killing “600,000 women and children… in Korea by Napalm, jellied gasoline.”

Note: A follow-up article by this author will consider the critique made by the three Canadian scientists.
In Dr. Endicott’s pamphlet, I Accuse, published after the May 1952 speech, the former missionary, turned activist against imperialist war crimes, asked the public:

If you had seen what I have seen, what would you say?

What would you say if you had seen with your own eyes sections of the brains of children who had died from acute encephalitis following germ-war bombardments by U.S. aircraft?...

If you had talked to churchmen and Red Cross officials who thoroughly confirmed what the others said?

If as a result of all this you found out beyond reasonable doubt that germ warfare had been committed, what would you say?

Would you be silent? That would make you an accomplice.

Or would you speak out?

The need for Marxists to avoid romanticizing the lumpenproletariat—the social element that operates on the economy’s margins—is more urgent than ever. Because our class conflict is escalating amid the recent disruptions to U.S. hegemony, and the related economic breakdowns. Which means the ruling class is increasingly seeking to weaponize the lumpen against the working class cause, heightening the dangers of investing in the lumpen.

​In The Peasant War in Germany, Engels wrote that “The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.” To many modern Marxists, this statement would be seen as incorrect, but it’s true. “Lumpen” has been redefined by the New Left to mean anyone from the underclass, when the proper definition for Marxists to use is the one which Marx and Engels used. 

This is the definition of lumpen as meaning individuals who utilize illegal, or at least economically peripheral, means of subsistence. Whose immediate material interests are based not within advancing the class struggle, but within furthering their renegade means for gaining monetary benefits. The lumpen are fully detached from the productive aspect of the economy, which can create conflict between them and the workers. We’ve seen this conflict manifest in stories like that of Cheyenne, the Chicano communist who tried to unite the California gangs into a revolutionary front. His own gang betrayed him, setting him up to be murdered in prison by the enemy gang. This only escalated the conflict between the gangs, making it all the less likely that someone else will ever succeed at what he attempted. 

Historically, the way that lumpenproles have become revolutionaries in the United States is by coming to no longer be lumpen; by getting brought out of this lifestyle by communist entities that can give them a viable alternative. The Black Panthers and the Brown Berets are examples of such projects to lift the lumpen out of their situation, and give them a choice. These groups, and those who’ve done similar things, have taken on the right strategy. What would be a mistake is to act like the lumpen are the same as proletarians, because both history and socioeconomic analysis show this distinction to be important.

The events from the last century-and-a-half of class struggle have shown how right Engels, as well as Marx, were about how to view the lumpen. As Marx concluded, the lumpen’s class character makes them especially susceptible to becoming “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.” That’s why it’s not worked to simply try to build revolutionary power from within the lumpen structures; the method of the Panthers and the Brown Berets is what’s been proven as the correct one.

If we disregard the history of how communists have been backstabbed by the gangs, or act like the differences between the lumpen and the workers don’t matter, then we take the proletarian character out of communism. We make “communism” no longer about proletarian revolution, and instead into a pan-leftist project which compromises with forces which lack material ties to the workers struggle. Because there are plenty of political actors who lack proletarian class character, or alignment with the proletariat’s interests, yet who’ve adopted the “communist” label. In reality, they’re not communists but rather leftists, which are not the same thing. 

The historical role of leftism is as the “progressive” wing of bourgeois politics, which places it in conflict with communism; that’s what Lenin illustrates in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. For the left, the only “communism” that’s acceptable is one which de-centers the proletariat, and diverts the struggle towards furthering the interests of the lumpen. Because the rule of capital will always be maintained as long as “communism” lacks a proletarian character.

What we do needs to center the proletariat. This is true both during the pre-revolutionary stage, and during the stage when we’ll need to be constructing socialism. Building socialism is about production, about growth. And if we base our practice in the non-productive parts of the economy, we won’t just enable undisciplined habits within these criminal elements, or let in gang members with conflicting loyalties. We’ll also let our operations be influenced by the anti-growth elements of the left, which are materially aligned with the lumpen. Degrowth ideology is a tool of monopoly finance capital, which seeks to further degrow our economy in the name of environmentalism. And such a program would help the operations of the lumpen, as capitalism’s engineered economic crises always do.

These realities are especially relevant to our time because at this stage in the class conflict, the lumpen and their adjacent left groups are the most useful elements the ruling class can use for counterrevolutionary violence. The Zionist counter-protesters who’ve been carrying out vigilante assaults against pro-Palestine protesters are the ones who’ve mobilized the fastest, but they’re not the ones the state ultimately views as the most useful. The vast majority of the country’s people aren’t willing to support the actions of right-wing counter-gangs like these ones, because when violence comes from the right, society easily recognizes it as fascist. The left counter-gangs can better hide the fascist nature of what they do, though, by presenting themselves as “anti-fascist.” And developing Marxists are among the most at risk of being fooled by this ploy, because Marxists tend to ideologically originate from leftism. This leads to them embracing pan-leftism, and treating left counter-gangs as allies, even though though these counter-gangs are utterly hostile towards any successful version of Marxism.

This is similar to the mistake of treating the gangs as allies, and both errors are directly related to lumpen fetishism. That’s because the social base which the left counter-gangs draw from is largely a lumpen one. The proletarians, the workers whose labor directly contributes to economic production, lack a material incentive to join these counter-gangs. The radical liberal ideology, with its opposition towards both the existing social order and towards existing socialism, is one that appeals to a particular kind of individual. To come to radical liberalism, somebody needs to be alienated, but not in the way that proletarians become alienated; the radical liberal mindset represents alienation not just from labor, but from the society one lives in. From the people as a whole, who radical liberals see as fundamentally reactionary. 

When somebody has had the experience of being connected to the means of production, they’re inclined to have a dialectical way of thinking. Their radicalization towards communism tends to lack the anti-popular, idealist, anti-growth, and left anti-communist qualities of the left counter-gangs. Therefore, these counter-gangs depend on the kinds of people who are separated from production. The further away they are from the economic centers, the more likely they are to embrace radical liberalism’s idealist dogmas, where growth is seen as bad and the bulk of the workers are seen as the enemy.

The state is seeking to nurture this left opposition towards the proletarian struggle, using it as a means for assailing communists both ideologically and physically. And the lumpen are instrumental towards waging this monopoly capitalist proxy war against the workers. The factors are coming into place for the proletarian struggle to win. To end the narrative dominance of monopoly capital’s foreign policy machine, build mass workers power, expand the anti-imperialist united front, and overthrow our capitalist dictatorship during the decisive moment. This dictatorship hopes to use the lumpen as a buffer against our revolutionary momentum, recruiting lumpenroles into the left counter-gangs for an anti-communist purge. 

This is what the Jakarta Method, the Cold War’s model for anti-communist terror, looks like in the United States: a threatened capitalist class pitting one section of the underclass against the other. But we’re capable of overcoming this counterinsurgency, if we navigate our conditions correctly. We must make sure to prepare our cadres for defense against whatever violence the counter-gangs enact, and to center our practice around actual workers struggle. Not around making alliances with elements that will backstab all serious revolutionary efforts.

​———————————————————————--

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​Why were Clean Slates so important to Bronze Age societies? From the third millennium in Mesopotamia, people were aware that debt pressures, if left to accumulate unchecked, would distort normal fiscal and landholding patterns to the detriment of the community. They perceived that debts grow autonomously under their own dynamic by the exponential curves of compound interest rather than adjusting themselves to reflect the ability of debtors to pay. This idea never has been accepted by modern economic doctrine, which assumes that disturbances are cured by automatically self-correcting market mechanisms. That assumption blocks discussion of what governments can do to prevent the debt overhead from destabilizing economies.
​
The Cosmological Dimension of Clean Slates

Mesopotamia’s concept of divine kingship was key to the practice of declaring Clean Slates. The prefatory passages of Babylonian edicts cited the ruler’s commitment to serve his city-god by promoting equity in the land. Myth and ritual were integrated with economic relations and were viewed as forming the natural order that rulers were charged with overseeing; in this context, canceling debts helped fulfill their sacred obligation to their city-gods. Commemorated by their year-names and often by foundation deposits in temples, these amnesties appear to have been proclaimed at a major festival, replete with rituals such as Babylon’s ruler raising a sacred torch to signal the renewal of the social cosmos in good order—what the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade called “the eternal return,” the idea of circular time that formed the context in which rulers restored an idealized status quo ante. By integrating debt annulments with social cosmology, the image of rulers restoring economic order was central to the archaic idea of justice and equity.

