Biden or Trump: No Road Ahead

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

By Sudip Bhattacharya

“I am your retribution,” said Donald Trump, the king of the sunlight-challenged, the prophet of those hollering through dried and cracked lips.

It’s been months since the presidential race officially began, although electioneering never really ends. The United States thrives on political circus, with a mass media uninterested in the issues, save for gas prices and whether a candidate is sufficiently patriotic. 

Trump is set to be the GOP nominee. He humiliated Ron DeSantis and is on track to overwhelm Nikki Haley, the so-called moderate. As his popularity has grown among the Republican base of bootlickers and crypto-fascists, with segments of the disaffected sprinkled in, there’s been reasonable fear and anxiety surrounding his potential return to the White House. 

“It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” Bernie Sanders stated recently.  

In his sole and hopefully only term in office, Trump relished cruelty. From separating families at the southern border to his explicit support for law enforcement, Trump’s agenda is clearly a destructive one, steeped in white supremacy, a conspiracy-charged and anti-human American exceptionalism, and an extreme pro-business posture. Trump’s coalition was a ragtag assortment of Christian evangelicals eager to eradicate transgenderism, whites who view racial equality as a threat to their identity, and a rainbow coalition of the greedy, selfish, and insecure. 

Still, it would be a gross oversimplification, and dangerously naive, to attribute all oppression and anti-democracy to Trump. His Republican rivals are hardly paragons of compassion — especially as it relates to people of color and trans folks. Currently, the DeSantis regime in Florida is committed to dismantling educational equity. DeSantis and his braindead allies are vigorously repelling any challenge to Eurocentric or otherwise whitewashed humanities curricula, accusing his truth-seeking opponents of pushing “indoctrination.” Oh the irony. 

Haley too is a bottomless well of the very right-wing insanity that outlets like Fox News have fought hard to normalize. Although now Fox has been outpaced in its cravenness and conspiracy theories by other far-right blogs and “independent” news sources. 

But what about the #Resistance, led by Joe “Anti-Busing” Biden and Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris? It bears repeating that Democrats and Republicans are not mirror images. Republicans are worse. At least there are progressives in the Democratic Party. But, at the leadership level, the average Republican and average Democrat are remarkably similar. 

Both refuse to challenge the very undemocratic electoral college system. And both are doing nothing to stop the Supreme Court from laying waste to reproductive and voting rights. Sending fundraising pleas doesn’t absolve Democrats’ failure to combat these severe infringements on freedom and autonomy. 

When it comes to the very nature of the American economy, leaders of both major parties insist that basic necessities — whether it’s housing, healthcare, or clothing — must be distributed through the private sector. Both parties expect Americans to rely on business interests for their daily bread. And they call that precarious dependency “freedom.”

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To wake up each day when it's still dark, then prop yourself behind a desk or stay on your feet until they’re swollen. To return to your apartment exhausted but with another dozen emails in your work inbox, many written in the passive-aggressive tone typical of managers and their paranoid bosses. Is that what it means to be free?

Claudia Jones, the foremost theoretician of the Communist Party USA, didn’t think so. More than anyone, she understood the shortcomings of American capitalism.

“American monopoly capital can offer the masses of American women, who compose more than one-half of our country’s population, a program only of war and fascism.”

Jones made this remark following the end of World War II — just as Democrats were advocating a return to “normal.” By the war’s end, the Harry Truman administration began intensifying the Cold War and concomitant anti-communist purge within the country’s major unions and mainstream politics. Jones warned her comrades this wasn’t just a phase. With Truman’s blessing, major companies were firing their female employees and ordering them home to work for far less as domestic laborers. Jones saw that the Democratic Party was itself a vessel for the same retrograde policies the country allegedly fought in the war. 

Much like Biden’s current support for the far-right regimes in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and India, the United States, following World War II, continued to develop ties to anti-communist, anti-democratic, and arguably neo-fascist regimes across the world. Though the United States portrayed itself as somehow anti-colonial, it sided with anyone willing to build a world safe for counterrevolution — from white supremacists to Islamists. As Charlotta Bass, the first African-American woman on a presidential ticket, stated in 1952:

“Yes, it is my government that supports the segregation by violence practiced by a Malan in South Africa, sends guns to maintain a bloody French rule in Indo-China, gives money to help the Dutch repress Indonesia, props up [Winston] Churchill’s rule in the Middle East and over the colored peoples of Africa and Malaya.” 

In 1952, Bass was the vice presidential nominee of the Progressive Party — an attempted vehicle for channeling the radicalism of the interwar period to challenge the duopoly. It was the right strategic move. What followed, however, was more purging of radicals and communists from major institutions and intensified suppression of the Left broadly.

This cycle repeated in the early to mid-1970s when groups like the Black Panther Party faced attacks from law enforcement and the labor movement itself, which had become just another coalition partner of the Democrats — a party that hated labor unrest. Soon, the labor movement, or what was left of it, would descend into a hollow business unionism that aligned itself with some of the worst elements in American political life. 

Despite inevitable and often overwhelming resistance, the American Left still needs to cultivate a socialist constituency — a social base of people willing and able to move beyond the two-party system and replace capitalism with something far more humane and just. What’s required is a constituency that is pro-socialist, pro-Palestine, pro-humanity, against climate change, against the companies that command us to use paper straws while they pollute the water we drink, and against the scourge of American empire and the various monsters its money and weapons empower. 

But there’s a problem. The commitment necessary to do this, the capacity and leadership that’s so foundational to such a daring agenda, is lacking. The American Left has no Bass or Jones to guide it. Sanders is better than most but he too, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, still supports Biden, despite the bodies piling high in Gaza. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have criticized Biden. But how far can that criticism travel when neither has been willing to use any type of leverage against the Biden administration regarding Palestine?

There are insightful and brave voices scattered across the United States. But many of them are too consumed by meeting the daily demands of living, waking up, sipping stale coffee, and grinding their teeth while riding a bus stuck in traffic. 

Not to mention that building an independent social force will involve heartbreak. Some challenges will trounce us before we conquer them. Who amongst us is willing to sacrifice their time and energy? Who amongst us is willing to fail many times before they succeed? 

Look to the streets. You’ll find many people expressing the same commitment to basic humanity. These are the people who fight for $15 and against a genocide their tax dollars are financing. But it takes organic, transformative leaders to cohere those miniature uprisings into a tidal wave of undeniable resistance. 

Yet, where is our Bass? Where is our Jones? Where is our soul? 

Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers University. He’s written for outlets such as Jacobin, Black Agenda Report, Protean Magazine, Truthout, and Current Affairs, among others.

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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Taking a Closer Look at Vivek Ramaswamy's Supposed Anti-War Record

By Jon Reynolds

With a stiff drink, a heavy heart, and a strong sense of masochism, I recently subjected myself to the first round of Republican presidential debates. While the clown show lived up to expectations of being a tragic showcase of democracy gone wrong, the aftermath has been even more disturbing, particularly the flood of pundits and news stories claiming that Vivek Ramaswamy is anti-war.

Ramaswamy himself has even adopted the title, telling Israeli media in late August that “Israel needs to be in a strong position to defend itself. And the United States will be at Israel’s back. But I think that that’s a very different thing from automatically sleepwalking ourselves into war. I’m an anti-war president. And the way I’m going to do it is by deterring war, be it ending the war in Ukraine and deterring China.”

And yet, as is often the case with supposedly “anti-war” politicians operating in the two major political parties, there is more to the story, and Ramaswamy, like every other Republican on the GOP debate stage — and every other Democrat currently running for president — is far from anti-war.

IRAN AND CUTTING AID TO ISRAEL

During the debates — which were hosted by Fox News — Goddess of War, Nikki Haley, worked eagerly to out-hawk Ramaswamy on foreign policy:

“You want to go and defund Israel. You want to give Taiwan to China. You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia. You will make America less safe.”

Like clockwork, Ramaswamy played right into it:

“I will lead Abraham Accords 2.0,” he said. “I will partner with Israel to make sure Iran never is nuclear armed.”

Nevermind that politicians have been fearmongering about Iran building a bomb for decades, or that Iran has said it does not want to build a bomb, or the consensus of US intelligence agencies, which have repeatedly stated Iran is not pursuing nukes.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, Ramaswamy doesn’t actually want to flat-out cut aid to Israel.

First, Ramaswamy said Israel should not get more aid than its other neighbors after the year 2028, when the current US aid package of $38 billion expires. But secondly, and perhaps most crucial to his comments about Israel, is that it’s questionable if he actually wants to cut aid to the country at all. Shortly after the Republican debate, Ramaswamy appeared on Israeli TV and offered a very different view:

“I said that if Israel was so strong that it would not need our assistance anymore, it would be a sign of success for inter-country companies. I want to be clear: we will never stop aid to Israel until Israel says it is ready for it. Relations between Israel and the US will be stronger at the end of my term than they have ever been, and more than they will be under the other contestants.”

In other words: don't count on Ramaswamy to break the decades-long, bipartisan tradition of arming Israel to the teeth.

“I love [Israel’s] border policies,” Ramaswamy said during the GOP debate. “I love their tough on crime policies. I love that they have a national identity and an Iron Dome to protect their homeland."

Or, put another way, the border policies which routinely cost Palestinians their lives are the same border policies “anti-war” Ramaswamy admires.

And if that's the case, just imagine the horrors awaiting Mexican people living along the southern border of the United States.

RAIDING MEXICO

“A lot of what he [Trump] did makes total sense to me," Ramaswamy told Russel Brand in early August. “I’m saying a lot of the same things.” But, in some cases, “I’m going further than he ever did. I said I’d use the military on our southern border."

Ramaswamy’s proposal apparently involves exploiting the fentanyl crisis and using it as justification to launch drone strikes into Mexico to “eliminate” drug cartels.

As reported by Politico in April, Ramaswamy said using military force on cartels without permission from Mexico “would not be the preferred option” but we would “absolutely” be willing to do it, adding that what the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States. “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the US president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”

And what could possibly go wrong considering how much success the US has endured trying to kill its way to victory in the decades-long failure known as the drug war.

Perhaps it would be more surprising that Ramaswamy wants to take Trump’s border policies to the “next level” if he wasn't so utterly infatuated with the former president and obsessed with strengthening his legacy.

