Examining the Role of Anti-Communist Rhetoric in the Growth of Reactionary Cult Movements

By Oskar Kaut

Amidst America’s increasingly polarized political climate, there has been growing concern regarding the emergence of reactionary groups that display cult-like behaviors and tactics, posing vital questions about the impact these groups have on individuals as well as mainstream political discourse. Cults can be broadly defined as groups or movements that share a set of philosophical, spiritual, or political beliefs that are by and large considered to be extremist or deviant by mainstream society. On the other hand, the label “reactionary” is typically given to individuals or organizations that oppose social change and desire a return to “traditional” values and practices. Such beliefs have been on the steady rise for several years, and the conception and popularization of affiliated organizations and movements have followed (Rodrik 162). Many fringe reactionary groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front have come under scrutiny for some of their practices, which are often highly secretive and can involve physical and psychological manipulation (Ashland 37). In recent years, there has been a concerning rise of far-right movements worldwide, providing an opportunity for reactionary groups to amplify their message and reach a much larger audience. Many of these groups display clear cult-like behaviors, as demonstrated by their deference to authority and distorted sense of reality. These groups often use anti-communist rhetoric to infiltrate mainstream political discourse, which serves as a gateway to legitimizing and normalizing the extremist ideology of far-right cults. Resultantly, it is crucial to recognize and address the presence of these cults within right-wing movements and the impact their rhetoric can have on broader society. 

A cult is a group or movement centered around a given (typically extremist) belief system that uses coercive tactics to maintain its hold over followers. Sociological research has shown that cults utilize tactics of social influence in order to manipulate their followers into submission (Corvaglia 9). Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard divided the concept of social influence into two subcategories. Informational social influence refers to humans’ intrinsic desire to be “right”, whereas normative social influence refers to the desire to be liked by others. Both of these concepts can be aptly applied to cults. Cults use normative social influence (known colloquially as “peer pressure”) to recruit new members. In an increasingly isolated society, cults offer some individuals an opportunity to be a part of something that they see as larger than themselves. The propagation of this form of influence can lead to cult members partaking in practices that they would normally oppose in an attempt to gain favor with other members (Deutsch & Gerard 14). Similarly, in a world where misinformation is increasingly rampant and it can be difficult to know which sources to trust, cults make use of informational social influence to develop genuine conformity to their beliefs and practices. Cults attempt to create a hegemony of “accurate information” for their followers, thus justifying even private conformity in which individuals truly believe that the group is right or justified in their struggle (Corvaglia 18).  

Many reactionary organizations and movements embody the aforementioned cult characteristics. Stanley Milgram’s classical experiments in conformity shed light on the willingness of individuals to obey those whom they view as authority figures and perform actions that go against their own conscience (Slater 32-63). The experiments found that test subjects were willing to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person (who they believed to be a fellow test subject) even to the degree where they believed the shocks to be lethal. Reactionary cults (like other cults) often exert substantial social influence over their members and rely on a hierarchical structure of authority that leaves them vulnerable to pressures similar to those exhibited in Milgram’s experiments. Oftentimes–as can be seen in the cults of personality surrounding Gavin McInnes within the Proud Boys or Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera in Ukrainian nationalist organizations–members of far-right movements are subject to pressures to conform to the extreme beliefs and practices of groups under the direction of authoritative leaders (Rabotyazhev 525). In many ways, this demonstrates the presence of normative influence within reactionary groups and movements. Moreover, members of fringe right-wing movements are also frequently subject to constant messaging from the group’s ideological leaders and even cut off from external sources of information (Jurg & Tuters). This can be clearly seen as an application of informational social influence, in which far-right organizations appeal to their members’ intrinsic desire to be right by bombarding them with their subjective version of reality accompanied by statements such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”. The intent of this process is to present their extreme viewpoints as objective truths that cannot be challenged, thereby working to shift members’ worldviews over time. The existence of such cult-like behavior in reactionary groups and movements presents real issues for mainstream society as the prevalence of these cults continues to grow. 

In recent years, the presence of reactionary groups has risen sharply both in the United States and globally (Rodrik 162). The attention given to these cults has also increased in the wake of sustained political polarization and social unrest. Large rallies such as the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march and the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States capitol demonstrate the power that these fringe movements now hold as well as their capacity for violence and contribution to the erosion of democratic norms and social stability. The prevalence of right-wing cults can also be seen through the drastically increased proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Now more than perhaps ever in modern history, mainstream American politics are characterized by a general rejection of the notion of objective reality (Bleakley 1). One of the main causes of this rejection can be attributed to the prominence of echo chambers among political extremists on social media, in which aligning beliefs are reinforced and dissenting viewpoints are actively suppressed (Bleakley 12). This phenomenon hints at a bleak reality: the influence of reactionary cults and movements is not limited to their own movements. Rather, their extremist views and tactics can be observed slipping into mainstream political discourse. 

The growth of reactionary cults within far-right politics has drastically influenced mainstream political discourse. These cults both directly participate in mainstream political campaigns and employ a number of more indirect methods to influence political dialogue. As previously mentioned, the rise of fringe, right-wing cults has coincided with a sharp increase in the prevalence of disinformation and harmful conspiracy theories (Bleakley 2). Reactionary groups have used their growing platforms to disseminate propaganda promoting their fringe ideology and undermining that of their political opponents. Much of this is centered around tactics of fear-mongering in an attempt to create a feeling of urgency for action. Additionally, fringe-right cults are able to methodically slip into mainstream political discourse through media coverage of contentious issues as well as through the actions of individual politicians. Over the past several years, a large number of far-right politicians have adopted language that echoes the beliefs held by reactionary cults in attempts to appeal to certain voters. For example, both Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert are former followers of the QAnon cult and continue to espouse much of the same rhetoric supported by the group today, even as they hold some of the highest elected offices in the country. Powerful politicians and media figures’ adoption of framing similar to that propagated by reactionary cults has led to a dramatic shift in the “Overton Window”—the frame of what beliefs are considered socially acceptable within mainstream society. 

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The Overton Window is a concept designed to describe the range of ideas that are considered largely acceptable within conventional society at a given time. Joseph Overton (for whom the term is named) conceptualized that ideas outside the window (i.e., politically unacceptable) may later fit within the realm of acceptable ideas because the “window” can “either move or be transformed in size” (Oleksandr 52). It is through this process that reactionary cults are able to slip their ideas into conventional political discussions. Even over relatively short periods of time, one can observe how views that were previously unthinkable become widely adopted within the mainstream. Similar to the concept of the Overton Window is that of deviance, which refers to the idea of departing from generally accepted standards present in society. According to Hewitt, “Deviance…represents a real or imagined threat to social order, and the deviant is accorded a special and discredited position in relation to it,” (214). Thus, views outside of the Overton Window at a given point in time typically also fall under the umbrella of deviant views. The concepts of the Overton Window and deviance (and the relationship therewithin) are crucial to understanding the strategic importance of falling within the views accepted by mainstream society for far-right organizations. As Zuckerman puts it, “Stray outside the sphere of legitimate debate into the sphere of deviance, and your position becomes invisible to mainstream media dialog,” (16). Essentially, in order to reach a larger audience, reactionary cults have to struggle to fit within the established norms of society at any given point in time. Because of the tactical need to infiltrate mainstream political discourse, many right-wing, reactionary cults seek to normalize their own viewpoints by falsely equivocating their views with those held on the left. 

Reactionary groups often use anti-communist rhetoric to slip into mainstream political discourse by framing their opposition to communism as a defense of democracy, individual liberties, and freedom. One of the simplest means by which fascists can achieve their ultimate goal of consolidating power is by utilizing anti-communism as a tool to create a common enemy. By depicting socialism as a threat to national security, reactionaries can silence opposition, suppress meaningful dissent, and legitimize their authoritarian system. Another means by which reactionary groups seek to utilize anti-communist rhetoric is to equivocate fascism (and oftentimes Nazism) and communism. This is of course, on its face, absurd: while communism promotes the seizure of the means of production by the workers (Marx & Engels 38), Nazism is characterized by its emphasis on racial purity and antisemitism. The false equivalence of communism and Nazism is often propagated by far-right cults and media figures alike as a means to both discredit left-wing ideas and shift the Overton Window in favor of their own ideology. Making the comparison between communism and Nazism serves to downplay the severity of the crimes of one of the worst atrocities in human history and silence legitimate criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism. The conjoined propaganda tools of finding a common enemy around which to unite and equating communism to the atrocities of Nazism allow reactionary cults to both delegitimize leftist movements and slip their own beliefs into conventional political discourse, ultimately serving their own end goal of consolidating power within mainstream institutions. 

  Fictitious tropes equating communism to Nazism have been widely disseminated and adopted within transnational mainstream political discourse, perpetuating misinformation, reinforcing negative stereotypes about leftist political movements, and legitimizing the views of reactionary cults. While the degree to which such attempts varies, in some parts of the world (especially in former Soviet states), reactionary cults have been able to “...[capitalize] on decades of anti-communism mainstream discourse built-up to develop a full-blown populist radical right narrative and politics,” (Popescu & Vesalon 5). In practice, this means that fascist sects such as the AUR in Romania and the OUN/UPA cult in Ukraine have been able to normalize their own beliefs and have massive impacts on public opinion and public policy (Crstocea). As previously discussed, cults have a tendency to rely on (among other things), informational social influence. In many instances, this can include followers accepting blatantly false information and shaping their perceptions of reality around lies (Corvaglia 9). Naturally, it’s not difficult why it would be undesirable for distorted worldviews to slip into mainstream politics, but in many instances, it already has. One such example can be seen in The Black Book of Communism (Courtois et al, 1999), which coined the “100 million deaths by communism” myth that has since been thoroughly debunked (Francois et al 4). Despite being categorically disproven, this myth is still perpetuated within mainstream conservative (and even many liberal) circles. As the views of reactionary cults with distorted worldviews gain traction within mainstream political discourse, they are enabled to both expand their influence and increase their numbers. 

The presence of anti-communist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has led to the growth of reactionary cults characterized by informational isolation and a deference to authority. The use of anti-communist rhetoric fosters an atmosphere of apprehension and widespread suspicion toward leftist ideologies, which renders individuals more vulnerable to the perspectives of reactionary groups. The fear-mongering and demonization of communism that has pervaded Western political discourse for decades has created a fertile breeding ground for reactionary cults and movements that espouse radical anti-communist ideologies. These groups oftentimes promise protection against a supposed communist threat and frame themselves as protectors of freedom and traditional values. By stoking fears of a communist takeover of institutions, these cults and cult-like movements are able to tap into the anxieties of ordinary people who are disillusioned with mainstream neoliberal politics and searching for a sense of belonging and purpose. Further, the adoption of fictitious anti-communist tropes by mainstream political leaders and media figures can also serve as a means of legitimizing the views of these movements, leading to a further increase in their membership and influence. As reactionary cults continue to gain traction in mainstream political discourse, the consequences of anti-communist rhetoric are becoming increasingly evident. The aforementioned groups are given steadily more and more massive platforms to promote fringe ideologies and often resort to violence, as seen in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Additionally, the dissemination of anti-communist disinformation and conspiracy theories among these cults creates a pipeline toward radicalization and a complete rejection of objective, factual information, facilitating the exacerbation of societal divides. The normalization of radical, anti-communist rhetoric also perpetuates narrow-minded perspective ideologies, discouraging both critical thought and nuanced discussions about complex societal issues. In conclusion, the prevalence of anti-communist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has led to a sharp rise in reactionary cults, posing a threat to the very institutions that underpin Western so-called “liberal democracy”. Acknowledging and rectifying the adverse consequences of the normalization of anti-communist rhetoric is vital in averting the proliferation of reactionary cults and the further degradation of the material conditions of everyday Americans.

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Educators Must Help Defeat the New Racist and Imperialist 'Red Scare'

By Derek R. Ford

Originally published on PESA Agora

Introduction: Racism and imperialism unite ‘both sides of the aisle’

Responding to criticism of the political system of the newly-independent Tanzania, the great African teacher, revolutionary, and theorist Julius Nyerere responded, observing ‘the United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.’ He was and is right. Rhetorical differences and popular presentation aside, the two ruling-class parties effectively function as a dictatorship domestically and globally. For concrete and contemporary evidence, look no further than the New McCarthyism and Red Scare promoted by media outlets and politicians on ‘both sides of the aisle,’ from Fox News and Marco Rubio to The New York Times and Chuck Schumer.

On August 5, The New York Times released a report that, in essence, boldly and baselessly suggests groups and other organisations advocating for peace with China are part of an international conspiracy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite the absence of any substantive proof, politicians are already using it as ammunition in their broader ‘new McCarthyism’ agenda, which could potentially have devastating consequences for the globe. Fortunately, a variety of institutions and networks are already mobilising against it by building a fight-back movement in which education plays a key role, and you can too.

Their presentation opens with the racist logic guiding their investigation as they try to discredit the multitude of spontaneous global actions against anti-Asian racism in 2021. They narrate a single action in London where a scuffle broke out, they contend, after activists with No Cold War (one of the event’s organisers) ‘attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.’ They offer only two words to back up this narrative: ‘witnesses said.’

No Cold War is dedicated to promoting peaceful relations between the US and China, organising in-person and virtual events to advance the global peace movement. Having spoken on their panels and attended others, I can confirm they are educational, generative and productive intellectually and politically. They include a range of perspectives, given they are working toward peace. This principle is unacceptable for the Times and the New McCarthyites, however, as the journalists ‘reveal’ that No Cold War is merely ‘part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.’ So too, it seems, is any group advocating for peace.

The investigators construct an international conspiracy centred on Neville Roy Singham, a millionaire sympathetic to peace and socialism who donates his millions to left-wing non-profits who, in turn, help finance very active and crucial anti-war, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist organisations. This is where the most dangerous suggestion emerges, one upon which pro-war forces quickly seized: that groups receiving funding from Singham could be agents of the Chinese Communist Party and thus in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

These suggestions are completely unfounded. The only ‘evidence’ presented are statements made by a handful of former employees and members of some organisations partly funded and supported directly or indirectly by Singham, including the Nkrumah School, the media outlet New Frame, and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party in South Africa. Then, of course, there is the fact that Singham supported Hugo Chávez, has relationships with some of the million members of the Chinese Communist Party, is pictured at a CCP meeting (excuse me, ‘propaganda forum’) taking notes in a book ‘adorned with a red hammer and sickle.’ And I almost forgot the nail in the hammer: a plaque of Xi Jinping hanging in Singham’s office.