(Mis)Interpreting the Meaning of ‘Freedom’

The Hebrew word used for the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25 is dêror, but not until cuneiform texts could be read was it recognized as cognate to Akkadian andurarum. Before the early meaning was clarified, the King James Version translated the relevant phrase as: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” But the root meaning of andurarum is to move freely, as running water—or (for humans) as bondservants liberated to rejoin their families of origin.

The wide variety of modern interpretations of such key terms as Sumerian amargi, Akkadian andurarum and misharum, and Hurrian shudutu serve as an ideological Rorschach test reflecting the translator’s own beliefs. The earliest reading was by Francois Thureau-Dangin1, who related the Sumerian term amargi to Akkadian andurarum and saw it as a debt cancellation. Ten years later Schorr (1915) related these acts to Solon’s seisachtheia, the “shedding of burdens” that annulled the debts of rural Athens in 594 BC. The Canadian scholar George Barton2 translated Urukagina’s and Gudea’s use of the term amargi as “release,” although the Jesuit Anton Deimel3 rendered it rather obscurely as “security.”

Maurice Lambert4 initially interpreted Urukagina’s amargi act as an exemption from taxes, on the ground that most of the debts being annulled were owed to the palace. His subsequent 1972 discovery of Enmetena’s kindred proclamation dating some fifty years earlier led him to see amargi as signifying a debt cancellation. F. R. Kraus5 had followed this view in 1954, and greatly elaborated his survey of Babylonian proclamations in his 1984 survey of rulers “raising the torch” to signal debt cancelations.6

In America, Samuel Kramer (History Begins at Sumer [New York, 1959]) interpreted these acts as tax reductions. In a letter to The New York Times the day President Reagan took office in 1981, he even urged the president-elect to emulate Urukagina and cut taxes! The term amargi became popular with U.S. libertarians seeking an archaic precedent for their tax protests.

Kramer7 further belittled Urukagina’s reforms as soon “gone with the wind,” being “too little, too late,” as if they were failures for not solving the debt problem permanently. In a similar vein Stephen Lieberman8, deemed Babylonian debt cancelations ineffective on the ground that they kept having to be repeated: “The need to repeat the enactment of identical provisions shows that the misharum provided relief, but did not eliminate the difficulties which made it necessary.…What seems to have been needed was reform which would have eliminated all need for such adjustments.” He did not suggest just what could have created an economy free of credit cycles.

A Practical Solution

Mesopotamian rulers were not seeking a debt-free utopia but coped pragmatically with the most adverse consequences of rural debt when it became top-heavy. Usury was not banned, as it would be in Judaism’s Exodus Code, but its effects were reversed when the debt overhead exceeded the ability to pay on a widespread basis. These royal edicts retained the economy’s underlying structure The palace did not deter new debts from being run up, and kept leasing out land to sharecroppers, who owed the usual proportion of crops and were obliged to pay the usual interest penalties for non-delivery.

Igor Diakonoff9 emphasized that “the word andurarum does not mean ‘political liberation.’ It is a translation of Sumerian amargi ‘returning to mother,’ that is, ‘to the original situation.’ It does not mean liberation from some supreme authority but the canceling of debts, duties, and the like.

The Assyrian term “washing the tablets” (hubullam masa’um10; may refer to dissolving them in water, akin to breaking or pulverizing them. Likening it to the Babylonian term meaning “to kill the tablet,” Kemal Balkan11 explained that the idea was to cancel grain debts by physically destroying their records. Along more abstract lines, Raymond Westbrook12 likens the idea of “washing” to a ritual cleansing of the population from inequities that would displease Sumerian and Babylonian patron deities. Urukagina’s edict thus was held to have cleansed Lagash from the moral blemish of inequity.

Some Anachronistic Creditor-Oriented Views of Clean Slates

Instead of enforcing debt contracts at the cost of social and military instability, Sumer and Babylonia preserved economic viability via Clean Slates. Today’s creditor-oriented ideology denies the success of Clean Slates overriding free-market relations. It depicts the archaic past as much like our own world, as if civilization was developed by individuals thinking in terms of modern orthodoxy, letting interest rates be determined simply by market supply and demand, duly adjusted for risk of non-payment.

Modern economic theory assumes that debts normally can be paid, with the interest rate reflecting the borrower’s profit. The implication is that the fall in interest rates from Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome resulted from falling profit rates and/or the greater security of investment. In this view, debt cancellations would only have aggravated debt problems, by increasing the creditor’s risk and hence the interest rate.

Modernist assumptions distract attention from what actually happened. No writer in antiquity is known to have related interest rates to profit rates or risk, or to the use of seeds or breeding cattle to produce offspring. We may well ask whether it was fortunate for the survival of Babylonian society that its rulers were not “advanced economic theoreticians” of the modern sort. If they had not proclaimed Clean Slates, creditors would have reduced debtors to bondage and taken their lands irreversibly. But in canceling crop debts, rulers acknowledged that the palace had taken all that it could without destroying the economy’s foundations. If they had demanded that debt arrears be made up by cultivators forfeiting their family members and land rights to royal collectors (who sought to keep debt charges on the crop yield for themselves), the palace would have lost the services of these debtors for corvée labor and in the armed forces to resist foreign attack.

Markets indeed became less stable as economies polarized in classical antiquity. Yet it was only at the end of antiquity that Diodorus of Sicily (I.79) explained the most practical rationale for Clean Slates. Describing how Egypt’s pharaoh Bakenranef (720-715) abolished debt bondage and canceled undocumented debts, Diodorus wrote that the pharaoh’s guiding logic was that:

“the bodies of citizens should belong to the state, to the end that it might avail itself of the services which its citizens owed it, in times of both war and peace. For he felt that it would be absurd for a soldier, perhaps at the moment when he was setting forth to fight for his fatherland, to be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all.”

That would seem to be how early Mesopotamian rulers must have reasoned. Letting soldiers pledge their land to creditors and then lose this basic means of self-support through foreclosure would have expropriated the community’s fighting force—or led to their flight or defection. By the 4th century BC, the Greek military writer known as Tacticus recommended that a general attacking a town might promise to cancel the debts owed by its inhabitants if they defected to his side. Likewise, defenders of towns could strengthen the resistance of their citizens by agreeing to annul their debts.

This emergency military tactic no longer reflected a royal duty to restore economic self-reliance as a guiding principle of overall order. What disappeared was the relief of debtors from their obligations and reversal of their land sales or forfeitures when natural disasters blocked their ability to pay or after a new ruler took the throne. The oligarchic epoch had arrived, abolishing any public power able to cancel the society-wide debt overgrowth.

1. Les inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad, 1905, pp. 86-87
2. The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad, 1929.
3. Sumerische Tempelwirtschaft der Zeit Urukaginas und seiner Vorgänger, 1930, p. 9.
4. “Les ‘Reformes’ d’Urukagina,” La Revue Archéologique 60, 1956, pp. 169-184..
5. Ein Edikt des Königs Ammisaduqa von Babylon (SD 5, [Leiden]).
6. Fritz Rudolph Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit, 1984.
7. Samuel Noah Kramer History Begins at Sumer 1959, p. 49.
8. Stephen J. Lieberman “Royal ‘Reforms’ of the Amurrite Dynasty,” Bibliotecha Orientalis 46, 1989, pp. 241-259.
9. “The City-States of Sumer” and “Early Despotisms in Mesopotamia,” in Early Antiquity 1991, pp. 67-97, p. 234.
10. A. Kirk Grayson Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: From the beginning to Ashur-resha-ishi I, Volume 1 of the Records of the Near East  Harrassowitz, 1972, p. 7.
11. “Cancellation of Debts in Cappadocian Tablets from Kultepe,” Anatolian Studies Presented to Hans C. Guterbock, 1974, pp. 29-36, p. 33.
12. Raymond Westbrook, “Social Justice in the Ancient Near East,” in Morris Silver and K. D. Irani, eds., Social Justice in the Ancient World, 1995, pp. 149-163.

Amidst all the sadness and grief over the loss of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, let’s take a moment to showcase the critical path he helped forge toward a new global order. 
​
In the nearly three years since Raisi ascended to the Iranian presidency, Eurasian integration and the drive toward multipolarity have become fundamentally conducted by three major actors: Russia, China, and Iran. 

Which, by no accident, are the three top “existential threats” to the hegemonic power.

At 10 pm this past Sunday in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited Iran’s ambassador to Moscow, Kazem Jalali, to be at the table in an impromptu meeting with the cream of the crop of Russia’s Defense Team. 

That invitation reached far beyond the myopic media conjecture over whether the Iranian president’s untimely death was due to an “accidental crash” or an act of sabotage. It came from the fruits of Raisi’s tireless labor to position Iran as an east-facing nation, boldly forging strategic alliances with Asia’s major powers while sweetening Tehran’s relations with past regional foes.