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TRUMP "THE SINGLE GREATEST" PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME

During an August News Nation Town Hall, Ramaswamy referred to Trump as “the single greatest president” in his lifetime.

However, the problem with Ramaswamy’s love for Trump — and a seriously gigantic red flag — is that Trump is not anti-war.

While in office, Trump amped up Obama's drone wars, boosted military spending, bombed Syria and pledged to “keep” their oil, cut up the Iran nuclear deal, and dropped the largest non nuclear bomb in America's arsenal on Afghanistan.

Trump also mulled killing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whereas Ramaswamy claims he wants to pardon him, and they both share the same views on Chelsea Manning, who shared classified info with Wikileaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq:

“I will pardon Julian Assange because his prosecution was fundamentally unjust,” Ramaswamy tweeted in June. “Chelsea Manning, the government officer who actually leaked the information to Assange, had ‘her’ sentence commuted by President Obama because ‘she’ was part of a politically favored class: she’s trans — yet Assange now sits in a foreign prison for doing what the DC press corps does every day. This is wrong & I will fix it. We can’t have two tiers of justice: one for trans people, one for everyone else; one for violent Antifa/BLM rioters, one for everyone else; one for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden.”

COLD WARRIOR

It’s in our “vital interest” to make sure China “doesn't control the global semi-conductor supply chain in Taiwan,” Ramaswamy said in June, adding: “until we achieve semi-conductor independence, we will ensure Taiwan is not invaded by China” by ending the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

This should be good news, right? Ramaswamy wants to end the war in Ukraine. But how, you ask? By convincing Russia to break their alliance with “our enemy” China:

“The Russia-China military partnership outmatches the US on nuclear capabilities, on hypersonic missiles, on China’s naval capacities,” Ramaswamy said, later adding: “Worst of all, through the Ukraine war, we’re actually pushing Russia further into China’s hands. So, I will end that war.”

“The top military threat we face is the Russia-China alliance,” he said during an early August interview with PBS. “Our top adversary today is communist China.”

“I’m a George Washington America First conservative,” he tweeted on August 21. “Just as Nixon opened China to win the Cold War against Russia, the next president must open Russia to defeat China, starting with a peace settlement in Ukraine.”

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

“We talk about nation building,” Ramaswamy said during the early August News Nation Town Hall. “We have a nation to build right here back at home.”

But 23 years ago, another politician running for president also made this promise:

“I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations,” George W. Bush said during the 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore. “Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

Three years later, he was nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

While on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end the US war in Iraq:

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

In early 2008, Obama reiterated that he was “opposed to this war in 2002. I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009.”

Well, the war in Iraq didn’t end. In fact, Obama added more conflicts to the tally while his other anti-war campaign promises slowly fizzled out, such as investigating torture under the Bush administration or closing down Guantanamo Bay.

Trump was a deviation from Obama and Bush in the way that he campaigned and the things he campaigned on. Unlike Obama and Bush, Trump made comments about “loving” torture and wanting to “bomb the hell” out of ISIS. Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — was US imperialism with the mask off.

And still, the bulk of his campaigning had less to do with promoting actual policy and more to do with promoting his own image as a businessman, a non-politician, and most importantly, as an “outsider” to the establishment. Yet once elected, Trump’s promises of “draining the swamp” came to an abrupt halt as he spent his first term adding Bush-era neocons like John Bolton to his cabinet while dutifully continuing all of the wars started by Bush and Obama since 9/11.

Ramaswamy, like Bush, claims he is against nation building. Like Obama, he makes comments that are passable on a surface level as anti-war. And like Trump, he is marketing himself as a businessman, a non politician, and an outsider.

With recent polling showing a majority of Americans turning against the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and general burnout from other wars such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s not at all surprising that so many of us desperately latch on to any politician who even remotely seems to promote a message of peace.

Unfortunately, between parroting neocon talking points about Iran, praising Israel’s oppressive border policies, regurgitating cold war propaganda about China and Russia, pledging to launch drone strikes inside Mexico, and praising hawkish presidents such as Trump, Ramaswamy hardly deserves to be called anti-war.

The Fight for Migrant Rights in the U.S.: An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón

[Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg]

By Brendan Stanton

Republished from Red Flag.

Justin Akers Chacón, a socialist based in San Diego, California, campaigns for worker and migrant rights in the US-Mexico border region and is the author of “The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.” He caught up with Red Flag to discuss immigrant rights in the US under Democratic President Joe Biden. 

Q: After the polarisation under former President Trump, what has shifted in the politics of the border and migration during the Biden era?

A: The short answer is that it’s gotten worse. There were some 400 executive actions taken by the Trump administration that affected immigration, including family separation at the border, the Muslim travel ban, expanding the border wall and ending temporary protected status for many groups. Much of this framework has been institutionalised under Biden. 

This is despite the fact that, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the whole discourse of the Democratic Party was towards dismantling the inhumane and punitive measures of the Trump regime. While Biden wasn’t on the left wing of that discourse, he characterised Trump as harmful to immigrants and refugees and promised a pathway to legalisation for migrants in his first 100 days. This shifted immediately after the Democrats won, and they quickly walked back any discussion.

It’s worth also mentioning that Biden technically ordered a month’s moratorium on deportations early in the administration. But the order was overruled by a Trump-appointed federal judge on the day it was issued. The administration used this as an excuse to abandon the promise completely, but it was quickly pointed out by immigration scholars that there were multiple ways in which the administration could have worked around that ruling to stop deportations. 

Although vocally opposing Title 42 [a Trump-era measure allowing authorities to turn away migrants at the border on public-health grounds], one of his first acts as president was using it to conduct a mass deportation of Haitians from south Texas. Even while the Trump policy of family separation at the border was stopped, the Biden administration announced that it’s going to begin the process of reauthorising family detention.

The Democrats’ real orientation around border politics was signalled by Kamala Harris when she was sent to Guatemala in 2021 to tell Central Americans, “Do not come to the United States”. This signalled the institutionalisation of Tump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which defunded the legal side of the asylum process.

This, of course, didn’t stop people from migrating. Just like under Trump, it created conditions where large populations are forced to live in overcrowded encampments, on the street and in other uninhabitable areas on the Mexican side of the borderlands. 

The Democrats played an equal or even greater role in building the immigration enforcement apparatus than the Republicans. They have no left or progressive or reformist orientation towards immigration, and they face pressure from the right when the Republican Party redeploys all the racist tropes like “our border is under attack”, or “we’re being invaded” during each election cycle. So they consistently diverge their rhetoric during elections, and after elections they converge with Republicans again. 

That’s how we’re in a situation where far more people were deported in Biden’s first year than under the previous four years of Trump.

Has there been any opposition from the likes of Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or other people who made a name for themselves calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security division in charge of deportations?

There was this interesting period in 2019, when a lot of these people on the left of the party were going to detention centres and giving speeches. Ocasio-Cortez gave a very moving account of the horrors of a detention centre, and said we have to close the “concentration camps”.

But as soon as the Democrats won, it all evaporated. She and other “left” Democrats stopped calling these horrible places “camps” and started promoting the idea that with Democrats in office, there’s going to be reform. That reform never happened, but there has still been a shift in terms of softening rhetoric or not talking about it at all. Since the abandonment of immigration reform after the election, there has been no movement within the Democratic party to change the status quo. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in campaign mode leading up to 2024, the Biden administration makes similar promises as before. But for now, it’s shifted far to the right, taking the whole party tent and the stakes to the right with it. 

A couple of months ago, a story broke about undocumented children working in quite dangerous conditions for major US corporations. Have there been any significant changes around labour protection in the wake of that scandal?

It actually created an internal conflict within the Biden administration. Some officials who were monitoring the child refugee crisis were calling the administration’s attention to how many of these children were being absorbed into the workforce as early as a year and a half ago. People higher up, like Susan Rice, one of the chief advisers of Biden, knew this was happening. They basically quashed it, said it was not a priority, and so it took outside reporters to break the story.

It’s important to understand what immigration enforcement is designed to do and what it’s not designed to do. It’s not designed to stop people from migrating or to prevent people from falling into these conditions. It creates pathways for this to happen by essentially creating systems of regulation for a growing segment of the workforce in this country. 

Being exposed for their awareness that child labour is flourishing once again in the United States is a public relations problem for the Biden administration, but it hasn’t provoked a political crisis. It’s also because the Republicans and the right don’t have a problem with this issue—they’re not going to try to make it an issue. 

Even within organised labour, it’s not clear that there’s any effort to address the issue of child labour. Like so many other things, it’s either under-reported or swept under the rug really quickly. It’s a reflection of how little opposition there is inside the US to the politics of immigration enforcement.

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How do you think socialists and leftists should understand the class dynamics of border politics?

We can walk through that child refugee scenario from beginning to end and explain how this is a political function of capitalist policy. 

Between 2011 and 2016, almost 200,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, came to the United States. Two major factors played a key role in this. One is the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement first implemented in 2006. By 2010, there were radical economic changes like the opening up of these economies to unrestricted foreign capital investment and the privatisation of much of the economy. 

There was a systematic displacement of people who could no longer afford to work the land, or whose jobs in manufacturing were displaced by foreign capital. This foreign capital is invested in extreme forms of labour production associated with maquiladoras [US-owned factories], basically laboratories for increasing productivity, repressing wages and keeping unions out. 

This destroys many of the social aspects of the economy, and by 2011 we saw the first significant effects of these policies displacing people. 

Earlier, in 2007, the US initiated a region-wide security strategy called the Mérida Initiative, through which it gave money and political support to Mexican and Central American governments to expand the border enforcement apparatus of the United States further south. The US trains police and militaries in these countries to engage in the Drug War and also control migration, 

Alongside the other realities of the War on Drugs, which contributed to the growth of drug cartels, this has destabilised the region. The illegal drug industry is now one of the major industries of the Western hemisphere, and these cartels have grown in rhythm and tempo with the criminalisation of drugs and the growth of enforcement mechanisms. Instead of the cartels being contained and defeated in Mexico through this regional militarisation, they’ve been pushed further into Central America. 