Fox News and other right-wing outlets and politicians are at the helm of the bandwagon as well. For years they promoted propaganda alleging China is influencing US schools and universities as a method of attacking freedom of inquiry and speech in the US, including in my state of Indiana. In August 2021, Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita (whom most Hoosiers don’t support) threatened to investigate the Confucius Institute at a small college, Valparaiso University, saying it operates ‘to spread propaganda and circulate the mantra of the CCP at both the university and in several K-12 schools in Indiana.’ The University closed the Institute but, importantly, maintained Rokita was lying about its function, which is to promote cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. Unfortunately, almost all such institutes have shuttered.

Old or new, ‘McCarthyism’ is reality, not hyperbole

On August 9, Senator Marco Rubio officially called on the Department of Justice to investigate a range of progressive organisations in the US for violating FARA and acting as unregistered Chinese agents. Rubio’s evidence? The Times ‘investigation.’ Rubio includes but adds to the groups smeared in the Times article. The strategy is to discredit anti-war groups, grassroots movement hubs, and anti-imperialist and anti-racist organisations as CCP operatives, thereby silencing opposition to their foreign policy strategy, part of which includes funding separatist movements in places like Hong Kong. In their opening, the Times journalists neglect to mention that most people in that region of China actually oppose the ‘freedom movement,’ partly because of its political character, exemplified by its leaders such as Joshua Wong, a close collaborator of Rubio, who led the charge to nominate Wong for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Rubio’s letter to the Biden Administration’s Attorney General names nine entities, including the anti-war group Code Pink, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and The People’s Forum, amongst others. This list will likely expand to include numerous others who either didn’t respond to the journalists’ red-baiting or who maintain some connection to the groups identified.

Already serious, it could potentially be devastating. I don’t know a peace or social justice activist, let alone an anti-imperialist or anti-racist revolutionary organisation, with a substantial base, membership, or level of activity, that isn’t somehow related to one of these organisations and networks. The People’s Forum should be of particular concern for educators, as it is the most active and pedagogically innovative popular education institute in the US. Academic journals and publishers work with them to host events and book launches, and a range of professors, including myself, teach classes for them (without getting a paycheck, let alone a ‘lavish’ one, I should add).

There are several continuities between the anti-communist and anti-Black witch-hunts of the 1940s-50s and the new McCarthyism. In both cases, the same ruling-class parties united as outlets like The New York Times recklessly promoted their campaign, slandering heroic Black figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston, Hughes and Paul Robeson. Newspaper headlines alone facilitated this work, such as the 1949 Times headline calling Robeson a ‘Black Stalin’ who “Suffered ‘Delusions of Grandeur.”’ This continued with the Civil Rights Era and was a major factor stalling its militancy and has again resurfaced. They never apologised for their role in spreading such racist propaganda.

Imperialism and white supremacy: More than and predating McCarthy

Labeling this wide historical period and its complex political configurations as ‘McCarthyism’ is useful in speaking popularly, but educators should note it can be misleading. The anti-Black and anti-communist/radical crusade preceded Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Historian Gerald Horne cogently locates the foundations of contemporary racist US capitalism in the imbrication of white supremacy and anti-communism insofar as it

‘is undergirded by the fact that slave property was expropriated without compensation.… [O]ne of the largest uncompensated expropriations before 1917 took place in this nation: African-Americans are living reminders of lost fortunes.’

Similarly, Charisse Burden-Stelly’s concept of modern US racial capitalism specifically designates a ‘political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination and labour superexploitation.’ Like Horne, the system ‘is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism.’

History proves their theses correct. For one example, take Benjamin J. Davis, the first Black communist ever elected to public office in the US. He served as a New York City Councilman from 1943 until 1949, when he and other Communist Party leaders were arrested under the Smith Act. In Davis’ set of ‘autobiographical notes’ penned while captive in an apartheid federal prison in Terre Haute, an hour’s drive from where I’m writing, the Black Party leader recounts how, following the end of the US’s alliance with the Soviet Union, ‘the pro-fascist, Negro-hating forces which had been held in check during the war, began to break loose.’ The Republicans, Democrats, FBI, and other state elements sat idly by as racist attacks, including a mass lynching in Atlanta by the Klan, intensified.

Communists, on the other hand, responded immediately, with the Party’s Black leadership uniting and mobilising broad sectors of society. It was only then that the state responded, and not to the racist lynching but to those fighting them. In other words, while the US state passively accepted racist and fascist groups in the US, they turned to active repression when Black people and their supporters and comrades fought back.

The 1949 conviction and imprisonment of Davis and other Party leaders for violating the anti-communist Smith Act was an example of this repression. The US imprisoned and suppressed hundreds of communist leaders and fellow travelers, with countless others driven underground, blacklisted, and deported.

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It was not only their organising that threatened the state; it was also their ideology. Thus, prison administrators prevented the publication of Davis’s book for a decade after he was released. Physically and ideologically repressing communism was part of a project to exterminate the revolutionary, internationalist, and Black Liberation movements and traditions just as a new wave of US imperialist aggression was kicking into high gear.

Decolonisation and anti-colonialist struggle: A matter of survival, not academic fodder

This leads to one other glaring connection between the Red Scare of today and then, one that demonstrates the historical and ideological continuity of racist US imperialism, helps define the current conjuncture, and might convince academics we don’t need new words and more language but action: the US war against the Korean national liberation and socialist struggle.

Seventy years ago, on July 27, the resistance of the Korean masses forced the US to sign an armistice agreement, ceasing the US’s horrendous violence against the peninsula. Despite their military might, new chemical and biological weapons, and bombs that even the Air Force admits inflicted ‘greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II,’ they couldn’t defeat the freedom fighters in the Korean People’s Army (many of whom were from the south).

Before the armistice signing on February 2, Trinidadian-born Black communist Claudia Jones, who at 37 years of age was a high-ranking Party member and leading organiser and theorist, stood before Judge Edward J. Dimrock in a New York courtroom along with a dozen other Party leaders They were all convicted of several charges, including conspiring to overthrow the US government. The pre-sentencing statement is generally used to plea for leniency, but, as a revolutionary communist, Jones saw another opportunity to agitate and raise consciousness.

Jones opened by making it clear it wasn’t meant for the Judge or the state. No, Jones addressed the real power in the world: the global revolutionary movement. ‘If what I say here,’ she began, ‘serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed.’

Overall, this and other trials that persecuted communists and progressives weren’t about specific articles or actions, although, as Denise Lynn notes, in 1947, J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to surveil ‘her every speech, radio interview, mention in the Daily Worker, and all of her written work as well as party functions she attended or hosted.’

The prosecution, Jones highlighted, introduced her articles as evidence but did not read them; actually, they could not read them aloud because, in the first place, doing so would affirm ‘that Negro women can think and speak and write!’

Jones then called attention to the second piece of evidence they could not read: her historic speech delivered at an International Women’s Day rally and published in Political Affairs under the title ‘Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security’ in March 1950, the same year the state obtained her deportation order.

In that speech, delivered months before the ‘barbaric’ war against Korea, as she called it, Jones proposed that ‘a fundamental condition for rallying the masses of American women into the peace camp is to free them from the influence of the agents of imperialism’ by linking them with the new phenomenon of a global anti-imperialist women’s movement spanning 80 countries. This would ‘inspire the growing struggles of American women and heighten their consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day.’ Thus, the prosecution could not read it aloud because

‘it urges American mothers, Negro women and white, to emulate the peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in Latin America, in the new European democracies, in the Soviet Union, in Asia and Africa to end the bestial Korean war … to reject the militarist threat to embroil us in a war with China, so that their children should not suffer the fate of the Korean babies murdered by napalm bombs of B-29s, or the fate of Hiroshima.’

How terrifyingly presciently Jones’s words resonate with us here today, 70 years on. We face ongoing imperialist aggression against the Korean people and their struggle for peace, national liberation, and reunification, the ramping up of US militarism as they prepare for a war against China, and the accompanying ‘Red Scare’ to produce consent, silence dissent and inhibit solidarity efforts.

The US is a … Pacific power?

The US’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ dates at least back to 1898 when they waged a war against and occupied the Philippine Republic, but its current iteration emerged in November 2011, when then-President Barack Obama told the Australian Parliament ‘The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.’ That month, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, published an article in Foreign Policy (the unofficial organ of the US State Department) articulating the US’s new line, that first and foremost entailed ‘a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region.’

We all know what Clinton meant by ‘otherwise,’ as did the Chinese people, government, and governing Party. For some context, recall that this came out one month earlier Clinton erupted in joy during a CBS interview after hearing of African revolutionary Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal assassination by reactionary forces (whose campaign was based on disproven propaganda and racism against migrant workers from the southern part of the continent). ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ she said laughingly after destroying an independent African nation and its widely popular government.

As the US was waging dozens of wars, occupations, covert military operations, and more, China followed the CCP’s line of a ‘peaceful rise.’ They did so as long as they could, and when it was clear the US wasn’t stopping, both China and Russia finally stood up to the US.

Especially since the election of Xi Jinping to the position of General Secretary of the CCP, China has made a sharp shift to the left and now, after decades, finally offers an alternative pole for the world order so the people of the world can finally be freed from the colonial rule of the US through military occupations and other mechanisms like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. This is why the Belt and Road initiative is critical to formerly colonised states, and why it is falsely labeled ‘colonialist’ by ruling-class figures from Steve Bannon to Clinton.

What would you do then? Do it now! Resisting intimidation is the path to victory

Rubio ended his letter to the DOJ by proclaiming: ‘The CCP is our greatest adversary, and we cannot allow it to abuse our open system to promote its malign influence any longer.’ The threat of war is not rhetoric. The Department of Defence’s new military doctrine is explicitly guided by ‘Great Power Rivalry, a euphemism for an all-out war to recolonise and redivide China.

As US imperialist occupations expand, as they continue conducting military exercises in the South China Sea, China remains remarkably restrained. Can you imagine what the US would do if, say, China sent nuclear-armed submarines to the shores of California, patrolled the Atlantic waters off the coast of New York City, or stationed military bases throughout Mexico and Canada?

It is irrelevant wherever one stands on China, its political system, or any issue or policy. In terms of internationalist solidarity, the least that educators in the imperialist core can do is restrain our government. Even if one of your colleagues supports US imperialism, however, they will hopefully at least stand against attempts to intimidate and silence opposition and free speech. As the petition against the New McCarthyism states:

‘This attack isn’t only on the left but against everyone who exercises their free speech and democratic rights. We must firmly resist this racist, anti-communist witch hunt and remain committed to building an international peace movement. In the face of adversity, we say NO to xenophobic witch hunts and YES to peace.’

Read, sign and, share the petition now. Don’t be intimidated. The heroic freedom fighters we teach and write about, the ones we admire, never gave in despite their extraordinary oppression and unthinkable suffering.

For those of us committed to ending white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, or at the very least, to protecting the freedom of speech and dissent, one small thing to do now is to talk with everyone about it, to sign this petition and affirm that you won’t be silenced or intimidated. Let’s follow the words and deeds of Jones, not Marco Rubio.

Our enemies aren’t in Russia or China, North Korea or Cuba. They are right here in the US, from the Pentagon and Wall Street to the cops who routinely murder and harass the exploited and oppressed. What the police do here, the US military does across the globe. Together, we can defeat them.

Full Citation Information:

Ford, D. R. (2023). Educators must help defeat the new racist and imperialist ‘Red Scare.’ PESA Agora. https://pesaagora.com/columns/educators-must-help-defeat-the-new-racist-and-imperialist-red-scare/

Cornel West, the Pitfalls of Bourgeois Politics, and Forging a New Future Among the Rubble

By Colin Jenkins

On Monday, June 5th, Dr. Cornel West announced his bid to run for the presidency of the United States in 2024. Coming on the heels of two such runs by Bernie Sanders, as well as current runs by Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy, Jr. West is seeking to fill what many view as a “progressive” void on the grandest electoral stage. However, in contrast to the other three, West, a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), will shun the Democratic Party and run on a third-party ticket under the People’s Party.

West’s announcement came via his Twitter account, where he has one million followers, and has amassed over 18 million views, 47k likes, and 18k shares in a few days. The announcement coincided with an interview on Russell Brand’s Rumble livestream, Stay Free, and sparked a flurry of mainstream news reports over the last few days.

As the buzz continues to gain momentum, we should ask ourselves a few questions. What does this candidacy mean for working-class politics? Considering the recent betrayals by Bernie Sanders, can we expect anything different from West? Can any significant change come from participating in bourgeois elections? And, finally, should working-class people invest our time, energy, and resources to support West?

What does this mean for working-class politics?

While West’s candidacy could properly be described as the most potentially-overt, working-class (aka anti-capitalist, left-wing) endeavor we have seen on this stage since perhaps the 1960s, it remains to be seen how far he is willing to go. Outside of the Green Party, which has made strides to fill this void in recent years by including explicitly anti-capitalist wording in its national platform and running candidates such as Ajamu Baraka, there is no actual, organized, mainstream left in the United States. Socialist parties that are grounded in working-class emancipation exist, but they are typically small, fragmented, at constant war with one another, and subjected to mainstream censorship. The Green Party itself falls into the same traps, is scattered and unorganized due to a lack of resources, and has been chronically hamstrung by the capitalist duopoly’s (Democrats and Republicans) increasingly difficult standards for getting on ballots.

A major problem for authentic working-class politics in the US is the widespread misconception that Democrats and liberals are, in fact, “left wing.” This is an ahistorical belief that is ignorant to the formation, and subsequent historical developments, of political ideology. It is also an issue that has been historically unique to the US, as an international powerhouse birthed from the fascistic wombs of Native Genocide and chattel slavery and maintained by fascist tendencies embedded within the utter dominance of capital (the wealthy minority) over labor (the working majority). It goes without saying that the US government, in serving global capital, has thrived on exploiting not only much of the world, especially the Global South, vis-à-vis colonialism and imperialism, but also much of its own population, especially working-class peoples from historically-marginalized demographics (black, brown, women, migrants).