Increased Eurasian integration

Back to that Sunday night table in Moscow. Everyone was there – from Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and Secretary of the Security Council Sergei Shoigu to Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, Emergencies Minister Aleksandr Kurenkov and Special Assistant to the President, Igor Levitin.

The key message portrayed was that Moscow has Tehran’s back. And Russia completely supports the stability and continuity of government in Iran, which is already fully guaranteed by Iran’s constitution and its detailed contingencies for a peaceful transition of power under even unusual circumstances.

As we are now deep into total Hybrid War mode – bordering on Hot – across most of the planet, the three civilization states shaping a new system of international relations could not be more obvious. 

Russia–Iran–China (RIC) are already interlinked via bilateral, comprehensive strategic partnerships; they are members of both BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and their modus operandi was fully unveiled for the whole Global Majority to examine at Putin’s crucial summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week. 

In short, none of the three Asian powers will allow the other partners to be destabilized by the usual suspects.

A stellar record

Late President Raisi and his top diplomat, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, leave a stellar legacy. 

Under their leadership, Iran became a member of BRICS, a full member of the SCO, and a major stakeholder in the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). These are the three key multilateral organizations shaping the road to multipolarity. 

Iran’s new diplomatic drive reached key Arab and African players, from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to Libya, Sudan, and Djibouti. Tehran, for the first time, conducted a sophisticated, large-scale military operation against Israel, firing a barrage of drones and missiles from Iranian territory. 

Iran–Russia relations reached the next level in trade and military-political cooperation. Two years ago, Putin and Raisi agreed on a comprehensive bilateral treaty. The draft of the core document is now ready and will be signed by Iran’s next president, expanding the partnership even further. 

As a member of an Iranian delegation told me last year in Moscow, when the Russians were asked what could be on the table, they replied, “You can ask us anything.” And vice versa.   

So all interlocked declinations of Raisi’s “Look East” strategic shift coupled with Russia’s earlier “pivot to Asia” are being addressed by Moscow and Tehran.

The Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO is meeting this Tuesday and Wednesday in Astana, preparing for the summit in July, when Belarus will become a full member. Crucially, Saudi Arabia’s cabinet has also approved the decision for Riyadh to join, possibly next year. 
Iran’s continuity of government will be fully represented in Astana via interim Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani, who was Amir-Abdollahian’s number two. He’s bound to immediately enter the fray alongside Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to discuss the multi-layered multipolar path.  

A hypersonic joint statement

The overarching charter of what a new system entails was revealed last week at the landmark Putin-Xi summit via a stunning 10-chapter joint statement, over 12,000 words long, with “cooperation” appearing no less than 130 times.

This document can correctly be interpreted as a joint hypersonic manifesto comprehensively blowing up Washington’s artificial “rules-based international order.”
This section particularly stands out: 

Iran, sanctioned to death for over four decades, is now learning directly from China and Russia about their efforts to destroy “decoupling” narratives as well as the effect of a tsunami of western sanctions on Russia. 

For example, an array of China–Europe train corridors is now mostly used to ship Chinese goods to Central Asia and re-export them to Russia. 

Yet amidst this trade boom, logistical bottlenecks also increase. Virtually every European port refuses to handle any shipments from or to Russia. And Russia’s largest ports continue to have problems: Vladivostok does not have capacity for large cargo ships, while St Petersburg is very far from China.

So Chapter 3 of the Russia–China joint declaration places particular emphasis on “port and transportation cooperation, including developing more logistics routes,” and deepening financial cooperation, “including via increasing the share of local currency in financial services,” and increasing industrial cooperation, “including in strategic areas such as car and boat manufacturing, metal smelting, and chemicals.”

All that applies to Russia–Iran cooperation too, for instance, in streamlining the International North–South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), especially from Astrakhan in the Caspian to Iranian ports and then via roads down to the Persian Gulf. 

Iranian Foreign Minister Bagheri Kani had previously remarked that thanks to Iran’s “exceptional geopolitical location” reaching West Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea region, and wider Eurasia, Iran can contribute to the “economic growth and economic potential” of all regional players.

Putin’s visit to China last week included a visit to the northeastern powerhouse Harbin – which has strong geographical/historical links to Russia. A giant China–Russia Expo attracted over 5,000 commercial firms. It’s not far-fetched to imagine an equally successful Russia–Iran Expo at a Caspian port. 

Promethean project 

What links Russia, China, and Iran is, first and foremost, an emerging framework designed by Sovereign Civilizational States. The fateful passing of president-martyr Raisi won’t alter The Big Picture in the least.  

We’re in the middle of a long process against an environment conditioned for decades by pain and fear. The process has gained immense traction these past few years, starting with the official launch of the New Silk Roads in 2013. 

The New Silk Roads and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are a Promethean project that is as much geopolitical as geoeconomic. In parallel came the gradual expansion of the SCO's role as an economic cooperation mechanism. Once again, Iran is a top BRI, SCO, and BRICS member.

After Ukraine’s Maidan coup in 2014, the Russia–China strategic partnership really started picking up speed. Soon, we also had Iran selling practically all of its oil production to China and coming under the protection of the Chinese nuclear umbrella. 

Then we had the Empire humiliated in Afghanistan. And the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in February 2022. And the expansion of BRICS into formerly western terrains in the Global South.   

During his memorable Spring 2023 visit to Moscow, Xi told Putin that “changes not seen in a hundred years” would occur and that both should be at the helm of these inevitable changes.

That was exactly the crux of their discussions last week in Beijing.

The Iranian bombing of ultra-protected Israeli territory with perfect precision – as a response to a terror attack on its diplomatic consulate in a third country – sent a crystal-clear, game-changer message, completely understood by the Global Majority: the Hegemon’s power in West Asia is coming to an end. 

Losing the Rimland is anathema to perfectly American geopolitics. It must be back in its control as it knows how important it is. 

New direction 

The Angel of History, though, is pointing in a new direction – to China, Russia, and Iran as the natural Sovereigns shaping the re-emergence of the Heartland. 

Concisely, these Three Sovereigns have the epistemological level, will, creativity, organization skills, vision, and tools of power to realize a true Promethean project. 

It may sound like a miracle, but the present leadership in all three states shares this common understanding and endeavor. 

For instance, what could be more enticing than the possibility of former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili as Iran’s next president to join new Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani? In the past, Jalili has been cast as too “hardline” for western palates, but the west hardly matters anymore on these shores. 
​
After Raisi’s eastward and multipolarity grand U-turn away from former Iranian “reformist” President Hassan Rouhani’s misguided, failed westward foray, Jalili may be just the ticket for Iran’s next phase. And oh, what a perfectly dashing complement to the Xi–Putin duo that would be.

​After 76 years of occupation, students from across the Globe have shown their support towards the Palestinian cause during recent months. The agreements, cooperation and public relations with Universities and academic institutions from Israel has been a common factor in the causes towards it, considering the context of imperialism and aggression with direct complicity from the US’ government and the UK after the AlAqsa Flood Operation by Hamas and then continued by other parts of the Armed Resistance in Gaza.
 
Movements from civil society and grassroots organizations have been key in denouncing complicit relations with the genocide itself, considering the decisions made by governments from the Global North have been considerable weak, comparing with the case of Ukraine.
 
On its last report Francesca Albanese, the  “Anatomy of a Genocide” (February 26th, 2024) shown that Israel had killed more than 35.000 people, with a 70% of them being children and women.
 
In response, students from Universities such as California Berkeley, Chicago, Spain Universities and more recently Oxford in an effort made by academics, students and professionals have joined together in order to break relations with Israeli institutions.
 
In the case of Chile, a country with 19 million inhabitants, 1.341.439 students from higher education system, and the largest population of arab-palestine descendants, this situation has gone critical since May 15th, when a group of students camped in the Central Campus of the University of Chile.
 
University of Chile is the most prestigious and oldest institution for higher education. Along with this, students from other institutions such as University of Santiago, Chile have demanded the immediate ceasing of the agreements with Israeli universities.
 
The response from the authorities have consisted of advocating for “academic freedom” and defending possible “options for growing on knowledge” not considering that PACBI, movements from scholars such as SWAP (Scholars Against the War on Palestine) and more recently the work of Maya Wind (2024) has stated that Israeli academic institutions have contributed directly to the apartheid itself.
 
In that sense, Eduardo Asfura, Academic at the University of Santiago states that ‘it is contradictory that, in the first public University from Chile, the response of the authorities (in this case, from the University of Chile), to the mobilization for  Palestine, shows a dissuasive tone rather than a will for dialogue.’
 