In 2009, the US greenlit the overthrow of the left-of-centre president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. This set up the rule of the far right for the next several years, including Juan Orlando Hernández, a strong US ally who was also on the payroll of the cartels. While he was president, a lot of the funding and technology he received from the US for the drug war went towards repressing indigenous populations and social movements. Lots of people were displaced, and hundreds of labour organisers, socialists, LGBTQ people, indigenous organisers and other leftists were killed. 

So all that’s happening down there while we have the building up of the border enforcement apparatus, and the children who ultimately make it through to the United States end up in the workforce to survive. How do we understand the end of that scenario without understanding how every sort of step of this process is predicated on strengthening the ability of capital to exploit? 

The overthrow of a left-of-centre president in 2009 helped embolden a far-right government to destroy the left, attack all these vulnerable groups and displace countless people. When thousands of these children and teenagers start appearing in meat production facilities and construction jobs in the US, it’s a manifestation of US regional policies. It’s not necessarily a conscious act that someone masterminded, but it’s the outcome of decisions that advocate for the interest of capital. 

This creates larger and larger pools of exploitable workers, on both sides of the border, who are hard to organise, including workers who are regulated by the state. That impacts wage thresholds and impacts the whole labour economy. And when immigrant workers rise up, as they did in 2006, that leads to an increase in the repression of the state. 

In light of these border dynamics, in what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?

There has to be a rejection of criminalisation and border enforcement. That has to be a demand for all workers. In 1986 it actually was, when unions backed an amnesty for undocumented workers. This led to a surge in unionisation among newly legalised workers, who were much more class conscious than the rest of the population. Legalisation was a huge boost for the union movement at a time when it was otherwise declining. It also means supporting workers as they organise on the other side of the border.

I’m going to try to paraphrase Marx. He said something like, you don’t know what the problem is until a solution presents itself. In the context of the North American class struggle, capital has invested so much by shifting production south of the border and dividing production into cross-border supply chains. Therefore, the working classes in the US and Mexico have become fused together in ways that are much more apparent. More of these workers, especially workers in Mexico, recognise that class struggle is by necessity transnational, and there have been flashes of this potential and some sustained processes of a transnational labour response. 

There are some maquiladoras in Tamaulipas [a north-eastern state bordering Texas] making parts for General Motors that are going to be used for assembly in Tennessee or in Detroit, and there are also GM plants making whole cars in Mexico. 

The workers in these factories in Mexico have to be very savvy organisers, because in Mexico you don’t just organise against the employers, you organise against the fake unions that are muscle for the employers. You often have to organise directly against local and state governments and sometimes the federal government. 

In 2019, these workers in Matamoros [across the border from Brownsville, Texas], in extreme conditions, coordinated a series of wildcat strikes all at once. Rank-and-file women and men workers organising these networks got over 35,000 workers and shut down 48 factories over a month and a half. All of them won a 20 percent pay increase and a significant rise in their annual bonuses. A big part of why they won is because shutting down their factories disrupted parts supplies all across the US and Mexico, costing bosses an estimated US$50 million per day. 

That same year, United Auto Workers union members went on strike at GM, shutting down almost all production in the US and Canada, but not in Mexico. So GM decided to shift more production to Mexico to avoid further disruption and undercut these workers. In this context, workers trying to organise a union at the largest GM plant in Mexico, in Silao, Guanajuato, said that they supported the strike and the demands of the United Auto Workers in the US. They asked for the UAW to support them and bring them into the union or at least help them build an independent union so they could strike, start the process of shutting down Mexican auto production and completely shut down General Motors production. 

Unfortunately, the UAW ignored them and accepted a largely concessionary contract. But in the fallout was some recognition that they blew this opportunity. How could they not support the organisation of auto workers in Mexico, when GM is actively using these disorganised workers to undermine them? A couple of years later, the UAW began to support these Mexican workers in their unionisation efforts—they won and even expanded to other non-GM auto plants. This didn’t create equal wages. but it was a recognition by the UAW that they can’t afford not to support Mexican workers organising. 

In this process, more workers, especially militants fighting to build fledgling unions, recognise that they have to build international solidarity and engage in class struggle across the border. They recognise they’re not fighting just the employer but all of these other forces. It’s interesting to see how these workers are recognising that, as capital is operating at a North American scale, they too have to organise against it at a North American scale and not let the border divide them.

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.

The Unwakeable American Dream

By Jack Ely

For many, to varying degrees, picking the next president (or nearly any elected official) feels analogous to deciding which doctor is best fit to care for a terminal patient. Their job is merely to mediate the impending decline, to maintain all the basic life processes so long as that patient can go on existing without ever hoping for more health than what they precariously still cling to. The terminal nature of this condition, however, can never be openly acknowledged without fracturing the ideological fantasy that maintains our collective reality as Americans. But over the last few decades the Settler-Capitalist mythology that imbued the cultural consciousness of the 20th century has developed into something else entirely, a form of hyper-reality. The lofty, idealistic language of past American leaders remains as popular as ever, yet detached from anything real. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with the American Dream, an ideal rooted in a past that never was and speaks to a future that will never be. The promise of economic security and upward mobility that so many White, “Middle-Class” Americans enjoyed in the decades following World War II remains as ubiquitous as ever within the political ethos of both major parties, yet strays further and further from the actual experience of workers today. My goal is not to dive into the specific causes of this phenomena, as there is already plenty of existing research that can explain them far better. What I am interested in are the philosophical implications of this shifting material landscape and how they’ve reverberated across our social reality in the 21st century to deliver us to our current political moment.

At the forefront of both of the last two presidential elections has been the question of “How did we end up here?” Many in the media and general public alike opt for a top-down chain of causality, attributing the dismal selection of candidates on both sides to an institutional decline in our political system. There are several problems with this kind of moralizing, the first of which being that the bygone, golden era of party politics that both Republicans and Democrats wish us to believe we’ve strayed away from never really existed to begin with. We saw this with the media’s incessance on exceptionalizing Trump as some sort of uniquely depraved and corrupt deviation from past GOP presidents of the likes of the Bushes and Reagan. In reality, Trump only differed from them on the surface. Behind all of his outsider rhetoric and populist eccentricity, Trump largely governed like any standard Neoliberal of the past 40 years. In fact, the material damage sanctioned by his administration was rather mild compared to his Republican predecessors, yet George W. Bush receives cushy media coverage with the blood of a million Iraqi citizens on his hands, while Ronald Raegan still remains nationally beloved despite his numerous domestic and international crimes. Perhaps Trump was ostracized to the extent he was because he ripped the mask off and showed us who the ruling class is and always has been. Rather than a deviation from the norm, Trump is American Capitalism personified in its most crude form, stripped of all its niceties and decorum. If that is true, then what does that make Biden? 

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is not the mastermind behind the violent acts he carries out; his family takes advantage of his mental impairment to force him into killing for them. It’s also heavily implied that the Sawyer family are displaced slaughterhouse workers who kill in order to continue their way of life and means of subsistence. In many ways, Leatherface can be seen as a sympathetic character who is as much a victim of his family and circumstances as the people he slaughters. For Joe Biden, the mask he wears may be symbolic, but it is just as crude and disfigured as the one Leatherface wears of human skin. Like the Sawyers, the American ruling class grows increasingly desperate as they cling to an unstable status quo, the only difference being they are the architects of this instability rather than its maddened victims.

What Trump offered was a bombastic alternative to the glib, sanitized politics that came to represent the Neoliberal order, even if this alternative was itself a different form of masquerade. Nonetheless, his defeat by Joe Biden, narratively, was a ‘return to normal’. Yet, as I alluded to earlier, there is a sense that this normal can no longer exist. They can piece the mask back together, but the cracks can no longer be ignored. Joe Biden exemplifies this desperation to maintain this reality so acutely because for so many years he was the ideal personification of it; the traditional White moderate with an All-American charm who made a career of bolstering the Imperial and Carceral industries while tempering the public's expectation that any real or meaningful change is possible. Additionally, his proximity to Obama (whom Democrats truly long for) made him the obvious Neoliberal torch bearer to take on Trump. However, the Biden of today far better reflects the Late-Capitalist decay that we find ourselves in, contrary to the Pre-Neoliberal idealism that cloaks his administration. He appears as an anachronism, a relic of a past only accessed through fading memories much like the abandoned remnants of industrial America that litter our roadsides. And in his lassitude, the exhausted breath of a dying political order can almost be felt.

Still, Trump and Biden seem to have only warped America’s ideological mythos. Ruling class ideology still remains potent as ever in shaping our reality in this country, and no amount of cracks seem likely to change that anytime soon - regardless of how unpopular the last two presidents have been. In fact, that may only be reinforcing it, as the 2020 election had one of the highest voter turnouts in history. But why, in a time when faith in our government is so low, does its grip on power remain so strong? Here I turn to Slavoj Žižek’s insight on how ideology functions under Postmodern Capitalism - “Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (Žižek 33). Many supporters of Biden (especially young people) had a sort of weary, begrugended attitude in doing so - a choice between the ‘lesser of two evils’. What matters is not whether that wager was true, rather why so many people unequivocally accepted voting for any form of ‘evil’ in the first place. The politics of cynicism that we find ourselves living in today seem to be even more subordinating than any form of propaganda that authoritarians could hope to devise. As Žižek pointed out, Nonbelief  is the prevailing ideology of Neoliberalism, and it does all the work of propaganda without us ever realizing it. No matter how much we disavow the ruling class in our beliefs, we still support them in our actions - which ultimately produces an even more totalizing form of control. 

Despite this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those of us who’ve grown up in 21st century America still hold a very different image of it than our parents do. If Nixon and Vietnam fractured the ideological consensus of post-war America, today’s younger generations have grown up in the chasm left in its wake. Endless imperial war and presidential scandals seem to us almost banal - as Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The waning patriotism and political pessimism among young people in response may be justified, but it also presents a new problem in the form of cynicism. We’ve seen one crisis after another, all directly caused or exacerbated by the Imperial rot unfolding all around us. Yet we remain as disengaged and detached as ever, transfixed in a near catatonic gaze on the endless stream of attention grabbing media bites informing us of the latest horrible event that deserves our outrage. 

