4/29/2024 Review: Angela Harris – Strike Story: A Dramatic Retelling of the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912 (2013). By: J.N. CheneyRead NowTo highlight the more obscure pieces of labor and socialist history is a noble feat. Though the academic realm is vital for such an act, artistry is of similar significance. Not every piece can be a grandiose display of dense intellectualism full of jargon with highly specific details, sometimes a more colloquial, entertaining piece is necessary in spotlighting a particular history. The play Strike Story: A Dramatic Retelling of the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912 by Angela Harris is one of those pieces designed to fill the gap between dense academia and the simplification of say, a blog post. Now for clarification’s sake, this is purely a review of the written form of the play. I was fortunate enough to be kindly gifted a copy of the play by Angela Harris herself, however I have not yet had the opportunity to view the actual live production in person or in video form. As the title implies, Strike Story is a dramatization of the events that unfolded within the Little Falls Textile Strike that went on from early October of 1912 to early January of 1913. This strike was primarily made of working immigrant women employed by two different textile mills in the city of Little Falls, New York. A three act play, the production is structured with a chorus outlining the happenings of the strike as fictionalized versions of the strike’s historical actors provide further details from their perspectives. Numerous important strike figures are represented in this piece, including Matilda Rabinowitz, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, George Lunn, the first and only socialist mayor of the city of Schenectady, New York, and Helen Schloss, a socialist and public travelling public health nurse. Of all of these significant figures, none of the “characters” in this strike are of more importance than one known only as the “Woman Striker,” a representative of who this strike is really all about; the workers fighting for a fair wage. It is of our own importance though to understand what exactly brought about this fight in the first place. Act one of the play is the only one broken up into two scenes. The first two scenes are designed to provide a brief explanation as to why exactly the strike came about in the first place. In act one, scene one, various characters are introduced using the chorus as a framing device. The chorus gives the context of the introduction of a law in New York limiting the amount of time women and children were allowed to work in certain industries, going down from 60 hours a week to 54. This reduction of hours would lead to a reduction in pay for the workers in the Little Falls textile mills, ultimately being the primary reason for the strike. After this bit of exposition, the reader is given a further glimpse into some of the conflict encapsulated within the strike conflict itself, with an exchange between George Lunn and the Little Falls Chief of Police James Long over the issue of free speech being highlighted. In act one scene two, the reader receives even greater context regarding the history of the textile industry in Little Falls and what would be the catalyst to initiate the aforementioned law. This second scene touches upon the financial straits of the textile industry in this area, Helen Schloss being brought into the city by a group of well-off women called the Fortnightly Group to help fight tuberculosis in the city, and the horrifically catalyzing power of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 in bringing about what would become known as the 54-Hour Law. The introduction of Helen Schloss in particular helps in painting a picture as to what exactly the immigrant population of the city was dealing with, that being abysmal living and working conditions on top of an antagonistic management. Crowded, poorly ventilated homes, rickety, dangerous structures, pollution, exposure to harmful chemicals, mistreatment by mill foreman, all things that Schloss witnessed in her investigation of the root causes of tuberculosis in the city. When the strikers eventually went on strike, Schloss would send a letter of resignation to the Fortnightly Club so that she may support them in various forms. Act two of Strike Story further explores the battle for free speech encompassed within the strike battle, soon after providing a deeper dive into the strike proper. The involvement of socialists from Schenectady, the formation of the strike committee created with the help of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the mass arrest campaign against the strikers carried out by the police and their privately hired deputies. As important as the events in the first act are, act two is where the historical narrative of the strike reaches at the least comes close to a climax as things begin to ramp up in this microcosm of class warfare. Act three is where the game truly begins to change, as the strikers and the strike committee look for new leadership in the aftermath of the mass arrests carried out only a few weeks after the strike began. The introduction of Matilda Rabinowitz as the new leader of the strike committee, the fight against the American Federation of Labor as they tried to undermine the efforts of the IWW, the involvement of labor legend Bill Haywood in garnering support for the strikers, and efforts to protect the children of the strikers are among several integral developments at this point in the story. Act three would ultimately bring us to the end of the strike, with a resolution officially being made between the mill owners and the strikers with the help of the New York State Labor Department in early January of 1913. Though legal battles would proceed for a number of the following months, the strike itself would come to an end. Something that needs to be appreciated about this play is that it’s based almost entirely on the factual history of what happened in this strike. Angela Harris thoroughly researched the proceedings of the strike and the relating preceding events, aiming for as much historical accuracy as possible while taking certain creative liberties, at least with the presentation of the events. Harris provides a bibliography of her sources, utilizing significant pieces such as first-hand accounts from Helen Schloss and Matilda Rabinowitz, works by Philip S. Foner and Little Falls native Richard Buckley, as well as a myriad of newspapers throughout New York State. Much of the dialogue of the prominent figures is taken directly from the speeches and articles of said figures, further sticking to the prospect of historical accuracy. The creative liberties come in the form of the character of the Woman Striker and the chorus. For the Woman Striker, her presence is for the purpose of personifying the collective struggle that these immigrant woman faced. The strike was, ultimately, all about her and those like her. This single character is made to encapsulate the pain and the determination of the masses of women who fought to ensure that she and her children could eat, that they could have even somewhat decent housing, and that they could improve conditions for their fellow workers. Elsewise, the creative liberties come in the form of the chorus. The chorus adds a new layer of storytelling to the strike, providing details that would feel rather awkward if explained directly by individual characters, such as listing off how much debt the mill owners were in prior to the strike or listing off the names of strikers and supporters who were arrested. The framing device of the chorus aids in explaining how this fight between labor and industrial capitalism came to be, serving as a welcome and a creative method of helping to inform the reader of the greater context of what this strike means. There’s even a musical element to this piece of theater. Throughout various points of this play, the chorus will sing brief sections of both popular music of the early 20th century, as well as various pieces of labor, socialist, and strike music. More notable pieces featured in this play include On Moonlight Bay, Bread and Roses relating to the Lawrence, Massachusetts strike that some tactics of the Little Falls strikers were borrowed from, Solidarity Forever, The Internationale, and The Marseillaise, one of the staple songs of the strike. This brief synopsis doesn’t do this story justice. The Little Falls Textile Strike is an event with a deep history that goes well beyond the confines of the story told in this piece, however what is being told here is well-structured, thoroughly researched, and as far as a written piece goes, an interesting and engaging read. Despite being a dramatization, there is much to learn from in reading Strike Story, and the same can likely be said for an actual theatrical production of this extremely significant story. There are several texts written about particular historical actors of this event, and the strike has had a handful of chapters dedicated to it in certain pieces, many of them being used as a reference in my own research and this play, however there’s a severe lack of pieces focusing solely on the strike. While my work aims to fill that gap as robustly and rigorously as possible, Angela Harris’ Strike Story holds the distinction as of the spring of 2024 of being one of the very few pieces dedicated to the strike as a whole, dramatic or not. This is an important piece that helps keep a relatively unknown piece of labor history alive, sharing a goal that I aim to contribute to with my upcoming book, and it deserves more attention. Copies of this play can be purchased on Amazon for just under ten dollars. AuthorJ.N. Cheney is an aspiring Marxist historian with a BA in history from Utica College. His research primarily focuses on New York State labor history, as well as general US socialist history. He additionally studies facets of the past and present global socialist movement including the Soviet Union, the DPRK, and Cuba. Archives April 2024
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Think about this: when well-informed Americans engage in discussions about American politics, they reveal a thorough grasp of the intricate workings of the American government. They can conduct in-depth analyses on topics such as the influence of the Squad on Democratic Party policies and even assess the policy proposals of third-party candidates like Robert F, Kennedy or Cornell West. They can discuss the historical dynamics between institutions like the FBI and the CIA, noting differences between eras such as Hoover's and Mueller's leadership. Moreover, with sufficient knowledge, they can investigate the impact of financial entities like Citibank, Goldman Sachs, or BlackRock on cabinet selections and recognize the various vested interests involved, such as the appointment of people like Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. Similarly, well-informed Brits will tell you many details on the latest drama between Labour and Tories, and Canadians may provide insights into the deeper political meanings behind actions like Pierre Poilievre eating an apple. Beyond the borders However, when asked about the politics of foreign countries, individuals tend to oversimplify, reducing complex political landscapes to singular figures. For instance, ask the average American about Russia's government, and the response often centers around Putin or Putinism. The same applies to China, where discussions typically focus solely on Xi Jinping, and the only thing they may know about the DPRK is their leader - Kim Jong Un. This oversimplification fosters a problematic "Leader = Country" mindset, perpetuated even by some "independent media," which invariably portrays leaders like Xi, Putin, and Jong Un as evil dictators. Foreign nations, like one's own, are multifaceted entities with diverse interests, power struggles, and internal conflicts. Yet, many fail to recognize this complexity. Consider how many Russian politicians you can name beyond Putin, or how many parties Russia has. How familiar are you with their backgrounds, ideologies, and roles in Russian politics? How many policies can you attribute to them? If you're struggling to answer these questions, you're not alone. So, can we deepen our understanding of geopolitics by challenging this simplistic "Leader = Country" narrative? Roughly 70% of Americans want the Biden administration to push Ukraine toward a negotiated peace with Russia as soon as possible, according to a new survey from the Harris Poll and the Quincy Institute. And for that reason, we need to understand Russian politics better. Let's explore together. Russian Political Structure There's a prevalent misconception among many people, particularly in Western countries, that Alexei Navalny was the sole opposition figure in Russian politics. But in reality, Russia's political landscape is much broader, with various opposition figures, parties, and movements operating within it. Russia's political structure is shaped by its history, culture, and unique socio-political dynamics. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has undergone significant transformations, particularly in its political system. Today, the country operates under a semi-presidential republic, in which the president holds substantial power alongside a bicameral legislature and various political parties are vying for influence. Let's delve into the intricacies of Russia's political structure and examine the key parties and their positions. The Kremlin's Dominance: United Russia At the center of Russian politics stands United Russia, the ruling party known for its close affiliation with the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin. Founded in 2001, United Russia has consistently maintained its dominance in the political arena, securing significant majorities in both the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) and regional legislatures. United Russia positions itself as a centrist party, advocating for stability, economic development, and national unity. However, critics often label it as a vehicle for consolidating power under Putin's leadership, with some accusing it of suppressing opposition voices and limiting political pluralism. The Communist Party: A Legacy of the Soviet Era The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) remains a prominent force in Russian politics and is the main opposition party. Founded in 1993 as the successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party, the CPRF espouses socialist principles, advocating for justice and the protection of workers' rights. The CPRF maintains a significant presence in the State Duma and enjoys support primarily from older demographics nostalgic for the stability of the Soviet era. It criticizes United Russia's policies as serving the interests of the elite. Liberal Opposition In contrast to United Russia and the CPRF, liberal opposition parties such as Yabloko represent a minority voice within Russia's political landscape. Founded in the early 1990s, Yabloko advocates for democratic reforms, civil liberties, and market-oriented economic policies. Yabloko's platform emphasizes the rule of law, human rights, and the decentralization of power away from the Kremlin. However, the party struggles to gain significant traction, often facing obstacles such as limited media coverage and electoral barriers. Nationalist Forces: LDPR and A Just Russia Completing the spectrum of Russia's political parties are the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and A Just Russia. Despite their ideological differences, both parties share nationalist sentiments and occasionally align with the Kremlin on certain issues. The LDPR, previously led by the charismatic Vladimir Zhirinovsky, combines populist rhetoric with nationalist policies, advocating for a strong Russian state and assertive foreign policy. A Just Russia, on the other hand, positions itself as a social-democratic party, prioritizing social welfare programs and progressive taxation while also supporting Putin's presidency. Despite many socialist elements in its domestic policies, Russia today remains a capitalist country. Moscow’s foreign policy has become anti-imperialist out of necessity. After years of offensive actions from NATO, the Russian government has had no choice but to intervene to safeguard its sovereignty. Only time will tell how successful their fight with the Empire will be. Our job is to support Russia and others who oppose Western hegemony and seize the right opportunity for Socialist Revolution. AuthorSlava the Ukrainian Socialist This article was produced by The Revolution Report. Archives April 2024 Since the explicit Israeli colonisation of historic Palestine in 1948 supported by colonialist and imperialist powers, namely Britain and the US, the Palestinian struggle has become a global cause. Resistance was a natural response to the invasions and incursions better known as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”. Even before then, as the military occupation entrenched itself at the hands of pre-state Zionist militias and paramilitary units, massacres and forceful expulsion were committed, leading to the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe, of the loss of the Palestinians’ homeland. The 1967 Naksa, or “set back”, followed with the defeat of Arab armies. Displaced indigenous Palestinians were forced to live in refugee camps in makeshift tent cities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, relying on food hand-outs provided by UNRWA. At first they assumed that they would one day return to where they had been driven out by force. During the Nakba, some 500 towns and villages were wiped off the map as they were looted. Today, 70 years later, the displaced and dispossessed are still waiting for the implementation of that dream – “the right of return”. Amid all the developments at the time, a sense of revolt began to emerge among Palestinians to defend their land. “Fedaeyyeen” – the Arabic term for “freedom fighters” – began to assemble and carry out reprisal attacks against occupying Israeli forces. Some fighters infiltrated the security border fence from neighbouring Arab countries. Horrendous massacres followed, most notably in 1953, 1955 and 1956, in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed at the command of Ariel Sharon, then a hawkish army general charged with uprooting the Fedaeyyeen and punishing the refugees for supporting them. Revolutionary spirit in Egypt Egypt, known then as “The United Arab Republic”, had administered the Gaza Strip between 1948 and 1967 and lost dozens of its soldiers, police and security officers, especially in south Gaza’s Khan Younis and Rafah towns during a triple-pronged offensive against Egyptian forces by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, following Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal. The spirit of revolution was running high in Egypt under leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the godfather of pan-Arabism, who was known for his anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist stance. Nasser, who dominated Arab politics and the imagination of the Arab masses at the time, extended an invitation to none other than Ernesto Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, to visit Cairo. It’s not known if visiting Gaza was on Che’s agenda, or if it was Nasser’s idea. But the timing of the visit was of great importance for the Palestinian national movement which was comprised of Fedaeyyeen. The movement drew inspiration from guerrillas in Latin America, Vietnam and Algeria. The ideology of the Palestinian Fedaeyyeen was mainly left-wing nationalist, socialist or communist, and their proclaimed purpose was to defeat Zionism and liberate Palestine through armed struggle to establish it as “a secular democratic state“. The idea of liberation gained momentum as Palestinians had never achieved any form of real national independence in their homeland, and a few years later, in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed and led by Ahmad Shukeiri. Yasser Arafat became the PLO’s chairman in 1969 until his death in 2004. Che Guevara in Gaza After accepting Nasser’s invitation, Guevara was sent to the region by Cuba’s Fidel Castro on a three-month tour of 14 countries. A one-day visit was dedicated to Gaza which was then under Egyptian