In may 24th, the University Council from the University of Chile rejected to suspend agreements with Israeli academic institutions, pointing out that ‘the purpose of the international agreements established between universities and their units is to promote academic exchange, whether through training or research, in order to enhance the quality or impact of their work and contribute to the generation of knowledge networks at a global level’ (https://cooperativa.cl/noticias/mundo/medio-oriente/conflicto-israel-palestina/universidad-de-chile-descarta-eliminar-convenios-con-planteles-israelies/2024-05-24/200232.html).
 
Asfura continues to point out that ‘this will  has been expressed, fundamentally, in two strategies: 1) initial delegitimization of the strategies of the movement itself, through the stigma of ‘violence’ and "intolerance’ and 2) delegitimization of its demands, by questioning the usefulness and meaning of them. In this second case, the argument has been basically the following: ‘To break with Israeli universities is to silence dissident voices and critical voices. If the world did not do it with us during the dictatorship, it would be a mistake for us to do it now with the universities of Israel’. ‘Unlike what happened in Chile during the dictatorship, Israeli academic institutions have not been the of crimes against humanity”. Also in the 9 months of genocide, these university institutions (Israelis) have shown very little initiative for peace, showing that their main virtue is not dissent, but rather complicity’. In that sense, as Israeli academic Maya Wind put it, ‘Israeli universities are a central pillar of Israel’s regime of oppression against the Palestinians’. Something that is ratified not only in scientific, technological and logistical support’.
 
In more general terms, Luna Jadue, member of the Committee in Solidarity for Palestine of the University of Chile says that “I think that the contribution we can make is important, considering that if the Universities show that we are committed with the social problems for nowadays, it will be easier for the people to understand deeply our struggle for the Palestinian liberation and its foundations”.
 
To the opinion of Mauricio Rosales, Coordinator of the Solidarity with Palestine Committee at the University of Santiago de Chile, this movement “is something that is taking a very wide and massive character. This has strengthened the student movement and has been an opportunity to agitate an anti imperialist view, in order to make Universities Free from Apartheid, considering we are not only fighting for breaking the academic agreements but for demanding our national government to suspend all the relations with Israel’.
 
This refers to the government of Gabriel Boric, which, unlike Gustavo Petro or Luis Arce in South America, hasn't cut diplomatic ties with Israel but has preferred to stick to  other formulas such as calling the ambassador and joining the South African demand at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as it been announced on Saturday, on his Public Account  Annual Speech in 1st of June, 2024.
 
In relation to the student movement, lately it has started gaining momentum, with a statement from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Chile announcing the immediate suspension of one local and one global frame agreement. This, derived from protests and activities open to the citizens.
 
As well as in other contexts, this has shown that the higher superior education system is still divided between a conservative élite reluctant to any political change, even if that means complicit relations with institutions with empirical relations with a genocide ongoing, based on military cooperation and legal international defense from the arguments of the Likud. Alongside this, even considering that the Palestinian movement still has an elite-base in Chile, this has been a challenge for being more massive and gaining an anti-imperialist approach, which has started exploring debates between the relation from indigenous peoples and the working class from the Global South and palestinian liberation, proving that solidarity with Palestine is not about ethnicity, nor esthetic, but about struggle of the oppressed around the world.
 
Meanwhile the massive movement from civil society recalls the resistance led all across the globe to the Vietnam war and the mid 20th century’ American imperialism. As in the case of the opposition to imperialism during that time, it didn’t come from State actors, but from the civil society (grassroots and student movements) across the globe.
 
Even with all the war crimes and transgressions of Humanitarian Law and Human Rights by Netanyahu's administration and the support from Biden, Rishi Sunak and the German government, Non State actors still have a power to question the international crimes and impunity from colonialist and imperialist countries and their academic allies.
 
Currently, the student movement has been discussing to project Universities as Apartheid Free Zones (AFZ), going beyond only cutting academic agreements, establishing restorative and reparative processes -also on past practices-, preventing new agreements with institutions linked to genocide.
 
This, understanding that liberal academia only acknowledges knowledge as a means to an end and obscures all the relations of power and impunity subjacent.
 

Authors

Camilo Godoy Pichon is a Chilean sociologist from the University of Chile and MA candidate in International Studies in University of Santiago, Chile. He has worked on topics such as environmental struggles and conflicts in the Global South, in regards to companies or corporations who promote extractivism and ecocide. He has worked with indigenous people, elders, and children from poor towns and areas from his country, along with developing academic work and research on the environmental justice' topic. He is very interested in analyzing how class influences environmental conflicts and other inequalities in South America and specially in neoliberal countries such as Chile. He has published 2 social/political poetry books both in Chile (2019) and Argentina (2022) and another poetry book on political repression during Pinochet's dictatorship, for the case of poor youngsters killed by the police in Southern Santiago in 1973, which will be published in Spain in early 2023.

Catalina Calderón​

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you all for this opportunity to address the Security Council and to provide a briefing on the issue of peace as it relates to Ukraine and its connections with people in this country and all over the world.
​
As a journalist, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and of the United National Antiwar Coalition, and as a citizen of the United States, the nation which has taken a lead role in continuing this crisis, I am very eager to speak to this issue. As of now, the U.S. government has allocated nearly $175 billion for the Ukrainian war effort and to support the workings of Ukraine’s civilian government.

For the last two years we have seen a terrible war which would end if this country and others would stop providing arms and instead seek peace. There were opportunities for that very thing to happen in March and April of 2022, when the government of Turkiye hosted peace talks between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The possibility of peace was lost when my country and others subverted these talks by promising the government of Ukraine that it would receive an endless supply of weapons with which to achieve a military victory. Not only has that victory been elusive, but thousands of Ukrainians, the people this country claims to care so much about, have lost their lives. And of course, many Russians have also perished in the fighting. The goal should be for the death toll to end for both nations.

We don’t have to guess why this huge sum of money has been spent. We need only recall what the president of the United States and his foreign policy team have said publicly. The Secretary of Defense famously said in a rare moment of candor, that the U.S. wanted to “see Russia weakened.” This is a dangerous goal for the United States to have at all. The world needs cooperation. It is the only way to avoid escalation and disastrous outcomes between the major powers. The U.S. shouldn’t be attempting to weaken any nation but should be continuously engaged in finding ways to prevent and to end conflicts.

Not only is the Secretary’s confession dangerous, but it has surely failed. President Biden himself said that U.S. imposed sanctions against Russia would “turn the ruble to rubble.” No such thing has happened, but other nations have suffered economically from the futile effort to keep Russian oil off of world markets. Global South nations in particular were most impacted by what turned out to be a failed effort against Russia. More developed nations, those in Europe, have been deprived of affordable gas supplies they reliably received from Russia for decades.

There have been other serious consequences and some of them have fallen on people in this country, the one most responsible for continuing the crisis. Project Ukraine as it is called is a bipartisan effort, with both Democrats and Republicans supporting the continued infusion of huge sums of money to the defense industry, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and to dubious projects in Ukraine itself. This funding is not just spent on the military but is literally supplying many domestic government functions within that country. Most Americans are unaware that small businesses in Ukraine are being supported with their public funds. At least $25 billion in non-military aid has been spent.

It isn’t as if people in this country aren’t in need of help. Money for weapons continues thanks to consensus among the political class while needy people here are being removed from the Medicaid program which pays for health care for low-income people, as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Students take on thousands of dollars in debt to attend universities. The same administration which is committed to spending money on weapons has never presented a plan to help the estimated 500,000 people in the U.S. who are unhoused. There are constantly calls to cut or end these programs altogether but the funding stream for war remains untouched. Democracy itself is in crisis because of these endless conflicts. War is not the only indicator of violence in the world and peace is not just the absence of conflict. War making leads to immiseration, which is antithetical to the concept of peace.

The U.S. public do not have the unanimity of opinion on Ukraine that one would expect considering that billions of dollars have been allocated. Even those who say they support this effort also say that they would like to see negotiations too. A recent poll indicated that 71% of people in this country would like to see a negotiated settlement instead of ongoing conflict.

But the millions of Americans who want an end to the conflict have been deprived of the representation we are supposed to have. Not only does the administration refuse to reconsider its position, but there are reports that President Biden wants to prevent future presidents from playing a different role. According to President Zelensky, he is working with the U.S. and other NATO nations on a ten-year plan to provide weapons. Joe Biden can only serve for a maximum of four and a half more years, meaning that he wants to make a commitment that a future president could not change. In so doing, he invalidates the concerns of voters in this country and of the people who are supposed to represent them.