Accordingly, two horrific massacres just recently unfolded in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX. The discourse surrounding these uniquely American forms of pathological violence has been trite to say the least. Lost in the clamor over guns, video games, and mental illness is the reality that those factors by themselves are not enough to explain what’s happening to the degree it has here. Only in a country as deeply alienated, hyper-individualistic, and foundationally violent as America could these seemingly unthinkable acts be so commonplace. Mass shootings, especially ones as gut-wrenching as the one at Robb Elementary School, clearly provoke a more visceral and outspoken reaction. It often feels like the solutions are right in front of us and all that stands in the way is legislative action from our political leaders. But once again, this brings us to the Sisyphean predicament at the forefront of all aforementioned issues; the American ruling class is not interested, nor capable of reconciling the inherent contradictions within our country. To do so would mean to unravel the Settler-Capitalist fabric of the nation itself, which is antithetical to their class interests and roles in maintaining those very power structures. 

In light of this, it's no wonder why so many (young) people feel hopeless that things can change. The America we’ve grown up in has made it nearly impossible to go on believing in the fantasies told to us about it, yet we remain ideologically imprisoned to the very structures we know are broken. Neoliberalism’s greatest triumph is how thoroughly it’s managed to obscure and weaken our collective capacity to envision a different, better world. Even the Anti-Capitalist Left falls victim to this lack of political imagination far too often, and our task moving forward shouldn’t simply be to try and recreate past forms of struggle. We’ve reached an inflection point in American politics with Donald Trump and Joe Biden. However, we can’t, and shouldn’t wish for a return to Obama-era politics that do nothing more than mask the underlying reality playing out in this country. As Fascists try to drive us off a cliff, the Democratic party has done nothing but pave the road for them. Now, in the face of ecological collapse and every other imminent crisis at bay, our hopes will have to lay outside of the ballot box and in new forms of collective political struggle. 

Citations

Desilver, Drew. “Turnout soared in 2020 as nearly two-thirds of eligible U.S. voters cast ballots for president”. Pewresearch.org, January 28 2021, https://pewrsr.ch/3oAN3MB

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso Books, 1989. 

A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.

Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat al-Shabab? Is al-Shabab actually linked to al-Qaeda and, if so, to what degree? As usual, the mainstream state-corporate media reportage is missing context and reference to international law.

As we shall see, the context behind the US redeployment is naked imperialism using counterterrorism as the latest in a long line of excuses to interfere in the politics of the strategically-significant country on the Horn of Africa. In terms of international law, signatories of the UN Charter have legal responsibilities to gain authorization from the Security Council before launching military operations –– something the Biden administration and its predecessors have never done in Somalia, or anywhere else, for that matter.

It is also worth tackling the Trump-era propaganda, which is double-edged. Trump supporters claimed that their hero ended America’s “forever wars,” as he “bombed the shit out of ISIS,” in his words, which often meant dumping munitions on Iraqi and Syrian women and children, while blowing Somalis to pieces via drone operators in numbers greater than during Obama’s term. It is accurate that Trump withdrew US ground forces from Somalia, though it appears to have been both an America First PR stunt and a device to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration.

On the other side, the pro-war, neoliberal, anti-Trump establishment sought to portray Trump’s withdrawal of ground troops as a sign of American weakness in the face of globalized “Islamic” terrorists. By demonizing Trump and inaccurately reporting the motives of his withdrawal, the NYT, BBC and company were essentially clamoring for US militarism in Somalia: Trump bad so militarism good. And as usual, their reporting was absent of any critical or skeptical voices.

The real agenda: “acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests”

Billionaire-backed, self-appointed “fact-checkers” like Snopes, PolitiFact often rate what they call “fake news” as having “missing context,” yet mainstream state-corporate media operate almost entirely on an unspoken doctrine of propaganda-by-omission. Researchers are left to piece together the kind of coherent recent-historical narratives that MSM refuse to provide. Somalia’s “missing context” can be summarized as follows:

In 1997, the US Space Command (which is still operational, though its duties are largely second to the Space Force) committed the Pentagon to achieving “full spectrum dominance” of land, sea, air, and space by the year 2020, “to protect US interests and investment,” which means elite corporate interests. Since then, numerous oil-rich and strategically-important nations have been occupied by the US and its allies. Various Pentagon departments, including the Central Command and Africa Command, divide the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility, based on the given region and/or nation’s strategic relevance to the Pentagon. This follows Britain’s colonial model.

In the 1950s, the Colonial Office described Aden—the Gulf between Yemen and Somalia—as “an important base,” from which forces could rapidly deploy to the energy-rich Middle East. In those days, the so-called Scramble for Africa (which began in the late-19th century) was justified under the doctrine of the “white’s man burden”: the mission to civilize the backward black races, as their lands and resources were plundered.

But Somalia gained independence in 1960 before being governed by the one-time CIA-backed dictator Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to ‘91. At the time, US support for Siad—including his killing of tens of thousands of political rivals—was justified as part of American Cold War policy.

With the Cold War over and Siad deposed, successive US administrations tested new “interventionist” doctrines, the first post-Cold War ideology being humanitarian intervention. Operation Restore Hope was launched in 1992 by the outgoing George H.W. Bush administration, supposedly to provide humanitarian relief during the famine triggered by the civil war. But a Fort Leavenworth paper reveals a hidden agenda: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Under an umbrella of Islamic political parties, known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), most of them non-extremist, Somalia enjoyed a short period of peace, stability, and an increase in living standards. Branches of the UN, Amnesty International, and the British foreign policy think-tank Chatham House have acknowledged that the ICU prevented “piracy,” provided schooling for large numbers of children, and reduced malnutrition.

The US and UK wage proxy war on the ICU, infiltrate the movement with Al Qaeda extremists

The attacks of 9/11 in 2001 provided the George W. Bush administration an excuse to sanction Somali banks, even though the 9/11 Commission cleared the banks of wrongdoing. Since then, Somalia has become a testing ground for the imposition of cashless societies.

Convinced that the more right-wing elements of the ICU were “al-Qaeda” fronts, the Joint Special Operations Command and CIA operated covertly in Somalia. Failing to destroy the ICU from within, the US and Britain backed an opposition government in exile comprised of Ethiopian and other warlords.

In December 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia as a US-British proxy war. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to neighboring Kenyan and Ethiopian refugee camps, while others made the perilous journey in rickety boats to Yemen. The so-called Transitional Federal Government was comprised of killers and torturers funded by the British taxpayer and given homes and citizenship in the UK. The war reversed the ICU’s social achievements and thousands starved in successive famines.

The frightening-sounding al-Shabab simply means “the Youth,” and was the young persons’ wing of the ICU. In 2007, with the non-violent ICU destroyed by a campaign of US-British terror, al-Shabab turned to violence to defend its country against Ethiopian aggressors and Somali collaborators. British intelligence agencies saw their chance to infiltrate al-Shabab with terrorists and transform it from a nationalist militia into an extremist group that could then be used as pretext for more Western aggression against Somalia. And indeed, some of the high-profile terrorists operating in Somalia post-9/11 were US-British intelligence assets.

It is well-known that the British and American militaries helped fuel the rise of what was later known as “al-Qaeda” to battle the Soviets in 1980s’ Afghanistan. One Afghanistan-based terror cell at the time was a Somali group called Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, whose leader Ahmed Abdi Godane went on to lead al-Shabab after the ICU collapsed. In London, an MI5 double agent tasked with spying on mosques tried in vain to alert his handlers to the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s main UK connection, Abu Qatada, was training and sending fighters to half a dozen Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. TIME had reported that Qatada was an asset of MI5.

A US puppet takes control in Somalia as drone war escalates

In 2010, with war still raging, US President Obama signed Executive Order 13536, describing Somalia — a country nearly 8,000 miles away with a GDP of less than $5 billion — as an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” As you wipe tears of laughter away, notice the emphasis on “foreign policy”: non-compliant regimes in Somalia might threaten total US operational freedom along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

That year, the radicalized and infiltrated al-Shabab launched its first foreign attacks (in Uganda and later Kenya), prompting regional governments to join the US in “counterterrorism” operations. A year later, drone strikes against “al-Shabab” and other groups began, killing at least 300 people by 2017; tragedies small in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who died in multiple, human-made famines over the last decade.

In 2011, the group allegedly pledged allegiance to “al-Qaeda.” The 2012 election of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud provided the US with a client who was described by Obama’s National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, as committed to “strengthen[ing Somalia’s] democratic institutions and promot[ing] economic development.”

By 2016, Bush and Obama had launched a total of 41 confirmed strikes largely from the US base at Camp Lemonier in neighboring Djibouti. The Shabab leader, Godane, was killed in one such strike. His replacement is supposedly named Ahmad Umar, and is a shadowy bogeyman about whom little is known.  By 2020, Trump alone had launched 40 drone strikes against Somalia, eliminating AFRICOM’s accountability protocols.

Exploiting “playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa”

We cannot say that corporate-state media do not do their job. They have successfully kept the public ignorant and deluded on virtually every geopolitical issue of significance. Nor can we say that the “war on terror” has failed (i.e., that after 20 years terror groups still operate), because it is not designed to combat terrorism. It is designed to produce an endless cycle of tit-for-tat killings and to create extremist groups where none previously existed. Permanent counterterrorism is a thin smokescreen to justify “full spectrum dominance” to the voting and taxpaying American public whose purse is plundered to fund these wars.

As we see from recent history, professed justifications for bloody US interference in impoverished Somalia shift according to the political climate: countering the Soviets until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, preventing famine under the guise of 1990s’ humanitarian intervention, stopping “pirates” as European ships plunder the starving country’s fish stocks, and, for the last two decades, fighting endless hordes of post-9/11 terrorists; many of them incubated in London by protected intelligence assets.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence recently announced that 70 personnel are training 1,000 Somalis as part of the African Union’s so-called Transition Mission in Somalia, “protecting civilians from Al Shabaab and other terrorist groups.” A more plausible reason for the ongoing US-British involvement is offered by a policy paper published last year by the European University: “Strategic areas of the western shore and the Horn of Africa are being incorporated in the Red Sea geopolitical map and Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia and Eritrea have become playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa.”