Thus, the country’s proclaimed “democracy,” or “republic,” has never actually been democratic in any genuine manner because self-determination and self-governance do not, and cannot, exist under capitalist modes of production. A “common good” can also not exist, which means that a so-called “social contract” cannot exist. These are realities that were firmly understood by the founders of the country, all of whom were privileged men of wealth hell-bent on breaking free from the confines of a monarchy while simultaneously arranging their own elaborate system of class dominance for centuries to come. The masses have been led to believe that the two capitalist/imperialist political parties which run the US exist in vastly different ideological wings, and that we have civic empowerment through the act of voting. However, this could not be further from the truth. And a West candidacy has the potential to destroy this illusion simply by showing the people what a genuine working-class (aka left-wing) candidate looks like – something most have never seen.

However, before we decide on where to stand with West’s campaign, there are many questions that need to be pondered. Because West’s track record is a mixed bag. There are aspects of his politics that are promising, just as there are aspects that are problematic. In light of the last few elections, we can’t help but ask ourselves if he will choose the same path as Bernie Sanders by building potentially radical momentum among the masses, only to pull the plug and herd us back to the Democrats? Or will he understand the importance of truly breaking from not only the capitalist duopoly, but also the dominant bourgeois (capitalist) institutions, narratives, and psychological tactics that have us all trapped in a tightly-manicured ideological space, inundated with delusions, paranoia, and hysteria pushed by capitalist media? Will he use this campaign in an ironically-masterful manner to steer us away from the electoral arena? And, if so, can he leave us with at least a foundation of formidable working-class organizations that are prepared for both the fascist wave and the demise of both capitalism and the United States as we know it?

the bernie lesson, the good and the bad of west, and will we ultimately be sold out again?

So, will West and his campaign ultimately herd us back to the Democratic Party? Anyone who has been involved in working-class politics – most notably, the Bernie Sanders campaigns – would likely ponder this question with fear, and understandably so. Sanders has been the closest thing we have had as a representative of the working class on a national stage in decades. Sanders’ first run in 2016 was especially electric in this regard, as he railed against capitalist greed, did not shy away from the “socialist” label, and generally maintained a solid campaign in support of the working-class masses, at least by US political standards. In terms of tangible results, Sanders spearheaded a formidable organizational following and gave millions of young adults the courage to call themselves “socialists,” even if perhaps many still did not know what this meant.

However, as beneficial as Sanders was to many, some noticed warning signs early. In a 2015-piece at Black Agenda Report, as the Sanders phenomenon began to gain steam, the late Bruce Dixon published a scathing critique, and what would come to be a prophetic warning, about Sanders serving as a “sheepdog” for the Democratic Party and its anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton. Unfazed by the momentum, Dixon brilliantly noted,

“Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Dixon’s article was labeled as unnecessarily cynical by many at the time. However, to those who had followed electoral politics from a working-class perspective for some time, it was an accurate reflection of a decades-old tactic used by Democrats:

“1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it's Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there's a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November.”

In the end, Dixon’s warnings and predictions came to fruition. Sanders did, in fact, throw in the towel, publicly lauded Clinton, and asked his army of loyal followers to support her in the general election against Trump.

A much greater degree of skepticism followed Sanders’ second run in 2020. In a 2019 piece for Left Voice, Doug Greene exposed Sanders as a consistent supporter of US imperialism, opening with the following breakdown:

“On February 19, 2019, Vermont Senator and “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders announced his plans to run for the Democratic Party nomination for President. The announcement was met with cheers from large swaths of the American left who identify with his support for expanded labor rights, Medicare for All, free college, and a litany of other progressive issues. Those appear to be very compelling reasons to back the Sanders’ campaign. However, when it comes to American imperialism and war, Sanders may offer slightly different rhetoric than other Democratic candidates or Donald Trump, but his record proves him to be no alternative at all.”

Greene went on to provide detailed examples of Sanders’ support of the US war machine as a battering ram for global capital, which included backing the arms industry during the Reagan years, supporting sanctions and bombings during the Clinton years, supporting Bush’s initial response to the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center, providing lukewarm responses to Israel’s brutalization of Palestinians while refusing to support the BDS movement, and finally “by voting in favor of the military budget in 2009, 2010, and 2013, and supporting Obama’s military actions against Libya, sanctions against Russia, providing a billion dollars in aid to the far right Ukrainian government in 2014, and supported arming the Saudi Arabian monarchy to fight ISIS.”

Ultimately, despite being slighted by the Democrats, which pulled every backdoor maneuver possible to push their corporate candidate, Joe Biden, to the forefront, Sanders once again willingly stepped back, publicly proclaimed Biden to be worthy of the office, and asked everyone to support Biden. While Sanders had already lost a significant amount of support after his first betrayal, this second act of treachery seemed to be the final nail in his coffin, and legacy. Now, in retrospect, it is difficult for many of even his loyalist followers to see Sanders as anything other than what Bruce Dixon labeled him – a sheepdog who stole the immense time, energy, and resources that he received from millions and handed it over to the capitalist/imperialist Democratic Party, with no strings attached.

Which now brings us to Cornel West, who happened to be a vocal supporter of Sanders. To be fair, Marianne Williamson or Robert Kennedy, Jr. fit the profile of “sheepdog candidate” much more so than West does. West offers us much greater potential in terms of constructing an authentic, working-class campaign. But, still, we must ask ourselves, is he any different than Sanders?

In many ways, he is. First and foremost, West is not a career Senator of the US imperialist state and a direct surrogate of the Democratic Party. While West supported Sanders during the runups to both presidential elections, he ultimately had the integrity to “disobey” him by endorsing Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, in the 2016 general election. And while West, like many others, threw all of his weight behind the political ascendency of Barack Obama in 2008, he showed bravery and consistency by reconsidering this support shortly after Obama took office, publicly criticizing the country’s first black president for his Wall Street appointments, rampant drone strikes, record deportations, and unwillingness to take action for the struggling working-class masses, including the millions of black USAmericans who experienced no tangible benefits from the administration. In doing so, West faced a harsh backlash from much of the black community, who were understandably high on the symbolic victory and immense significance of seeing a black man in the oval office. Many viewed West’s criticisms of Obama as “petty jealousy,” despite the fact that they were perfectly consistent with West’s track record and represented a level of intellectual honesty that is rare in these times.

West has also remained steadfast in his support of the Palestinian people against the apartheid regime in Israel, something that typically amounts to political suicide in the United States (see the recent example of Robert Kennedy, Jr. quickly changing his tune on this very matter when pressured). And perhaps the most important difference is West’s willingness to shun the Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate under the People’s Party. There has been much to say about why West chose this relatively-unknown party over the seemingly obvious choice of the Green Party, and that may be worthy of investigation, but the importance of this decision is more so in the blatant rejection of the Democrats, who have maintained a decades-long stranglehold on progressives, much of the working class, a large majority of the black community, and even some socialists, despite ongoing militarism, pro-corporate policies, and covert racism.

West has openly pushed for internationalism and has provided a more nuanced opinion on the situation between Russia and Ukraine, ultimately placing much of the blame on the United States and NATO, while calling for the disbandment of NATO. It is difficult to imagine someone like Bernie Sanders, who is a career Senator of the very state responsible for much of the strife in that region, thinking such things, much less saying them out loud. In fact, Sanders notably hopped on the “Russiagate” train following the 2016 election and has toed the Democratic party line since then.

However, in many ways, West is not different. In 2020, West joined other public intellectuals in supporting Biden as the “anti-fascist choice” in the general election against Trump, essentially going against his consistent opposition of both capitalist parties under the impression that Trump represented the greater threat. West described the battle between the two parties as “catastrophe (Trump and Republicans)” versus “disaster (Biden and Democrats)” and, while noting that Biden was not his first choice, ultimately proclaimed that “catastrophes are worse than disasters” in his official endorsement of Biden:

“There is a difference in neofascist catastrophe and neoliberal disaster,” he said. “Catastrophes are worse than disasters. Disasters have less scope and range regarding certain kinds of issues. I never want to downplay the least vulnerable in our society — our gay brothers, lesbian sisters, trans, Black poor, brown poor, Indigenous poor. They are more viciously attacked by the neofascists than the neoliberals. But the neoliberals capitulate to the attack. I would never say they’re identical, but I would say poor and working people are still getting crushed over and over again.”

On a Facebook post made on September 4, 2020, West shared a video link of his speech along with the explanation that, “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics. In this sense, I agree with my brothers and sisters like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Paul Street, and Bob Avakian.” Fifteen months earlier, however, in a Fox News appearance on The Ingraham Angle, West correctly referred to Biden as a “dye-in-the-wool, backward-looking neoliberal with little vision and even less courage” who “represents a past that hurt black people.”

West’s attempts to be a unifying force throughout his role as a public intellectual has led him to appear on platforms that many view as problematic, especially in a time when overt fascism is converging around various forms of bigotry, including Fox News, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the former founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes’s, show, to name a few. There are also questions regarding the new People’s Party itself, which has faced criticisms about its ineffective organizing and willingness to include right-wing populists in a big-tent effort to focus on common struggles. This approach has led to some internal strife, rooted mainly in race dynamics, where some black members have felt understandably uneasy about the inclusion of working-class whites who exhibit racist and xenophobic undertones. It is unclear how substantial this problem is within the party but, at a time when identity politics has largely overshadowed and obstructed working-class unity, it is safe to assume it is potentially significant. Nevertheless, West has obviously embraced the party, being a founding member himself, enough to run as its presidential candidate.

West has openly supported the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement, which may not seem problematic on the surface, as the call for reparations for black descendants of US slavery is a righteous and worthy cause. But, in doing so, West has ignored a perceived betrayal of Pan-African principles by the organization, which excludes most of the African diaspora throughout the world to embrace a peculiarly pro-US orientation. In a nuanced critique of the organization, Broderick Dunlap tells us,

“There is no question that Black folks in the United States are entitled to reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and centuries of racist violence. There is also no question that the United States has caused insurmountable harm to Africans outside of the US. To deny that is to deny history and reality. Understanding that the demand for reparations is an attempt to hold America accountable for harm done to Black folks, excluding Black folks from the conversation contradicts what ADOS claims to be trying to achieve. Besides the impracticality of trying to distinguish between people who are deemed ADOS and other diasporic Africans and biracial Black folks, Africans are socialized and racialized the same as Black folks born in the US. This contradiction is the primary reason it would serve ADOS leaders to adopt Black internationalist principles, so they can build a movement ‘informed by and engaged with real-world struggles.’”

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of West’s politics, though, has been his willingness to express anti-communist talking points. This willingness stems from the red-scare era of US history, when anyone and everyone who merely “sympathized” with socialism and communism were ostracized, exiled, imprisoned, and even murdered by the US government. And while such fears have certainly dissipated since the end of the Cold War and disbandment of the USSR, public intellectuals with large platforms and tenures at major universities are seemingly still held to this standard, with Noam Chomsky being the most notable of this bunch.

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West’s longtime association with Michael Harrington’s DSA also represents an in-between, anti-communist position between capitalism and socialism that is often indistinguishable from mid-20th century US liberals. From this standpoint, folks like West and Sanders can safely deliver vague socialist talking points while serving as social democrats, but are ultimately limited by their peculiar faith in US democracy and reformism, which becomes even more problematic by their anti-communism.

West’s constant yearning for unity among the people, while certainly commendable and needed, can and has led to extending an open hand to elements of the working class who are likely irredeemable, if not simply dangerous, due to their fierce bigotry, intense xenophobia, and blatant misogyny. And his unwillingness to commit to forceful politics over vague intellectualism has led him to make problematic assessments, one of which included a tweet from 2011, in which he oddly proclaimed Ronald Reagan as “a freedom fighter in terms of supporting our Jewish bros & sis in the Soviet Union & opposing vicious forms of communism.”

Granted, this tweet was made as part of a series of tweets that addressed Barack Obama’s public adoration of Reagan – ironically stating “this glorification of Ronald Reagan is really a sad commentary on our lack of historical consciousness” and concluding that Obama was “chasing the cheap fantasy of bipartisanship.” But, nonetheless, it provides a good example on how the weight of anti-communism, which seems to be holding West hostage, can be a potentially blinding force during a time when it, as a direct product of Nazism and fascism, needs to be snuffed out once and for all. In the end, such a blind spot is not only a massive liability, but also seemingly suggests the potential to drift back into the hands of the Democratic Party.

Can any significant change come from participating in bourgeois elections?

Oddly enough, if any significant change comes from this campaign, it will exist outside the realm of electoral politics. We would be foolish to believe that A) West can win, and B) even if he did win, he would have the power to single-handedly enact policies that would benefit the working-class masses. While this may sound defeatist, it is not. Because the reality is the US government and its entire political system are not only completely controlled by the will of capital, but were deliberately set up by the founders for this very reason: “to protect the opulent minority from the toiling majority,” to paraphrase James Madison.

Does this mean the working class has never won meaningful concessions from the government, via electoral politics? Of course not. Bourgeois democracy, despite its deliberate orientation as a force of capital, has represented a battleground between the class interests of the capitalist minority and the working-class majority in the past. In fact, during times of capitalist crises, the system has responded in ways that have resulted in very real concessions for the working class. In the US, the most notable period that included such concessions came during the 1930s, when “New Deal” policies were implemented in response to the Great Depression. Throughout the 20th century, Keynesianism represented the primary macroeconomic policy direction deployed by the government in its management of capital, using high tax rates on corporations and the wealthy to fund governmental programs designed to both supplement capitalist growth and soften the systemic parasitism of that growth. And, in the 1960s, coming on the heels of radical uprisings throughout the country — most notably, the antiwar and Civil Rights movements — “Great Society” policies were created to provide more assistance and opportunities to working people.