As a citizen of the United States, I am frankly shocked by the lengths this country will go to in order to pursue a dangerous plan that is doomed to failure. The most recent tranche of U.S. weapons funding is dependent upon Ukraine mobilizing more men, approximately 500,000. Several million Ukrainians fled to nearby states in 2022 but now they are told they cannot renew their passports abroad. They must return to Ukraine where we see videos of men literally being press ganged into service, dragged off the street and forced to join the military. The freedom that is allegedly being fought for seems to require a lack of freedom for Ukrainians who face the risk of death on the battlefield. This corruption requires a steady stream of indoctrination and propaganda to keep the U.S. population from asking questions or actively opposing the war. I suppose that is why Secretary of State Antony Blinken thought it wise to perform with a Ukrainian band on his last visit to Kiev. Not only that, but neither the Secretary nor his handlers were aware that the song he performed, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” is a lament about poverty and hopelessness in a supposedly free world which isn’t truly free for millions of people. The administration is so divorced from reality that they thought it wise for Secretary Blinken to play this song as men are rounded up to be cannon fodder.

I want to add that this conflict didn’t begin in February 2022. It began years earlier with the U.S. plan to have Ukraine join NATO. In 2008 William Burns, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, revealed in a cable known to us, because of the work of Wikileaks, that doing so would cross a Russian red line and potentially lead to “a major split, involving violence or at worst civil war.” As we all know Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange languishes in a UK prison, facing extradition to the country that has made an example of him because he has revealed secrets such as this cable.

I reiterate that there have been peace proposals in the past two years, with the most recent attempt being made by the People’s Republic of China, which has developed a comprehensive 12-point plan that could mean the end of destruction and suffering if it is given serious consideration.

Lastly, I would like to make a plea to the United Nations to use its power to investigate a catastrophic event that is tied to the Ukraine conflict. On September 26, 2022, the NordStream pipelines were destroyed in an explosion which also sent approximately 15 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming.

Investigations have been closed without conclusion and at least one internationally known investigative journalist has provided evidence of U.S. responsibility. Sadly, no one in a position to investigate in this country has demanded an investigation. It is imperative that the United Nations undertake an independent investigation of its own. This is only possible if fantasies about domination are finally and firmly rejected. Doing so would free nations to be honest with one another, to struggle over issues but to resolve them without death or expenditures of money that are better used for human needs.
​
I end by thanking you profusely for this opportunity and for the work of the Security Council in upholding the United Nations Charter on behalf of the people of the world. Thank you so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Author

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

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

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

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

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

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

​References

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

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

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

The Palace Forgave Excessive Debt

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

Flexible Pricing Beyond the Palace

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

Mesopotamian Institutions Boosted the Commercial Takeoff

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

Ex Oriente Lux

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

Individualism Was a Symptom of Westward Decline

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

References

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

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

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

My Poisoned Land

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

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

Gaza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Author

Utsa Patnaik 

Originally published: Peoples Democracy

Victory Day In Chicago

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

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

You can watch the full concert here:

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

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

Author 

Donald Courter

Republished from the Revolution Report

Historical narratives are constituted by our capacity to suffuse them with an imaginary, un-real supplement: this was one of the great insights of modern historiography. It is never enough to recount the facts as they are – the brutal soberness of ‘facts’ are often in themselves coloured by inevitable distortions of a form of ideological appraisal. Neutral facts are, in other words, mostly impossible to present ‘by themselves’. To understand a historical period, one must necessarily understand its phantasmatic and imaginary aspects – one must engage with how a historically materialistic set of facts is retrospectively ‘filled in’ by a subjective construction of meaning. Ultimately, understanding any great juncture in history implies a recognition that the account of this juncture is often immediately formulated in retrospect by a certain supplementary, speculative historicization. The most radical of historical events are all too often forced to ‘make sense’ by being applied to a dogmatic set of presuppositions.
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As with any radical thinker in the history of ideas, Marx’s intervention is from its conception coloured by the type of narrative which is only retrospectively positioned. The radical novelty of Marx’s thought inversely meant that he was inevitably placed in a conceptual relation to various preceding philosophical traditions. Ultimately, the capacity to understand ‘Marx for himself’ was almost immediately abandoned.

This question of a retrospective integration of Marx (both of dialectical materialism and of historical materialism) into a theoretical legacy was, for justifiable reasons, narrowed into a question of Marx’s fidelity to and heritage in Hegelian philosophy. Marx frequently presented his texts as revisions of or reactions to Hegel’s system. His references to Hegel were extensive and his origin in the Young Hegelian tradition of the mid-19th century is well documented. This Marx-Hegel conjunction would therefore inevitably continue after Marx’s death.

During the early 20th century, the intellectual trend of Hegelian Marxism rose to prominence. Lenin himself rigorously engaged with Hegel’s Science of Logic in 1914-1915 (although his interest in Hegel undoubtedly continued aften this period) in order to substantiate his reading of Marx. Lukács’ seminal work (History and Class Consciousness, 1923) was partially characterised by a theoretical engagement with the origin of the legacy of dialectical materialism in Hegelian thought. The reciprocal positioning of Marxism and Hegelianism, whilst sceptical, was distinctively kept alive by Lukács’ return to the necessity, as Marx put it, of not treating Hegel as a ‘dead dog’.

This frequent attempt at understanding Marx alongside the spectres of Hegelianism was however progressively abandoned. A definitive shift emerged towards the radical separation of Marx and Hegel. The novelty of Marx was framed according to the irreducibility of his theoretical invention to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Lenin had famously stated that we need Hegel’s Science of Logic in order to understand Marx’s Capital (Lenin, 1929). However this dependency of Marx upon Hegel was either negated, or progressively inverted into the dependency of Hegel upon Marx. Althusser is perhaps the most recognisable figure of this inversion. Lenin’s statement that Hegel’s Logic is the key to Marx’s Capital was reformulated. For Althusser, if anything ‘we need Marx in order to understand Hegel’ (Althusser, 1969). Hegel remains fallible until you translate his Logic into dialectical materialist terms.

Althusser is in part most famous in this tradition for eventually decisively asserting that Marx’s dialectical materialism owes nothing to Hegel. As a standalone philosophy, it breaks with Hegelianism to the point of being unrecognisable at its very core from the latter. Both For Marx (1965/2005) and the early texts of On Ideology (2020) would lay the ground for precisely this de-coupling of Marx and Hegel. The Ideological State Apparatus as furnishing the everyday coordinates of reproducing the fundamental conditions of capitalist-economic modes of production; an analysis reformatted to be deployed on the ideological level of our subjective-discursive methods of interpellation into a decentralised, diffused State apparatus; a non-idealised, un-centralised understanding of consciousness as posited within a pre-existing set of material conditions – these were aspects of Marxism which Hegel had failed to ever articulate.

At the same time, Althusser’s grand treatise on the independence of Marx and his undeniable break from previous methods of philosophical questioning was Reading Capital (1965), in which the vision of a Hegel-independent Marx is most clearly argued for. Althusser’s purism towards Marx is clear: the very ‘object of enquiry’ posited in Capital is itself furnished by the new method of questioning which Marx installs; new disjunctive temporalities of independent historical and economical ensembles/regimes are opened up; a scientific analysis grounded in the recognition of a constitutively ‘blundered view’ of ideological enquiry is stressed. Marx’s epistemological rupture is at its roots understood as anti-humanist and anti-historicist (and hence irreconcilable with the historicism of Spirit for Hegel). Fundamentally Althusser deploys a profound criticism of any attempt to think Marx inside the confines of Hegelian philosophy. In the same work, Ranciere, Balibar, Macherey, and Establet similarly provide a vision of Marx constitutively detached from Hegel: the analysis of commodity fetishism, and an analysis of the concept of ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ (to be returned to below) are only some of the examples of this.

In the following decade, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari as avatars of this vision of ‘Marx without Hegel’. The two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 & 1980), sees in its eccentric overturning of French structuralism an abandonment of Hegel’s idealising thinking according to absolute categories: ‘negation’ and ‘the absolute’ are replaced by rhizomatic fluidities and a philosophy of ‘pure difference’. Yet despite this aggressive tradition subsumed under a vision of ‘Marx for himself’ which characterised 60s and 70s French philosophy, a return to Hegel emerged as a necessary treatment of Marx’s (at this point) confused intervention.