rule. Guevara landed in Gaza wearing his dark military fatigues on 18 June 1959 after travelling about 450km from Cairo. He received a hero’s welcome from the Egyptian de facto governor of Gaza, General-Lieutenant Ahmad Salim, as well as from Palestinian officials and heads of municipalities and many ordinary people. During his short visit, he toured several Palestinian refugee camps including Al-Buraij camp, where he was welcomed with chants from the Cuban revolution. Cuba went on to welcome the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, making official contact with it in 1965. One of Che’s goals for the visit was to support Arab and Palestinian national liberation and revolutionary movements against western imperialism and colonisation. Zulfiqar Swirjo, an official affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stated during a previous interview that his father was there during that historic visit that aimed to share Guevara’s beliefs and revolutionary ideas with Gaza’s fighters. They had wanted to put together a strategic plan for a popular struggle to fight the Israeli forces using guerrilla warfare tactics. Gaza The Gaza Strip is a small slice of the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea in the southern part of historic Palestine, bordering Egypt to the south-west and Israel to the east and north. At 45km long and between 5 and 12km in width, it has a total area of just 365 square km – around the same size as the city of Bakersfield, California (pop. 380,000). Today, two-thirds of Gaza’s two million inhabitants are refugees, ethnically cleansed from their original homes. According to Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, after Guevara’s visit to Gaza, Cuba gave scholarships to Palestinian students, granted citizenship to stranded Palestinians and held many conferences in support of Palestine. And as Palestine has become a symbol of struggle against colonialism, it’s no surprise that India’s first prime minister and anti-British colonialist Jawaharlal Nehru also visited Gaza in 1960 and met with the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), whose presence was to protect the old armistice line between Israel and Egypt. The Argentinean revolutionary leader was summarily executed by Bolivian forces in October 1967, nearly four months after the “six-day war”, when Gaza was annexed from Egyptian control and came under total Israeli occupation. Che became an icon of resistance, especially for leftist Palestinian resistance movements such as The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People’s Party. His legacy endures and, for many Palestinian activists, he remains a source of inspiration, as a popular icon of rebellion against imperialism, colonialism and military occupation. AuthorYousef al-Helou is a freelance Palestinian journalist. This article was produced by Resumen. Archives April 2024 Despite efforts to quash pro-Palestinian protests on campus, students continue to organise and demand divestment from companies with ties to Israel, as the US witnesses an "Ivy League spring." For the past week, Columbia University has emerged as one of the latest epicenters of the global struggle to save Gaza from the Axis of Genocide. Israel with full economic, diplomatic and military support of the United States and other Western colonial powers, has been starving, dehydrating and carpet-bombing Gaza for 200 days now. Inspired by the pain that every free-thinking human being feels at the sight of emaciated and burnt children and families, Columbia students took on big personal risk when taking a stand and building a Gaza Solidarity Encampment in the centre of campus last week. Their goal: to get the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. After Columbia's president disbanded the protests by calling the police, another encampment has already popped up on campus. In addition to divestment, demonstrations are now calling for the removal of police presence and the reversal of disciplinary action taken against protesters involved in the first encampment. The enormity of this image: pic.twitter.com/SfuaLlP4dV — Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 18, 2024 I am a Columbia University alum and fired John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who has joined in, spending time listening and learning from this fearless generation of student fighters. I cut my teeth as a student organiser at Columbia College from 1996 to 2000 and at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) from 2004-2006. In 1997, we shut down the campus with a giant human circle in support of striking workers on campus who were mistreated and underpaid. The ongoing struggle for more classes on anti-colonial struggles and ethnic studies included a banner drop during graduation, highlighting some of the voices marginalised by Columbia’s core curriculum. On October 4, 2006 we shut down the racist, anti-immigrant group the Minutemen who were pushing white supremacy and anti-immigrant hysteria on campus. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment follows a storied history of students standing up for what is right, just like the 1968 generation did in protest of racism against Black America and the US war in Vietnam, in which we dropped 6 million tons of napalm and bombs on the Southeast Asian country from 1962 to 1975. The Baroness Shafik At the centre of the struggle for free speech and a free Gaza is the new president of Columbia, Manouche Shafik, who is trying to finish her first year on the job. She justified siccing riot police on peaceful student protestors by saying, "the safety of our community was my top priority and we needed to preserve an environment where everyone could learn in a supportive context." Despite mainstream media distortions and lies, there are no documented incidents of hate speech associated with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Hailing from a background of extreme privilege, Shafik is literally a "Baroness," following her employment with the Bank of England. She has a track record of defending free speech when it comes to white supremacists. She has long served global elite interests. She sits on the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There is no disguising where she stands on the global division of humanity: she's on the side of the global 0.1 percent. As former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, the same bank that stole $1 billion dollars in Venezuelan gold reserves at the behest of the US government in 2019. College presidents like Shafik and Mason are willing to scrap academic freedom and our first amendment rights to please powerful Zionist and foreign policy establishment interests. In an age where identity politics and hypocritical liberal diversity rhetoric dominate the US political scene, the Baroness is seen as a strategic asset to Columbia. In her testimony before the House of Representatives about rising anti-Semitism concerns on campus last week, Shafik looked comfortable engaging in the charade. Aware of the consequences of not bowing down to pro-Israel and pro-genocide Republicans and Democrats, like the president of my college Karol Mason, Shafik engaged in the McCarthyite hearings. Determined not to be taken down like the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, college presidents like Shafik and Mason are willing to scrap academic freedom and our first amendment rights to please powerful Zionist and foreign policy establishment interests. In a recent interview, Rebecca Jordan-Young, a Columbia and Barnard professor, explained the significance of the televised hearings: "What happened at those hearings yesterday should be of grave concern to everybody. What we got was a live performance (of President Shafik) throwing the entire university system under the bus." While Columbia University’s president testifies before Congress about alleged antisemitism on college campuses, professors @NaraMilanich & Rebecca Jordan Young say the hearing is weaponizing anti-semitism to suppress free speech in an “intensifying attack on liberal education.” pic.twitter.com/85EO2xjzxx Another professor from the college, Nara Milanich, warned: "Antisemitism here is being used as a wedge. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a very different political agenda." As the cynical circus played out in the nation's capital, students seized the national and international moment to escalate the struggle to halt the genocidal madness raining down on Gaza. Hundreds of students erected tents on East Lawn of Columbia’s 116th street campus. Student activists reiterated in their speeches and posters: "Stay Focused!" insisting on not allowing anything to distract them from what gave birth to the encampment, the asymmetrical war on Gaza. Palestine is everywhere What's happening at Columbia actions has inspired a wave of solidarity protests at Harvard, Yale, the New School in New York, New York University, the University of Michigan and across the world. On Saturday, student groups led a march against displacement, connecting the 76-year war on Palestine to the evictions that thousands of uptown New York City families have endured at the hands of one of New York City's biggest landlords, Columbia University. After more than 100 students from Barnard College and Columbia University were arrested at an encampment calling for the school to divest from Israel amid the country's deadly assault on Gaza, similar encampments have begun across the United States. pic.twitter.com/DfK2MXbYx3 — Democracy Now! (@democracynow) April 22, 2024 Columbia students are facing unprecedented threats and repression. In January, former Israeli soldiers sprayed student protestors with a chemical called skunk, resulting in hospitalisations. Shafik has suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace clubs - and is being sued for it. Meanwhile, the media accuses us of supporting terrorism. An NYPD drone hovered over last week's encampment. Organisers encouraged everyone to wear masks to protect their identity. Private detectives have harassed students. One undercover officer threatened us with his gun. If your family, community and nation was being dehydrated, starved, blockaded and bombed out of existence, how would that impact your preparation for exams and term papers? Has US society stopped to think of the impact of the genocidal violence raining down on Gaza on Palestinian-American students? If your family, community and nation was being dehydrated, starved, blockaded and bombed out of existence, how would that impact your preparation for exams and term papers? The Columbia administration's response has been to ignore the students (the true protagonists) and resort to the age-old trick of blaming "outside forces." One-sided mainstream news coverage contains a lot of misinformation about the student protests, going as far as to try to link them to Hamas. There is a fresh and full barrage of mainstream headlines about anti-semitism and the encampment "making it unsafe for Jewish students at Columbia." This week, Columbia has gone as far as to cancel in-person classes, creating headlines such as "Jewish students told to leave Columbia after Passover warning." Isolated and despised by humanity, the forces of genocidal Zionism dig their holes ever deeper. Many faculty members have expressed their dismay at Shafik's crackdown on free speech. The wider movement participated in jail support. All the way from Gaza, the Palestinian resistance has recognised the heroic sacrifices and contributions of the student movement. "Your people are my people. Our struggles align" Students have been eager to hear from activists from past generations who stood up at Columbia. One of the protestors from 1968 spoke at a teach-in on the East Lawn over the weekend. 🚨UPDATE: Cornel West has joined the students occupying the West Lawn at Columbia University in support and solidarity with the students arrested in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and the Palestinian struggle!!! pic.twitter.com/hfMOds7Qi0— sebas 🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇵🇬 (@cybersebb) April 18, 2024 Dr. Norman Finkelstein, third party presidential hopeful Dr. Cornel West and faculty who were fired from other universities addressed the encampment. This was in the spirit of the Liberation Classes of 1968, when students organised teach-ins around local and global issues left out of Columbia’s "core curriculum." On behalf of a generation of student leaders and fighters who came before you, thank you to the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other student organisations who have not stood down in the face of genocidal lies and bombs. Both of these student groups have been suspended for working to expose and stop the genocide. Their bravery and organisation of this leadership at Columbia has given us all – from Gaza to Harlem – more hope and determination that we can stop the genocidal, colonial zionist war machine. Stay strong Columbia students! You are not alone! Suspended students, doxed employees, fired professors: We are all in this together. We got your back! AuthorDanny Shaw This article was produced by TRTWorld. Archives April 2024 Martin Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Virtually all areas of philosophy, along with many other disciplines as well, have had to tackle in one form or another the questions he poses, and the insights he provides. His work grasped the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s for most of continental philosophy. It is a tour de force Marxist philosophers must face head on. Simply calling it ‘bourgeois,’ ‘Nazi’, or the expression of the middle-class state of being in post WW1 Germany is not enough. While it is important to situate Heidegger in his proper historical and class context, and while it is essential to show the Nazism and antisemitism he was undoubtedly committed to for a significant period of his life, this is insufficient to defeat the thought of this giant. Other leftist scholars have already made tremendous inroads in this area. Since at least the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, but especially now with the publication of Richard Wolin’s recent text, Heidegger in Ruins, the intimate connection between Heidegger and Nazism is indisputable – even though many, including those working within his Gesamtausgabe (collected works), have tried to paper over it. Certainly, to borrow an expression Domenico Losurdo uses to describe Nietzsche scholarship, there has pervaded a “hermeneutic of innocence” in Heideggerian scholarship which tries to divorce his work from the essentially political context that embeds it. Its political horizon, its class basis, its connection with Nazism, these are all things any Marxist discussion on Heidegger should include. But we must ask, is this enough to ‘defeat’ Heidegger? If he was simply a ‘Nazi,’ why hasn’t he, like Emmanual Faye suggests, been taken off philosophy shelves and put next to Goebbels?[1] Why have so many leftist scholars in the Global South and East, thinkers aware of Heidegger’s Nazism, turned in various parts of their work to Heidegger for insights? Unlike the tradition of Western Marxism, where the eclecticism is intimately connected to a politics that throws on the support of imperialism a radical veneer, a lot of these scholars are fervent critics of U.S. imperialism and have stood for decades on the side of socialist construction. Why does, for instance, the late Bolivian Marxist, Juan Jose Bautista Segales, find that he can incorporate insights from Heidegger’s critique of modernity into the process of understanding the dimensions of the indigenous struggle for socialism, a struggle that must, necessarily, tarry with the question of capitalist modernity? Why does the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of the radical, Christian Socialist liberation theology tendency, central to so many socialist and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin American, turn to Heidegger to discuss the question of care in ethics? In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci reminds us that: "A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems."[2] Gramsci would go on to lambast Nikolai Bukharin, in part, for failing to address in his ‘Manual’ the critics of Marxism in their utmost coherence, i.e., for failing to deal with the best bourgeois philosophy and science had to offer, opting instead to obtaining the quick victories one gets when they challenge an opponent of a lower caliber. Gramsci says that while reading Bukharin’s text, “one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear.”[3] Unfortunately, a similar fatal flaw can be observed in the traditional Marxist-Leninist critiques of Heidegger. Far from engaging with him honestly and comprehensively, we have opted for quick victories based on dismissals of his thought as petty-bourgeois, subjectivist, Nazi, etc. While components of this critique are certainly true, they are not enough – i.e., they are not worthy of proper Marxist-Leninist critique. Yes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin name-called their opponents and spoke of the class positions and subsequent political interests they often spoke from – but in conjunction with this was always a thorough demolishing of their arguments along the kind described by Gramsci previously. Additionally, how these thinkers expressed in their work and concerns a class position was something that was proved, i.e., there was a concrete study of the relationship between the base and superstructure, between the class the thinker represents and the ideas they enunciate. This refined analysis has often been missing in our tradition’s treatment of Heidegger. Far too often conclusions that have to be proven are accepted simply at face value. As R. T. De George, who did an umbrella study of Marxist-Leninist writing on Heidegger up until the mid-1960s, argued, "The failure of Marxist criticism of Heidegger, as well as of other Western philosophers, is not necessarily that it has been wrong; but rather that most of it has been shallow, polemical, beside the point, and poor Marxism. Marxist criticism is difficult. Marxist-Leninist criticism has become too easy. It would perhaps be too much to ask that Marxists follow Lenin's advice and criticize not in the manner of Feuerbach but in the manner of Hegel, i.e. not by merely rejecting views but by correcting them "deepening, generalizing, and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept". But this presumably is what Marxist and Marxist Leninist philosophy should do."[4] De George is, of course, not a Marxist. But he is right to call us out on this shortcoming. In doing so he is being a good ideological enemy, an enemy that, to use an obscene American expression, wants us to get our shit together. In the 20th century, the best inroads into the Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger would be made by Georg Lukács, who situates him within the irrationalism of the imperialist period in his seminal Destruction of Reason. Here Lukács is correct about what it takes to carry forth this critique in a proper Marxist manner. He writes: "To reveal [a thinker’s] social genesis and function is of the greatest importance, but in itself by no means sufficient. Granted, the objectivity of progress will suffice correctly to condemn as reactionary an individual phenomenon or orientation. But a really Marxist-Leninist critique of reactionary philosophy cannot permit itself to stop at this. Rather it must show in real terms, in the philosophical material itself, the philosophical falsity and the distortion of basic philosophical questions, the negation of philosophy's achievements and so on… To this extent, an immanent critique is a justified and indeed indispensable element in the portrayal and exposure of reactionary tendencies in philosophy. The classic Marxist authors have constantly used it. Engels, for example, in his Anti-Duhring and Lenin in his Empirio-Criticism. To reject immanent criticism as one element in an overall survey also embracing social genesis and function, class characteristics, exploration of the true nature of society and so on is bound to lead to a philosophical sectarianism, to the attitude that everything which is axiomatic to a conscious Marxist-Leninist is also immediately obvious to his readers…[Therefore, while] the antithesis between the various bourgeois ideologies and the achievements of dialectical and historical materialism is the self-evident foundation of our treatment and critique of the subject-matter, [we must still] prove in factual, philosophical terms the inner incoherence, contradictoriness, etc., of the separate philosophies [as] also unavoidable if one wants to illustrate their reactionary character in a truly concrete way."