It should be noted, though, that the underlying reasons for many of these concessions were tactical, as they have been made to prevent a radical or revolutionary break from the dominant capitalist/imperialist system. In other words, they were just as much forms of appeasement issued by the capitalist class, for the sake of their own survival, as they were hard-fought gains won by the working class, for our betterment. Many gains were the direct result of organized labor struggles, but were also made possible by the US military’s brutalization and looting campaigns of the Global South via colonialism and imperialism. They were also products of the US’s advantageous post-world-war-two positioning, the Marshall Plan, and the fact that US infrastructure was virtually untouched by the ravages of the war. And much of these gains excluded black and brown members of the US working class, as well as women, all of whom continued to be relegated to hyper-exploited positions within the working class, often confined to internal colonies and subjected to compounded social and material forms of oppression. These inconsistencies, as well as the inability of these reforms to affect the modes of production, left such legislation vulnerable to both circumvention and rollbacks.

It is important to include context behind these concessions because we must understand, first and foremost, that all of capitalist society rests upon a fundamental class struggle between those who own and control the means of production (capitalists) and those of us whose only chance for survival is to sell our labor to those owners (workers). With this understanding, we can see that societal progression, or regression, is the result of this dialectical battle. The sobering reality for the working class is that capitalists always have the upper hand because they have claimed ownership of the means we use to function and survive. And, while capitalist governments like that of the United States have awarded us some rights, and have occasionally given us some concessions, they are ultimately tools that are wielded by the capitalist class to maintain their dominance over us.

Thus, bourgeois (capitalist) democracy is a brilliant scheme for the (capitalist) ruling class because it gives off the appearance of freedom via constitutional documents, legal systems, voting, and a variety of supposed civil/human rights. Beneath the facade are extremely strict power dynamics represented primarily by these class distinctions (again, the minority class who own/control property and the means of production overseeing the majority class whose only basis of survival is our labor). The working-class masses are repressed and controlled in nearly every way possible within this arrangement. Injustice is a daily part of our lives that we learn to accept to survive the drudgery. 

In some instances, where gross injustices occur, we are awarded the "right" to appeal to the systems that exist on the surface, but this "right" always places the burden of proof on us. Therefore, since we have no time, money, energy, and resources to dedicate to these processes (because we're all working our lives away while living paychecks to paychecks), it is incredibly rare for any sort of justice to materialize against a powerful state/class that has seemingly unlimited amounts of time, money, energy, and resources to oppose us. In this never-ending, losing scenario, the ruling class and all of their institutions (including schools and media) can simply say: "we gave you inalienable rights and encourage you to use them if you feel wronged," knowing very well these rights, and the systems put in place to exercise them, are nothing but manufactured dead ends hidden behind virtual freeways.

This systemic understanding brings us back to the question at hand: can significant change come from bourgeois elections? If we were to look at the history of the US, we would surely conclude that it can, as noted above. However, when looking at capitalism as the regressive system that it now is — due to its fascistic foundation of claiming “private property” as a social relationship for capital to employ (exploit) labor; its birth from trillions of dollars of “free capital” generated by chattel slavery; its tendency to centralize wealth and, thus, political/social/governmental power; its cancer-like need for never-ending growth; its bloodlust for expansion and theft via war; and its array of elements that are riddled with internal contradictions which only worsen over time due to perpetually falling rates of profit — we should understand that it has reached a very late stage. In other words, the concessions that were made in the past are, quite frankly, no longer possible. The formation of an industrialized — albeit, mostly white — “middle class” was an anomaly only made possible by the unique stages of historical development that existed in the 20th century.

The capitalist coup called “neoliberalism” put an end to all of that. And it did so during a period of time (1970s/80s) when falling rates of profit were decimating the Keynesian model, the gold standard was removed, monopoly capitalism became entrenched, corporate governance (what Mussolini himself referred to as “fascism”) was cemented, and globalization and financialization became prominent factors in wealth extraction. Pro-capitalists will claim all of these things are “artificial mutations” of “true, free-market” capitalism, caused by “too much government involvement,” but the truth is they are mature stages of capitalism that were inevitable, absent a socialist revolution. Clever terms like “cronyism” and “corporatism” merely refer to natural developments caused by capital accumulation (and, conversely, widespread dispossession) and the concentration of wealth and power that has allowed capitalists to gain control of all aspects of society, including the entirety of government.

The sobering lesson from all of this is that any meaningful concessions from the capitalist class (via the electoral arena) will likely never materialize during capitalism’s late stages. The system has become so cannibalistic and riddled with crises that it has been feeding on itself for at least the past forty years. The industrialized “middle class,” or aristocracy of labor, has been all but destroyed, small capitalists are being devoured by big capitalists, and the economic system has become fully intertwined with the government. Thus, we are already decades deep into a very real transition from covert fascism to overt fascism, as the system scrambles to shield itself from crises after crises.

During this process, capitalism has been propped up by so many tricks and tactics coming from the capitalist state — corporate subsidies, quantitative easing (“printing money”), constant meddling by the federal reserve, etc. — that it is too far gone to respond to the needs of the people. These tricks and tactics are necessary for the system’s survival; or, in more precise terms, necessary to protect and maintain the wealth of the capitalist minority, by further degrading the working-class majority and perpetually “kicking the can down the road.” But, this road comes to an end. And we are fast approaching that end.

The only thing that capitalists and their state are concerned with now is protecting themselves from the imminent collapse, which means we’re already well into a significant fascist transition. The fact that unfathomable amounts of money are being thrown at military and police during a time when tent cities, homelessness, and drug overdoses are taking over every major city, and working people everywhere cannot afford rent or food, tells us that the US government, which is a direct manifestation of the capitalist class, is unable to see past its own interests to avert this collapse. So, it has chosen to dig in and protect the increasingly wealthy minority from the increasingly desperate majority.

West will not have a chance to win the election, and will likely not even capture a miniscule percentage of the vote. He may not even make the ballots in most states. And, even worse yet, if he were to win the election in some dream scenario and assume “the highest office in the land,” nothing substantial would come from it. Because the system was set up to represent wealth (or capital), not people. And the days of meaningful capitalist concessions are long gone.

Despite this, West and his campaign should approach the election with the intent to win, because that is the way to build genuine momentum. But, in this process, the focus must be on building a new world from the ravages of the inevitable collapse. This is where our time, energy, and resources should be, and should have been for decades now, but we’ve been too enamored with bourgeois politics to begin that transition. However, it’s not too late to regroup and refocus. And West’s campaign, like Bernie’s campaigns, can be a catalyst for this shift. Bernie sold out, chose his career, and failed. West can succeed in serving as a launching pad, for us, if he chooses the correct path.

Should working-class people support West’s campaign?

Working-class people should support West’s campaign, if he chooses the right path. We need to divest from bourgeois politics and the capitalist system. A campaign like West’s, which will ironically occur in the bourgeois electoral arena, can be a major catalyst in this divestment. So, what do we need to understand, and what will he need to do, to stay on the right path?

1. We need to understand that electoral politics are both a time suck and a dead end if the goal is to win elections, assume office, and enact legislation. Therefore, campaigns should only be used to educate, agitate, and form counter-hegemonic and liberatory institutions and organizations.

2. We need to understand that building working-class consciousness is the primary need at this moment in time. Challenging capitalist propaganda from mainstream media, providing knowledge and historical context, and offering reality-based narratives as a counter to the extreme paranoia and delusion pushed by capitalist media is the way to do this.

3. We need to understand that authentic working-class politics (aka a left-wing) must be built from the ground-up in the United States. It must initially be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and rooted in the working-class struggle against the capitalist ruling class. In this process, any remnants of anti-communism, which are almost always products of fear and/or ignorance, must be ironed out.

4. We need to understand that liberal identity politics and culture wars are being disseminated by the ruling class to whip up hysteria among the masses, cause widespread confusion and misdirected rage, and keep the working class not only further divided, but constantly at each other’s throats. We must challenge this head-on by keeping the focus on class struggle while, at the same time, not allowing for bigoted elements to fester, as they are mere remnants of capitalist culture and naturally anti-working-class.

5. We need to understand that fascism is already here in the US, and it has always been here for many of the hyper-marginalized members of the working class. This understanding includes the knowledge that the capitalist system has become fully intertwined with the capitalist government and is being protected by both capitalist political parties. In other words, Democrats are not anti-fascist; they are just as much a part of the transition to overt fascism as Republicans are.

6. We need to understand that formidable working-class institutions and organizations need to be built NOW, because time is running out. These organization and institutions must exist completely outside the realm of electoral politics, which means they must be organized, funded, and maintained by us, with no ties to, or relationships with, bourgeois politicians, the capitalist parties, or the US government.

What will West and his campaign need to do to make this happen?

1. West and his campaign must understand that the purpose of this run is not to win, assume office, and enact legislation. It is also not to build a political party to do these things moving forward. If those things happen to occur as a corollary development, then fine, but the primary goal should be to use this platform to radicalize (aka educate) and organize the US working class.

2. West and his campaign must use this platform to promote working-class consciousness. This can be done by attacking mainstream (capitalist) narratives head-on, offering counter narratives based in reality, and deconstructing the hysteria and paranoia being disseminated by media.

3. West and his campaign must show what a true left looks like. This means that he must be unapologetically radical by exposing the roots of our problems, which are not things like immigration, inflation, and “corruption,” but rather are capitalist modes and arrangements of production, imperialism, and the bourgeois state, which has been intentionally constructed to shield these roots. He should expect red baiting and take ownership of it without fear of being “unelectable,” which is easy to do if you are not ultimately concerned with winning an election. He should be openly socialist. He should be clear about what socialism actually is — the people owning and controlling the means that are used to sustain society. He should be clear that the welfare state is not socialism, but rather a necessity of capitalism. He should be clear that social democracy is merely a softer version of capitalism that simply cannot be maintained because of the predatory nature of the capitalist class in this late stage. Using very clear wording, even technical wording, goes against West’s oratory style, but he must make an effort to include such deliberate terminology along with his traditionally soulful approach.

4. West and his campaign need to keep the focus on class struggle by avoiding the inevitable pitfalls of liberal identity politics and culture wars. This does not mean ignoring the social realities of marginalized identities, which of course are naturally intertwined with class oppression, but rather by constantly keeping the focus on the basis of class. This is something West has done exceptionally well in the past and there is no reason why this should not continue moving forward on this particular stage.

5. West and his campaign need to express the reality that fascism is already here in the United States and is in a transitional period from being covert (in that it has always existed in the margins as well as in the foundation of both capitalism and the United States) to overt. He must explain that fascism is capitalism in decay. He must explain that the exponential funding of military and police by the capitalist class and its government will naturally come home to roost on the entirety of the US working class. And he must publicly rid himself of the belief that Democrats are allies in the fight against fascism.

6. West and his campaign must use this platform to build actual organizations and institutions, on the ground, throughout the country, funded and maintained by the people. These organizations and institutions must be constucted to last far beyond this campaign, and must be built with the understanding that they will never work with bourgeois institutions, including the government and political parties owned by the capitalist class. These organizations should exist to meet the most basic needs of the people: food programs, clinics, self-defense, political education, ideological development, etc. all rooted in a working-class culture formed in direct contrast to bourgeois culture.

A means to an end?

From a dialectical perspective, Dr. Cornel West’s announcement to run for president of the US is a seemingly positive development for the working-class masses, in our struggle against the forces of capital. This is not necessarily saying much, as we have had very little reason to pay attention to, let alone participate in, bourgeois elections for quite some time. Thus, this is not positive because West has any chance of winning or assuming office — he does not — but because it provides us the opportunity to finally break away from the stranglehold of bourgeois politics and the two capitalist/imperialist political parties. We should seek to use this campaign as a way to build our own proletariat infrastructure throughout the country — community centers, clinics, food programs, networks, schools, etc. — something that will be needed as both the capitalist system and US government continue their rapid descent into overt fascism.

As West throws down the gauntlet against what he, and many others, see(s) as systemic ills, he will find himself stuck between two vastly different worlds: one where the masses of people desperately need, and I believe are ready for, an unapologetically radical candidate from the left; and another where dominant society and its very real mechanisms of capitalist violence and oppression will simply not allow this need to be delivered. The best thing West can do in this moment is dedicate himself to serving this need. Whether or not he and his campaign choose to use this opportunity as such a catalyst remains to be seen.

By all signs, Cornel West is a social democrat. And, history tells us we should be very wary of the compromising nature of social democrats. So, we should be skeptical. We should continue working on our own efforts and projects to construct authentic, working-class organizations and institutions. We should pace ourselves and not throw too much energy, physical or emotional, behind West and his campaign. But we should also give this a chance to serve our needs — use it as a potential tool whose frequency can increase if we find it on the right path, or decrease and even discarded if it becomes clear that it will not be fruitful. We should attempt to steer it in the right direction because it is the best option we have been given on this type of platform, if only for the fact that it exists outside the Democratic Party.

Our present reality is dismal. Our immediate future is dystopian. Capitalism is rotting away and taking us with it. Fascism is here. The capitalist government and all of its institutions are clearly responding by choosing an increasingly-predatory and barbaric direction. We must forge our own way, dig ourselves in, and prepare for the absolute worst, while building our own institutions that show the promise of a better world. West and his campaign are a potential tool in starting to build this future.

Whose lessons? Which direction?

[Pictured: Poster, 1962, by Nina Vatolina. The text reads: 'Peace, Labor, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Happiness.']

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our failures? If we are to advance politically in the twenty-first century, we need to learn the correct lessons from the twentieth. But what are they?

For some on the left, the problems we face today are as they have ever been failures of organization and collective commitment. A disciplined and organized working class could do more than compel concessions from capital; it could transform society. What’s needed is the revolutionary party. Others on the left blame labor’s political weakness on refusals to compromise. Militant organizations aren’t solutions. They’re errors. Only when unions and left parties accept capitalist social property relations do workers earn their seat at the table and engage in the bargaining that increases their share. Communist parties hinder such acceptance.

Forty years of neoliberalism reveals the bankruptcy of the latter perspective. Capital makes concessions only when it has no other choice. Ruling classes across the Global North have dismantled public sectors and decimated middle classes rather than provide the tax support necessary for maintaining social democracy. They’ve rolled back hard-won political and social gains, treating basic democratic rights as threats to their power. While strong tendencies on the right recognize radicalization as necessary for politics in a period of uncertainty and double down on their various illiberalisms, opponents of revolution insist that the lesson of the twentieth century is the necessity of compromise. Presuming there’s no alternative to capitalism, left Thatcherites declare that progress depends on leaving behind our communist baggage.