Interestingly, Žižek would reproduce Althusser’s inversion of the Marx-Hegel relation: Marx’s Capital is indeed necessary in order to retrospectively fully understand Hegel’s Logic. Žižek indeed agrees that Hegel most directly makes sense in the light of (and in his difference from) post-German-Idealist philosophy – however Žižek would draw the opposite conclusion to Althusser: that Hegel is clarified by Marx, makes Hegel the more radical of the two thinkers. This is one of the principal theses of his self-described magnum opus, Less Than Nothing (2013): by understanding Hegel in the confines of Marx, we see that Hegel is clearer in conceptualising the political agency of the rabble. In other words, for Žižek, the potential for revolutionary political action is more present in Hegel than in Marx.

A similar homogenisation of Marxism and Hegelianism emerges with the work of Badiou, who defends the communist hypothesis from the perspective of what he calls an ‘event’. An event is an ontologically-grounded disparity in a structured political, artistic, or scientific order, which conditions an aggressive and targeted reformulation of the logical forms of our discursive and historical forms of understanding – the event is an unstructured multiplicity irreducible to the situation in which it appears. Importantly, the logic of the event is not possible without Hegel. What Badiou calls his ‘mathematical ontology’ is, according to his own words, an appropriation of Hegel’s ‘greater logic’ (Badiou, 2006). Thus his Marxist framework for the intervention of popular political movements is explained by a Hegelian logic. Once again, Marx has to be thought within the confines of Hegel.

The question of the Marx-Hegel relation returns today with the same tensions. Some of the perceived failures of 20th century Marxist-Leninist projects has prompted Western “Marxists” to ‘return to Hegel’ as a method of reflecting upon political and historical events in order to discern a logical mode of articulating new forms of politically grounded social justice. Others insist that the attempt to discern the Hegelian workings of Marx is an inexcusable attempt to institutionalise (and neutralise) his radical political potential: Marx is kept ‘safe’ by being framed according to an intellectual game or hermeneutics of the Hegelian forms latent in Marx’s texts. In order for Marx’s works to mean something, in order for them to carry any political weight, they must exist as a separate entity from any (inherently sterilising) Hegelian speculation.

Žižek’s argument that Hegel is more radical than Marx himself would be the ultimate suffocation of any form of spontaneous and collective political agency. By implication, workers must get acquainted with the Science of Logic and learn to decipher a radical, practical potential within the dialectic of the concept, through a rigorous approach to Hegel’s 150-year long conceptual engagement with Marx. To claim that any political collective must be grounded in an expert reading of Hegel is in this sense an impossible and bourgeois proposition. Others may argue, as Žižek himself does, that, politically speaking, it is not enough to ‘just do things’: we have a duty to reflect upon why an instinctual fixation upon direct, unquestioning action – a dedication to mindlessly and endlessly producing ‘formal’ political acts (protests, union strikes etc.) – is an inevitably impotent endeavour. The antidote to this impotence would be Hegel, who allows us to ‘think through’ Marx in a politically productive way.

It is barely worth mentioning that major moments in the history of Marxism (Luxemburg, Gramsci, Korsch, Bloch, nuances in the writings of the Hegelian Marxists, the unique position of the Frankfurt School, and a multiplicity of reversals in classical and contemporary Marxism, just to name a few) are missing in the above exposition. However this exposition is far from an intended history of Marxism, and rather serves to briefly illustrate the distinctive lack of univocity in the development of thought on the relation between Marx and Hegel.

‘Marx’ or ‘Marx and…’: these are the opposed poles of a political-philosophical thought that have come to partially define the continental tradition. These two positions are understood as profoundly irreconcilable, and entail radically different implications for the coordinates of political agency and for the recurrent Leninist question, even more pressing now, of what is to be done. But are these positions truly as mutually antagonistic as assumed? It would seem that the alternative between ‘Marx’ and ‘Marx and…’ reproduces Lacan’s paradox of a robber who gives the (false) alternative between ‘your wallet or your life’. In this forced decision, the wallet is always and unquestionably up for taking. The context in which an apparent choice is presented is conditioned by the appearance of a free choice. This ‘free choice’ is however nothing but the freedom to choose a forced alternative. The question of ‘your wallet or your life’ implies the same inevitable consequence – the asymmetry is clear: I cannot somehow choose to ‘give my life and keep my wallet’ as the alternative of ‘giving my wallet and keeping my life’ – the question implies a non-existent freedom. The asymmetry inherent in the choice derives from the fundamental identity of each position. In either case, the wallet is taken.

The latent form of the Marx-Hegel debate is a similarly unavoidable asymmetry, a fundamentally false sense of choice. Hegel is a fictive implication, a retrospective addendum to the category of Marx. The addition of Hegel, if Marx is to be properly understood, will in itself mean nothing to any formulation of ‘Marxism for itself’. The Marx-event (the unsettling introduction of Marxism in the history of ideas) must be understood as radical enough to be independent of any Hegelian tone that may be attributed to it, as much as this tone may nevertheless necessarily be attributed to it. What is of fundamental concern is, in fact, the Marx-event as an initially inarticulable disjunction. When considered from the perspective of his distinctive originality, it will be inevitable that Marx will be thought from the retrospective formulation of ‘Marx and…’ – there is no ‘Marx for himself’ if the ‘and what?’ is not inscribed in the basic logic of his emergence in the philosophical tradition. The most unique inventions are unavoidably framed according to what preceded them, however irreconcilable they are to their original context.

Hegel became the privileged reference-point for this speculative, conceptual and reflective counterpart to the category of ‘Marx and…’: for each Marxist innovation, its formal avatar can be, however forcefully, seemingly discerned in the Hegelian system. One of the more contested instances is perhaps what (via Engels and Althusser) would be called ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ – a category contested even within Marxist literature. With the structures of surplus-value production and forms of commodity circulation (and the ‘socially determining’ aspect of their investment-processes and inherent commercial tendencies) detailed in Capital (1867, 1885, & 1894), ‘determination in the last instance’ is generally understood to denote the conceptual, indirect agency of economic modes of production in positing the presuppositions for the social structures in which these same modes of production are exercised. The furnishing of the ground of a system’s own intervention – this retrogressive logic is generally attributed to Marx’s dialectical materialism. However is this dialectical method of furnishing the ground for one’s own articulation not even more fundamentally inscribed in the very core of the Hegelian ‘concept’ (Begriff), in the Science of Logic (1812/2014)? The concept is the dynamic actualisation of the logical becoming of essence out of the constitutive antagonism of existence (a transient indeterminacy between being and nothing). The concept must exist towards, as constituted by, that which is radically other, or constitutively irreducible, to itself – it must therefore posit the coordinates of its own un-representable negation as internal to its own substantial expression, and in so doing it posits its own presuppositions in an interminable contradiction of which it is itself the product.

Ultimately, as can be seen in these many examples, there appears to be little value in desperately searching for the ‘missing aspect’ of dialectical materialism which will either reconcile it with, or make it irreducible to, other philosophical systems. Even with more recent trends insisting that Hegel is himself a materialist, any history of the Marx-Hegel relation is itself more of a logical problematic, as Fraser and Burns (2000) had suggested. However, this problematic indeterminacy of Marx can be framed as being far from a weakness. In fact, it is the paradoxical, conceptual strength of reflection that it can reformulate the new according to its roots in the old. This is not to be taken as a detriment to Marx, but as a testament to his originality. His intervention is so retrospectively malleable precisely because of the radical indeterminacy of his historical and dialectical materialism. If we return to Badiou, we can propose that the ontologically inassimilable discontinuity conditioned by an ‘event’ is so radical precisely because it lends itself to an infinite series of possible retrospective reformulations. It is a testament to Marx’s conceptual ingenuity, as a philosophical and as an economical thinker, that he is indefinitely and retrospective forced into various philosophical systems in order to ‘make sense’ of him.

The question should not therefore be, ‘what does Marx owe to Hegel?’ Marx can be made to owe a lot of things to a lot of philosophers. In order to maintain a fidelity to the originality of Marx’s thought, the initial question should be, ‘what about Marx made him retrospectively assimilable to a variety of philosophical traditions? What about Marx’s thought lent him a malleability allowing him to be constructed according to his meaning for any of a series of preceding philosophical systems? The question of Marx’s fidelity to Hegel might be an interminable question, however this question does not herald an immanent articulation of the relation or reproduction of absolute idealism within dialectical materialism, but rather signifies a constitutive inarticulability central to the Marxist intervention, which renders his work constitutively and retrospectively constructed by his temporary ‘fit’ within a historical tradition. Marx’s break from philosophy is radical enough to be both indeterminate and incomplete. Recognising that the debate on Marx’s relation to Hegel is a consequence of this historical inconsistency of Marxism itself, and thus of its undisputable originality, is becoming an increasingly important task for the 21st century avatars of Marxist thought.