[5] This is precisely the task that Lukács sets for himself in this monumental text. However, as he tells us, it is a task that cannot possibly be completed in one book, even an 800 page one. The Heidegger section, for instance, is a mere 25 pages. Even shorter is his treatment of Heidegger in Existentialism or Marxism, published a few years after. Nonetheless, it is on the basis of this limited work that a proper Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger can be developed. Lukács tells us that with Heidegger phenomenology “turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period.”[6] He performed a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism,” a “transference of purely subjective-idealist positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones.”[7] His “ontological materiality” and claims to concreteness “remained purely declarative,” dominated through and through by irrationalistic arbitrariness and an “epistemological hocus pocus.”[8] Even in the aspects of his thought that are ‘historical’, what is operative, Lukács argues, is the “transformation of real history into a mythified pseudo-history.”[9] In Heidegger the “Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach,” intuitivist and irrationalist though it might have been in its own right, had now “faded completely.”[10] Philosophy’s task was “to keep investigation open by means of questions.”[11] The discipline is turned into a big question rigamarole centered on a question of Being that had already been answered by the discipline more than a century prior in Hegel’ Science of Logic, where it was shown, in its indeterminacy, to be indistinguishable from nothing, impelling us to move beyond pure being into being as coming to be and seizing to be, being as becoming, determinate being, and all the subsequent categories unfolded out of these in the Logic. The context which situates the rise of Heidegger, Lukács writes, is akin to the post-1848 context which saw the rise of Soren Kierkegaard’s romantic individualist agony: “Kierkegaard's philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel's idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy [i.e., Heidegger and et. al.] were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings.”[12] This mood of despair, for Lukács, produced like it had decades prior, an “ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, of anxiety” which “was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers” on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power.[13] It was a “yearning to rescue naked existence from universal collapse.”[14] Philosophically it was marked by an attempt at ‘third ways’ beyond idealism and materialism and rationalism and irrationalism, but in each instance, idealism and irrationalism ultimately showed their dominance. While his phenomenology and ontology were, in Lukács’s words, little more than “abstractly mythicizing” a “vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask,”[15]it nonetheless provided, he admits, an “often grippingly interesting description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period.”[16] In his phenomenological description of the inauthenticity of everyday existence, pervaded by Verfallensein, a state of falling prey, we come under the “anonymous dominance of das Man” (the one or they).[17] Lukács argues that Heidegger’s detailed description of this fallen state “constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of Being and Time, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book’s broad and profound effect… [It is] here, with the tools of phenomenology, [that] Heidegger [gives] a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the worldview of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years.”[18] While he was fundamentally unable to understand the socio-historical causes that grounded such experience, Lukács holds that the value of his account is seen in the fact that it “provides – on the descriptive level – a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of the post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences.”[19] Here Heidegger follows to the T the tradition of irrationalism which preceded him and of which he becomes a central figure of in the 20th century. As Lukács writes in Existentialism or Marxism: "In times of the crisis of imperialism, when everything is unstable, everything is in disarray, when the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to observe, as the next day refutes what seemed indestructible today, it is faced with a choice. It must admit either its own defeat or the defeat of reason. The first path means recognizing your inability to comprehend reality in thought. Here it would be the turn of reason, but it is from this rationality that bourgeois thinking must withdraw. It is impossible to recognize this defeat from a bourgeois standpoint, for that would mean a transition to the camp of socialism. Therefore, at the crossroads, the bourgeois intelligentsia must choose a different path; it must proclaim the collapse of reason."[20] While the scope of the work leads Lukács to sometimes move too quick in his critique of Heidegger, his situating of him in the tradition of irrationalism and its rejection of the enlightenment is a thread that must be picked up and developed by Marxist scholarship on Heidegger. The best place I have seen this done is in Domenico Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War, published first in Italian in 1991, and in English a decade after. Here it is lucidly shown how Heidegger and the Nazis inherit the Kreigsideology (War ideology) of the post-WW1 period, rooted in a mythical Gemeinschaft (community) inhibited by an equally dubious notion of fate (Schicksal) and a fetish of death and its proximity as central to authentic life. Reason, which is tied to civilization and society (Gesellschaft), is lambasted for tearing communal bonds and breaking from the community’s destiny.[21] The enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism, which takes the rational kernel of the former to their historical and logical conclusion, are necessarily condemned.[22] The rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment has been a fad in Western academia for decades. Heidegger alone is not to blame. But he is, as a fellow traveler of the tradition of irrationalism, a key voice in the anti-modernity and anti-Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment, although imperfect and filled with contradictions, brought with it the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in as rational creatures, that provides for us the ability to see and fight for progress in history. It represented the thought of the bourgeoisie in its most progressive moment, before it undeniably turns into a force of reaction after the 1848 revolutions. The universalist ideals of the enlightenment have been given concrete content through the various progressive struggles of the last three centuries – from the American revolution to the French to the Haitian and to the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century. Those who have stood against it have been the forces of reaction – those who deny our common humanity in favor of tribalism (usually of a hierarchical and supremacist kind). It has been the reactionary and conservative forces who have historically rejected the use of reason and the notion of progress, since both of these can provide challenges to the ruling order… an order which can become the object of critique through reason, and which can be shown, through an appeal to the progressive dialectical unfolding of history (or, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, through the arch of the moral universe that bends towards justice) to be just a moment in humanity’s development towards greater freedom. Central to any Marxist critique of Heidegger, then, is also considering how this foundational rejection of the enlightenment – necessary for bourgeois philosophical irrationalism and its turn towards indirect apologetics of the system – takes alternative forms after Heidegger. John Bellamy Foster has done important work in this area, showing how currents dominating contemporary social sciences in Academia like postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, etc. all share a foundation in philosophical irrationalism and its indirect apologetics of the dominant order.[23] Although with certain downfalls, the work of Susan Neiman in Left is Not Woke also does a swell job in showing how the tribalism central to contemporary wokeism is fundamentally rooted in the reactionary, anti-modernist and anti-enlightenment tradition which Heidegger is a central figure of. For all the claims to being ‘woke’, this dominant ideology in the liberal wing of capital is deeply ignorant of the reactionary philosophical foundations underlaying their worldview – a worldview that serves to reinforce the dominant order under the delusion that it is waging an emancipatory attack on it. A Marxist critique of Heidegger, therefore, must also contain an awareness of how the tradition he works through has seeped into the Academic and activist left, often giving its deeply reactionary philosophical foundation a seemingly progressive gloss. For this we must also study the work of our colleague Gabriel Rockhill, who outlines the political economy of knowledge that has facilitated and promoted this eclecticism to counter the genuine communist left. In sum, while necessary, exposing Heidegger’s Nazism and his thought’s class basis is insufficient to defeating him. As Gramsci and Lukács have argued, we must also beat these monumental figures of contemporary bourgeois thought in the realm of ideas as well – showing how the problems they pose are baseless, or how the response they provide to real problems are insufficient. These are things that must be shown, not just taken axiomatically for granted simply because we understand the Marxist worldview to be the most advanced humanity has given rise to. If in questions of ethics or meta-historical narratives comrades of the left (like the two I previously mentioned) turn to Heidegger, it is not sufficient to just lambast them for taking partial insights from a problematic thinker. We must also inquire into what deficiency is there in our answering – or even asking – of the problem that led them to turn to Heidegger. How can the Marxist worldview extend itself to commenting concretely on every possible topic of intellectual inquiry such that the need to turn to Heidegger, or any other bourgeois thinker, is superfluous for those within our tradition. This requires an explicit turn away from the Western Marxism accepted in the Academy. This so called ‘Marxism’, imbued with postmodernist sensibilities, cringes at the description of Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. They wish to limit Marxism to the sphere of history and social analysis, rejecting the dialectics of nature and the fruitful insights the dialectical materialist worldview can provide in any sphere of investigation. In China, where Marxism-Leninism has been able to develop relatively peacefully since at least 1949, the tendency is towards the contrary. The more fields the Marxist worldview can be present in the merrier. I would like to conclude with a quote from Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic, "Marxism is a telescope through which we can clearly see the trends according to which reality develops, and a microscope through which we can see its crucial details. It is a set of night-vision goggles through which we can see light and hope in the darkness, a set of diving goggles through which we can see things at a deeper level, a fluoroscope through which we can see into the nature of the matter beyond the level of appearance, and a megaloscope through which we can make sense of blurred images. Marxism is a reflector through which we can see the truth behind things, a polygonal mirror that enables us to see the diversity and unity of opposites, an asymptotic mirror that allows us to see things near and far with multiple focal points and a monster-revealing mirror in which, if we have sharp eyes, we can see mistakes clearly."[24] This should help to get us to see Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. A worldview which, as Lenin told the Young Communists in 1921, absorbs and develops upon the “knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”[25] When we are successful in this task, the need for anyone in the camp of the genuine progressive forces to turn to Heidegger or any other bourgeois thinker would be superfluous, since they would find a much more concretely explicated account for their inquiry within the tradition itself… or, at the very least, the tools to do so themselves ready-to-hand (pun intended). Notes [1] Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 5 [2] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 433. [3] Ibid. [4] R. T. De George, “Heidegger and the Marxists,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 5(4) (1965), 294. [5] Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), 5-6. [6] Ibid.,489. [7] Ibid., 496, 494. [8] Ibid., 495-6, 493. [9] Georg Lukács, “Heidegger Redivivus,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive//lukacs/works/1951/heidegger.htm [10] Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 497. [11] Ibid. 498. [12] Ibid. 491. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid., 493. [15] Ibid., 498, 497. [16] Ibid., 498. [17] Ibid., 498-9. [18] Ibid., 500. [19] Ibid. [20] Georg Lukács, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1948/bourgeois-philosophy.htm [21] Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and The Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 15-40. [22] I am happy to see my friend, Colin Bodayle, recently take this task up. I have known no other Marxist who has studied Heidegger’s work as closely as he has (and in the original German). For more, see the series titled “Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought,” published through the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. Part one is here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/why-the-left-should-reject-heideggers-thought-part-one-the-question-of-being-by-colin-bodayle [23] John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74(9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ [24] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 20. [25] V. I. Lenin, “The Task of the Youth Leagues,” in Collected Works Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 287. Watch the ‘Heidegger and the Left’ panel, hosted by the Critical Theory Workshop and the Midwestern Marx Institute, here: 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. Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 Understanding the Laws Underlying the Development of Chinese Civilization. By: Qiu PingRead NowAt a meeting on cultural inheritance and development held in Beijing, June 2, 2023, President Xi Jinping put forward a holistic and systematic explanation of the distinctive features of Chinese civilization—consistency, originality, unity, inclusiveness, and a peaceful nature. President Xi's profound exposition has granted us a deeper understanding of the laws underlying the development of Chinese civilization by shedding light on its intrinsic characteristics. Chinese civilization is distinguished by a remarkable level of consistency, being the sole ancient civilization to endure without interruption and develop as a nation down to the present day. With history in China encompassing a million years of humanity, ten thousand years of culture, and more than five thousand years of civilization, the Chinese nation boasts a distinctive, deep, and wide-ranging civilization and value system. The consistency of Chinese civilization is the outcome of carrying forward our culture by building on past achievements and signifies the high degree of unity defining Chinese civilization both as a whole and in every specific stage. Chinese civilization is set apart by its outstanding originality, which is based on discarding the outdated in favor of the new, moving in step with the times, and ceaselessly pursuing self-improvement. Originality is the fundamental reason why Chinese civilization has flourished among the civilizations of the world. As a civilization, we have tended to discard the outdated in favor of the new, move with the times, and ceaselessly pursue self-improvement. Moving with the times is in fact a core tenet of our civilization. These three qualities have kept Chinese civilization moving forward in a material, institutional, and cultural sense, allowing it to reach one height after another. Chinese civilization enjoys remarkable unity, featuring great diversity, internal cohesion, and solidarity. Over its more than 5,000-year history, Chinese civilization has gradually developed the concept of great unity. This principle of governance and institutional design has been widely acknowledged in the political process for thousands of years, greatly contributing to the stability of China as a unified multiethnic country. Within a politically unified framework, Chinese culture, as the collective creation of all China's ethnic groups, is manifested in a colorful and wide range of forms. Chinese civilization is characterized by exceptional inclusiveness, bringing together a diverse array of elements and maintaining openness to exchanges. Chinese civilization came to maturity in a historical environment featuring the simultaneous existence of numerous ethnicities. The history of Chinese development is thus defined by the convergence of diverse ethnic cultures. The openness and inclusiveness of Chinese civilization enabled the Chinese people readily to absorb the best of what other nations had to offer in both a material and cultural sense at every level. At the same time, the best of traditional Chinese culture spread to neighboring regions and further afield. Chinese civilization is distinguished by a peaceful nature, advocating concord between oneself and others, advancing harmony through dialogue, promoting coexistence and shared progress, and upholding peace. Chinese civilization advocates a world of harmony based on a moral order and believes in fostering concord between oneself and others while putting others before oneself, embodying the spirit of collectivism. The Chinese have always been a peace-loving people. China does not subscribe to the notion that a country is bound to seek hegemony when it grows in strength. Aggression and hegemony are simply not in the blood of the Chinese people; rather a love of peace is imprinted on our character. Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 Science and Freedom: Toward a New Revolutionary Epistemology. By: Sambarta Chatterjee and Purba ChatterjeeRead NowPaul Robeson, speaking of the scientific achievements of the West which have formed the bedrock of its claim to supremacy, posed a question for the 20th century: “having found the key, has Western man—Western bourgeois man—sufficient strength left to turn it in the lock?”1 Today, as we witness the spectacular and terrifying unraveling of the West, this question takes on a new urgency. Western epistemology, rooted in white supremacy and domination, has proved to be woefully inadequate at explaining the rapidly changing world, or answering the great moral and ideological questions of our time. Why is there unbridled poverty and homelessness in the richest nations? Why are Western democracies suffering the biggest crises of legitimacy in their history, with ordinary people utterly distrustful of experts in every field? Why has liberal democracy not made freedom real? What is the way forward for humanity, and for knowledge? Barely three decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of the “End of History.” He was articulating the thesis of the triumphant post-Cold War Western ruling elite that the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”2 Ironically, the U.S. imperialist state and its allies could only sustain this end point by waging endless wars and coups throughout Asia and Africa, in “defense” of Western standards of “freedom” and “democracy.” It is clear that the logic and assumptions of liberal democracy have failed miserably to explain the world, and the aspirations of the masses. The vast majority of the world’s people, weary of war and striving for a new path forward, will not respect or be controlled by these false standards any longer. They do not see Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump as the enemy, nor Ukraine and Israel as bastions of democracy. However, the political decline of the West has not yet translated into a commensurate decline in the influence of Western science and academia, which shares and serves to perpetuate the logic and assumptions of the Western ruling class. The dominant view of science, which is the white view of science, is that science is the concern of a select few “experts,” who must pursue it as a disinterested activity, even as their careers secure their place among the ruling elite. The scientist, in choosing what he works on, must be neutral and unconcerned with moral questions, even as his research is funded by, and often aids, war. And the purpose which science must serve is rarely discussed, even as “academic freedom” is passionately defended as “the bedrock of the American university.” The question of how we know, or epistemology, is necessarily preceded and informed by the question of why we know, or the purpose of knowledge. As such, scientific inquiry has never been and can never be a purely rational and objective endeavor. It is dishonest to pretend that science can remain neutral in the face of war and the degradation of humanity. Whether it be the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the use today of Artificial Intelligence in ensuring the maximum civilian casualties in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the practice and use of science has always collided with the moral choice. The question facing us today is this: how can science, the vanguard of human knowledge and the method to know the truth, be freed from the confines of the compromised scientist? And in what way will humanity—on its path to a new stage in history—bring forth the next revolution in science? The question of how science relates to society is at least as old as the modern world, although it takes on qualitatively new forms in every epoch. A close look at the history of the philosophical debates that have shaped science as we know it today delineates two epistemological frameworks for science—one compatible with the striving for the broadest measure of freedom for the people, and another which seeks to free the individual scientist from their responsibility to society. Lenin, Materialism, and PositivismTen years before the October Revolution, Lenin argued that materialism, which is the philosophical framework rooted in the existence of an objective, material reality outside the human mind, was the basis for advancing human knowledge.3 Central to this framework is the historical lesson that human knowledge has always crossed hitherto unknown frontiers—frontiers never completely predicted by existing knowledge, but nevertheless anticipated. Of course, Lenin was defending not a mechanical understanding of a fixed external world, but a dialectical relationship between an evolving external world and human action. He saw knowledge as a prerequisite to human freedom, and his defense of materialism was a revolutionary step to further freedom. In order to make freedom real, epistemology had to be rooted in the historical lesson that human beings are capable of knowing the world and hence acting to change it. The materialist framework was opposed and attacked by adherents of the positivist school of philosophy. Positivism argues that Truth is subjective, and the totality of human knowledge is determined by what human beings can observe or sense alone. Positivism as a framework has developed over historical time. In the 18th century, Bishop George Berkeley argued that the idea that the external world exists independent of our perception, is a “manifest contradiction.” He argued, “what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these [objects that we perceive], or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?” He revealed that his philosophical line was ultimately a defense of the Church as the sole arbiter of Truth, when he identified materialism as “the main pillar and support of Skepticism… Atheism and Irreligion.” More than 150 years later, Ernst Mach reinvented Berkelian categories to posit the external world as a “complex of sensations.” Instead of the material world, Mach argued that “sensations,” which lead to the external world, should be the object of scientific study. This was of course a reaction to the revolutionary science of his time, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, which sought to study and understand the concrete, changing world. Thus, although positivism had different manifestations in different epochs, its uniting essence could be found in its adverse relationship to revolutionary thought of the time. At every stage, positivism was revealed to be a reactionary philosophy that denies the existence of an objective world independent of human experience, thereby obviating the striving to understand the world in its movement. Lenin noted that from the positivist framework, “It inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea. Starting from such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the existence of other people besides oneself: it is the purest solipsism.” Lenin’s argument helps explain the worldview from which Europe has historically related to the rest of the world. As long as the European idea of the world was the only one that mattered, Europe did not need to care about the existence of the rest of humanity, who could be enslaved, colonized, and written out of history. Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, and the Battle Over the Nature of Reality Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, believed that in order to bring forth new scientific discoveries, the scientist cannot proceed “without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday thinking.”4 Science is then a specialized articulation of humanity’s striving to know itself and the world, reflecting and shaping everyday thinking. It was Einstein’s groundbreaking discovery of the wave-particle duality of light that ushered in one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the modern world. The quantum realm, having been discovered, necessitated new theoretical and epistemological formulations, because the laws of classical physics could no longer explain the physical world in its entirety. Following Einstein’s new theory of light, Niels Bohr had proposed a new model for subatomic particles, which disobeyed classical laws but verified patterns of light emitted by matter when heated. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg independently advanced two statistical theories to substantiate Bohr’s model, in which the electron existed at all times in a superposition of states. While the transition between states explained the statistical phenomenon of light emissions, these laws said nothing about direct measurement of the electron itself. Eventually, it was Max Born who proposed a physical world-picture emerging from these theories, in terms of probabilities of finding the electron in a given state. The trouble was, measurement always found the electron in a single state. Born’s interpretation of statistical laws as definitive ones, necessarily implied that the electron, and by extension material reality itself, was fundamentally indeterminate. This was the Copenhagen interpretation, which was eventually championed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Born, despite their different formulations of the theory itself. Instead of investigating the inconclusive aspects of this new theory, the partial success of quantum mechanics was used to canonize it as the ultimate description of reality. It is only the act of measurement, or observation, that determines reality. An objective Truth does not exist independent of our observations. Thus once again, the debate over the nature of reality was invoked, and positivism found its new heroes in the defenders of this interpretation. Einstein categorically rejected this interpretation.5,6 He, like Lenin, believed in the existence of an objective world independent of the human mind, that could be known. Our understanding of the natural world surely depends on how we probe it, but the “curve of knowledge” bends towards the most accurate description of objective reality. He considered quantum mechanics to be an incomplete theory because even though it found “external confirmation,” it lacked an “inner perfection”—the harmony and beauty that he saw in the arc of natural science in its movement toward Truth. He refused to accept the Copenhagen interpretation because he saw in it “the end of physics as we know it.” For him, to accept that objective reality didn’t exist was to stop striving to know it. The Cold War Capture of Science The period after the Second World War was ripe with the possibility of solidifying the commitment of science to human freedom. The Soviet Union was admired by scientists the world over for its heroic role in the defeat of fascism and the call for planned scientific and technological development of society. The rising anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa further created conditions for a view of science that was concerned with the uplift of the masses from poverty and the immiseration of war. Scientists embraced their moral responsibility, flocking to the defense of Peace and global disarmament. At the same time, Soviet science made remarkable strides in working out the ramifications of the unresolved epistemological questions brought forth by quantum mechanics.7 This was also the period of the Cold War, and science did not escape the scourge of the anti-communist witch-hunt in America. A carefully planned propaganda campaign launched by the CIA breached all sections of intellectual activity, and a new view of science, separated from questions of politics and ideology, began to take shape in the Western academic establishment. The scientific framework of the Soviet Union was demonized and portrayed as the enemy of “academic freedom” of the individual scientist. With the fall of the Soviet Union, this view of science as a narrow technical pursuit was declared victorious. Peace and hunger were no longer worthy concerns of the scientist, who was encouraged to “shut up and calculate.” Theoretical physics in particular was completely cut off from the philosophical and moral questions that had thus far been instrumental in shaping its historic arc. With the passing of Albert Einstein, the epistemological battle over the interpretation of quantum mechanics was forgotten, its implications for the nature of reality remaining unresolved. The failure to address this question charted a trajectory for theoretical physics that sought to understand, not the concrete material world, but only an abstraction of it. This pathology is perhaps most starkly reflected today in the fate of String Theory. Based on the idea of replacing point-like elementary particles with one-dimensional objects called “strings,” this theory held out hope to unify quantum mechanics with the gravitational force, and thereby furnish a “theory of everything.” After decades of research however, no evidence supporting the existence of strings could be found, and string theorists concluded that four dimensional space-time was too narrow for a description of reality. Peter Woit, in his book Not Even Wrong, says that string theory “required postulating the existence of many extra unobserved dimensions, and by different choices of the properties of these extra dimensions, one could get just about anything one wanted.”8 Once more, one is reminded of Lenin’s assessment of positivism, that “the whole world is but my idea.” What was outstanding, however, was that the theory was not discarded despite the absence of experimental proof. Woit goes on to say, “the term ‘superstring theory’ really refers not to a well-defined theory, but to unrealised hopes that one might exist. As a result, this is a ‘theory’ that makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the whole subject to survive and flourish.” What does this view of science have to offer today, especially to the youth who must understand the world in all its complexity, as well as their place and role in it? It tells us that the world cannot be known in any useful way, and hence gives us no way to imagine a new future. It denies the possibility of the yet unknown, including the possibility of revolutionary change. Is science then to be altogether rejected in our search for the way forward? What happens to centuries of progress in human thought which Western science inherited, and yet lost its way? Science and the Human Being History is meaningful to the living if it can be used. The history that has shaped science makes one thing clear, that the current crisis in science is rooted in a crisis of epistemology. As such, it cannot be resolved purely within the domain of science. The deep philosophical and moral questions at its heart must be engaged with and answered. Returning to where we began, the question of how we know cannot be separate from the question of why we know, and for whom? Science is not separate from society, it assumes the values and contradictions of the society that produces it. W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of modern sociology and the first to scientifically study race in America, wrote, “Science is a great and worthy mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves; one thing there is greater than knowledge, and that [is] the Man who knows.”9 If it is the human being that science serves, then in order to address the crisis in science we must first investigate the relationship of the society that shapes science, to the human being. How is the human being regarded in American society? We are encouraged to keep him at a safe distance, and only see him through layers of abstraction, e.g. through categories of identity. The ordinary human being does not have the capacity to understand what the expert knows, and hence the expert must speak for him. However, in order to speak for him, it is enough for the scientist to “observe” him and his life-world from the lofty heights of the ivory towers of academia. He does not need to descend to the ground and get his “hands dirty.” Not equipped or even required to know the human being, the scientist is then free to cast doubt on the possibility of knowledge itself, and thereby abdicate his responsibility to the human being. This lies at the heart of postmodernism, which asserts that Truth is multiple and subjective—it belongs to and is shaped by an individual’s experience and identity, and thus cannot be known by the “other.” Postmodern theories are packaged as radical and progressive, claiming to serve the broadest measure of freedom to the individual in society. However, the freedom they offer is the freedom of the individual from society, and not of society itself. By separating people into increasingly narrow and mutually exclusive categories of experience, this worldview obliterates the possibility of unity, of people coming together to form a consensus about the Truth and social change. Postmodernism employs language and jargon to obscure the truth, and this tendency has become rather commonplace in science today. Woit, pointing out the similarity between how string theory research in physics and postmodern theories in the humanities are pursued, says, “In both cases, there are practitioners that revel in the difficulty and obscurity of their research, often being overly impressed with themselves because of this. The barriers to understanding that this kind of work entails make it very hard for any outsiders to evaluate what, if anything, has been achieved.” An illuminating example is the Sokal Affair. In 1996, the academic journal Social Text published physicist Alan Sokal’s “hoax” article attacking the legitimacy of science, which mimicked postmodern language and positionalities, but made no scientific contribution or even common sense. Sokal’s intent was "to bury postmodernism,” and the fact that one of the most prestigious postmodern journals in America could not tell his deception apart from a serious work of scholarship, proved the absurdity and obscurantism that pervades postmodern ideas and theories. Perhaps even worse than the conclusion that there is nothing more to know, is the assertion that it is the human being who doesn’t have the capacity to know. This was the premise of John Horgan’s The End of Science,10 a book which claims that all discoverable knowledge has been discovered, and the limitations on human cognitive ability preclude any further progress. He proposes the concept of an “ironic science” going forward, which cannot produce new knowledge, but takes inspiration from postmodernism “to invent new meanings, ones that challenge received wisdom and provoke further dialogue.” This same worldview forms the basis for the current craze about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), which seeks to replace the human being with the machine, the former having served his limited purpose. The “A.I. revolution” is rooted in the pathetic and sinister hope that the machine can achieve what the human mind, inadequate and stagnated, cannot—produce new knowledge, and hence the next revolution in science. Now, machines may well be able to do a great many things that human beings cannot, but they cannot think for you. A.I. can at best interpret and consolidate the existing body of human knowledge, but it cannot produce anything new or revolutionary. That task still falls squarely on the shoulders of Man, if he can yet find the courage and tenacity to carry it. However, this requires serious philosophical work. It requires an assessment of the anti-human assumptions on which today’s intellectual activity is based, and the limitations they impose on the human capacity to know and change the world. It also requires the rejection of these assumptions in favor of a new epistemology rooted in the human being, that will realign the purpose of knowledge with the strivings of ordinary people. King and Baldwin: Towards a New Revolutionary Epistemology At this point, we will make a bold proposition. Perhaps there is something yet in the revolutionary history of this country that can show us the path forward. America, which declared “the end of history” when it emerged as the principal hegemon of the Western world at the turn of the 21st century, also produced a philosophical and epistemological tradition that may yet take history forward, and that is the Black Radical Tradition. It is in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin that the world of Man, and hence the world of science, may find the key to the future. What has King, a preacher and a Civil Rights leader, got to do with science, one may ask? Everything possibly, if the thesis that science and philosophy are tied at the hip holds muster. King was a philosopher and a revolutionary. Deeply troubled by the suffering and indignity of his people, he embarked on a scientific study of philosophy, seeking the basis for a method of social change. While moved by the best of the European tradition, it was in Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence that King found intellectual and moral satisfaction saying, “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”11 King’s touchstone for knowing the world, and the nature of reality, was the life-world of the Black working poor, whom he loved. It was this worldview, rooted in the condition of the human being, that led him to conclude that war was the biggest enemy of the poor, and that the struggle for racial justice in America could not be separated from the struggle for Peace in the world. He asserted that “there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws.”12 He saw clearly that scientific advance without concern for the moral progress of man had led to “guided missiles and misguided men.” For him, non-violence was a revolutionary framework that could forge a new kind of human being. This new human being, by refusing to conform to the standards of an unjust