As excuses change, the geographies of power remain the same. These strategic interests are the real motivations for war. Ordinary people, as always, pay the price.

T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute and the author of several books, the latest being We’ll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus.

The U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine: How the Past Became the Present

By John Bellamy Foster

The following is the text of a presentation by John Bellamy Foster given on March 31, 2022 to the advisory board of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Thanks for inviting me to make this presentation. In talking about the Ukraine war, the essential thing to recognize at the outset is that this is a proxy war. In this regard, none other than Leon Panetta, who was CIA director and then secretary of defense under the Barack Obama administration, acknowledged recently that the war in Ukraine is a U.S. “proxy war,” though seldom admitted. To be explicit, the United States (backed by the whole of NATO) is in a long proxy war with Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield. The U.S. role in this conception, as Panetta insisted, is to provide more and more weapons faster and faster with Ukraine doing the fighting, bolstered by foreign mercenaries.

So how did this proxy war come about? In order to understand that we have to look at the U.S. imperial grand strategy. Here we have to go back to 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved or even further to the 1980s. There are two prongs to this imperial grand strategy, one as geopolitical expansion and positioning, including the enlargement of NATO, the other as the U.S. drive for nuclear primacy. A third prong involves the economy but won’t be considered here.

The First Prong: Geopolitical Expansion

The first prong was enunciated in Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Policy Guideline for the United States in February 1992, just months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The grand imperial strategy adopted at the time and followed ever since had to do with the United States advancing geopolitically into the terrain of the former Soviet Union as well as what had been the Soviet sphere of influence. The idea was to prevent Russia from reemerging as a great power. This process of U.S./NATO geopolitical expansion commenced immediately, visible in all the U.S./NATO wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe that have taken place in the last three decades. NATO’s war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was particularly important in this respect. Even while the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was going on, the United States began the process of enlarging NATO by moving it further and further East to encompass all of the former Warsaw Pact countries as well as parts of the former USSR. Bill Clinton in his 1996 election campaign made the enlargement of NATO part of his platform. Washington started to implement that in 1997, eventually adding 15 additional countries to NATO doubling its size and creating a 30-nation Atlantic Alliance targeting Russia, while also giving NATO a more global interventionist role, as in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya.

But the goal was the Ukraine. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the most important strategist of all of this and had been Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor said in his 1997 Grand Chessboard that Ukraine was the “geopolitical pivot,” particularly in the West, which if it were brought into NATO and under Western control, would weaken Russia so much that it could be tethered, if not dismembered. This has been the goal all along and U.S. strategic planners and Washington officials, along with the NATO allies, have stated over and over that they wanted to bring the Ukraine into NATO. NATO made this goal official in 2008. Only a few months ago, in November 2021 in the new strategic charter between the Biden administration in Washington and Zelensky government in Kyiv, it was agreed that the immediate aim was bring Ukraine into NATO. But this has also been NATO’s policy for a long time now. The United States in the final months of 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 was moving very fast to militarize the Ukraine and accomplish that as a fait accompli.

The idea, articulated by Brzezinski and others, was that once the Ukraine was secured for NATO, Russia was finished, the proximity to Moscow with Ukraine as the thirty-first nation in the NATO alliance, would give NATO a 1200-mile border with Russia, the same path through which Hitler’s armies had invaded the Soviet Union, but in this case with Russia facing the world’s greatest nuclear alliance. This would change the entire geopolitical map giving the West control of Eurasia west of China.

How this actually played out is important. The proxy war started in 2014 when the Maidan coup, engineered by the United States, took place in Ukraine, removing the democratically elected president, and putting ultra-nationalists largely in control. The immediate result though was that Ukraine began to break apart. Crimea had been an independent, autonomous state from 1991 to 1995. In 1995 Ukraine illegally tore up the Crimean Constitution and annexed it against its will. The Crimean people didn’t consider themselves part of Ukraine, and were largely Russian speaking, with deep cultural connections to Russia. When the coup occurred, with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in control, the Crimean population wanted out. Russia gave them an opportunity with a referendum to stay in the Ukraine or join with Russia. They chose the latter. However, in the eastern Ukraine the primarily Russian population was subjected to repression by ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Kyiv forces. Russophobia and extreme repression of the Russian-speaking populations in the East set in—with the infamous case of the forty people blown up in a public building by neo-Nazis associated with the Azov Battalion. Originally there were a number of breakaway republics. Two survived in the Donbass region, with dominant Russian-speaking populations: the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

A civil war thus emerged in Ukraine between Kyiv in the West and Donbass in the East. But it was also a proxy war with the U.S./NATO supporting Kyiv and Russia supporting Donbass. The civil war started right after the coup, when the Russian language was basically outlawed, so that individuals could get fined for speaking Russian in a store. It was an attack on the Russian language and culture and a violent repression of the populations in the eastern parts of the Ukraine.

Initially, there were about 14,000 lives lost in the civil war. And these casualties were in the eastern part of the country, with something like 2.5 million refugees pouring into Russia. The Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 led to a ceasefire, mediated by France and Germany, and supported by the United Nations Security Council. In these agreements the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics were given autonomous status within Ukraine. But Kyiv broke the Minsk agreements again and again, continuing to attack the breakaway republics in Donbass, though on a reduced scale, and the US continued to provide stepped-up military training and weapons.

Washington provided an enormous amount of military support to Kyiv between 1991 and 2021. The direct military aid to Kiev from the United States was $3.8 billion from 1991 to 2014. From 2014 to 2021, it was $2.4 billion, increasing in rate, and then finally skyrocketing once Joe Biden came into office in Washington. The United States was militarizing the Ukraine very fast. The United Kingdom and the Canada trained around 50,000 Ukrainian troops, not counting those trained by the United States. The CIA actually trained the Azov Battalion and the rightwing paramilitaries. All of this was targeting Russia.

The Russians were concerned particularly about the nuclear aspect, since NATO is a nuclear alliance, and if Ukraine was brought into NATO and missiles were placed in Ukraine, a nuclear strike could occur before the Kremlin had time to respond. Already there are anti-ballistic missile defense facilities in Poland and Romania, crucial as counterforce weapons in a NATO first strike. Yet, it is important to understand that the Aegis missile defense systems placed there are also capable of launching nuclear offensive missiles. All of this factored into Russia’s entry into the Ukrainian civil war. In February 2022 Kyiv was preparing a major offensive, with 130,000 troops on the borders of Donbass in the East and South, with U.S./NATO, firing into Donbass, with continuing U.S./NATO support. This crossed Moscow’s clearly articulated red lines. In response, Russia first declared that the Minsk Agreements had failed and that the Donbass republics had to be regarded as independent and autonomous states. It then intervened in the Ukrainian civil war on the side of Donbass, and in line with what it considered its own national defense.

The result is a proxy war between the U.S./NATO and Russia being fought in Ukraine, developing out of a civil war in Ukraine itself, which had its inception in a U.S.-engineered coup. But unlike other proxy wars between capitalist states this one is occurring on the borders of one of the great nuclear powers and is brought on by the long-articulated grand imperial strategy in Washington aimed at capturing the Ukraine for NATO in order to destroy Russia as a great power, and establish, as Brzezinski stated, U.S. supremacy over the globe. Obviously, this particular proxy war carries grave dangers on a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis. Following the Russian offensive, France declared that NATO was a nuclear power and immediately afterwards, on February 27, the Russians put their nuclear forces on high alert.

Another thing to understand about the proxy war is that the Russians have been trying to with considerable success to avoid civilian casualties. The populations of Russia and Ukraine are interwoven, and Moscow has attempted to keep civilian casualties down. Figures in the US military and in the European militaries have been indicating that the civilian casualties are remarkably low, when compared to the standard of U.S. warfare. One indication of this is that the military casualties to the Russian troops are greater than the civilian casualties of Ukrainians, which is the reverse of the way it works in U.S. warfare. If you look at how the United States fights a war, as in Iraq, it attacks the electrical and water facilities and the entire civilian infrastructure on the grounds that this will create dissension in the population and a revolt against the government. But targeting civilian infrastructure naturally increases civilian casualties, as in Iraq where the civilian casualties from the U.S. invasion were in the hundreds of thousands. Russia, in contrast, has not sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure, which it would be easy for them to do. Even in the midst of the war they are still selling natural gas to the Kyiv, fulfilling their contracts. They have not destroyed Ukraine’s Internet.

Russia intervened mainly with the object of freeing up Donbass, much of which was occupied by Kyiv forces. A priority has been gaining control of Mariupol, the main port, which would make Donbass viable. Mariupol has been occupied by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. The Azov battalion now controls less than 20% of the city. They are hiding out in the old Soviet bunkers in part of the city. The Donetsk People’s Militia and the Russians control the rest of it. There are about 100,000 paramilitary forces in Ukraine. Most of the paramilitaries within the Ukrainian forces that constituted the larger part of the 130,000 troops that were surrounding Donbass, have now been cut off by the Russian military. Besides gaining control of Donbass together with the people’s militias, Moscow seeks to compel the Ukraine to demilitarize and to accept a neutral status, remaining outside of NATO.

If you look at the situation from the standpoint of the peace agreements—and the Global Times had a good report on it on March 31—you can see what the war is all about. Kyiv has provisionally agreed to neutrality, to be overseen by certain guarantors from the West, such as Canada. But the sticking point in the negotiations is what Kyiv calls “sovereignty.” That is all about Donbass and the civil war. Ukraine insists that Donbass is part of its sovereign territory, irrespective of the wishes of the population in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The people in the Donbass republics and the Russians can’t accept that. In fact, the peoples’ militias and the Russians are still working at liberating parts of Donbass that are occupied by these paramilitary forces. It is there that the main sticking point in the negotiations lies, and this goes back to the reality of the civil war in Ukraine. The U.S. role in this has been to operate as a spoiler in the negotiations.