One instance of this perspective is Jonah Birch’s “The Cold War Made it Harder for the Left to Win” [1]. Criticizing Gary Gerstle’s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Birch rejects Gerstle’s claim that it was the communist threat that made significant reform possible in the twentieth century [2]. With homogeneous Sweden as his example of social democratic success, Birch asserts that conditions were worse for labor in countries with large communist parties. He concedes that the socio-economic context that led to economic growth after World War II is unlikely to reappear. Nevertheless, Birch advises the left to accept the lesson that communists hurt the working class.

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

Birch’s deeply conservative message moves to the right of mainstream liberal recognition of the impact of the court of world opinion during the Cold War. It is widely accepted that competition with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds pushed the U.S. to take steps toward the abolition of Jim Crow apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy. The denial of voting rights and violent repression of activists damaged the country’s reputation as democracy’s global defender. As soon as one acknowledges the multiracial and multinational character of the working class, one realizes how the Swedish fantasy operates (even in Sweden, as Tobias Hϋbinette demonstrates in a recent piece in the Boston Review) to make a small subset of struggles—the wage struggles of white workers—stand in for the broad array of struggles of the diverse multinational working class [3].

In the U.S., for example, communist involvement in the fight against lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow was more than a propaganda point in the Cold War’s great power conflict. From its early years, the Communist Party recognized that workers would only prevail if they were united. So long as Black workers were paid lower wages than white workers and so long as Black workers excluded from unions were available as strikebreakers, the position of all workers was insecure. The struggle against white supremacy was thus central to building the collective power to win the class struggle. This analysis of the national composition of the working class under conditions of white supremacy and racism committed communists to deepening engagement in “Negro work” in multiple arenas. These arenas included organizing agricultural and domestic workers, taking on legal campaigns on behalf of the falsely accused, and drawing out the connections between the conditions facing Black people in the U.S. and oppressed and colonized people all over the world. Even more broadly, the Party demonstrated how anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements for peace were indispensable to class struggle insofar as they all took aim at U.S. monopoly capital [4].

Communists were at the forefront of the struggle against fascism and its doctrine of Aryan superiority. Birch treats the French and Italian Communist Parties as divisive organizations. He blames them for splitting the labor movement in their respective countries, thereby marginalizing the left and isolating the working class. On the one hand, Birch’s charges are belied by his own evidence: in both countries the communists regularly won around twenty percent of the national vote in elections, hardly an indication of marginalization and isolation. Multiple localities and municipalities had communist leaders. On the other hand, Birch’s myopic focus on the expansion of social programs as the single measure of political success leads him to neglect central communist contributions. The partisans who gave their lives in the war against European fascisms, the thousands who carried out a heroic resistance in occupied countries, are erased from view. Surely their achievements are as noteworthy as the collective bargaining institutions, and generous social services that preoccupy Birch. And since Birch concedes that the economic conditions that prevailed in the post-war heyday of social democracy are unlikely to appear again, what is the political cost today of failing to acknowledge and learn from the courage of communist resistance?

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

The significance of the communist contribution continues to expand as we zoom out from a narrow focus on Europe. No one can deny the role of communist-led national liberation movements in the colonized world. In virtually every liberation struggle Marxist-Leninists played an indispensable part. Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and China are not insignificant data points just because they are not from Europe.

For decades critics of colonialism and neocolonialism have pointed out that the capitalist class has been able to secure the political passivity or even support of a large layer of the working class in the imperialist core through benefits accrued from the global exploitation of Black and brown people. These critics continue a line of argument already prominent in Lenin’s analysis of the enormous super-profits generated by imperialism. That capital is international and the struggle against it must be as well is a lesson from communists in the twentieth century that remains indispensable in the twenty-first. Workers couldn’t afford nationalist myopia then and surely cannot in today’s setting of global supply chains, mass migration, and climate change.

In the U.S., Black women in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated the practical implications of internationalism in their organizing. As early as 1928, Williana Burroughs emphasized concrete tasks related to engaging foreign-born Black workers in the U.S. (West Indies, South America, Cape Verde Islands, Africa) and using anti-imperialism as a point of connection (“Thousands of Negroes from Haiti, Cuba, British possessions, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have felt the iron heel of British or American Imperialism”) [5].

The Party took the view that Black workers in the U.S. were an oppressed national minority with a right to self-determination. While controversial within and without the Party, this line constituted a fundamental ground for unifying Black and white workers because it recognized the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Organizing Black workers meant organizing Black women because most Black women worked for wages to support their families. Organizing Black women meant organizing immigrants and farm workers and attending to the housing, education, and neighborhood conditions impacting workers’ lives. Organizing immigrants and farm workers meant building an understanding of the patterns of oppression and resistance facing all workers. Internationalism was more than an expression of solidarity. It was a principle with repercussions for domestic organizing.

Claudia Jones’s famous International Women’s Day speech from 1950 described the global peace movement and signature campaign against the A-bomb, Marshall Plan, and Atlantic war pact. Jones noted women’s organizations’ opposition to NATO, “which spells misery for the masses of American women and their families.” She advocated rousing the internationalism of American women in protest against “Wall Street’s puppets in Marshalized Italy, in fascist Greece and Spain.” And she linked the Justice Department’s attack on the Congress of American Women as “foreign agents” with the group’s long-standing advocacy of women’s equal rights, Negro-white unity, and child welfare and education [6].

The resolute internationalism of communists in the twentieth century was indispensable to confronting imperialism and colonialism. We build the power of the working class by emphasizing the patterns of oppression and resistance, linking struggles, and targeting capitalism as the system to be defeated.

Anti-communism is the enemy

Over the last decades of neoliberalism, the right has advanced. In the U.S., UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere, conservative parties use nationalism to reach out to those left behind by globalization. When socialists take as their measure of success the wages of an outmoded, masculinist, and Eurocentric image of the working class, they undermine their capacity to build mass unity, strengthening the hand of the right. Insistence on the multinational composition of the labor force of all the so-called developed countries gives the lie to nationalist and isolationist fantasies as well as to the patriarchal conceptions of the family that support them.

A component of right-wing advance has been its relentless assault on communism. Thirty years after the defeat of the Soviet Union, conservatives attack even the most common sense of public measures as communist plots. More subtle but no less reactionary are the epistemological dimensions of anti-communism, what Charisse Burden-Stelly theorizes as intellectual McCarthyism [7]. Anti-communism persists today in the suppression of knowledge of the continuities between anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Instead of the site where those struggles were unified, communism is treated as a dangerous and alien ideology. Its role in the fight against white supremacy domestically and internationally is buried.

For anti-communists disorder is foreign—the refugee, the immigrant, the Black, the Muslim, the Jew. Anti-communists disavow the capitalist disorder of competition, markets, innovation, dispossession, foreclosure, debt, and imperialist war. Dramatic changes in the character of work, communities, and life that accompany disruptive and ubiquitous technology; urbanization and rural depopulation; shifts from industry and manufacture to services and servitude; the intensification of competition for decreasing numbers of affordable houses and adequately compensated jobs—these all congeal into a disorder to be dealt with by the assertion of police, family, church, and race. Anti-communism remains the lynchpin of this assertion.

The fear that anti-communism mobilizes is a fear of loss, a fear that what you have will be taken from you, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “theft of enjoyment” [8]. Marx and Engels call out this mobilization of fear in The Communist Manifesto when they address charges that communists want to take people’s property. They write, “in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” [9]. The anti-communist mobilization of fear conceals the absence of property, wealth, job security, success, sovereignty, and freedom. It posits that we have them by positioning them as stolen. Communism is what prevents you from being rich, widely admired, having lots of sex, and so on. The “theft of enjoyment” fantasy obscures the fact that under capitalism a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the planet. By positing communism as a source of deprivation, as an ideology based on taking something away, anti-communism conceals that we don’t have what is ostensibly being stolen.

Anti-communism is not confined to the political right. It often seeps into progressive and self-described socialist circles. Left anti-communists proceed as if communism were the barrier to workers’ success, as if we would all live in a Swedish social democratic paradise but for those damned communists. Not only does this deny the multiracial and international reality of the working class, but it conceals broader left political division and weakness. Virtually nowhere does the left face the choice of reform or revolution. Virtually nowhere is the left in a position where class compromise is on the table. Anti-communism obscures this basic fact.

Communism is that modern political ideology always and everywhere on the side of the oppressed. When labor begins to appear strong, when those who have been racially, sexually, ethnically, and colonially oppressed become more visible, more organized, and more militant, anti-communism intervenes to set up barriers. On the left as well as the right, anti-communism attempts to structure the political field by establishing the terrain of possibility: which political paths are available, which are unthinkable. Even in settings where communism is dismissed as itself impossible, anti-communism mobilizes social forces to oppose it. This fight against the impossible is an ideological signal: the discussion isn’t aimed toward seriously evaluating lessons and goals. It’s about shoring up the status quo, disciplining working-class imagination by preemptive arrest of any challengers to capitalist social property relations.

The political and economic situation that prevails today differs significantly from the postwar era. The U.S. has lost both its preeminent economic status and the moral position it assumed following the end of WWII (a position always fragile and contested given the U.S.’s use of atomic weapons, backing of dictatorships, imperialist and neocolonial foreign policy, and domestic police state). Unions have lost their prior bargaining power and workers their hard-won rights and benefits. Today the issue is building organizations and movements with power sufficient to compel the socialist reconstruction of the economy in the context of a rapidly changing climate. This fight is multinational and international or it is lost.

References

[1] Jonah Birch, “The Cold War May It Harder for the Left to Win Social Democratic Reforms,”Jacobin, 15 November 2022. Availablehere.
[2] Gary Gerstle,The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order(Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Tobias Hϋbinette, “Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn,”Boston Review, 19 October 2022. Availablehere.
[4] See the contributions toOrganize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, ed. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean (London: Verso, 2022).
[5] Williana Burroughs, “Negro Work Has Not Been Entirely Successful,”  inOrganize, Fight, Win,21-25.
[6] Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” inOrganize, Fight, Win,181-197.
[7] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “OnBankers and Empire: Racial Capitalism, Antiblackness, and Antiradicalism,”Small Axe24, no. 2 (2020): 175-186.
[8] Slavoj Žižek,Tarrying With the Negative(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1988/1967), 237.

Resurrecting the Ghouls: On the West's History of Hating Russians and Rehabilitating Nazis

[Pictured: The Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary group that is part of Ukraine’s armed forces]

By Julien Charles

The immensely popular Swedish noir crime procedural novels by Lars Kepler are part of one of the more compelling series in Nordic crime fiction. In particular the Joona Lina series, in which police detectives track a Hannibal-esque serial killer who wreaks havoc on those he deems deserving. It only occurred to me late in the first novel that the killer is a Russian. Jurek Walter is an ex-soldier, remorselessly cynical, immune to pain, and a brutally efficient torturer and murderer of men and women alike. His feverishly demented goal is to ‘restore order’ by punishing those who have gotten away with a lot less criminal activity than murder. In short, an unimaginable psychopath of the kind that could only emerge from the ruins of the Soviet Union. The personification of evil.

The character in the novel embodied a version of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a process by which the West caricatures other regions, nations, and people in cartoonish and sophomoric ways. The better to understand them at a glance. Almost like a kind of intellectual shorthand by which to characterize and dismiss entire populations. Perform conceptual violence on them until they can be shunted into a shape that slides neatly into a western man’s conception of the world. Fits the Western cosmology, in which the U.S. and Europe shine as lodestars in a firmament of flickering blight. Everything in the heavens is of course in desperate need of guidance from the western polestar.

Examples of the dynamic of Orientalism are particularly rife in Hollywood. Countless series and movies have pitted pious Americans against a raft of crackpot Latinos, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, and Asians bent on genocide, world domination, and numberless other monomaniacal schemes. There’s of course no small amount of projection at work here in the fictional stylings of “the best minds of [our] generation”, as Ginsberg put it.

Not unlike the Kepler book, the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films capitalize on the by now threadbare trope of a Soviet psychopath set loose in the naive and peaceable democracies of the West. The Zec is a man who escaped or survived the gulags in Siberia to wreak havoc on the West. In one scene, he describes how he once gnawed off a few fingers to avoid working in Siberian sulfur mines. A man of such exceptional capacities is no doubt useful to certain organizations, he muses. The Zec then encourages one of his low-level thugs to chew off his thumb as a show of fidelity, or some such deranged proof. The man—human, all too human—cannot do it and is summarily executed. The bloodless Zec then waxes psychopathic, wondering why westerners are so weak.

Observe the set pieces in the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle Red Sparrow. Scenes from the West are well-lit and overflowing with human emotion; scenes from behind the “iron curtain” are dimly lit, drab in color, stylistically old-world, barren of human empathy. In short, thoroughly depressing. Of course, as part of Lawrence’s character Dominika’s training in demolishing her human emotions (weaknesses all) and steeling herself in the arts of pitiless manipulation, she must appear naked before her class and satisfy the lust of a man who previously assaulted her.

Chronic Resentments

These are caricatures of Russians who evidently have been thoroughly dehumanized by life in the USSR. What has really dehumanized these characters is the propaganda which invented them.

Few events ignite this kind of Orientalism more than a war or proxy war with Russia, America’s bete noire. Despite the fact that the wall has been down for 30 years. Despite the fact that the West enjoyed an extended period of unrestrained looting in the Former Soviet Republics. During which time mortality rates skyrocketed for citizens of those fledgling states, thanks principally to the loss of the generous social supports that underpinned their Soviet economies. Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin is an avowed neoliberal who has repeatedly sought deeper integration with Europe and America, like a stepchild desperate to claim his birthright among a welter of siblings. Despite all this, Putin’s patriotic desire to reconstitute Russia as a viable economic and military power has damned him irreparably in the eyes of the West. He is like Kepler’s killer, the manifestation of undiluted evil. Except that Putin is real.