society, could compel society to transform in order to fit him. James Baldwin, similarly, must be regarded not just as a writer, but as a philosopher and a revolutionary. He explains that the American sense of reality, or lack thereof, is a pathology firmly rooted in the failure of white America to confront its history of slavery—“one of the most obscene adventures in the history of mankind.” Thus, what the white man does not know about the world and the human being, is precisely what he does not know about the Black man—having trapped himself into the necessity of denying the Black man’s humanity in order to justify his enslavement. Baldwin’s primary concern is the Human—man’s knowledge of himself leading to knowledge of the world, and how to act in it. His writings on the Civil Rights Movement can be read as a sociological study of human capacity—what produced figures like King, Rev. James Lawson, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Diane Nash? How is it that from the life-world of the descendants of slaves, a great revolution could emerge that threatened to fundamentally alter American society, and bring forth a New American People? Baldwin writes, “The rock against which the European notion of the nation-state has crashed is nothing more—and absolutely nothing less—than the question of identity: Who am I? And what am I doing here?”13 He finds the response to this universal question in the Blues, the only original music to ever be produced in America. The Blues are an articulation of a people’s striving to reclaim their captive humanity, to make of their despair and suffering a song, and to use their history and experience to create a unique identity and a personal authority, that rejects every standard of their captor. And this music “begins at the auction block.” Is it possible then, that at the auction block, which was “the demolition, by Europe, of all human standards,” was also forged a way to know the human being and the world that might be our salvation? Consider nonviolence, which the great civil rights leader Diane Nash called the greatest invention of the 20th century. Could nonviolence have been invented if Man had not been compelled, at great personal cost, to look white supremacy in the face, and see in its insistence on brute force and domination, the spiritual and moral undoing of Man? Can this not explain why Gandhi’s philosophy and method was forged in the crucible of apartheid South Africa, and why he was able to see that the true meaning of nonviolence would be revealed to the world by the Black Freedom Movement, a prophecy that King brought to fruition? If it can, then from this wellspring of thought and ideas can emerge a new revolutionary epistemology that articulates the strivings of today’s human being. Centered on the human being, this way of knowing the world will once again create the possibility of liberatory knowledge, and offer answers to the philosophical questions that confront science. However, this is a unique moment. One thing is certain, Asia and Africa will never again be colonized, enslaved and starved for the benefit of Asia’s peninsula, nor will neo-colonization and war be accepted by dark humanity as the birthright of the West for much longer. For the first time in history, the majority of the world’s peoples, and not just Europe, will have to work out the answer for all humanity. References:
Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 ON THE GENERAL DISCUSSION DOCUMENT FOR THE CPUSA’S 2024 NATIONAL CONVENTION. PART THREE: THE FASCIST DANGER. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowGDD 3 Part Three— THE FASCIST DANGER [part one here, part 2 here] First, what is fascism? According to THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY it is ‘’A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” Trump, MAGA, and Republicans are often called ‘’fascists.’’ It would seem that, under this definition, that’s not quite the right word. The last thing the MAGA folks/ Republicans are advocating are ‘’stringent government controls’’ of the capitalist economy — it’s just the opposite. We Communists are the ones who advocate that to control and eventually, one fine day, to abolish capitalism. As far as ‘’violent suppression of the opposition’’ is concerned, THE PEOPLE’S WORLD (the advocate of Bill of Rights Socialism), maintains that Trump, MAGA, and Republicans are part of the Fascist Danger and quotes approvingly from the Communist leader Dimitrov ‘’the creation and fortification of a united front, one determined to ‘resist and smash fascist bands’ and motivate government, even a bourgeois one, ‘to adopt measures of defense against fascism.’ As he advocated: ‘Arrest the fascist leaders. Close down their press, confiscate their material resources and the resources of the capitalists who were financing the fascist movement’.’’PW 11-7-2022 This is certainly PC as far as dealing with fascists is concerned. The PW was lamenting the perceived leniency the January 6, 2021 Capitol rioters were receiving. But we have to be sure that we are dealing with actual fascists and not just crying wolf over the actions of typical American right-wing extremists and racists that appear to be endemic to the US bourgeois version of liberal democracy. There were certainly fascist elements at the Capitol but the majority were seemingly opportunistic rioters and people milling around outside watching. It was definitely a Trump inspired riot but it was too amorphous and ill planned to qualify as an ‘’insurrection.’’ Marxists have their own definition of ‘’fascism’’ given in the same PW article—‘’Fascism, as described by Dimitrov, is ‘the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital’.’’ It is highly unlikely, if Trump becomes President again since not only the Pentagon as well as ‘’the deep state’’—i.e., the FBI, CIA, and the intelligence community in general, consider him an incompetent and many states will be under control of the Democrats, more importantly the vast government bureaucracy is hostile to him, that the next four years will see ‘’an open terrorist dictatorship’’ as capitalism is doing just fine without one [so far]. Even the PW recognizes this— ‘’there will likely come a time when the ossified ruling class will be unable to rule in the old way, and when the enlightened ruled masses no longer wish to be ruled in the old way. Should that revolutionary moment arrive, capital may openly resort to fascism to save itself.’’ The CPUSA should be spending its time trying to bring about that mass enlightenment that both major parties are infected with the virus that causes fascism and we need a viable workers party, not telling us Genocide Joe has our backs. Anyway, the GDD, plays down Trump and company as the major fascist threat. “Rather, the threat stems from a mass neo-fascist movement organized by the most reactionary sections of the billionaire class. It’s been nurtured over decades, first in the evangelical right’s Moral Majority, then in the Tea Party, and now in the MAGA movement.” MAGA is just the tip of the iceberg of a mass neo-fascist movement fomented by elements of the “billionaire class (sic).” Again, it is a bourgeois, not a Marxist, view of class to view it as based on wealth rather than its relation to the means of production. So, where does the source of neo-fascism come from? The answer of the GDD is based on the aforementioned PW article. It turns out to be practically every private and public entity listed on any of the stock markets or conducting business of any sort in the country, as well major educational institutions, everything from the local chamber of commerce to the Fortune 500. In other words, almost the entire American economy and its supporters are behind, or part of, this faction of the billionaire pseudo-class. Since the overwhelming majority of voters identify with and/or vote for one of the two major parties which are controlled by the ruling class which controls the economy, the whole frigging country logically, willing or unwilling, is part of this neo-fascist movement. It appears that the author(s) of the GDD is too extreme in the description of the fascist threat. There is a serious neo-fascist movement at work in the country but it will not take over as a result of the 2024 election. We have time to organize against it, but not by advocating electoral support for one of the two leading parties which follow de facto neo-fascist lines of thought. The GDD paints a picture of both parties following a bipartisan neo-fascist foreign policy but domestically the GDD sees a difference, but it obfuscates what it is. It’s basically Good Cop versus Bad Cop and all the revisionist BS in the world won’t change the nature of monopoly capitalism’s ruling parties. Good Cop will not (most of the time) use sticks and stones to break your bones, but you are still going to jail. Well, let the GDD and its class collaborationist position speak for itself. As U.S. imperialism strives to adjust to an increasingly multi-polar world, their positions [ the DP & RP] may coincide to some degree on foreign policy, but governing domestically is another issue. Coincidence of position in one arena does not necessarily imply convergence in others. Understanding why positions at times correlate and in other instances diverge is key to learning how to exploit these contradictions in the course of ongoing democratic struggles over policy. And it’s the ongoing struggles over policy that are key to advancing the cause of the working-class and people’s movement. It’s also key to defeating the fascist threat. The role of the Communist Party is to bring these issues forward and organize around them. The role of a CP is just the opposite. Here the role is seen as concerning itself with the squabbles between the leaders of the DP and RP over which policies better reflect the interests of the ruling class and using the contradictions between them to further the ‘’democratic struggle’’ — we will see shortly that this consists in de facto support for the DP and, pari passu, whether we like its or not, support for the genocide in Gaza because, like love and marriage (so they say) with Genocide Joe and the DP, you can’t have one without the other. The CP is supposed to advance the cause of working people and defeat the fascist threat by exploiting the differences between two groups of fascists to see which one will throw us more crumbs from the table. The real role of the CP is to denounce and expose both imperialist parties and have others join with us to build a working class alternative party not muck around with some mythical ‘’all peoples front’’ full of self-styled socialists, progressives and also various centrists and even anti Communist liberals all working at cross purposes with the only common denominator being they are anti-Trump. Here is what the GDD is worried about. Millions on the left are disgusted with Biden and the DP and their wholehearted support for the apartheid Zionist state and its genocide waged against the people of GAZA. Many people will vote against Biden and the DP or just stay home on Election Day. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t allow their distaste for genocide and the murdering of thousands of innocent and helpless children stand in the way of their civic duty of electing Genocide Joe as president for four more years (inshallah). Because of all this Genocide stuff ‘’the election’s outcome may now be in serious jeopardy.’’ Yes, indeed it is. ‘’A significant part of the anti-fascist coalition is in danger of splintering off, precipitating a serious crisis.’’ Not to worry. The ‘’anti-fascist coalition’’ is a fiction of the Webbite revisionists. There is no such coalition, i.e., an alliance entered into for joint action e.g., a coalition government, or an alliance of unions. Talk of our coalition or our coalition partners, save for one or two tiny groups, is pure rubbish to give the membership the illusion the leadership is actually doing something. In reality there are many large and small organizations and civil society groups that are, for their own many and manifold reasons, opposed to Trump and the RP and want to see them defeated in November. But they have not created any sort of official coalition to work together for this common end. They may support each other’s marches and demonstrations but that’s about it. Most of them wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you asked them, ‘’Are you in a coalition with the CPUSA?” after you explained to them what the letters CPUSA stood for. Nevertheless, yet again like the Emperor in his new clothes, the leadership will continue to refer to ‘’our’’ coalition. Anyway, the next part of the GDD deals with how the party should meet ‘’the serious jeopardy.’’ Coming up Part 4, and last, WHAT IS TO BE DONE Author Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Tom is the Counseling Director for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022), Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism (2022), The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: Friedrich Engels on G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach (2023), On Lenin's Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (2023), and Early Christianity and Marxism (2024) all of which can be purchased in the Midwestern Marx Institute book store HERE. Archives April 2024 Within just 24 hours of the horrific mass shooting in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22nd, which left at least 137 innocent people dead and 60 more critically wounded, US officials blamed the slaughter on ISIS-K, Daesh’s South-Central Asian branch. For many, the attribution’s celerity raised suspicions Washington was seeking to decisively shift Western public and Russian government focus away from the actual culprits - be that Ukraine, and/or Britain, Kiev’s foremost proxy sponsor. Full details of how the four shooters were recruited, directed, armed, and financed, and who by, are yet to emerge. The savage interrogation methods to which they have been, and no doubt continue to be subjected are concerned with prising this and other vital information from them. The killers may end up making false confessions as a result. In any event, they themselves likely have no clue who or what truly sponsored their monstrous actions. Contrary to their mainstream portrayal, as inspired purely by religious fundamentalism, Daesh are primarily guns for hire. At any given time, they act at the behest of an array of international donors, bound by common interests. Funding, weapons, and orders reach its fighters circuitously, and opaquely. There is almost invariably layer upon layer of cutouts between the perpetrators of an attack claimed by the group, and its ultimate orchestrators and financiers. Given ISIS-K is currently arrayed against China, Iran, and Russia - in other words, the US Empire’s primary adversaries - it is incumbent to revisit Daesh’s origins. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere just over a decade ago, before dominating mainstream media headlines and Western public consciousness for several years before vanishing, at one stage the group occupied vast swaths of Iraqi and Syrian territory, declaring an “Islamic State”, which issued its own currency, passports, and vehicle registration plates. Devastating military interventions independently launched by the US and Russia wiped out that demonic construct in 2017. The CIA and MI6 were no doubt immensely relieved. After all, extremely awkward questions about how Daesh were comprehensively extinguished. As we shall see, the terror group and its caliphate did not emerge in the manner of lightning on a dark night, but due to dedicated, determined policy hatched in London and Washington, implemented by their spying agencies. ‘Continuingly Hostile’RAND is a highly influential, Washington DC-headquartered “think tank”. Bankrolled to the tune of almost $100 million annually by the Pentagon and other US government entities, it regularly disseminates recommendations on national security, foreign affairs, military strategy, and covert and overt actions overseas. These pronouncements are more often than not subsequently adopted as policy. For example, a July 2016 RAND paper on the prospect of “war with China” forecast a need to fill Eastern Europe with US soldiers in advance of a “hot” conflict with Beijing, as Russia would undoubtedly side with its neighbour and ally in such a dispute. It was therefore necessary to tie down Moscow’s forces at its borders. Six months later, scores of NATO troops duly arrived in the region, ostensibly to counter “Russian aggression”. Similarly, in April 2019 RAND published Extending Russia. It set out “a range of possible means” to “bait Russia into overextending itself,” so as to “undermine the regime’s stability.” These methods included; providing lethal aid to Ukraine; increasing US support for the Syrian rebels; promoting “regime change in Belarus”; exploiting “tensions” in the Caucasus; neutralising “Russian influence in Central Asia” and Moldova. Most of that came to pass thereafter. In this context, RAND’s November 2008 Unfolding The Long War makes for disquieting reading. It explored ways the US Global War on Terror could be prosecuted once coalition forces formally left Iraq, under the terms of a withdrawal agreement inked by Baghdad and Washington that same month. This development by definition threatened Anglo dominion over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, which would remain “a strategic priority” when the occupation was officially over. “This priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war,” RAND declared. The think tank went on to propose a “divide and rule” strategy to maintain US hegemony in Iraq, despite the power vacuum created by withdrawal. Under its auspices, Washington would exploit “fault lines between [Iraq’s] various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts”, while “supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran”: “This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces…The US and its local allies could use nationalist jihadists to launch proxy campaigns to discredit transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace…This would be an inexpensive way of buying time…until the US can return its full attention to the [region]. US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict…by taking the side of conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.” ‘Great Danger’So it was that the CIA and MI6 began supporting “nationalist jihadists” throughout West Asia. The next year, Bashar Assad rejected a Qatari proposal to route Doha’s vast gas reserves directly to Europe, via a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometre-long pipeline spanning Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. As extensively documented by WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables, US, Israeli and Saudi intelligence immediately decided to overthrow Assad by fomenting a local rebellion, and started financing opposition groups for the purpose. This effort became turbocharged in October 2011, with MI6 redirecting weapons and extremist fighters from Libya to Syria, in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s televised murder. The CIA oversaw that operation, using the British as an arm’s length cutout to avoid notifying Congress of its machinations. Only in June 2013, with then-President Barack Obama’s official authorisation, did the Agency’s cloak-and-dagger connivances in Damascus become formalised - and later admitted - under the title “Timber Sycamore”. At this time, Western officials universally referred to their Syrian proxies as “moderate rebels”. Yet, Washington was well-aware its surrogates were dangerous extremists, seeking to carve a fundamentalist caliphate out of the territory they occupied. An August 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report released under Freedom of Information laws observes that events in Baghdad were “taking a clear sectarian direction,” with radical Salafist groups “the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” These factions included Al Qaeda’s Iraqi wing (AQI), and its umbrella offshoot, Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The pair went on to form Daesh, a prospect the DIA report not only predicted, but seemingly endorsed: “If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria…This is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime…ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create