 
References
 
Althusser, L. (1965/2005). For Marx. London: Verso Books.
Althusser, L. (1965/2014). Lire Le Capital. PUF.
Althusser, L. (1969). Lenin before Hegel. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm.
Althusser, L. (2020). On Ideology. Verso Books.
Badiou, A. (2006). Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1972/2013, 1980/2013). Capitalism and Schizophrenia [Anti-Oedipus & A Thousand Plateaus]. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Fraser, I. & Burns, T. (2000). Introduction: An Historical Survey of the Hegel-Marx Connection. In: Burns, T., Fraser, I. (eds) The Hegel-Marx Connection. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1812/2014). The Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press.
Lenin, V. I. (1929). Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/.
Lukács, G. (1923). History and Class Consciousness. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/.
Marx, K. (1867, 1885, & 1894). Capital [vols. 1-3]. Available from Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/.
Žižek, S. (2013). Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso Books.

While neoliberalism is the economic and political ideology that dominates most of the Western world today, it is an ideology that is unknown to most American citizens. The purveyors of neoliberal ideology present themselves as objective and as being above ideology, which serves as a method of concealing the real underlying principles of neoliberalism, which are actually wildly unpopular with regular people. In this book journalist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison attempt to reveal these hidden principles of neoliberalism so that the ideology can be better understood and combatted. And while they do a good job revealing what makes neoliberal capitalism such a predatory, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, and ecologically disastrous system, they also fall into the left-anticommunism that plagues so much of the Western left, which was critiqued brilliantly by Michael Parenti in his 1997 classic Blackshirts and Reds.
         
The most valuable contribution of this book is that it traces the ideological history of neoliberalism through different thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and Milton Friedman, up until today where neoliberals themselves now reject the word neoliberalism because of how unpopular it has become. Instead, neoliberals prefer to posture as being above ideology, and to portray the principles of neoliberalism as being natural and eternal.

The authors show how the rise of politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Agusto Pinochet represent a transition away from Keynsianism and toward neoliberalism, or an unregulated, monopolistic, financialized, version of capitalism, justified by the idea that if we allow the rich to concentrate as much wealth and power into their hands as possible, then somehow this wealth will eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us at the bottom. Since the rise of Reagan and Thatcher inequality has skyrocketed, ecological degradation has accelerated, countless wars have been fought on behalf of corporate plunder, rents and debts are through the roof, and wealth has been concentrated at the top at unprecedented rates.
         
The book also makes a pertinent and valuable analysis of the rise of right wing populist demagogues like the business tycoon Donald Trump in the US, the Musolini praising Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and the far right Hindutva associated leader of India Narenda Modi. Monbiot and Hutchison avoid falling into what some have called “Trump derangement syndrome” by making a sober and realistic analysis of Trump’s rise to power, arguing convincingly that deteriorating economic conditions make people more susceptible to right wing demagogues who claim to be fighting the establishment while doing its bidding in reality. They point out that it was Bill Clinton, the husband of Hillary Clinton who Trump ran against in 2016, that allowed many good manufacturing jobs in middle America to be outsourced to the Global South with the passing of the free trade agreement NAFTA. Free trade is a core principle of neoliberal ideology, and thus the authors show how it is neoliberalism that set the stage for the populist right wing movement, masterminded by the likes of Steve Bannon, and brought to fruition by his preferred candidate Donald Trump.
         
I also found the author’s analysis of mental health under neoliberalism to be pertinent, as too often we overlook the atomization of humanity and the lack of social connection that permeates throughout the neoliberal system. Obviously these factors play a role in the unprecedented rates of depression, opioid addiction, and mass shootings that now exist across the US. Too often the issue of social isolation in society is overlooked as politicians push half-baked cure-all solutions to these problems that won’t upset their corporate donors. For example the Democrats pushing for gun control, and gun control alone, everytime a new shooting takes place, while generally having very little to say about social isolation and the deterioration of community. It is important to understand that these social issues are complex and are rooted in the social system, and therefore, require systemic and complex solutions. The authors do a fantastic job of making this case in their systematic critique of neoliberalism.
         
Neoliberals tell us that the current state of society is the way things have to be, that this is the natural order of life which must be maintained forever because there are simply no alternatives. And it is this assumption that Monbiot and Hutchison look to challenge in their book. However, by also claiming that communism is a “failed ideology” {1}full stop, with absolutely no explanation or analysis of why it has “failed”, they too are unwittingly propagating the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism. In the words of Michael Parenti, “to claim that Communism can never work is to ignore that fact that it has for millions of people around the world.” Today China is leading the charge against neoliberalism and in doing so have accomplished the incredible feat of bringing 800 million people out of poverty. {2} A fact that the authors of this book don’t even attempt to grapple with, instead falling back on the lame cold war talking point that communism has simply failed.

I would encourage these two authors to read economist Michael Hudson’s fantastic article “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs.China’s Industrial Socialism”{3} which lays out in great detail the systemic differences between American neoliberalism and Chinese socialism. Although, if a positive word was spoken about Chinese socialism in this book it might not have gotten published by Penguin publishing house. Thus, the decision to badmouth socialism while completely ignoring all of its successes may have been more of a financial decision than a scholarly one.
         
Existing socialist countries are only mentioned a few times in this book and always disparagingly. In Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti says “For decades, many left leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anti communist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist Leninist Left.” {4} The authors of Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism repeatedly engage in this time honored tradition of bashing socialist countries in order to distance themselves from the communist left, and to fit their message within what is allowed by the established political orthodoxy. It’s amazing how the authors can be aware of the fact that our society is dominated by corporations, bankers, and shareholders, who spend billions of dollars trying to manipulate the public’s understanding of political economy, yet they seem to believe everything that these entities are telling us about communism. As a result the author's analyses of communism sound no different than what you would see in old school cold war propaganda, or a corporate owned news outlet like Fox.
         
Parenti’s text goes on to say that “sorely lacking within the US (or in this case the British) Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union.” {5} Likewise, sorely lacking from the Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of Neoliberalism, is any kind of rational evaluation of China, Cuba, Vietnam, or even non-socialist nations like Iran, who are attempting to construct an alternative economic system to Western neoliberalism. Which you’d think would be important in a text about neoliberalism. The authors choose to totally ignore the emerging multipolar world which is challenging the existing Western power structure and trying to bring about a world where the neoliberal US is no longer the unipolar global hegemon. Even the notedly anti-communist academic Noam Chomsky made a better analysis of China and the multipolar world in his recent book The Withdrawal which was a joint effort with Communist academic Vijay Prashad. {6}

Instead of socialist nations like China, these authors choose to champion the region of Rojava as an existing example of a possible alternative to neoliberalism. Rojava is a semi-autonomous region in Syria which is governed by a self described socialist party with many different branches known as the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers Party. During the Syrian Civil War the PKK sided with the US and CIA backed Free Syrian Army which allied itself with Jihadist extremist groups like ISIS and Al-Nusra in their effort to overthrow the sovereign Government of Bashar Al-Assad. It was in the chaos of this horrific civil war that the Syrian Kurds were able to establish a semi-autonomous zone in so-called Rojava for the first time. Rojava and the PKK have been criticized, especially by the Marxist Leninist left, for acting as proxies of Western imperialism, and for enforcing ethno-nationalist policies that have reportedly led many Syrian Christians to flee Rojava. [7]

The authors champion Rojava because of its efforts to implement Democratic reforms, socially progressive policies distinct from the rest of Syria, and to establish worker cooperatives. But there are many reasons to question whether Rojava should be upheld as a viable alternative to Western neoliberalism, especially when Rojava and the Kurds were recently used as pawns in a regime change effort led by Western neoliberals, intended to overthrow a sovereign state by putting arms in the hands of some of the worst extremist groups in the region. The US currently maintains seven military bases in so-called Rojava which further brings into question whether or not this region is truly a new kind of popular democracy distinct from Western neoliberalism. It is highly possible that Rojava is being allowed by Western neoliberals to experiment with some new forms of Governance so long as they continue to act as a proxy of Western power in the Middle East. {8}

Similarly to Rojava, the state of Israel has adopted a progressive veneer in the past, claiming to be champions for women's rights and for the labor movement, or even claiming to have a socialist economic system due to the prevalence of worker co-ops. However, nobody in their right mind would argue that Israel is a country that anyone should attempt to emulate. As they have of course been charged with maintaining a system of apartheid that systematically discriminates against Palestinian Arabs, who have been ethnically cleansed by the US and British backed State of Israel for over 70 years. Palestinian living standards have reached disastrously low levels, and over 70% of Palestinian people are now living in refugee status, proving that it is impossible to build an equitable and democratic state so long as you allow yourself to be a pawn of western imperialism.  We should be wary of any US backed countries that claim to be heroes for women's rights and Democracy.