All this comes from a long lineage of Russophobia. It dates back to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which stirred fears of Russian plots to conquer Europe; to subsequent paranoia by British colonialists that Russia would steal the Indian subcontinent from its grasp; to the war to unseat the Bolsheviks and blistering responses to stories of mass slaughter under Soviet rule. In 1944, Hitler described Russians thusly, “These are not human beings: they are beasts from the Asiatic steppes, and the battle I am leading against them is the battle for the dignity of the people of Europe.” This view summarized the ideology behind Germany’s plan to murder 100 million Russians after the defeated the USSR. Likewise, we rarely hear that one of the small handful of groups energetically targeted for liquidation by the Nazis were communists. The Russians sacrificed 27 million people fighting off fascism. This loss is also infrequently highlighted.

The McCarthyite paranoia was a particularly acute instance of this chronic phobia. One can catch a whiff of the age-old bigotry in the propaganda of the present moment. The reflexive aggression toward Russia action in Ukraine (a recent article in The Times (UK) was entitled, “Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul”) This latest surge of bile seems in part an explosion of unresolved angst from the Russophobia of the Trump years, and perhaps a hundred years prior, though partially diffused by the fall of the wall. Yet it was still there even in the post-wall melees of capitalist looting under the doddering oversight of the Pushkin-quoting boozer Boris Yeltsin. Russians, Muscovites mostly, were freshly depicted as amoral, thieving mafiosi seduced by the flash of capital, the men brutal grotesques and the women biddable jades. Little was made of the valueless cosmos into which they’d been hurled by the blitzkrieg of capital on a society not remotely prepared for it.

(Much like the diagnosis of mental health in the West, problems of post-fall Russians were and are localized in the person, in the soul of a people, rarely traced to their societal causes. The New York Times just released a series on the “Inner Pandemic” of mental health issues, though it spends little time focusing on the circumstances that generated these crises, and which it enthusiastically supported.)

Even today one finds strains of the old Hitlerian trope coursing through the western mainstream. Recently on Germany’s ZDF channel, a guest of the Markus Lanz Show reminded viewers, with a slim smile, that, “Even if Russians look European, they are not European.” She rambled on incoherently about the Slavic view of death and noted that, “They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life.” She may as well have said they were beasts from the Asiatic steppes and referred viewers to the Jack Reacher movie. After which, perhaps, they might donate to the latest national purity fund.

This seems to be part unhinged racism, but also a psychological necessity for enemies in nation-states. And one wonders if race isn’t utilized to that end. And whether this psychological need springs from a desire for national purpose, or more from an unrelenting need of capital for new markets—and the geospatial requirements that go with it. Surely the historical Lebensraum looms large behind modern geopolitical conflicts.

Addicted to Conflict

But it isn’t just the xenophobic fear of Slavic people. There’s another element at work here. One is reminded of Colin Powell, former leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and dissembler nonpareil—before the U.N. Security Council. He once told a reporter that he feared he was “running out of enemies” in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. He was unwittingly disclosing a clandestine principle of Washington foreign policy. Namely, that it must always have an enemy. It cannot conceive a world of peaceful inhabitants, engaged in serene market exchange, celebrating a peace dividend while occasionally reminding new generations of the perils of conflict. This is not a conceit in the mental universe of the planners of American hegemony, be they retired generals on media networks, cabinet lieutenants sketching hemispheric takeovers, or well-compensated scriveners in beltway think tanks. And certainly not among the lurid corridors of K Street defense lobbyists. If Putin did not exist, Washington would have invented him. Much as they invented, to a surprising degree, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen.

More often than not, the enemy must be cut from whole cloth. They do not ordinarily present themselves. Few countries are interested in going to war with the United States. At worst most nations are disinterested in submitting themselves to American rule, which manifests in numberless ways, a protean ogre extending its tentacles across the globe. Soft power, hard power, invisible power. Be it the petro dollar and the SWIFT system that places a subject nation under the perpetual threat of American sanctions. (A form of economic colonialism.) Be it bilateral security arrangements that infiltrate the country with U.S. military personnel and ensnare it in long-term weapons contracts with beltway defense contractors. (A form of military subjugation.) Be it onerous and odious loan agreements with Bretton Woods institutions that enslave generations of citizens to corrupt banks of the global North. (A form of vassalage.) From which those citizens’ meager avenues of escape include metastasizing debt service and consequent debt deflation, firesales of national patrimony, or the trauma of default, runaway inflation, and economic collapse. Choose wisely.

Rather than being enemies of the American state, such nations would really rather be left alone. To experiment with alternative economic models including socialism and its various hybrids. To trade in local currencies. To align in regional economic blocs. But this option–attempting to implement an economic structure other than western neoliberalism–is anathema to Washington. Just ask Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and any other nation that wishes to forge its own path.

The Real Enemy

Which brings us to the real enemy of the United States. Despite reports to the contrary, it is not fascism. Fascism is merely an end-point of capitalism, which will almost assuredly emerge wherever capitalism is practiced in unregulated and unrepentant fashion. As middle class wealth craters, however broadly, and extreme wealth and privilege expands, however narrowly, it will require force to generate compliance within a resentful and restive population. We are witnessing this transition in the West right now.

All this to say that, no, fascism was never the primary nemesis. The real enemy is communism. Western capital cannot abide the notion of a workers' state full of nationalized enterprises committed to the general welfare. One which deprioritizes the profit motive and tars it with the stigma of avarice and usury. This is and has always been Washington’s worst-case scenario, which it watched materialize in the Bolshevik Revolution, a knife in the side of capital that drew blood for 74 years, and which it tried hysterically to end all the while.

Not even the shameful scourge of Nazism rising up in the heart of civilized Europe was enough to lift fascism above communism as public enemy number one. As John Steppling notes in an excellent essay on the rehabilitation of fascism, Arthur Schweitzer, author of Big Business in the Third Reich, says that many German businessmen saw virulent anti-semitism as little more than a form of “economic policy reform.”

It is instructive to read works like The Splendid Blond Beast, which outlines the myriad deceptions of the postwar era of supposed deNazification in Western Europe. As it turns out, Washington was torn on the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Although Frederick Roosevelt and others supported harsh punishment, helped establish Nuremberg and sent principled judges like Robert Jackson, others like powerful Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his Secretary of State brother John Foster Dulles sought to shield German industrialists and military officers, all deeply complicit and enthusiastic collaborators in the Nazi extermination campaigns.

Then there was Operation Paperclip, a full program dedicated to repatriating Nazis in the United States and installing them in key posts in pivotal internationalist institutions like the UN. And Nato’s alleged role in Operation Gladio, code name for a series of stay behind secret armies committed to armed resistance, acts of subversion, and terror, that were to be activated in the event of an invasion of Western Europe by Warsaw Pact nations, something never on the books in Moscow, but alive in the feverish imagination of beltway anti-communists. These dispersed embedded and hastily assembled paramilitaries were actually left behind to agitate against and prevent the rise of leftist (see communist) political blocs. They operated in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Portugal and across Northern Europe. Nato, the CIA, and various European intelligence agencies were not about to watch Western Europe go communist regardless of what the democratized masses aberrantly desired.

Much of this history suggests that the underlying need of capitalism for new markets is primary, and perhaps that race is a tool leveraged to rationalize what is at bottom base exploitation. Hence our general acceptance of fascism in Ukraine and hysteria against Russia.

Selective Outrage

We might argue that this is different: Russia invaded another country. On investigation the argument falters, fractures amid a sea of sharp facts: a foreign backer, a coup d’etat, an ultranationalist takeover, a Nato infiltration, a legal apparatus mobilized against its own citizens, a massacre of ethnic Russians, preparations for a final assault. And finally, a full response from Moscow.

But even if an invasion were our threshold for outrage, none of this pathos has been evident in our response to the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen, or U.S. wars on Libya and Syria. Even though the western aggression is criminal and death tolls are staggering. Even though there were plenty of visuals and myths available to rouse the choler of the people: visions of rampaging soldiers on Viagra rape sprees; grotesquely thin and lifeless children in the dust of the KSA’s induced famine; the hurling of gays off rooftops in Raqqa by ‘moderate rebels’. No, our collective consciousness has definitely been conditioned to despise most of all the legatees of Soviet communism, punished for the sins of the father in the first instance and for the defense of their national autonomy in the second. War, and war propaganda, is often a kind of industrialized hatred, organized malice armed with the implements of death.

As Arthur Ponsonby says in his book Falsehoods in War Time, deceitfulness is extraordinarily useful because humanity is mendacious and credulous in near equal measure. It lies and refuses to believe it is being lied to. Ponsonby, a member of British Parliament writing after World War I, says that nations must “justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion for the continuance of the struggle.” Obviously little has changed since our initial experience of industrial warfare. We are constitutionally and economically committed to domineering aims, are inimical to anything that might impede our expansion, and we rationalize our behavior to these ends with a healthy dose of projection abetted by racist caricature. It is a frightful concoction of pitiless greed and base prejudice.

Yet every time we think we have put these cruel rancorous sides to our human selves to rest, they reappear, refashioned in new apparel, with fresh logic, ironclad rationales. We are sold a bill of goods. Perhaps this should come as no real surprise to citizens of a country that worships a single skill, salesmanship, and a single “virtue”, wealth, as its most sacred values. Everything is a commodity and everything that has been sold in the past will be sold again. Our entertainment culture is rife with reproductions of yesterday’s stories. Why not re-commoditize fascism? Wave the colors of a new flag and herald the insignia of a new battalion. Lionize a new leader, dress him in army green and pose him on the marble stairs of the halls of power, sandbags stacked to the roofs behind him. Honor under siege.

What has been sold before will be sold again; what we have hated before we will hate again. If it isn’t quite eternal return then it surely is history recurring as tragedy then farce. This soft embrace of fascism and rabid anti-communism goes all the way back to the Bolshevik uprising. As one of Kepler’s Nordic tales is subtitled, “Sometimes the past won’t stay buried.” Yes, the graves are always rather too near the surface.

Julien Charles is a concerned citizen hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the disingenuous narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures.

The FBI's War on the Left: A Short History of COINTELPRO

By Alex Zambito

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Throughout its history the United States has billed itself as an open society upholding the free exchange of ideas. We are told that, unlike people in less-enlightened countries, Americans do not have to worry about being persecuted for their political beliefs. Of course, this has never been true. From its very inception, the US government has been restricting free-speech through legislation such as the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798- not to mention the restriction on expression for the enslaved. Americans usually consider this a thing of the past, but political repression continued throughout the 20th century to this day, but in more covert forms. In this essay, I will explore the historical development of the US government’s system of covert domestic political repression, its consolidation, and its culmination in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

The FBI has its origins in the General Intelligence Division which was created in 1919 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to collect information on radical organizations. J. Edgar Hoover, who would remain in power for the next several decades, was appointed as its head.[1] The GID was immediately used in the infamous Palmer Raids- a series of mass arrests and deportations targeting “alien” members of radical movements. The raids began on November 7, 1919 when GID agents raided offices of the United Russian Workers across the country arresting 650 people and deporting at least 43 without due process.  The crescendo of the raids came on January 2, 1920 when GID agents descended on radical groups in over 30 cities across the country, arresting at least 3,000 people.[2] Much of this repression was directed at the Communist Party USA, with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson announcing on January 19th that membership in the CPUSA was enough to warrant deportation of immigrants.[3] The raids were finally ended by a court ruling in June 1920, but by then the damage had already been done. Left-wing organizations were effectively decimated with Communist Party membership dropping from over 27,000 in 1919 to just over 8,000 the next year.[4]

Along with the Palmer raids, the Bureau utilized numerous other methods to harass radical groups. In 1919, Hoover targeted Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Bureau employed several infiltrators in the UNIA to uncover information which could be used in trumped up criminal charges against Garvey. After numerous charges of criminal activity failed to stick, the Bureau managed to obtain a conviction against Garvey on mail fraud in 1925. He was deported to Jamaica in 1927.[5]

By the mid-1920s, Hoover was able to renounce the FBI’s past political operations. Aside from participating in repression of major strikes, the Bureau would be true to its word for the next decade. But as the Communist Party began to regain relevance- reaching 66,000 members by 1939- Hoover gained approval from President Roosevelt to resume repression of “subversive activities”. Although Roosevelt later altered this directive as the Soviet Union became a key ally in the fight against Nazi Germany, it would not prevent Hoover from using it as justification for later counter-intelligence activities.[6]

After World War II ended and the Cold War began, Communism became enemy #1 with the CP becoming a natural target. In coordination with the CIA, the FBI began a program of intercepting and inspecting the international communications of US citizens. This was particularly focused on the mail and cables between the US and Soviet Union.[7] Additionally, the Bureau would frequently use other forms of information gathering such as “surreptitious entry” and “bugging” CP offices.[8] The FBI also cooperated with the IRS to gather information on targeted groups and single them out for harassment from the IRS.[9]

Additionally, the FBI would perfect the divide and conquer techniques it would later use to great effect in official COINTELPRO programs against the CP. The Bureau used infiltrators to exploit internal divisions within the party, such as over Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin.[10] The Bureau also used “anonymous mailings” in various ways to disrupt party activities. Agents would send letters to party members warning about the treacherous activities of others in the party, hoping to stir up factional disputes.[11] This was also a common ploy in the FBI’s “snitch jacketing” technique to portray loyal party members as informants. This was also frequently accomplished by informants within the party spreading rumors, forged informant reports, or “interviews” where agents would publicly speak with a target to create the impression the party member was an informant.[12]

Anonymous letters and interviews would also be used to impact the personal lives of party members or disrupt alliances the party would make with other groups. Agents would contact the employers or landlords of party members in efforts to get them fired or evicted. Additionally, if the CP were seeking to cooperate with other organizations, agents would send derogatory information to these organizations to prevent an alliance.[13]

These were the FBI’s covert methods in the battle against domestic communism, but it also played a direct role in the overt repression. The FBI played an active role in the rise of McCarthyism by cultivating “friendly media” outlets which would be used to disseminate derogatory information about the CP. Further, the Bureau aided anti-Communist private organizations such as the American Legion and anti-Communist congressmen, with FBI agents even writing their speeches.[14]