great danger.” Despite such grave concerns, the CIA inexorably dispatched unaccountably vast shipments of weapons and money to Syria’s “moderate rebels”, well-knowing this “aid” would almost inevitably end up in Daesh’s hands. Moreover, Britain concurrently ran secret programs costing millions to train opposition paramilitaries in the art of killing, while providing medical assistance to wounded jihadists. London also donated multiple ambulances, purchased from Qatar, to armed groups in the country. Leaked documents indicate the risk of equipment and trained personnel from these efforts being lost to Al-Nusra, Daesh, and other extremist groups in West Asia was judged unavoidably “high” by British intelligence. Yet, there was no concomitant strategy for countering this hazard at all, and the illicit programs continued apace. Almost as if training and arming Daesh was precisely the desired outcome. Archives April 2024 United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference, “Decolonization and the Fight Against Imperialism”. April 5 – April 7, 2024 The recent 2024 United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference, brought together an international group of activists from member organizations who are mobilizing against imperialism, racism, and neo-liberal policies around the world. What did people say at the UNAC? They said: “Stop the wars at home and abroad.” The conference spent a weekend talking about war - a war waged by capitalists, racists, and imperialists against humanity. These people are the modern-day class descendants of those who had ravaged the continent, themselves, for hundreds of years. Here in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest public execution in US history took place December 26, 1862, during which 38 Lakota men were hanged. They were killed for resisting the genocide against their people in the so-called Lakota War. Outside the window of the conference’s venue, the Mississippi River is in full view, flowing all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi was one of the largest means of transit in the domestic, internal slave trade, as human beings were sold along this route in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Everything that was discussed over this weekend has its origins in these stories of stolen land, stolen human beings, and wars against humanity. More recently, it was here in Minnesota in 2020 that a man named George Floyd was murdered by the police. His killing sparked the mobilization of activists across the country and around the world! The capitalists, the imperialists, and the racists are in the process of killing all life on the planet with money forced out of our hands in the form of government subsidies. A few days the media featured a headline, “Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated.” Every month in the past year has been the warmest month since records were kept. March 2024 was the warmest March in history, and February 2024 was the hottest in history, and so on. Of course, a country with 800 military bases around the world plays a primary role. What quantity of fossil fuels is needed to fly jets, operate ships, and run military bases? We talked about that issue here at this conference. Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was also on the agenda. Life in the belly of the beast is more apparent than ever looking at Gaza, as the same Joe Biden who says he is defending democracy has given Tel Aviv a blank check to kill thousands of people with the help and support of Congress. Even after tens of thousands of dead civilians, including aid workers like those of the World Central Kitchen, Israel will continue to receive weapons. And their deaths would not even have been brought to the public’s attention without grassroots resistance. To their great credit, the Palestinian people have shown us their dead – no trigger warnings whatsoever. They have shown the world these victims and accelerated the political crisis necessary to end these war crimes. UNAC understands the importance of bringing people together from all over this country and the world, as exemplified by the two ambassadors we had for the conference, from Nicaragua and the Western Sahara, the Polisario front. The US government and its allies in corporate media hide the rest of the world from us. The UNAC attempts to do the opposite and bring the information we need to see to light. Specifically, the same people who fight against the sovereignty of African nations and who want to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution are the same people who build police-state cities. The same people who speak of “collateral damage” committed by the IDF are the same people who dismiss the around 1,000 police killings that take place in the country as mistakes. Yes, 1,000, an average of 3 people have been killed every day by police in the US for at least the past 5 years. Everyone who attended the conference knows that they are a revolutionary. The word revolutionary used to scare me. I felt it was a word I could not live up to. But sharing information about these issues and working on them - these are revolutionary acts. By taking part in UNAC member organizations, we know who our enemies are and we know that wishful thinking reformism is a road to failure. Gatherings like this give us renewed focus and concentrate our efforts. It is also important to acknowledge what we are doing ourselves and for one another when we come together like this. The ruling capitalist class wants us to be atomized, to be separate, to feel estranged from one another. We’re always told nobody wants to listen to us – that nobody believes what we believe. Sometimes when attempting to engage with people it can be difficult, especially for those who are in denial or are susceptible to propaganda. This can be very frustrating, but the worst thing we can do is to believe that we are alone when we’re not. Millions around the world do not want the public’s resources to be used for war. They know that their needs aren’t being met precisely because of the violence of war-mongers and the greed of profit-grubbing capitalists. People know that they are not living well. They know they are struggling. The worst thing we can do is to think that we are special people in a unique bubble. There are plenty of people who understand what we have been talking about and others who are desperate to hear from us, which is why they marginalize and censor us. They know that people do want to hear what we say. So, I will close by saying, “Power to the people!” and by calling on the European Appeal to the World community, the UN, the BRICS Alliance, the multipolar World, and the Global South to convene a Global Peace Conference! The current conflicts in the world tend to escalate and expand geographically. The countries of the capitalist/imperialist center (USA, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, France, the FRG, in general, the EU) are participating in these wars. The essence of the escalation and expansion of these conflicts (Ukraine-Russia, Palestine-Israel, Yemen) is an attempt to overcome stagnation in the imperialist world, revive the economy of global capitalism as a whole, and in particular to bring super-profits to the main arms manufacturers – the USA, Great Britain, France and the EU as a whole. Also, when employing modern weapons systems in conflict zones, highly qualified personnel specialists for the maintenance of such machines are necessary. This applies primarily to personnel who manage and operate air defense systems, missile defense systems, and missile weapons. Thus, many local personnel in Ukraine cannot properly operate the latest Western weapons systems, which are different from Soviet weapons. Due to this difference, there is a need to perform service to these systems by representatives of the supplying countries, sometimes with whole crews. In the course of the Ukraine conflict, personnel working with new Western weapons have become legitimate and priority targets for the influence of opponents of the Kiev authorities. It should also be emphasized that by attracting the latest weapons and trained personnel from the weapons-supplying countries, the Kiev regime is not able to ensure the safety of these personnel. It is already quite apparent that not only volunteers or mercenaries but also active officers (and maybe soldiers and officers) of the NATO armies and civilian specialists of weapons companies are among the employees of the latest weapons systems being sent to Ukraine. Therefore, these persons were sent to the conflict zone solely out of their official duty. On January 16 of this year, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported an attack on the temporary transfer points of the foreign military in Kharkov, in which 60 people were killed, presumably mostly French. This tragic example shows the full extent of the irresponsibility not only of the Kiev authorities but also of the French authorities, who send their citizens to the conflict zone because of the excess profits of arms corporations. The French leadership is also trying to deny these facts. Not only mercenaries, but also personnel and civilian experts from the USA, Great Britain, Germany, and other EU countries could have just as easily stood in the place of the dead French. French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent statement calling for the deployment of troops from European countries to the conflict zone in Ukraine is extremely alarming, as expressed by the French ruling circles' intention to draw their citizens into the fire of the conflict and thus resolve part of France’s internal contradictions. In this regard, we, the peace-loving peoples of the world, turn to the UN, the European Parliament, the US Congress, the parliaments of the EU, and the United Kingdom to call for: A. Immediate and unconditional ceasefires in the existing conflict zones – Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen! B. Stop the practice of sending soldiers and civilian specialists from the USA, France, Great Britain, Germany, and other EU countries to conflict areas to generate the super profits of large arms manufacturers! C. Stop arms deliveries to Israel and Ukraine from the EU! Europe should not be dragged into a spiral of conflict, sacrificing its citizens for the benefit of partners from abroad! D. To achieve a comprehensive peace, a Global Peace Conference should be convened as soon as possible! 4/21/2024 Totalitarianism: On Liberalism's Wrongful Equating of Stalin and Hitler. By: Marc-Antoine DupuisRead NowThe Soviet Union will be accused of many evils by the West. The author of "The Gulag Archipelago," Solzhenitsyn, even going as far as accusing the USSR of having killed 110 million people (Le Monde 1976). This is an exaggerated case but symptomatic of Cold War propaganda. One of the most well-known discourses stemming from the Cold War is the comparison between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin: they are totalitarian twins. Popularized by Arendt (1907-1975), she identifies Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR as the only two totalitarian regimes. More precisely, Germany after 1938, and the USSR in the 1930s (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 56-57). In "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), Arendt describes the typology of totalitarianism. Her methodology is derived from Montesquieu (Ibid: 16 and 28.). The latter designates three types of regimes: the Republic, the Monarchy, and Despotism. Here is his definition of despotism: "(...) in despotic rule, one person, without law or rule, drives everything by his will and whims." (Montesquieu 2019 [1748]: 70). This regime is characterized notably by the imposition of terror, fear (Ibid: 51). For Arendt, the terms totalitarian and despotic are almost similar: "The proximity between totalitarian governments and despotic regimes is quite evident and extends to almost all areas." (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 48). The totalitarian regime differs from the despotic regime in that, while the despotic regime is without law or rule, the totalitarian regime obeys the great Laws of history and any opposition to progress, justified by these great laws (historical materialism, racism, etc.), will be eliminated. (Ibid 41-42). The aim here is not to debate whether, firstly, the term totalitarian is relevant to describe a political regime and whether, secondly, the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian regime. In fact, the question is whether the comparison between Hitler and Stalin, made under the banner of totalitarianism, is pertinent. The thesis is that, as described by Arendt and as propagated during the Cold War, this comparison is not relevant. Among other reasons, because this term is biased by Cold War propaganda, the Nazi regime is, in many respects, much closer to the American and British regimes, Nazi extermination camps are far from comparable to Soviet gulags, and, far from being a homogeneous bloc, the Soviet Communist Party was a place of numerous heterogeneous debates and did not have the technical means to impose a totalitarian regime. The Cold War The use of the term totalitarianism does not specifically come from Arendt. Before her, authors like Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Adorno (1903-1969) speak of totalitarianism to draw parallels between the Third Reich and the extreme violence of Western capitalist countries towards colonies and the poorest within the metropolises (Losurdo 2004: 115-116). Simone Weil (1909-1943) will compare Nazi Germany to the USSR, but will draw more comparisons between the Third Reich and colonial empires (Ibid). According to Weil, the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) is already marked by a proto-totalitarianism, due to its "reckless and unscrupulous expansionism" (Ibid: 116). It is necessary to first understand that Arendt's typology of totalitarianism spans three works. In the first two volumes, she includes countries like France, due to its antisemitism, and England for its colonial empire, or denounces the totalitarian practices of Israel towards Arab populations in 1948 (Losurdo 2004: 118-119). It is only in the third volume that she draws a comparison between the USSR and Nazi Germany, published at the beginning of the Cold War. Thus, countries like Mussolini's fascist Italy (1922-1943), which even claimed to be totalitarian, will not be considered totalitarian regimes, nor will Franco's Spain (1936-1975) or Salazar's Portugal (1932-1968) (Ibid: 119). Two of these countries, Portugal under Salazar and Italy, will join NATO, whose main goal is to defend against the USSR. For Arendt, these regimes become "only" single-party dictatorships (Ibid: 124). As she indicates in "The Origins of Totalitarianism": "Neither Lenin nor Mussolini were totalitarian dictators, and they did not even know what totalitarianism really meant" (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 53). Thus, after 1951 and the beginning of the Cold War, criticisms of Western countries ceased, and the only "politically correct" thesis became the one that targeted only the Third Reich and the USSR (Losurdo 2004: 119). In essence, for Western leaders: "(...) the ideological goal was to equate Stalin and Hitler, even presenting them as 'twin monsters'." (Losurdo 2020: 156). In essence, far from being neutral, this narrative served well during the Cold War to equate Stalin and Hitler, rejecting any other regime that could have fit into the totalitarian category. The Hitlerian colonial project and the complicity of the West. In 1953, Arendt describes the world as "The struggle between the free world and the totalitarian world" [emphasis added] (Arendt 2018 [1953]: 87). But what exactly is the free world? Let's first recall that the United States still operates under apartheid, and France still holds a large number of colonies, and fights, or will fight, to keep them. This so-called "free" world actually has strong ties to Hitler's pre-war regime. Already in Mein Kampf, Hitler regards the United States, a country of white race with "unprecedented inner strength" (Losurdo 2010). In fact, Hitler's colonial project is rather simple, aiming to replicate in the East what the United States did in the West (Losurdo: 2004). The American Indians will be compared to the Slavs of Eastern Europe, a region which, for the Nazis, becomes the new Wild West (Ibid). And American colonization served as a motif to justify Nazi colonization in the East (Whitman 2017: 9). This comparison is evident from the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Indeed, for Hitler, the United States is a "healthily racist" country and serves as a model for the implementation of laws (Whitman 2017: 2). Nazi leaders visiting New York during the New Deal era saw it as a country of white supremacy (Ibid: 28). Many Americans traveled to Germany after 1933 on "study trips and ideological pilgrimages" (Losurdo 2004). More than just an ideological connection, there was even real complicity between the West and Nazi Germany. For the British, a division of spheres of influence between their empire and the Third Reich was considered a reasonable proposal (Shypley 2020: 155). British and Canadian interests encouraged Hitler's expansion project to the East, as long as it did not interfere with their affairs (Ibid: 156-157). When Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King (1926-1948) visited Hitler in 1937, he praised him, especially for his legal repression of communism (Ibid: 155). It is also worth noting that the British, French, Americans, and Japanese intervened in the USSR after the revolution, until 1922, to support the White Army. Thus, nearly 3000 Canadians were sent to counter the Bolsheviks (Ibid: 117). Anticommunism was therefore a common factor between fascism and liberal democracies. And as soon as these fascists came to power, they sabotaged labor rights and privatized many public enterprises, to the detriment of German and Italian workers (Parenti 1997: 7). In fact, it was to preserve capitalist interests that the British (and Canadians) fought against the Boers in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902 (Ibid: 110). As for the First World War, it was primarily a fight between colonial empires, to see who would take the largest share of the cake (Ibid: 115), at the expense of colonized peoples. It was for these same interests that Americans and Canadians supported right-wing coups in South America or Japanese fascism (Ibid: 132). During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Western countries simply turned a blind eye, hoping that the socialists would not take power (Ibid: 146-147). Thus: "We must reconcile with a difficult-to-digest fact: fascism was never ideologically far from the positions of the so-called Western democracies" (Shypley 2020: 149). The elimination of the individual for progress among the English and Americans. In Nazi Germany, Hitler would use the infamous death camps in his Final Solution as early as 1941. Among others, nearly six million Jews (including 1.3 million Soviet Jews), about six million Soviet civilians, and three million Soviet prisoners of war would be killed in this campaign [1]. The Eastern Front alone would see approximately 40 million casualties out of the 70 to 85 million deaths of the Second World War [2]. A colossal toll for what was essentially a colonial expansion project. For Arendt, a key element of totalitarianism is the elimination of the individual in favor of progress and the grand Laws of History: any hindrance must be crushed (Arendt 2018 [1951: 71-73). Thus, Stalin and Hitler are equated because both the Soviet leader and the führer used extermination methods to achieve their goals (Ibid: 41-42). However, thanks in part to archives, we know that the gulags have nothing to do with Nazi extermination camps, which have more in common with Western practices. Let's first examine the case of the United States and the British Empire. Firstly, if the concept of totalitarianism is to be adequate, it must be able to explain the use of concentration camps elsewhere than in Nazi Germany, such as those used by Europe in the colonies (Losurdo 2004: 142). Often it is non-Western researchers who have compared the treatment of colonial peoples to the genocidal practices of the Third Reich, rather than to the