Comically, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds singles out two left anti-communist intellectuals for specific criticism, those being the anarchist environmentalist Murray Bookchin, and the self described socialist novelist George Orwell. Murray Bookchin once mocked Parenti for trying to make a balanced analysis of the Soviet Union by derriding him for caring so much about “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words). Ironically, it is Bookchin’s vision of a future society that Monbiot and Hutchison champion as the most viable alternative to neoliberalism. Despite the fact that no such society has ever been created and sustained in practice, unless you accept their fallacious argument about Rojava. This is not the case with Marxist-Leninist socialism, which has seen a great deal of success in practice, and has already elevated living standards for billions of people.
The other ideologue who Parenti criticizes, George Orwell, used his voice to vehemently denounce and criticize the Soviet Union at a time when they were locked in a mortal struggle with Hitler and the Nazis. Ironically, George Monbiot won the Orwell award for journalism in 2022 and has since given lectures for the George Orwell Foundation {9} carrying on Orwell’s legacy of criticizing capitalism, while bashing and deriding those around the world who are doing the most to construct an alternative to it.

While this book grasps the evils and contradictions of neoliberalism quite well, it fails to understand the geopolitical situation today in which a new multi-polar order is arising against US dominated neoliberal hegemony. The US is desperate for regime change in countries like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. because they continue to build stronger economic ties with one another, while preventing western neoliberals from plundering their resources and manipulating their Government policy.

Confusingly, the authors at one point lump Russian President Vladimir Putin together with neoliberal demagogues around the world such as Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Donald Trump in the US, and Narenda Modi in India. And while Russia did fall in line with the Neoliberal world order during the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent plundering of the Russian economy by Western capital, under Putin they have largely reversed course, building stronger trade ties with China, nationalizing sections of the energy industry, cracking down on certain oligarchs and Russian firms, and investing more resources in infrastructure development. It is for these reasons that the US desperately seeks regime change in Russia today, dumping billions of dollars into a Ukrainian Proxy war against Russia, and terroristically blowing up the Nord stream Pipeline to sever Russian economic relations with Europe. The Russia of today, with Putin at the helm, is far from fitting in with neoliberal puppets of the West like Netanyahu in Israel or Zelensky in Ukraine. This is why Putin receives only vitriol from the US Government, while the other two receive a seemingly endless supply of money and guns.

The authors also make the claim in this book that China’s production quotas under Mao Zedong had no social utility whatsoever, which simply shows a complete lack of understanding of Chinese history and socialist economic planning. Prior to the era of Mao, China was a feudal agrarian country with very little industry to speak of. The country was dominated by feudal landlords who ruled over vast swaths of land worked by impoverished peasants. In order for China to become a modern society Mao needed to industrialize the nation and teach these peasants to engage in modern economic practices such as steel working. This is why the now infamous backyard furnaces came about, as Chinese peasants had to be given tools by the state in order to teach themselves how to do modern industrial production. And while these policies were far from perfect, the first years of Mao’s rule in China were the fastest increase in human life expectancy that has ever been seen in human history. China transformed in a matter of decades from a backwards feudal agrarian dictatorship, into a modern economy where social metrics like literacy, housing, and access to healthcare, have been massively expanded. To say that the production quotas under Mao had no social utility, and to compare them to production as it now exists in the neoliberal United States, is a statement that can only be described as absurd and ignorant.

The authors do choose to acknowledge the power of central economic planning and how it can be used to direct production towards social ends. However, instead of analyzing how the USSR and China used economic planning to transform themselves from being semi-feudal agrarian countries into industrialized global superpowers in a matter of decades, the authors instead choose to praise Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the way that he was able to direct all production towards military equipment during the Second World War. And to be fair, this is not a bad example. It does show that the US can, and has historically, used central economic planning to direct production toward social ends. However, to use this as an example while dismissing China’s use of central economic planning as a failure is completely ludicrous.

An area of agreement I have with the authors is that the left of today needs to offer people a new narrative as to how our system can be radically changed. We at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis have been attempting to do just that, by fleshing out a theory of American Marxism, or what we call the American Trajectory. We believe that America has already gone through three periods of revolutionary change, those being the 1776 revolution against british colonialism, the Civil War of the 1860s which abolished slavery and made capitalism the dominant mode of production in the American South, and the civil rights movement which did away with apartheid putting black and white workers on a more equal playing field, and allowing them to organize together against the ruling class as one. As Americans we need to understand that our history is one of colonial plunder and corporate power, but it is also a history of resistance to that power. Heroes like WEB Dubois and Martin Luther King helped to fight for historic advances that brought us to the situation we are in today free of slavery and apartheid. The struggles of the past have moved our society forward and set the stage for what must come next… American Socialism. The abolition of the neoliberal capitalist system and the transition into a truly democratic system where production is directed towards social ends, rather than the production of surplus value alone. This is the American Trajectory and this is the “New Story” that I believe we need to start selling the American Public on.

Marxism is not a failed ideology. It is a science that must be applied uniquely to each country so that we might understand our current situation and how to change it through class struggle. Once we learn to apply Marxism to our own conditions and use it to understand our country’s history, we can start to understand how we got to the current situation, and how we can best move forward with changing it. There are many analyses in this book that are passed off as unique, but were already made by Karl Marx more than a century ago. Such as the idea that the ruling economic class of society will try to portray its own narrow interests as being in the interest of the whole of society, including the workers they exploit. This was something that Marx and Engels realized as early as 1840 in his text The German Ideology. The authors reformulate Marx and Engels’s analysis in different words without crediting or citing them, before turning around and claiming that Marxist ideology has failed. Such instances are common among Western Leftists who tend to throw endless shade at the work of Marx while copying some of his most important analyses of capitalism without credit.

Despite falling into left-anticommunism throughout, the authors of Invisible Doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, provide a solid and pertinent critique of capitalism and the current neoliberal social system. Because of this book, many people will come to understand how the social problems we face today are rooted in capitalism, and the neoliberal political ideology that stems from it, and serves to justify its continued existence. The book proves without a shadow of a doubt that for the vast majority of people living under neoliberalism the system has failed.

However, by arguing that capitalism's antithesis, socialism, has also failed, the authors further confuse the masses and push them to seek solutions in the anarchist school of thought which has yet to produce a successful revolution, or build a social system separate from western capitalism and imperialism. By arguing that keynesianism, neoliberalism, and socialism have all failed the authors extinguish some of the hope that the masses might place in the rise of socialism and the multipolar world. This might be acceptable if the authors made a sober analysis of rising socialist powers like China and Cuba, or their non-socialist allies like Russia and Iran, in order to argue that their rise will not be enough to destroy neoliberalism, and there is still much work to be done by workers here in the imperial core. Which is an argument that I would agree with. However, the authors instead fall back on cold war style state department talking points to dismiss these rising socialist and socialist adjacent powers without offering a shred of real analysis. And thus the book gives a solid analysis of neoliberalism, but confuses the current state of geopolitics by neglecting to analyze the massive and growing resistance to neoliberalism that is taking place in the East and the Global South.
​
Read this book if you want to gain a better grasp on modern neoliberalism, and especially its ideological roots which can be traced back to the beginning of the last century. However, also make sure to pick up Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky’s The Withdrawal for a more all encompassing and accurate analysis of the current geopolitical situation. Also don’t be afraid to pick up some Marx and Lenin. I promise there is more to learn from them than what much of the Western left would lead you to believe.

Citations

1. Monbiot, George, and Peter Hutchison. The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Penguin Books Ltd, 2024.
2. “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience.” Worldbank.Org, The World Bank, 1 Apr. 2022, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience. Accessed 2024.
3. Hudson, Michael. “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism.” Michael-Hudson.Com, 14 Apr. 2021, https://michael-hudson.com/2021/04/americas-neoliberal-financialization-policy-vs-chinas-industrial-socialism/.  Accessed 2024.
4. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 43.
5. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 45.
6. Prashad, Vijay, et al. The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. The New Press, 2022.
7. Hamou, Ammar, and Will Christou. “Syrian Christians: Exploited or Protected Minority?” Syria Direct, 22 Dec. 2019, syriadirect.org/syrian-christians-exploited-or-protected-minority/.
8. Line Struggle Collective. “On Rojava and the Western Left.” Linestruggle.Medium.Com, Medium, 22 Apr. 2022, https://linestruggle.medium.com/on-rojava-and-the-western-left-bac1b858173e. Accessed 2024.
9. “George Monbiot.” The Orwell Foundation, The Orwell Foundation, 13 July 2022, www.orwellfoundation.com/journalist/george-monbiot/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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