These activities would create a general context for the US government’s legal attacks against the CP leadership. FBI agents would use selective law enforcement to harass the party and its members. Party members were frequently arrested for minor or spurious causes. For example, a secretary of the Alabama branch of the CP was arrested and convicted of possessing “seditious literature” for carrying copies of The Nation and The New Republic. He was sentenced to 100 days hard labor and fined $100.[15] This culminated in the government’s use of the Smith Act to prosecute Communist Party members. The Smith Act was passed in 1940 and created criminal penalties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the US government and required all adult non-citizen residents to register with the federal government. It would be used to prosecute eleven top Communist Party members in 1949. All eleven were convicted with ten being sentenced to five to ten years and one- a World War II veteran- sentenced to three.[16] Similar cases would occur across the country, with frequent FBI interference in the judicial process.[17]

The official COINTELPRO program would not begin until 1956, although this was just a formalization of already existing FBI practices. Even though the Communist Party had already been decimated by the mid-1950s, the majority of COINTELPRO operations were carried out against the party. However, the most impactful COINTELPRO activities in this period were against other left-wing and civil rights movements. Some of the groups targeted were called “Black Extremist” groups. The Nation of Islam was an early target of this program, with the FBI maintaining massive files on just Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. The FBI would go on to play a role in driving a wedge between the two.[18]

As would become a habit for the FBI, the parameters for which groups qualified as “Black Extremists” was expansive. Organizations that would eventually come under the COINTELPRO purview included the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC.[19] The FBI infamously wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and sent him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide.[20]
COINTELPRO would reach its zenith in the late 60ss and early 70s with the inauguration of COINTELPRO-Black Panther and COINTELPRO-New Left. As with its counterintelligence activities against the CP, the Bureau’s tactics ranged from the petty to the outright murderous. Bureau infiltrators of New Left student organizations were instructed to uncover evidence of members’ “depravity” to be publicized.[21] Agents would even contact targets’ parents to inform them of their child’s subversive activities. The FBI also sought to prevent these groups from exercising their first amendment rights by preventing speaking events and public demonstrations. Further, given that many of these groups were popular on college campuses, the Bureau targeted academics friendly to radical groups, seeking to get them disciplined or fired.[22]
The Bureau also attempted to instigate violence between target groups and violence-prone rival political organizations or criminal organizations. In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to FBI field offices instructing them to devise plans to exploit the conflict between the Black Panther Party and Ron Karenga’s Black Nationalist “US” organization.[23]

This was accomplished through infiltrators, anonymous mailings, and forged propaganda. For instance, the Los Angeles field office responded to Hoover’s call for proposals reporting:[24]

​“The Los Angeles Office is currently preparing an anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US’, and they, ‘Us’ members, in retaliation have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an ‘US’ and [Black Panther Party] vendetta.”

Agents also distributed forged propaganda meant to increase tensions between the BPP and US, such as this cartoon attributed to US:[25]

This strategy would bear fruits as hostilities between the two groups spilled over into violent confrontations resulting in the deaths of four BPP members, including prominent members John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Despite Bureau protestations that it never intended to encourage violence, the FBI continued to encourage hostility between the two groups even after these killings. This is illustrated by a 1970 report from the FBI’s Los Angeles office:[26]

​“Information received from local sources indicate that, in general, the membership of the Los Angeles BPP is physically afraid of US members and take premeditated precautions to avoid confrontations.

In view of their anxieties, it is not presently felt that the Los Angeles BPP can be prompted into what could result in an internecine struggle between the two organizations…

The Los Angeles Division is aware of the mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”

The Bureau used a similar technique with Operation Hoodwink, where the Bureau attempted to spark conflict between the Communist Party and the criminal organization La Cosa Nostra, as well as criminal elements within reaction unions such as the Teamsters. Fortunately, this attempt did not lead to any reported physical conflicts.[27] [28]

Additionally, the FBI liked to use a specific form of infiltrator known as “Agents Provocateurs” who would encourage members to commit violent or criminal acts. For example, a member of the Weather Underground arrested for a conspiracy to bomb Detroit police facilities was actually an FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl. Grathwohl reportedly instructed members on how to build bombs and participated in the group’s bombing of a Cincinnati public school.[29] One of the most famous provocateurs was “Tommy the Travler” Tongyai who traveled around college campuses in the northeast encouraging students to bomb military research facilities.[30]

As they did with the CP, the Bureau cooperated with local law enforcement to harass targeted groups and their members. Officials sought to stop targets frequently, hoping to arrest and convict them on minor charges. They would also attempt to frame targets for crimes they did not commit. This is exemplified by the case of Geronimo Pratt- a prominent member of the Los Angeles branch of the BPP. After numerous attempts to convict Pratt on trumped up charges failed, Pratt was accused of the 1968 “Tennis Court Murder”. On December 18, 1968, a white couple, Caroline and Kenneth Olsen, were robbed and shot by two black men on a tennis court in Santa Monica, California. Caroline Olsen would die a week later. In August 1969, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Los Angeles Police Department claiming Pratt had committed the murder and had been bragging about it. Pratt was also positively identified by Kenneth Olsen, leading to Pratt’s arrest and eventual conviction in 1972. Of course, the FBI was heavily involved in the trial. The anonymous letter turns out to have been written by Julius Butler, an FBI infiltrator, who would become a key prosecution witness. Additionally, the Bureau had at least one infiltrator in Pratt’s defense team keeping the Bureau informed on defense strategy. And the prosecution concealed the fact that Kenneth Olsen had initially identified another man, Ronald Perkins, as his wife’s killer and that police had purposefully influenced his identification. Pratt would remain in jail for a crime he did not commit until 1997 when his case was invalidated due to the prosecution’s suppression of evidence.[31]

But the worst of COINTELPRO was the Bureau’s use of violent raids and political assassinations. On April 6, 1968 a group of Panthers were confronted by police officers in west Oakland. Gunfire was exchanged and the police cordoned off the block. After an hour and a half, the Panthers attempted to surrender, but when unarmed ‘Lil Bobby Hutton emerged from a nearby basement, he was shot dead by police officers.[32] In a more overt case, Chicago police officers, with the assistance of the FBI, assassinated Fred Hampton in 1969. They were assisted by an FBI infiltrator, William O’Neal, who provided detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment.[33]

This is far from an exhaustive exploration of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs. The FBI targeted numerous groups such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, American Indian Movement, etc. that I was unable to cover here. While COINTELPRO was brought to light by the Church Committee in the 1970s and, subsequently, formally ended, the FBI has definitely continued its counterintelligence activities. In recent years, it has been revealed that the FBI maintains a list of “Black Identity Extremists”.[34] With this in mind, I think it is incredibly important for leftists to learn the history of COINTELPRO. With this knowledge we can more thoroughly safeguard our organizations against the inevitability of government subversion 

​Citations

[1]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 297

[2] Admin. (2020, July 24). AG Palmer Promises "War on Reds," Delivers Palmer Raids. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://todayinclh.com/?event=ag-palmer-promises-war-on-reds-delivers-palmer-raids 

[3]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 299

[4]“Communist Party Membership by Districts 1922-1950.” Accessed October 3, 2020. https://depts.washington.edu/moves/CP_map-members.shtml.

[5] Marcus Garvey.” FBI File on Marcus Garvey, Part4, document no. 190-1781-6, 10 Aug. 1922. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/marcus-garvey/marcus-garvey-part-04-of-12/view

[6] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. II. Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.transformation.dk/www.raven1.net/cointeldocs/churchfinalreportIIb.htm Accessed: 2020

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 45

[11] Ibid, Pgs. 33-49.

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] O'Reilly, Kenneth. "The FBI and the Origins of McCarthyism." The Historian 45, no. 3 (1983): 372-93. Accessed October 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24445173.

[15] Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. P. 318, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf 

[16] McElroy, Wendy. “Smith Act Tyranny Against Communists.” The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 5, 2018. https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/smith-act-tyranny-communists/.

[17] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 57

[18] Chicago. Bureau of Investigation. Chicago Letters. Chicago: Bureau of Investigation, 1969. http://docs.noi.org/fbi_january_22_1969.pdf

[19] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 5

[20] Gage, Beverly. “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 11, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html.

[21]  Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 24 

[22] Ibid, Pg. 56

[23] “Federal Bureau of Investigation – Initial Memo on Fomenting Violence Against Black Panther Party.” Genius. Accessed October 4, 2020. https://genius.com/Federal-bureau-of-investigation-initial-memo-on-fomenting-violence-against-black-panther-party-annotated.

[24] Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 218

[25] Los Angeles. Bureau of Investigation. Things to do Today. Los Angeles: Bureau of Investigations, 1969. http://collection-politicalgraphics.org/detail.php?type=browse&id=1&term=Black+Panther+Party&page=3&kv=54716&record=141&module=objects

[26] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III, Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_3_BlackPanthers.pdf Accessed: 2020, 24 

[27] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, part 1, document no. 100-159407, 29 Nov. 1967. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[28] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, par1, document no. 100-49252, 25 Jan. 1968. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[29] Newton, Michael. The FBI Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012, 133

[30] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 48.

[31] Ibid, 77-94

[32]  Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 118-120.

[33] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 64-77.

[34] Speri, Alice. “The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional ‘Black Identity Extremism’ Movement.” The Intercept, March 23, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/.

A Marxist Vision for the Post-Sanders American Left

[Pictured: Members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in NYC}

By Matthew John

As a socialist writer who has been regularly producing political commentary for the last three years, I’ve made some observations about the state of the American Left and it’s potential future prospects. Though my political education began with reading authors like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn nearly two decades ago, I have more recently evolved in my political tendency and now consider myself a Marxist-Leninist. With the advent of Bernie Sanders and the prospects for social democracy in the United States, I was both inspired and frustrated during recent years.

My political views changed significantly over the course of the tumultuous four-year period that included both of Bernie’s presidential runs. But it wasn’t all at once, like a “Eureka!” moment. There was considerable overlap between my espousal of Marxism and my naïve hope in a Sanders-led push toward social democracy. I believe my political trajectory is far from unique and I believe others can change their minds, just as I did. After all, there is a vast population of disgruntled American progressives who recently watched their dreams of a “democratic socialist” presidential administration dashed before their eyes by a relentless, neoliberal, ruling-class institution; the Democratic Party.

Although I am somewhat new to Marxism-Leninism, I have recently read Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds,” Walter Rodney’s “The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World,” and Douglas Tottle’s somewhat obscure “Fraud, Famine and Fascism.” I am currently reading Vincent Bevin’s “The Jakarta Method,” and have many more books on communism and socialism in my queue. These texts and other sources of information (such as online publications and the Revolutionary Left Radio podcast) have allowed me to refine my views on socialism and consider what might be the best path toward this daunting task of reconstructing society. My recent trip to Cuba then provided tangible inspiration in this pursuit.

The goal, simply put, is for the working class to gain control of the political system and the economy so that industrial production is harnessed primarily for human need and public good. Once the “means of production” are decidedly seized, universal human flourishing can then be persistently pursued. Under capitalism, things like housing, healthcare, food, and education are largely commodified. Assuming adequate resources exist, socialists like myself believe these services should be human rights. Building class consciousness, political education, the capacity for community defense and mutual aid, and developing socialist political parties are some of the major projects that await us. But a primary barrier to these prerequisites is a ubiquitous Western phenomenon: anti-communism.

There are certain postures Bernie Sanders himself adopted that not only fall into the category of “left anti-communism” (such as the demonization of socialist projects of the Global South like Venezuela and Cuba), but also contributed to his demise (such as Russiagate). Whether or not Sanders personally believes in all of his public stances is another issue all together. But speculation could lead us to surmise that Sanders felt the best political calculation was to lean into the anti-communist rhetoric; after all, most of the American political landscape is still saturated with evidence-free, McCarthyist stereotypes of Marxism and Actually Existing Socialism (many of which originated with conservative — or in some cases fascist — sources; a fact all self-proclaimed “progressives” should care about).

In addition to recognizing the fabrications and McCarthyism of tactics like Russiagate, we need to continue exposing voter suppression, the corporate nature of the two-party system, and the problems with bourgeois democracy more broadly. We also need to re-examine imperialist lies beyond just the Cold War variety (many of which Sanders and other progressives utilize in their rhetoric). And we need to recognize the glaring omission of the entire topic of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism within the rhetoric of “democratic socialism”, especially in terms of the foreign resource extraction required of an empire like the U.S. and the related culpability of a hypothetically successful progressive presidential administration.

A larger theme in this discourse is the progressive push for Medicare for All, tuition-free college, housing reform, and other such policies. These and similar initiatives are consistently implemented by socialist countries, as they are in the material interests of the working class. Of course, this is yet another element of Western anti-communism; the whitewashing and omitting of the actual, tangible accomplishments of socialism (which Parenti and others have elucidated). It is important to explore this topic in general, but also to point out the inherently white supremacist, colonialist nature of such omissions, as they discount and marginalize the vast accomplishments of the anti-colonial and socialist movements of the Global South. This phenomenon can be witnessed pretty much any time American “progressives” share information about how all other “industrialized” nations have some form of universal healthcare, yet they consistently fail to mention Vietnam, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

Speaking of Venezuela, there should also be a discussion of this oil-rich, Latin American nation as a modern example of Actually Existing Democratic Socialism, including the inherent challenges in such a path. These include far-right political parties and their violent sabotage in coordination with the still-existing bourgeoisie, specifically large companies hoarding food, right-wing protesters burning food, etc. — phenomena practically unheard of in countries that have taken a more Marxist-Leninist path. A major lesson from this particular discussion, once again, is that these progressive social programs have already been successfully enacted by revolutionary socialist governments around the world — not just by Western bourgeois welfare states. We therefore have numerous historical models regarding how to accomplish this outside of the false notion of socialism that has found its way into American political consciousness (which is essentially just social democracy accompanied by vaguely socialist rhetoric).

The progressive movement centered around the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders has certainly had a far-reaching and positive impact. If nothing else, this effort accurately described the desolate material conditions in the “land of the free”, proposed reasonable solutions, and paved the way for future socialists to become involved in American politics. Possibly most importantly, Sanders has softened the blow of the “S” word, especially with Millennials. (Due to the vestiges of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyism, socialism has largely been portrayed as some sort of cartoonish “evil” in Western discourse.)