The Second Prong: The Drive to Nuclear Primacy

Here it is necessary to turn to the second prong of the U.S. Imperial Strategy. So far, I have discussed the grand imperial strategy in terms of geopolitics, the expansion into the territory of the former Soviet Union and the Soviet sphere of influence, which was articulated most effectively by Brzezinski. But there’s another prong to the U.S. grand imperial strategy that needs to be discussed in this context, and that is the drive to new nuclear primacy. If you read Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, his book on U.S. geopolitical strategy, you won’t find a word on nuclear weapons. The word nuclear doesn’t appear at all in his book, I believe. Yet this is of course crucial to the overall U.S. strategy with respect to Russia. In 1979, under Jimmy Carter, while Brzezinski was his national security advisor, it was decided to move beyond Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and for the United States to pursue a counterforce strategy of nuclear primacy. This involved placing nuclear missiles in Europe. In his “A Letter to America,” which appears in Protest and Survive published by Monthly Review Press in 1981, Marxist historian and anti-nuclear activist E.P. Thompson actually quotes Brzezinski admitting that the U.S. strategy had shifted to a counterforce war.

To explain this, it is necessary to go back a little bit further. By the 1960s, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States. There was a big debate within the Pentagon and security establishment about this, because nuclear parity meant MAD. It meant Mutually Assured Destruction. And whichever nation, it didn’t matter which, attacked the other, both would be utterly destroyed. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, started promoting the notion of counterforce to get around MAD. Essentially, there are two types of nuclear attacks. One is a countervalue which targets the cities, the population, and the economy of the adversary. That’s what MAD is based on. The other kind of attack is a counterforce war aimed at destroying the enemy’s nuclear forces before they can be launched. And, of course, a counterforce strategy is the same thing as a first strike strategy. The United States under McNamara, started to explore counterforce. McNamara then decided was such an approach was insane, and he decided to make MAD the deterrence policy of the United States. That lasted through most of the 1960s and seventies. But in 1979, in the Carter administration, when Brzezinski was the national security adviser, they decided to implement a counterforce strategy. The United States at that time decided to locate Pershing II missiles and nuclear-armed cruise missiles in Europe. That led to the rise of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, the great European peace movement.

Washington initially put Pershing II intermediate nuclear missiles, as well as cruise missiles, in Europe. This became a huge issue for the peace movement in both Europe and the United States. The dangers of a nuclear war were enormously enhanced. The Ronald Reagan administration heavily promoted the counterforce strategy and added their sci-fi Strategic Defense Initiative (better known by its nickname of Star Wars), which envisioned a system that would shoot down all of the enemy missiles altogether. This was largely a fantasy. Eventually, the nuclear arms race in this period was stopped as a result of the massive peace movements in Europe on both sides of the Berlin Wall and the nuclear freeze movement in the United States, as well as the rise of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. But after the dissolution of the USSR, Washington decided to go forward with the counterforce strategy, its drive towards nuclear primacy.

Over the next three decades, Washington kept on developing counterforce weapons and strategies, enhancing US abilities in that respect, to the point that in 2006 it was declared that the United States was near nuclear primacy, as explained at the time in Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the main center for U.S. grand strategy. The Foreign Affairs article declared that China didn’t have a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. first strike, given the improvements in U.S. targeting and sensing technology, and that even the Russians couldn’t count on the survivability their nuclear deterrent anymore. Washington was pushing forward to achieve complete nuclear primacy. This went hand in hand with the enlargement of NATO in Europe because part of the counterforce strategy was to get counterforce weapons closer and closer to Russia to decrease the time with which Moscow could respond.

Russia was the primary target in the strategy. While China was clearly intended to be the later target.  But Trump coming in decided to pursue detente with Russia and concentrate on China. That threw things off for a while, destabilizing the U.S./NATO grand strategy since the enlargement of NATO was an essential part of the nuclear primacy strategy. Once the Biden administration came into office, attempts were made to make up for lost time in tightening the Ukraine noose in Russia.

In all of this, the Russians, now a capitalist state and regaining great power status, were not fooled. They saw this coming. In 2007 Vladimir Putin declared that the unipolar world was impossible, that the United States wouldn’t be able to achieve nuclear primacy. Both Russia and China started to develop weapons that would get around the counterforce, strategy of the United States. The idea of a first strike is that the attacker—and only the United States has anything near this capability—strikes the land-based missiles, whether in hardened silos or mobile, and by tracking the submarines is in a position to eliminate them as well. The role of anti-ballistic missile systems is then to pick off whatever retaliatory strike remains. Naturally, the other side, namely Russia and China among the great nuclear powers, know all of this, so they do everything they can to protect their nuclear deterrent or retaliatory strike capability. In the last few years Russia and China developed hypersonic missiles. These missiles move extraordinarily fast, above Mach 5 and at the same time are maneuverable, so they cannot be stopped by anti-ballistic missile systems, weakening the U.S. counterforce capability. The United States itself has not yet developed hypersonic missile technologies of this kind. This type of weapon is what China calls an “assassin’s mace,” meaning that it can be used by a lesser power to counter an overwhelming advantage in the military power of the opponent. This then increases the basic deterrent of Russia and China by protecting their retaliatory capabilities in the event of a first strike against them. It is one of the major factors that that is countering U.S. first strike capabilities.

Another aspect in this game of nuclear chicken is the U.S./NATO dominance in satellites. It is largely because of this that Pentagon targeting is now so accurate that they can conceive of the possibility of destroying the hardened missile silos with smaller warheads because of the absolute accuracy of their targeting, while also targeting submarines. All of this has to do with the satellite systems. This gives the United States, it is widely believed, the capability of destroying hardened missile silos or at least command and control centers with weapons that aren’t nuclear, or with smaller nuclear warheads, because of the increased accuracy. The Russian and Chinese militaries have been focusing therefore a lot on anti-satellite weapons in order to take this advantage away.

Nuclear Winter and Omnicide

All of this may sound bad enough, but it is necessary to say something about nuclear winter. The U.S. military—and I imagine it’s true of the Russian military as well—have, if you read their declassified documents, completely walked away from the science on nuclear war. In the declassified document on nuclear armaments and nuclear war there is no mention of firestorms anywhere in the discussion of nuclear war. But firestorms are actually what result in the largest number of deaths in a nuclear attack. The firestorms can spread out in a thermonuclear attack on a city to as much as 150 square miles. The military establishments, which are all about fighting and prevailing in a nuclear war, leave the firestorms out of account in their analyses even in calculations of MAD. But there is another reason for this as well since the firestorms are what generate nuclear winter.

In 1983, when counterforce weapons were being placed in Europe, Soviet and American atmospheric scientists, working together, created the first models of nuclear winter. A number of the key scientists, in both the Soviet Union and the United States, were involved in climate change research, which is essentially the inverse of nuclear winter, though not nearly as abrupt. These scientists discovered that in a nuclear war with firestorms in 100 cities, the effect would be a drop in an average global temperature by what Carl Sagan said at the time was up to “several tens of degrees” Celsius. They later backed off from that with further studies and said it was that the drop would be up to twenty degrees Celsius. But you can imagine what that means. The firestorms would loft the soot and the smoke into the stratosphere. This would block to 70% of the solar energy reaching the earth, which would mean all harvests on Earth would end. This would destroy nearly all vegetative life, so that the direct nuclear effects in the northern hemisphere would be accompanied by the death of almost everyone in the southern hemisphere as well. Only a few people would survive on the planet.

The nuclear winter studies were criticized by the military and by the establishment in the United States, as exaggerated. But in the 21st century, beginning in 2007, the nuclear winter studies were expanded, replicated, and validated numerous times. They showed that even in a war between India and Pakistan using Hiroshima-level atomic bombs, the result would a nuclear winter not as severe, but with the effect of reducing the solar energy reaching the planet enough to kill billions of people. In contrast, in a global thermonuclear war, as the news studies have shown, nuclear winter would be even would be as bad or worse as what the original studies in 1980s had determined. And this is the science. It’s accepted in the top peer-reviewed scientific publications and the findings have been repeatedly validated. It is very clear in terms of the science that if we have a global thermonuclear exchange, it will kill off the entire population of the earth with maybe a few remnants of the human species surviving somewhere in the southern hemisphere. The result will be planetary omnicide

At first McNamara thought that counterforce was a good idea, because it was seen as a No Cities strategy. The United States could just destroy the nuclear weapons on the other side and leave the cities untouched. But that quickly dissolved, and nobody believes that anymore because most the command-and-control centers are in or near the cities. There’s no way that these can all be destroyed in a first strike without attacking the cities. Moreover, there’s no way that the nuclear deterrent on the other side can be completely destroyed, where the major nuclear powers are concerned, and only a relatively small part of the nuclear arsenals of the major powers can destroy all the major cities on the other side. To think otherwise is to pursue a dangerous fantasy that increases the chance of a global thermonuclear war that will destroy humanity. This means that the major nuclear analysts, who are deeply engaged in counterforce doctrines, are promoting total madness. The nuclear war planners pretend that they can prevail in a nuclear war. Yet, we now know that MAD, mutually assured destruction, as it was originally envisioned, is less extreme than what a global thermonuclear war means today. Mutually assured destruction meant both sides were destroyed in their hundreds of millions. But nuclear winter means virtually the entire population of the planet is eliminated.

Counterforce strategy, the drive towards first strike capability or nuclear primacy means that the nuclear arms race keeps on increasing in the hope of eluding MAD, while actually threatening human extinction. Even if the numbers of nuclear weapons are limited, the so-called “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal, particularly on the U.S. side, is designed to make counterforce and thus a first strike thinkable. That’s why Washington withdrew from the nuclear treaties like the ABM Treaty and the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty. These were seen as blocking counterforce weapons, interfering with the Pentagon’s drive to nuclear primacy. Washington walked out of all of those treaties and then while it was willing to accept a limit on the total number of nuclear weapons because the game was then being played in a different way. The U.S. strategy is focused on counterforce not countervalue now.

All of this is a lot to be absorbed in a short time. But I think it’s important to understand the two prongs of the U.S./NATO imperial grand strategy in order to understand why the Kremlin considers itself threatened, and why it acted as it did, and why this proxy war is so dangerous for the world as a whole. What we should keep in mind right now is that all of this maneuvering for absolute world supremacy has brought to us to the brink of a global thermonuclear war and global omnicide. The only answer is to create a massive world movement for peace, ecology, and socialism.