Soviet Union: for example, the deportation of indigenous peoples under Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt's attitude toward non-Whites, or England's treatment of the Irish, which will be similar to the treatment that indigenous peoples will undergo (Losurdo 2020: 156). Let's go back to the United States, which, as a reminder, is an inspiration for Hitler. For their expansion to the West, a recent estimate puts the number of deaths caused by the "American Holocaust" at 13 million (Smith 2017: 13). An expansion also marked by the annexation of part of Mexico, French and Russian possessions, and distant islands such as Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (where orders were given to kill all those over ten years old) (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 15). After the Second World War, 2 million North Koreans, 3 million Vietnamese, nearly 500,000 Cambodians, 1.5 million Angolans, or 1 million Mozambicans would be killed by Americans (Parenti 1997: 25). It is also nearly 500,000 to 1 million communists killed in the Philippines between 1965 and 1966 by the regime supported by the CIA (Vann 2021). The wars against terrorism, after September 11, would cause nearly 4.5 million casualties (Berger 2023): unpopular wars and often without international support (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 64). In fact, the United States acts as a godfather: "The United States cannot tolerate any country, regardless of its size, successfully challenging it." (Ibid: 65). Examples abound where the United States eliminates individuals for the advancement of its interests, yet it is not classified as a totalitarian regime. As for the British, one need only look at the horrors committed in India. Simply through Churchill's policies, in 1943, nearly 3 million Indians died in the Bengal famine (Safi 2019). Taking into account the excess mortality in India between 1820 and 1920, compared to its pre-colonial period, the number of victims rises to nearly 165 million people. (Sullivan and Heckel: 2023). In reality, even if this does not represent the number of direct deaths, which is rather estimated at tens of millions of people (Ibid), it is an interesting indicator. The British simply deindustrialized India and pillaged its wealth, regardless of the number of victims generated by this process, much like they imposed, at gunpoint, the opium trade in China (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 69). They eliminated individuals for progress, but are not classified as totalitarian regimes. The USSR: the Gulags and the Purges Now let's move on to the Soviet Union, which is supposed to be equivalent to the Third Reich. Fundamentally, the Gulags and the Nazi extermination camps had nothing in common. The opening of archives after the fall of the USSR allows us to observe some important elements about the Gulags. At its peak, about 3 million people were incarcerated in the USSR, for a population of 164 million people. Approximately 1.5 million people died in these camps, more than half of them between 1941 and 1943 during the German invasion. In fact, during this invasion, the Soviet government created a special food fund for the Gulags, and the conditions of the prisoners improved as the war turned in favor of the Soviets. Far from being a tool to eliminate the bourgeoisie, the majority of detainees were there for non-political reasons and with sentences of less than five years. And in the Gulags, at least until 1937, most deaths occurred mainly due to malnutrition and poor organization: "(...) it was not the intention of homicide that horrors were caused: it is a significant example of how things can go wrong due to lack of adequate planning" (Losurdo 2020: 130). Unlike Nazi camps, there was no systematic extermination, no gas chambers or crematoriums, and the majority of prisoners were reintegrated into society. (Parenti 1997 : 79). However, these places remained prisons, with very difficult conditions and where numerous abuses against prisoners took place. It is important to place these camps, inherited from tsarist Russia, in their context. Unfortunately, Soviet Russia did not have the privilege of being a "normal" state: there was always a danger, a state of emergency. We have noted the Allied invasion, from 1918 to 1922, after the Revolution, in a country devastated by the First World War. There was also the war against the Kulaks, the threat from Japan and Germany from the 1930s, or the Trotskyist front which called for a Second revolution just before the Nazi invasion. The German threat should not be taken lightly: the Third Reich openly called for the "Germanization" of Eastern Europe and the enslavement of its millions of inhabitants, with the complicity of the Western powers. There was also the need to industrialize the country, under penalty of death. Joseph Stalin declared in 1931, ten years before the German invasion: "Lenin said on the eve of October: 'Either death or catching up with and surpassing the advanced capitalist countries.' We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed." Far from being a homogeneous bloc, the 1930s in the USSR and within the party were marked by immense chaos at the administrative level: "If the Soviet government was a dictatorship, or tried to be, it certainly was not totalitarian" (Getty 2009 [1985]: 198). At the local level, the authorities were marked by disastrous incompetence, and Moscow sought more to know "what exactly was happening" than to impose a totalitarian rule. Stalin's role was that of an executor: to intervene occasionally, to correct certain policies, to consult experts, etc. It is in this confused, chaotic Soviet Union, threatened from the outside, that the Moscow Trials took place, where 681,000 people were executed. These purges were not the result of Stalin's own planning, but the result of this chaotic bureaucracy, internal party rivalries, the incompetence of certain politicians, etc. (Getty 2009 [1985]: 205-206). Stalin "... was an executive and reality forced him to delegate most of the authority to subordinates, who had their own opinions, interests, and clienteles" (Ibid). This is an extremely large number of individuals, and the authoritarian character of the Soviet regime should not be dismissed. However, these facts call into question Arendt's narrative that Stalin succeeded in rising to power after a fierce struggle against the peasants, and then against his political opponents. If the elimination of these individuals constitutes a criterion for placing the USSR in the category of totalitarian regimes, then we must include the United States and the British Empire. *This article was translated from French by the author using Chat GPT. Monographs and periodical articles Arendt, H. (2018 [1951]. La nature du totalitarisme, dans Idem, La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (11-84), Paris : Éditions Payot. Arendt, H. (2018 [1953]. Religion et politique, in , La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (87-140), Paris : Éditions Payot. Chomsky, N. et Prashad, V. (2024). Le retrait : La fragilité de la puissance des États-Unis : Irak, Libye, Afghanistan. Montréal : Lux éditeur. Getty, J. A. (2009 [1985]). Origins of the Great Purges : The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge University Press. Getty, A. J, Rittersporn, G. T. et Zemskov, V. K. (1993). Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years : A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. The American Historical Review, 98(4), 1017-1049. Losurdo, D. (2004). Pour une critique de la catégorie de totalitarisme, Actuel Marx, 1(35), 115-147. Losurdo, D. (2020). Stalin : The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo, D. (2010). The International Origins of Nazism. Montesquieu (2019 [1748]). De l’esprit des lois: Anthologie. Paris : Flammarion. Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and Reds : Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco : City Lights Books. SHIPLEY, Tyler A. (2020). Canada in the World. Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, Ottawa : Fernwood Publishing. Smith, D. M. (2017). Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present. Sullivan, D. et Heckel, J. (2023). Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World Development 161(Janvier 2023). Whitman (2017). Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law New Jersey : Princeton University Press. Web pages American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front » https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#. Berger, M. (15 may 2023). Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terror-911-deaths-afghanistan-iraq/ Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution Le Monde. (23 march 1976). « Soljenitsyne estime que les Espagnols vivent dans la " liberté la plus absolue. ». https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1976/03/23/soljenitsyne-estime-que-les-espagnols-vivent-dans-la-liberte-la-plus-absolue_2961304_1819218.html Neygebauer, J. (18 february 2023) «Rattraper et dépasser»: le rôle de l’Allemagne dans l’industrialisation soviétique des années 1930, Russia Beyond, https://fr.rbth.com/histoire/89324-industrialisation-urss-aide-allemagne Safi, M. (29 march 2019). Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study. Vann, M. G. (23 january 2021). The True Story of Indonesia’s US-Backed Anti-Communist Bloodbath. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/indonesia-anti-communist-mass-murder-genocide [1] Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution [2] American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front » https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#. Author Marc-Antoine Dupuis, political scientist at the University of Québec in Montréal, Canada. Archives April 2024 Traditional societies usually had restrictions to prevent self-support land from being alienated outside of the family or clan. By holding that the essence of private property is its ability to be sold or forfeited irreversibly, Roman law removed the archaic checks to foreclosure that prevented property from being concentrated in the hands of the few. This Roman concept of property is essentially creditor-oriented, and quickly became predatory. Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the wealthiest and most aggressive families grabbed such land for themselves in violation of early law. Patricians Versus the Poor The die was cast in 486 BC. After Rome defeated the neighboring Hernici, a Latin tribe, and took two-thirds of their land, the consul Spurius Cassius proposed Rome’s first agrarian law. It called for giving half the conquered territory back to the Latins and half to needy Romans, who were also to receive public land that patricians had occupied. But the patricians accused Cassius of “building up a power dangerous to liberty” by seeking popular support and “endangering the security” of their land appropriation. After his annual term was over he was charged with treason and killed. His house was burned to the ground to eradicate memory of his land proposal. The fight over whether patricians or the needy poor would be the main recipients of public land dragged on for twelve years. In 474 the commoners’ tribune, Gnaeus Genucius, sought to bring the previous year’s consuls to trial for delaying the redistribution proposed by Cassius. He was blocked by that year’s two consuls, Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius, who said that decrees of the Senate were not permanent law, “but measures designed to meet temporary needs and having validity for one year only.” The Senate could renege on any decree that had been passed. A century later, in 384, M. Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul (in 392) was murdered for defending debtors by trying to use tribute from the Gauls and to sell public land to redeem their debts, and for accusing senators of embezzlement and urging them to use their takings to redeem debtors. It took a generation of turmoil and poverty for Rome to resolve matters. In 367 the Licinio-Sextian law limited personal landholdings to 500 iugera (125 hectares, under half a square mile). Indebted landholders were permitted to deduct interest payments from the principal and pay off the balance over three years instead of all at once. Latifundia Most wealth throughout history has been obtained from the public domain, and that is how Rome’s latifundia were created. The most fateful early land grab occurred after Carthage was defeated in 204 BC. Two years earlier, when Rome's life and death struggle with Hannibal had depleted its treasury, the Senate had asked families to voluntarily contribute their jewelry or other precious belongings to help the war effort. Their gold and silver was melted down in the temple of Juno Moneta to strike the coins used to hire mercenaries. Upon the return to peace the aristocrats depicted these contributions as having been loans, and convinced the Senate to pay their claims in three installments. The first was paid in 204, and a second in 202. As the third and final installment was coming due in 200, the former contributors pointed out that Rome needed to keep its money to continue fighting abroad but had much public land available. In lieu of cash payment they asked the Senate to offer them land within fifty miles of Rome, and to tax it at only a nominal rate. A precedent for such privatization had been set in 205 when Rome sold valuable land in the Campania to provide Scipio with money to invade Africa. The recipients were promised that “when the people should become able to pay, if anyone chose to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the state.” Nobody did, of course. “The private creditors accepted the terms with joy; and that land was called Trientabulum because it was given in lieu of the third part of their money.” Most of the Central Italian lowlands ended up as latifundia cultivated by slaves captured in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia and imported en masse after 198. This turned the region into predominantly a country of underpopulated slave-plantations as formerly free peoples were driven off the land into overpopulated industrial towns. In 194 and again in 177 the Senate organized a program of colonization that sent about 100,000 peasants, women and children from central Italy to more than twenty colonies, mainly in the far south and north of Italy. The Gracchi and the Land Commission In 133, Tiberius Gracchus advocated distributing ager publicus to the poor, pointing out that this would “increase the number of property holders liable to serve in the army.” He was killed by angry senators who wanted the public land for themselves. Nonetheless, a land commission was established in Italy in 128, “and apparently succeeded in distributing land to several thousand citizens” in a few colonies, but not any land taken from Rome’s own wealthy elite. The commission was abolished around 119 after Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus was killed. Civil War and Landless Soldiers Appian describes the ensuing century of civil war as being fought over the land and debt crisis: “For the rich, getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands, and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbors’ allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force, came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army. At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in number and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service.” Dispossession of free labor from the land transformed the character of Rome’s army. Starting with Marius, landless soldiers became soldati, living on their pay and seeking the highest booty, loyal to the generals in charge of paying them. Command of an army brought economic and political power. When Sulla brought his troops back to Italy from Asia Minor in 82 and proclaimed himself Dictator, he tore down the walls of towns that had opposed him, and kept them in check by resettling 23 legions (some 80,000 to 100,000 men) in colonies on land confiscated from local populations in Italy. Sulla drew up proscription lists of enemies who could be killed with impunity, with their estates seized as booty. Their names were publicly posted throughout Italy in June 81, headed by the consuls for the years 83 and 82, and about 1,600 equites (wealthy publican investors). Thousands of names followed. Anyone on these lists could be killed at will, with the executioner receiving a portion of the dead man’s estate. The remainder was sold at public auctions, the proceeds being used to rebuild the depleted treasury. Most land was sold cheaply, giving opportunists a motive to kill not only those named by Sulla, but also their personal enemies, to acquire their estates. A major buyer of confiscated real estate was Crassus, who became one of the richest Romans through Sulla’s proscriptions. By giving his war veterans homesteads and funds from the proscriptions, Sulla won their support as a virtual army in reserve, along with their backing for his new oligarchic constitution. But they were not farmers, and ran into debt, in danger of losing their land. For his more aristocratic supporters, Sulla distributed the estates of his opponents from the Italian upper classes, especially in Campania, Etruria and Umbria. Caesar likewise promised to settle his army on land of their own. They followed him to Rome and enabled him to become Dictator in 49. After he was killed in 44, Brutus and Cassius vied with Octavian (later Augustus), each promising their armies land and booty. As Appian summarized: “The chiefs depended on the soldiers for the continuance of their government, while, for the possession of what they had received, the soldiers depend on the permanence of the government of those who had given it. Believing that they could not keep a firm hold unless the givers had a strong government, they fought for them, from necessity, with good-will.” After defeating the armies of Brutus, Cassius and Mark Antony, Octavian gave his indigent soldiers “land, the cities, the money, and the houses, and as the object of denunciation on the part of the despoiled, and as one who bore this contumely for the army’s sake.” Empire of Debt The concentration of land ownership intensified under the Empire. By the time Christianity became the Roman state religion, North Africa had become the main source of Roman wealth, based on “the massive landholdings of the emperor and of the nobility of Rome.” Its overseers kept the region’s inhabitants “underdeveloped by Roman standards. Their villages were denied any form of corporate existence and were frequently named after the estates on which the villagers worked, held to the land by various forms of bonded labor.” A Christian from Gaul named Salvian described the poverty and insecurity confronting most of the population ca. 440: “Faced by the weight of taxes, poor farmers found that they did not have the means to emigrate to the barbarians. Instead, they did what little they could do: they handed themselves over to the rich as clients in return for protection. The rich took over title to their lands under the pretext of saving the farmers from the land tax. The patron registered the farmer’s land on the tax rolls under his (the patron’s) own name. Within a few years, the poor farmers found themselves without land, although they were still hounded for personal taxes. Such patronage by the great, so Salvian claimed, turned free men into slaves as surely as the magic of Circe had turned humans into pigs.” The Church as a Corporate Power Church estates became islands in this sea of poverty. As deathbed confessions and donations of property to the Church became increasingly popular among wealthy Christians, the Church came to accept existing creditor and debtor relationships, land ownership, hereditary wealth and the political status quo. What mattered to the Church was how the ruling elites used their wealth; how they obtained it was not important as long as it was destined for the Church, whose priests were the paradigmatic “poor” deserving of aid and charity. The Church sought to absorb local oligarchies into its leadership, along with their wealth. Testamentary disposition undercut local fiscal balance. Land given to the Church was tax-exempt, obliging communities to raise taxes on their secular property in order to maintain their flow of public revenue. (Many heirs found themselves disinherited by such bequests, leading to a flourishing legal practice of contesting deathbed wills.) The Church became the major corporate body, a sector alongside the state. Its critique of personal wealth focused on personal egotism and self-indulgence, nothing like the socialist idea of public ownership of land, monopolies, and banking. In fact, the Crusades led the Church to sponsor Christendom’s major secular bankers to finance its wars against the Holy Roman Emperors, Moslems, and Byzantine Sicily. Author Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history on the Observatory. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives April 2024 Japan being drawn into any conflict over Taiwan is essential for the US ability to maintain Combat Air Patrol capabilities over Taiwan. Control over the skies is imperative for any US military operation near there.The US carrier fleet, while the strongest in the world, is still incapable of contending with the land based air power that China can bring to bear over Taiwan, especially since China continues to invest in the research and development of stronger long range anti-ship missiles, and is building more and more of them. Therefore, the US will always choose to strengthen Japanese military capabilities and give Japan whatever it asks in a desire to maintain the 85 military facilities that it currently has within their territory. But this is all a given for anyone who’s been keeping track. The real question that we should ask about this move is if it was explicitly an ask of the Japanese Government, or if it came as a result of American political pressure. A deeper question still is if this is the genuine desire of the Japanese people or if this shift has been fostered by a bloc of interests solely within the military industrial complex’s section of the ruling class. We know for Japanese citizens living in Okinawa the public sentiment for decades has been against the US military bases on their island. On the core islands of Japan, however, public opinion towards a more expansive/defensive military has grown. According to the official press release, the weapons systems being delivered are “defensive in nature” but we should realize that American military bases in Japan are already an aggressive act from the United States, aimed at other sovereign states in the region, such as China and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Due to this, any attempt by the US to arm Japan, even with defensive armament, is a further entrenchment of Japan as a military air strip for the US empire. We should also remember that the Japanese government is only putting its own citizens at risk by accepting this deal. As we have seen in Ukraine, the U.S. ruling class has no issue with sacrificing an entire generation of other countries’ young men in order to pursue its foreign policy goals. Ironically, the Japanese purchase of defensive armaments emboldens that same ruling class in the theater and may lead to open conflict over Chinese territorial waters and Taiwan. Therefore, if Japan truly wants to ensure that its people are protected it should first remove the American military presence from its own nation and end its relationship as a lackey for US imperialism. Only in this way can Japan ensure its own safety, which would also go a long way towards ensuring a more peaceful planet, in general, in the long run. Author Kyle Pettis is a Teamsters Steward and the Chief Labor Analyst for the Midwestern Marx Institute. Archives April 2024 Sanctions are political, not legal instruments. Their goal is to cause pain and suffering in order to force populations to overthrow their own governments and surrender their sovereignty. After Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s death on March 5, 2013, Washington began an economic siege to impede the continuation of the Bolivarian Process and the newly elected Nicolás Maduro government. The first war-like measure was Executive Order 13692, signed by President Barack Obama on March 8, 2015, which declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. Although downplayed as inconsequential by the corporate media, the Obama decree began the “toxification” of Venezuela, with international investors and companies recoiling from doing business with a nation targeted by the world’s largest financial and military power. In 2016, Citibank was the first institution to do so by closing accounts of Venezuela’s Central Bank and the Bank of Venezuela after conducting a risk management review. Caracas, despite stubbornly servicing its foreign debt, also faced rising borrowing costs. However, the fiction of Venezuela being a “threat” was just the basis for the upcoming full declaration of war, a unilateral and illegal one. EO 13692 provided the “legal” grounds for the U.S. Treasury Department to impose a wide-reaching sanctions program against the country, its economy and its people. Because the Obama decree has no expiration date, the siege can be perpetuated indefinitely. Maximum pressure In 2017, President Donald Trump announced a “maximum pressure” campaign to block any chance of economic recovery and accelerate Venezuela’s social collapse. Trump likewise began to threaten that “all options were on the table”. The siege especially targeted the country’s main source of revenue: the oil industry. In August 2017, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed financial sanctions against state oil company PDVSA followed by an export embargo in January 2019. With crude production falling from 1.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 to 350.000 bpd in 2020, GDP shrank by more than 65% between 2014 and 2019, hurting essential imports as the country entered hyperinflation. The primary and secondary sanctions combo led to severe fuel shortages as well. Without diesel fuel to power thermal generators, the country became over-reliant on hydroelectric power generation, which was also hit by a lack of access to imported equipment. As a result, a massive electricity crisis broke out in March, 2019. With Venezuela sitting on the world’s second-largest certified gold reserves, the mining sector was the next major target. In March 2019, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Venezuela’s General Mining Company (Minerven), blocking trade with U.S. persons and companies. Caracas was using gold reserves to pay for food, fuel, medicine and other imports. The ban on the gold trade was followed by embargoes against the Venezuelan public banking system. In April that year, the U.S. Treasury blacklisted the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) to restrict transactions and prohibit its access to U.S. dollars. Other executive orders resulted in the closure of several Venezuelan bank accounts in international financial institutions as well as a loss of access to credit. According to the Venezuelan government, since 2019 more than US$8 billion worth of Venezuelan assets and funds remain frozen or blocked by banks in the U.S., Portugal, Spain, Britain, France and Belgium, including nearly $2 billion in gold retained at the Bank of England. Washington alone has blocked the use of $342 million in accounts from BCV. The entire sanctions program was reinforced by notifications issued by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in September 2017 and May 2019, warning institutions not to deal with the Venezuelan state, even for essential imports. The new executive order banned all transactions with Venezuelan state entities and blocked state assets on U.S. territory, prohibiting them from being “transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in”. In February 2020, Venezuela’s state airline CONVIASA was blacklisted as well. The economic siege came alongside a ludicrous political gambit as the Trump administration supported the self-proclamation of Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Guaidó as “Interim President” in January 2019. The “parallel government” act lasted until early 2023. Guaidó was granted control of Venezuelan bank accounts and state assets seized by Washington and allies to fund his coup efforts, including $10-billion-worth U.S.-based oil subsidiary CITGO and $269-million-worth Colombia-based fertiliser Monómeros. In 2021, President Joe Biden took the reins of the medieval-type siege against Venezuela and left it essentially intact, including one particular perverse aspect: the “starvation sanctions”. Starvation as foreign policy Food purchases became an obstacle course as Venezuela’s public and private sectors lost access to the international system of payments and banks discontinued services out of fear of running afoul of U.S. sanctions. For example, in November 2017, Puerto Rico’s Italbank closed an account with Venezuela’s Central Bank because of “concerns about reputational risk”. The small bank was used by Caracas to process food and medicine payments. In July 2019, Washington fully established starvation as a main foreign policy goal by targeting a host of individuals and companies allegedly connected to Venezuela’s Local Food Supply and Production Committees (CLAPs), created by the Maduro government in 2016 to distribute low-cost food boxes to working-class families. One notorious case was Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab, who was targeted for allegedly profiting from overvalued state contracts. In September 2019 and January 2021, the U.S. Treasury announced more sanctions against three individuals and almost 30 companies for supplying the CLAP program. The starvation tactics were exacerbated in June 2020, when Trump nixed oil-for-food swap deals. As a result, an estimated 6-7 million working-class families suffered the consequences of fewer and lower quality CLAP products while food insecurity became widespread amidst shortages and soaring prices. The human costHunger came alongside diminished access to healthcare and other basic human rights as the Venezuelan people were hit by these invisible bombs called sanctions. Yet, to this day there is no systematic way to track casualties. There are, however, three studies that provide an approximation of the devastation caused by Washington and its allies. An April 2019 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, estimated that U.S. economic sanctions were responsible for 40,000 deaths between 2017 and 2018 and placed hundreds of thousands of chronic patients at risk due to the impossibility to get medicines or treatments in the upcoming years. In September 2021, following a visit to Venezuela, UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan reported that more than 2.5 million Venezuelans were suffering food insecurity after imports dropped 73% between 2015 and 2019, while fuel and diesel scarcity endangered food production and transportation. Douhan also warned that the insufficiency of basic medicines and their rising prices placed some 300,000 people at risk while thousands of cancer, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis patients were in dire need of treatment. Surgical procedures were reduced for lack of anesthesia and antibiotics, and due to only 20% of hospital equipment functioning. Additionally, the UN expert attested to an increase in teenage pregnancies and HIV/AIDS cases while 2.6 million children were deprived of vaccines. The report noted that the impact of sanctions on the economy led to an unprecedented migration wave, resulting in a brain drain of “doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, technicians and others”. According to the UN, 7.1 million Venezuelans have migrated due to the crisis between 2015 and 2023. Venezuelan human rights organisation SURES reported that Citibank and Euroclear were rejecting transactions to buy insulin doses and dialysis treatments, while pharmaceutical companies like Baxter, Abbot, and Pfizer repeatedly refused to issue export certificates for cancer treatments for Venezuelan patients. SURES highlighted the case of several children dying since early 2019 after not receiving liver, kidney, and bone marrow transplants abroad because banks and private companies became overly cautious in dealings with Venezuela. Venezuelan children had been beneficiaries of a humanitarian program financed by oil subsidiary CITGO, seized by Washington. Finally, SURES stated that women, children, indigenous communities and people with disabilities were the most affected by the economic crisis exacerbated by U.S. sanctions. The latter group has seen prosthetic donations reduced, with NGOs and government social programs unable to import them. The three studies agree that it is not possible to fully grasp the damage caused by sanctions against the Venezuelan people, but all the evidence points to one simple truth: sanctions kill and will continue to do so. [This is an abridged and edited version of an article which appears in A War Without Bombs: The social, political and economic impact of sanctions against Venezuela. Andreína Chávez Alava is based in Caracas and writes for Venezuelanalysis.] AuthorAndreína Chávez Alava This article was republished from Monthly Review. Archives April 2024 4/15/2024 On the General Discussion Document of the CPUSA's 2024 National Convention. Part 2. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowPart one commented on the general crisis of capitalism as described in the main general discussion document [GDD] of the 32nd convention of the CPUSA. This part continues that discussion but from a Marxist perspective. The GDD contends that the crisis in the US boils done to a struggle between two contending ‘’concepts’’ one based on ‘’capitalism’s drive for maximum profits, class struggle and the system’s inherent racial and gender inequality.’’ It’s true that Capitalism, based on commodity production for a market, strives to maximize its profits in competition between the capitalists but ‘’racial and gender inequality’’ are not inherent within the system. The system is based on the exploitation of a class, workers, who create surplus value expropriated by the capitalists. This system will work fine in a uni-racial environment or multi-racial environment of equal rights. It will also work in a society without sexual or gender discrimination. These features are extraneous to capitalism itself but are secondary characteristics derived from the historical context in which the system developed. This is why bourgeois reforms on these issues are possible as long as worker exploitation remains the basis of the system. This is why the civil rights movement of the last 70 years or so has made great reform advances but is not a ‘’revolution’’ in a Marxist sense — an overthrow of a ruling class and its economic system. The other concept is based on ‘’the fraternity of the working class and its conceptions of freedom, democracy and human equality.’’ This is difficult to understand. The US working class is only 10% unionized and 2020 exit polls showed that 40% of unionized workers voted for Trump vs 57% for Biden. The idea that there is in material reality now a ‘fraternal’ working class with its own concepts of freedom, democracy and human equality opposed to the bourgeois versions propagated by the capitalist ruling class has no basis in fact or Marxist theory, it is, perhaps well meaning, but in reality it is bourgeois reformist idealism dressed up, like the emperor’s new clothes, as Marxism. This is standard Webbism. Communists have to work to bring these ideas to the working class, not assume they are already present. The GDD presents two choices in the fight based on the concepts above— ‘’Indeed, the path ahead is fiercely contested: Does it lie with austerity cutbacks or union rights and a Green New Deal? Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again or Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community?’’ MAGA or Dr. King’s philosophy. This is very strange to find in a Communist document. No disrespect for Dr. King but his ‘’Beloved Community’’ is a Christian theological concept of universal human brother/sisterhood based on nonviolence and its roots are in bourgeois philosophical notions of liberalism and personalism— it is Dr. King’s deepest expression of his Christian faith. It is a noble expression of Idealism and definitely the opposite of MAGA but it’s not Marxism or anything to do with how Marx, Engels, or Lenin thought capitalism should be opposed, it’s really a throwback to pre-Marxist utopian idealism. It also shows how far the authors have detoured off the Road to Socialism. They are taking the party down the road paved with good intentions. We are told that ‘popular fronts’ have developed in support of the extreme right and of the broad left and center all striving for political power and this boils down to two basic groups— the MAGA group supported by about 1/3 of the country and the anti-MAGA majority of the broad left and center. The problem is there is no real ‘left,’ or ‘center’ for that matter. The capitalist control of the US is so overdetermined that the most ‘left’ politics we have (outside of many little groupings such as our own with no real power to determine policy) is practically confined to ‘’the squad’’ in the Democratic Party. Both major parties are conservative pro imperialist supporters of foreign wars and fascist governments serving US economic interests abroad. The DP is made up of basically moderate to extreme conservatives who will back some socially liberal reforms, while the Republican Party has been taken over by the extreme right and some neofascist elements hostile to any meaningful reform politics. This is a worrisome domestic development but by no means a sign that ‘’the GOP is arguably the most dangerous political party in history.’’ The policies of both parties are extremely dangerous when it comes to increasing the threat of a new world war, increasing the dangers of climate change, supporting genocide to further US interests and the support of Zionism, and both mock real democracy and ignore the general will of the people— the Republicans openly, the Democrats behind closed doors. Both parties will turn to actual fascism the minute the masses begin to move in a progressive way that threatens the domination of the ruling class. The only way to defeat the drive to fascism is to build an independent working class party as an alternative to the current duopoly of right wing control of the country. Next we are told ‘’A mass radicalization process has been quietly at work throughout, molding class consciousness and anti-monopoly sentiment, in turn, giving rise to a “socialist moment” among its most advanced contingents. Yes, a rising multi-racial and multi-gender “red generation” of young workers and students is coming into being. It is filling the ranks of anti-racist and pro-abortion movements, leading strikes, and, most recently, joining anti-war initiatives in response to the Israeli razing of Gaza.’’ There is little evidence that this is true— i..e., that this is evidence of a generational shift towards socialism as all these movements are compatible with reformed capitalism. The ‘’socialist moment’’ was an expression referring to Bernie’s surge in popularity running as a socialist in the Democratic Primaries but that moment expired with Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary. There was an afterglow in the growth of DSA but membership is now down and Bernie has endorsed Genocide Joe in 2024. With Genocide Joe and neofascist Trump as the putative main presidential candidates it’s difficult to conger up an image of a ‘’red generation’’ of young workers and students coming into being unless you are talking about the growth of MAGA young Republican clubs. This is not to down play the importance of the growth of youth participation in mass movements to protect abortion rights (an across the board movement not a socialist movement), and the same is true for the movements against racism, sexism and genocide. This is especially true considering the GDD admits ‘’nearly 100 million eligible voters, stand outside of electoral politics, disillusioned with the ballot, their hope for a better life scattered among countless broken promises.’’ It is all well and good that the document says this must be countered by the CPUSA running its own candidates under its name. I hope we do it as for the last 5 years it has only been talk. Coming up PART THREE [The Fascist Danger] AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives April 2024 |
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