Bernie’s “Political Revolution” unfortunately failed, but if it had succeeded, the success might have only been temporary. When social democratic reforms (like the New Deal) are implemented, those gains can be — and usually are — rolled back significantly by the tenacious forces of capital, which are allowed to continue operating under capitalism and within bourgeois democracy. In short, not only are the reforms themselves compromises with the ruling class (and therefore watered-down half measures), but they are subject to the whims of the ruling class, which has not been overthrown. In addition to our own New Deal legislation being gradually decimated by neoliberalism, things could end up even worse, as Chileans tragically learned in 1973.

Despite the momentary setbacks experienced by the progressive Left, I find myself optimistic that, when properly introduced to the ideas of Marxism, it is often the case that “non-sectarian” progressives and leftists will respond positively and openly. It happened to me, it has happened to acquaintances and many social media users I have interacted with, and it can happen to others as well. Learning about anti-communist propaganda and the rich, global history of socialism can be a very rewarding and liberating process, and those who have a pre-existing distrust of major Western institutions are inherently more receptive to this type of information. The failures of the attempted “progressive insurgency” within the Democratic Party and the subsequent widespread disillusionment should also serve as catalysts for American progressives who are seeking new analyses and visions for a future socialist reality. We must learn from these domestic failures and look to the infinitely demonized, yet successful global socialist triumphs of history.

It is time for progressives and working-class Americans of all stripes to unite and chart a path toward true socialism and human liberation. As Marx said, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

From Stolen Land to Riches: US Neo-Colonialism in South Korea

By Riley Bove

The history behind the division of Korea into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is a complicated matter that crosses many spheres. The history between the US and Korea dates back to the Joseon Dynasty when American missionaries introduced Christianity to the peninsula through mission trips and the building of orphanages. When the Japanese colonized the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the enslavement of Korean people, as well as the violent suppression of culture, language, and national sovereignty. After World War II and the defeat of Japanese colonialism, and the liberation of Korea, the US enacted both military and governmental control in the southern half of the peninsula. The Korean War was one of many conflicts during which US imperialism acted through proxies to contest the global struggle for socialism and national liberation through the US’s “containment policy.”

The point of this article is to explore the ways in which the US has enacted imperialism and neocolonialism on the Korean Peninsula since its division in the post-WWII era and into the present day. While much attention is paid to the devastation the US caused--and continues to cause--in the DPRK, this article focuses more on the divisive and exploitative role its played in the ROK.

The history of the exploitation of the Korean peninsula dates back to the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. By the 20th century, the Korean peninsula had already come under the Japanese sphere of influence and under the militarized gaze of the Meiji government. By 1910, Korea was fully under Japanese colonial rule. American missionaries had already been in contact with the Korean peninsula, starting the 1880s, spreading the evangelical faith throughout and beginning the connection between Korea and the West.  Japan had set its imperialist sights on conquering the rest of the Pacific by 1940. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was subjected to a brutal 35-year-long colonization by the Japanese. For example, Korean women experienced sexual subjugation under Japanese rule. In her essay, “The Korean “Comfort Women’: Movement For Redress,” Sarah Soh Chunghee states that, “Japan began drafting Korean women in full force from around 1937 when its army invaded China and the soldiers raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing” (1228). While occupying Korea, Japan forced women into sexual slavery and men, women, and children were murdered by the Japanese as they moved to fight the indigenous resistance  movements that emerged.

By the end of WWII, the liberation of Korea was underway as revolutionaries swept the Japanese imperialists from the peninsula. Both the Soviet Union and the US consolidated to rebuild the peninsula after the liberation movement. The Soviets helped the north establish a workers-led state and reclaim the land previously owned by landlords. There were preparations to have a “People’s Republic” in Korea that was of, by, and for Koreans. However, this never came to fruition. Anna Louise Strong, in her report for the CIA, writes that: “When the Americans landed in Korea, the Koreans had already a de facto government. A "People's Republic" had been declared a day earlier by a congress of Koreans themselves. General John R. Hodge, commander of the U. S. armed forces, dissolved this "People's Republic," and drove most of its members underground.”  Strong details how, between the liberation of Korea and the creation of the state of South Korea, a people’s democracy was already established in the south. However, the American forces overthrew the de facto government and established a US-backed puppet military dictatorship. The north established their own government without any assistance from foreign powers, while in the south, the Americans maintained their iron grip which has continued into the present day.

After the American “intervention” and toppling of the de facto “People’s Republic of Korea” government, the American imperialists  implanted a pro-US ally, Syngman Rhee, in order to govern the southern half of the peninsula. Rhee was a Western educated Korean who had anti-Japanese credentials but was fully in the pocket of Washington and Wall Street. Once Syngman Rhee was in power, he imposed his oppressive crackdown of all dissidence. In their essay, “Organizing Dissent against Authoritarianism,” Park Mi states that, “Even a moderate dissident became equated as a procommunist and pro-North Korean activity that was deemed to be prosecuted under the National Security Law” (263). The National Security Act (NSA) became the justification for repressive actions of the Rhee regime, including massacres that totaled in the hundreds of thousands. Park also details that, “Military confrontation with North Korea was used as an excuse to justify violations of human rights and the suppression of political dissidents” (263). The geopolitical landscape of a divided Korea was used by the South Korean-US government as a justification for the suppression of the people’s right to self-determination. At the same time in the United States, during the 1950s, McCarthyism reigned over the political landscape of post-war America. McCarthyism was defined as a “Second Red Scare”, a time of anti-communist setiment and political repression, in which the entire organized left was almost incapacited, with its leaders jailed or driven underground, and anyone who had any pro-communist or even pro-peace sentiments “blacklisted.” In the ROK, the Rhee regime enacted its own McCarthyism era under the NSA in order to snuff out and executed thousands of suspected communists.

After the Rhee administration was overthrown in the 1961 coup d’etat, Park Chung-hee rose to power and declared martial law under the Yushin Constitution, which allowed Park to openly violate civil liberties and assume total control of the government. Under his regime, worker unions and other types of mass organizing were suppressed and thousands of union members and organizers were brutally murdered. They faced sexual assault and rape as well as other forms of police violence. Student organizers, as well as organizations deemed to be Marxist oriented, were brutally suppressed under the Park regime.

Park was assassinated in 1979 and another pro-US dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, took power. Political and civil tension culminated in the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 in which 2,000 people, including student-led activist groups and anti-government demonstrators, were murdered by the military and governmental forces. Chun remained in power until 1988. Leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the Chun government attempted to make the city more “presentable”. Park Mi writes that, “the Chun government introduced a ‘beautification of the environment’ bill, which was designed to eliminate slums and unregistered street vendors” (278). The Chun government had attempted to gentrify the city, leaving the poor and working class citizens in poverty and forced many into homelessness. All while this was happening, the US government, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, actively supported and endorsed the brutal regimes. In the 1980s, the US sent a massive influx of capital to South Korea, and it was only during this time that the GDP of the South overtook that of the North.

At the end of WWII, the country had been transformed into one of the poorest countries in the world. The Korean War, which spanned from 1950 to 1953, economically devastated the entirety of the Korean peninsula. The US military and other allied forces fire-bombed and destroyed 22 of the 24 cities in the northern half. Thousands of people died in the war and hundreds of thousands of children become orphaned and displaced during and after the war. While the US fought under the flag of the UN, this was nothing more than a fig leaf for US imperialism. In one of the most infamous massacres to happen during the Korean war, a US cavalry regiment had opened fire on a crowd of South Korean refugees, murdering 150-300 of them. It would be known as the No Gun Ri massacre. Many years after, the US military attempted to whitewash the massacre and it still hasn’t been held accountable in its role of murdering civilians.

In her book, “From Orphan to Adoptee,” Soo-jin Pate critically analyzes the rise of militarized humanitarianism and the birth of transnational adoptions of Korean children after the Korean War. Pate writes that, “However, its location—its close proximity to the Soviet Union—made Korea extremely important to the United States” (24). Pate describes that even though the mountainous landscape of the Korean peninsula did not offer any crucial resources to the United States that they couldn’t get elsewhere, the close proximity to the Soviet Union made the Korean peninsula an important geopolitical area. This is true, but it is also important to acknowledge that Korea was and is targeted because the DPRK’s social and economic system remains antithetical to capitalism and imperialism.

Pate also writes about the conditions of post-war South Korea for orphans: “In addition, 100,000 children were left without homes and separated from their families so that by the end of the war, over 40,000 orphans resided in orphanages” (30). The devastation of the Korean war left children without parents and the orphanages that already existed were overfilled. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, along with American NGOs or non-governmental organizations, built more orphanages and provided materials for food and other necessities. Under the backdrop of the US military occupation and the Korean War, this type of humanitarianism became militarized. Pate also echoes this sentiment: “Militarism and humanitarianism became conflated through programs such as Armed Forces Assistance to Korea and Korean Civil Assistance Command, which produced what I call militarized humanitarianism” (34). Also under this backdrop of militarized humanitarianism, NGOs such as Holt International became frontrunners in the transnational adoptions of Korean orphans. With this, American families flocked to adopt children under the guise of “saving”. This type of savior complex often drove the NGOs like Holt International to be one of the most profitable companies in adoption of children. By contrast, orphans in the DPRK remained in the country, and the government provided them with excellent shelter, education, health care, and other resources. In the DPRK, war orphans were something like national heroes.

Images of “cold, hungry, and threadbare” children filling their stomachs with food donated by American and other Western countries inflated the image of the US military and others as saviors to war-torn children. A lot of these Korean orphans were exploited by public relations in the military in order to further conflate this trope. Images of children smiling and interacting with American servicemen became the poster for militarized humanitarianism. American media campaigns started to funnel money and editorials, describing the orphans as “victims of communism.”

With this mass campaign, American NGOs and other organizations donated immense resources. The influx of media attention and campaigns became the driving force of Korean adoptions. Pate describes the conditions of adoptions as follows: “The geopolitics of the Cold War and the discourse of Cold War Orientalism created a particular set of conditions that made the bodies of Korean children highly desirable” (87). She also writes that, “These children were highly desirable because they were perceived as exotic and cute and because they were perhaps the least threatening group of Asians that the United States had ever encountered” (87). Because of the anti-communist sentiment that plagued American society and Cold War politics, this made Korean children highly sought after for international adoption

 Korean children were seen as non-threatening because many of them were extremely young—infants and toddlers—so assimilation into American society would be easier than it would be with older children. Orientalism also played a part in the tropes of Korean children being more submissive towards assimilation tactics and being perceived as non-enemies. The fetishization of Korean girls had to do with similar orientalist tropes of East Asian women as docile and hyper-feminized. Pate describes the phenomenon this way: “the Oriental doll connotes femininity, exoticness, delicateness, silence, and docility, these very descriptions become assigned to the Korean female orphan” (94). This commodification of Korean women, in other words, relied on the racist, misogynistic, and imperialist view of Korean women as “doll-like”. As Pate writes, the interaction of Korean women with US military servicemen was used as a bargaining chip and to help maintain friendly relations between the US and South Korea.

Korean women and young female orphans were often forcibly recruited into sex work for the US military. These types of “camptowns” became a hotbed of sexual assault and rape. This form of exploitation towards Korean women echoes the brutal sexual violence that was forced upon Korean women by Japanese imperialists during the colonization of Korea and WWII. Soojin Pate wrote that, “the United States adopted a ‘boys will be boys’ policy toward camptown prostitution in South Korea. They were able to justify this policy by linking military prostitution to issues of national security. Citing a 1965 study on troop–community relations conducted by the Eighth U.S. Army” (58). The US military, as Pate argues, adopted a more “turning a blind eye” policy toward camptown and military prostitution. Sexual exploitation as US imperialism had evolved into the misogynistic sex industry.

Park Chung-hee had encouraged this sort of sexual exploitation as it fueled the South Korean economy. The Cold War era had turned South Korea into a neoliberal and capitalist hotspot. Even after the partial revitalization of the South Korean economy in the 1960s, political and inequitable economic woes dominated the geopolitical landscape of South Korea for decades. With the birth of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea’s economy was boosted by technological companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, primarily trading with its neo-colonial ally, the United States. Social issues such as high rates of suicide have been a consequence of the overbearing demands of production with little to no compensation for the workers themselves. As J. Sul wrote in an article for Anti-Imperialism.org, “I cannot state all the suicidal cases here, but note well that the suicide rate in South Korea is in the top among the OECD nations” (Sul). Toward the beginning of the 2000s, anti-American sentiment began in full swing in South Korea as two events, the 2002 Yangju highway incident where two Korean schoolgirls were fatally killed by a US military vehicle and the murder of Yun Geum-i in 1992 where a bartender was murdered by a US military private. These two events brought up the question of the USFK’s (United States Forces Korea) continued presence in Korea.

These are just some of the ways that US imperialism and neocolonialism manifest on the Korean Peninsula, and why the US’s presence in South Korea is detrimental and has only led to the division and exploitation of the ROK. However, the puppet regimes had also committed violence and murder with the full support of its neo-colonial ally. The US military occupation of South Korea remains the primary obstacle to peace and reunification of our homeland.  The United States needs to end its military occupation in South Korea and dismantle all of its military bases and facilities, paying reparations to all the peoples of Korea.

“For a colonized people: the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1960)

Riley Bove (Seungyoon Park) is a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition in Indianapolis.

References

Fanon, Franz. Les damnés de la terre. A verba futuroruM, 2016

Soh, Chunghee Sarah. “The Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Movement for Redress.” Asian Survey, vol. 36, no. 12, 1996, pp. 1226–1240., www.jstor.org/stable/2645577.

Moon, Katharine H. S. “South Korea-U.S. Relations.” Asian Perspective, vol. 28, no. 4, 2004, pp. 39–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42704478.   

Pate, SooJin. From Orphan to Adoptee: US Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Prism Key Press, 2011.

Sul, J. “Neoliberalism in South Korea: Financial Crisis, Fascism, and the Rise of Precarious Work.” Anti-Imperialism.org, 1 July 2015, https://anti-imperialism.org/2015/01/12/neoliberalism-in-south-korea-financial-crisis-fascism-and-the-rise-of-precarious-work/.

Mi, P. (2005). Organizing dissent against authoritarianism: The South Korean student movement in the 1980s. Korea Journal. 45. 261-288.