John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. He has published numerous articles and books focusing on the political economy of capitalism and the economic crisis, ecology and the ecological crisis, and Marxist theory: (with Brett Clark) The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology; (with Paul Burkett) Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (2016); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014); (with Robert W. McChesney) The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (2012); (with Fred Magdoff) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2009); (with Fred Magdoff) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009); The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (2008); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); (with Frederick H. Buttel and Fred Magdoff) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000); The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert W. McChesney) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (1998); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood) In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1997); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (1986); (with Henryk Szlajfer) The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (1984). His work is published in at least twenty-five languages. Visit johnbellamyfoster.org for a collection of most of Foster's works currently available online.

American Fascism: The Men, the Money, and the Myth

By J. Richard Marra

On May Day 2016, well before the election of Donald J. Trump, the Boston Globe published, "'Never forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting."[1] In it, Jeff Jacoby worries about its implications for a world experiencing a resurgence of violent right wing political extremism. For American Marxists, the timing may seem ironic. On the day of global celebration for the working class, they are reminded of both the horrors of fascism and their duty to unceasingly oppose it.

Marxist and other commentators appreciate the toxicity of fascism. However, their explanations regarding its features, organization, and operations differ. Each has enriched our understanding, while also introducing a disconcerting complexity and diversity. Accordingly, anti-fascists should aim at simplicity when considering historical fascism and Trump's 'neofascism."

The libertarian commentator George Will understands:[2]

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of "fascism" than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.

Furthermore, there are problems regarding recognizing fascism and justifying claims about specific political regimes. James P. Cannon recognized this in 1954 with reference to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy: [3]

Those who would judge specific American forms of fascism too formalistically by the European pattern, arbitrarily limit capitalist aggression against the workers’ movement in two forms:

They see the democratic form by which the workers are suppressed through strictly legal measures in accordance with the law and the Constitution—such as the Taft-Hartley Law, formal indictments and prosecutions for specific violations of existing statutes, etc....

On the other side they see the illegal, unofficial forms of violence practiced by “stormtroopers” and similar shirted hooligans outside the forms of law, as in Italy and Germany. This is characterised as fascist.

This kind of illegal violence under the outward forms of law has a distinctive American flavour; and it is especially favoured by a section of the ruling class which has very little respect for its own laws....This is, in fact, an important element of the specific form which American fascism will take....

Depending on one's perspective, contemporary fascism might appear nowhere, or anywhere. It is nowhere in the sense that Hitler and Mussolini are dead; and America's immigrant detention camps aren't as horrific as Auschwitz. Yet, it can emerge anywhere because capitalism is everywhere, and capitalism is its necessary and structural accomplice.[4] Given the right theorizing, many current capitalist regimes can exhibit fascist characteristics. For Will, fascism can occur anywhere because truculence toward liberal institutions and manners is common in social climates of political polarization and arrogance.

Three methodological problems contribute to the confusion. Consider, first, Lawrence Britt's[5] list of the identifying characteristics of fascism. Its items accurately capture salient features and establish a domain of likely candidate governments. Unfortunately, they don't supply an explanation regarding how any of these, or all of these, characteristics structurally realize the fascist form of governance. Lacking context, lists of attributes can become scattered and unwieldy, and fail to account for time-sensitive social and political contingencies, as Cannon anticipates. In addition, methodologies, and the theories supporting them, evolve over time. Although their theoretical "hard core" remains resistant, subordinate features may change. This may lead to reevaluations of the fascist-ness of political regimes. Finally, although Marxism, unlike capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to fascism, both are nevertheless liable to analytical bias. Will's commitment to capitalism prevents him from even mentioning it. He strips contemporary fascism of its theoretical and historical significance, dismissing it as merely a problem regarding hostile personalities.

To avoid these problems, this account will keep largely to operational matters, focusing on structures and functions. Parsimony is exercised in establishing necessary and sufficient characteristics, and explaining such features will help us introduce context. To do so, it proposes three fundamental structural components: Governance, economy, and ideology. Following Brecht and Lund, it suggests that capitalism plays a central role in the emergence and operations of fascism. However, unlike some Marxists, this analysis stops short of characterizing fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. Accumulation remains the prime purpose of the capitalist modes of production employed within fascism. Nevertheless, capitalists must routinely acquiesce to state requirements, which conveniently include protecting and advancing profitability. Both capitalists and fascists are keenly aware that workers, unions, and communists can negatively affect accumulation and the capitalist state. This mutual need is addressed by managing unprofitable class conflict through the establishment of state-run "corporations."

The Three Characteristics of Historical Fascism

When taken together, the following three necessary characteristics, involving both structural and ideological (especially nationalistic and religious) components, sufficiently define fascism.

1. Governance: Unitary and authoritarian national state controlled by a despotic "Leader."

2. Economy: State control of the economy through a system of sector-based corporations comprised of capitalist enterprises and labor.

3. Ideology: Traditionalist mythology justifying an exclusive moral exceptionalism in governmental affairs imported from 20th-century Futurism.

The key to recognizing fascism lies in appreciating how these characteristics synergize into a unique system of governance. With this in mind, let us now examine each more deeply.

Governance: The Leader Principle

The fascist state functions according to the "Leader Principle."[6] The "Leader" (aka Der Fuhrer, Il Duce) is the single sovereign authority over the state and its people. He/she stands atop a hierarchy of sub-leaders that govern the state's political and bureaucratic organizations. All sub-leaders pledge total obedience to all superiors, but always and primarily to the Leader. The fascist leader is not merely a person, but the ultimate manifestation of a state dynamically driven by its moral "will." In this way, the leader and the state are structurally and functionally identified. Mussolini writes, "the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State...." For Mussolini and Hitler, those consciousnesses, wills, personalities, and morality are theirs.

Economy: The "Third Way"

The leader dictates the structure and operations of the second necessary feature of fascism, an economic system called the "The Third Way." To understand the Third Way, let's compare how capitalists, communists, and fascists manage the class struggle that Mussolini denies.

Capitalists are attentive to class struggle, especially when it interferes with profits. They know that profit comes from their private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of labor. They understand that class struggle between owners and workers is a fact of capitalist social life. Capitalists understand that every rise in workers’ standards of living — living wages, pensions, healthful working conditions — are not only costly, but are costs that directly subtract from their profits. Thus, since workers will naturally demand such benefits, capitalists work continuously to weaken the political power of workers and unions.

For communists, class struggle is a symptom of capitalist social relations; yet they recognize that it is also a tool for working-class liberation. Their aim is to eliminate private control of the forces of production, while relocating ownership across the entire society. "Come the revolution," society will become classless. With the end of class struggle, a democratic economy is established that serves collective economic planning, and the physical and psychological well-being of workers.

Fascists place the needs of the state over all other national constituencies, including both capitalists and workers. This requires minimizing conflict between these two classes. To do this, fascists merge capitalist enterprises and unions into corporations, pairing them according to distinct economic sectors. Each corporation represents a sector of the economy wherein capitalists and labor are collectively bureaucratized, with all power vested in a state governed by an authoritarian leader.

The fascist leader principle is a relatively simple structural and operational conception, which any authoritarian state, fascist or otherwise, can implement. However, fascism couches the principle within a worldview that rejects the ideological foundations of both impotent liberal democracy and Marx's materialist sociology. [7]

...the liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results...the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production...if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

To summarize, the ultimate aim of capitalism is to end class struggle by subjugating the working class. The ultimate aim of communism is to end class struggle by eliminating the capitalist class. The ultimate aim of fascism is to corporatize the capitalist class and eliminate a collectivized working class through the formation of an absolutely supreme leader and state.

Ideology: The Nasty Superman

Fascism has three ideological pillars. The first concerns mythology. Mussolini's fascism is nothing without a myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.[8]

The existential conception of fascism lies in an identification of a heroic people with its leader and national mythology. Consider the two fascist "philosophers" Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Evola. Rosenberg served as the Nazi Party's Commissar for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education between1933 to 1945. Among his "scholarly" accomplishments is "The Myth of the Twentieth Century,"[9] a uniquely turgid and mind-numbing justification of Nazi anti-Semitism and Aryanism. Julius Evola, one of the founders of 20th-century traditionalism, enjoyed a continuing relationship with Hitler, high-ranking Nazis, and Mussolini. He took Rosenberg's work seriously enough to critique it his "The Racist Conception of History."[10] With Mussolini, myth and tradition join: "Tradition certainly is one of the greatest spiritual forces of a people, inasmuch as it is a successive and constant creation of their soul."[11]

The second foundation of fascism involves not bigotry but nastiness, its truculence finding its roots early 20th-century futurism. Evola enjoyed a brief artistic and philosophical relationship with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Movement. This connection is important because it exposes the second, and little remembered, ideological foundation of fascism.

Futurism speaks: [12]

...we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.

We wish to destroy the museum, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian malignancy.

We wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman.

This political grandiloquence finds translation in five of Britt's characteristics: distain for human rights, scapegoating, hostility toward intellectuals and artists, militarism, and sexism. These attitudes and behaviors are not Trump's alone. These come from Marinetti's Futurist Aristocracy (1923), edited by the Italian Futurist Nanni Leone Castelli. Marinetti influenced Mussolini, a person many worldwide view as the epitome of the aggressive and spontaneous futurist hero.

Mussolini the futurist:[13]

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest....

[Fascism]... repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism....war [sic] alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies....[14]

For fascists, traditionalism and futurism are tools for cultural atonement, redemption, and political power. The cultural historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke[15] appreciates Evola's and Trump's ideological poison. Fascism:

 ...speaks directly to those who reject absolutely the leveling world of democracy, capitalism, multi-racialism and technology...[Traditionalists] acute sense of cultural chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal.

It is not surprising that Steve Bannon, an Evola enthusiast and Trump's past political advisor, boasts, "I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."[16] Bannon's Lenin isn't a Marxist, but he is a futurist.

Fascism's third necessary ideological feature is a moral "exclusive exceptionalism" in public policy and international relations, particularly justified by its traditionalist mythology. The fascist state claims the exclusive moral right to do what it wishes: no individual, group, or other nation can assert the same right.[17] Antonio Salazar, a former Portuguese prime minister and authoritarian corporatist, explains: [18]

The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its goal without meeting complications or obstacles.

And for Adolph Hitler: [19]

It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad....

The Three Characteristics of American Fascism

Governance: The Fascist Presidency

Since the Civil War, America has enjoyed reasonably stable governance. It's democratic republic, separation of powers, and presidential term limits constrain the rise of tyranny. Capitalism is thoroughly imbedded in its politics, ideology, culture, and religion. It's culture celebrates freedom, democracy, multiculturalism, personal individualism, and egalitarianism; suitably framed in a comforting mythology. It's religious doctrines profess kindness, compassion, and equality among persons.

Taken together, these blessings provide Americans with a deep sense of self-identity and exceptionalism. They also offer few prospects for the rise of a hell bent authoritarian Fuhrer. Yet, for opportunists like Donald Trump, the 2016 election provided just the right circumstances for a heroic self-actualization.

Trump's fascist handler Steve Bannon has a plan. It begins by peddling a well-known TV reality superstar and billionaire entrepreneur as a national hero for the 21st century. He is marketed as a blessed, unconventional, and unrelenting savior. His operatives then inject him into a rapaciously neoliberal capitalist party. That party seizes the opportunity to both deflect growing criticism from disgruntled workers still suffering from the 2008 capitalist crisis and a ballooning wealth gap, while simultaneously safeguarding capitalist profits. Republican spin masters publicly celebrate him in their corporate media, offering him a shot at the Presidency.

Once this leader controls the executive branch, and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the Supreme Court, an American fascism will command absolute political authority. It can control national production and labor policy, thus removing class struggle from the political equation. This tactic takes advantage of an increasing centralization of power in the executive branch.[20] This situation is significantly different from the weak power structure at the top of the unstable Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany. Trump will exercise his authority, claiming the exclusive right to do what he wishes, and remain unaccountable. Since this impulsive and aggressive fascist leader is the incarnation of the state, all governmental policy and functions obediently follow suit. Anything or anyone getting in the way will be eliminated.

Trump is a worthy inheritor of Mussolini's political persona. His distain for human rights, scapegoating, sexism, hostility toward intellectuals, and militarism is indisputable. His immigration policy, islamophobia and racism, glorification of sexual molestation, anti-science rhetoric, and massive defense spending all herald a potential American Fuhrer.

Economy and Ideology: Steve Bannon’s 'Third-Way'[21]

Steve Bannon's fascism maximizes the operational efficiency of its governance, and coincidently the profitability of capitalism, through their fusion with the ideology of White-supremacist Christianity. The leader commands a Third Way that subjugates capitalist enterprises and labor under his control through corporations, in order to ameliorate class conflict. Capitalists in this new theo-economic state[22] will enjoy growing profits as before, as workers endure neoliberal social and labor policy that reduces their political presence. Workers will live insecure existences living on subsistence wages, fearing illness, and defaulting on their college loans. They will work more hours, save little, and receive fewer benefits.

In contrast to historical fascism, the American form benefits from an enduring capitalist program to weaken labor. Trump is elected on a day when worker participation in unions is historically low.[23] The Taft-Hartley Act, and the damage done through its original anti-communist provision, continues to block mass revolutionary efforts by workers. There are few mass demonstrations and street battles like those in Germany and Italy during the early decades of the 20th century.[24] More recently, the Supreme Court Citizen's United and "right to work" rulings impair union fund raising and organizing. Trump's truculence toward both organized labor and Wall Street is consistent with a politic that abhors class struggle.

All of this comes with Bannon's traditionalism and Judeo-Christian ethos: [25]

...look at the leaders of capitalism at that time [late 19th- through the 20th-centuries], when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the [their] faith,...the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored....I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

...[S]hould we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?"

Bannon imagines America as a restored Judeo-Christian and capitalist nation with Trump as its leader. He revives and consecrates Americans as a new saintly and capitalist volk. The leader leads, and capitalists and workers reap the benefits. Value added: Everyone achieves salvation and immortality, as they are actualized in the form of the fascist state. For Bannon, "What Trump represents is a restoration — a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism.[26] This restoration carries the Cross, is wrapped in the American flag, and struts to the tune of a uniquely garish form of exclusive exceptionalism. MAGA emerges as a pathologically narcissistic demon in the form of Trump's exclusive exceptionalism:

They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s like incredible.[27]

Conclusion

George Will places the intersection of futurism and fascism within the broader context of European Enlightenment:[28]

Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism: the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.

George Will correctly distinguishes "Trumpism" as a populist fad from communism as a political doctrine:[29]

Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.

Trumpism...is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.

Fascism is interesting precisely because it offers a compelling doctrine, a powerful system of governance, and is doggedly persistent over time and space. But, it's also rare. Unfortunately, small samples resist generalization. Cultural, geographic, and historical variables make comparisons difficult. While Marxists understand that the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism can lead to fascism, they don't often synchronize with other potent proto-fascist interventions. Fascism requires a unique convergence of causes and conditions. Economically, a major crisis of capitalism, significant economic distress among workers, a burgeoning wealth gap, and strong anti-union sentiments and policies prevails. There is a social climate of fear and hostility regarding vivid internal and external threats; citizens distrust distant and detached governance. They are mesmerized by a nativist and nationalist mythology energized by mythic traditions and beliefs. The spark that ignites the inferno of fascism comes as a uniquely clever and hell-bent futurist demagogue.

It is astonishing that an otherwise intelligent species would establish such profligate stupidity, wastefulness, and destructiveness as a system of governance. But it is here and continues to threaten humanity. History begs that we never forget what fascism represents, what it does, and what it takes to remove it from our presence.

Notes

[1] Jeff Jacoby, "'Never Forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting," Boston Globe, May 1, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/30/never-forget-world-said-holocaust-but-world-forgetting/59cUqLNFxylkW7BDuRPgNK/story.html (accessed June 5, 2021).

[2] George Will, "The difference between Trumpism and fascism," The Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-difference-between-trumpism-and-fascism/2020/07/09/377ae76e-c208-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html (accessed June 8, 2021).

[3] James P. Cannon, "Fascism and the Workers' Movement," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication March - April, 1954, The Militant, https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1954/mar/15.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[4] See Bertholt Brecht, "Fascism is the True Face of Capitalism," Off Guardian, Original publication 1935, https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/01/fascism-is-the-true-face-of-capitalism/. (accessed June 23, 2021). Ernest Lund, "Fascism Is a Product of Capitalism," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication Labor Action September 27, 1943. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/erber/1943/09/fascism.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[5] Lawrence Britt, "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism," Free Inquiry Magazine, 2003, https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.pdf (accessed June 5, 2021). See also umair, "Are Americans (Really) So Dumb They Don't Know Fascism When They See It?," Eudiamonia, April 6, 2019. https://eand.co/are-americans-really-so-dumb-they-dont-know-fascism-when-they-see-it-34cae64efa72 (accessed May 29, 2021).

[6]  "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression," A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005, http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DOCNAC3.htm.

[7] Benito Mussolini, "What is Fascism?," Marxist Internet Archive, Reference Archive, Original publication 1932, Italian Encyclopedia, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mussolini/works/fascism.htm. (accessed September 4, 2021).

[8] Franklin Le Van Baumer, ed., Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 748.

[9] Alfred Rosenberg, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Internet Archive, Original publication 1930,  https://archive.org/details/the-myth-of-the-20th-century-alfred-rosenberg/mode/2up (accessed September 4, 2021).

[10] Andrew Joyce, "Review: Julius Evola's 'Myth of the Blood: The Genesis of Racialism,'" Occidental Observer, September 18, 2018, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/18/review-the-myth-of-the-blood-the-genesis-of-racialism/ (accessed June 9, 2021).

[11] Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)," World Future Fund, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm (accessed September 10, 2021).

[12] N. L. Castelli, ed., Futurist Aristocracy (Rome: Prampolini, 1923).

[13] Le Van Baumer, op. cit.

[14] Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)."

[15] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

[16] Seth Millstein, "13 Quotes From Steve Bannon That Show The Toxic Worldview He Took To The White House," Bustle, August 18, 2017,

https://www.bustle.com/p/13-steve-bannon-quotes-that-paint-a-diabolical-worldview-he-took-to-the-white-house-77612  (accessed May 24. 2021).

[17] Charles L. Stevenson, "Value-Judgments: Their Implicit Generality," in Ethical Theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century, ed. Norman E. Bowie (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 13 - 37.

[18] "Corporatism," Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, August 30, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism.

[19] Louis Paul Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 11–12.

[20] "The Concept of the Imperial Presidency," UKEssays, May 16, 2017,  https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/the-concept-of-the-imperial-presidency-politics-essay.php (accessed September 6, 2021).

[21] Here, I allude to the fascist self-branding of being fundamentally opposed to both capitalism and socialism, offering a third way of social organization. See Roger Eatwell, "The Oxford Dictionary of Political Ideologies," Oxford Handbooks Online, edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, December 2013,

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199585977-e-009 (accessed September 6, 2021).

[22] Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

[23] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016 Union Membership In The United States, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[24] Mack Harden, "What is Taft-Hartley and Why Is It Bad?," Emergency Workplace Organizing, April 5, 2021, https://workerorganizing.org/what-is-taft-hartley-and-why-is-it-bad-1291/. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[25] J. Lester Feder, "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World," November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world (accessed June 8, 2021).

[26] James Hohmann, "The Daily 202: Bannon will be the id, Priebus the super-ego in Trump’s White House," The Washington Post, November 14, 2016,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/11/14/daily-202-bannon-will-be-the-id-priebus-the-super-ego-in-trump-s-white-house/58292237e9b69b6085905df2/ (accessed May 31, 2021).

[27] Katie Reilly, "Donald Trump Says He 'Could Shoot Somebody' and Not Lose Voters," Time, January 23, 2016,

https://time.com/4191598/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters/ (accessed May 21, 2021).

[28] Will, op. cit.

[29] Ibid.

Afghanistan, Western Imperialism, and the Great Game of Smashing Countries

By John Pilger

Republished from Mint Press News.

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal  reported that “150,000 persons… marched to honour the new flag… the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday… it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs:

We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré  and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it… Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York–within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly. The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me,

We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know….

In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898,

upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11.

The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

On Afghanistan, he added this:

We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:

The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering…

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?