Hitler Is Not Dead: On Bourgeois Electoralism, Liberalism as the Left Wing of Fascism, and the Politics of Exceptionalizing Donald Trump

By Joshua Briond

“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. at the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.”

—Aimé Césaire, Discourses on Colonialism

We are in a sociopolitical moment where it is arguably more crucial than ever to challenge widespread, and often deliberate, misapprehensions regarding historical precedents, to avoid remaking past mistakes and repeating history when so much is at stake. Fascism is a socio-economic and political project and system of governing that began the moment Europeans first made contact with West African shores. The process continued when the Euro-American bourgeoisie further invaded Indigenous territory in conquest for expanding markets and sources of capital, and marked the creation of what we know today as America—the most powerful and technologically advanced hyper-militarized carceral-police state and exporter of capitalist, imperialist, and colonial violence and domination that the world has ever seen. The consequential violence and contradictions that have been exposed the last four years, which by many have been attributed solely to Donald Trump and co., are simply the demands and material consequences of capital and white supremacy (which go hand-in-hand, and are essentially inseparable). The exceptionalizing of Trump or his administration is short-sighted and dangerous. In reality, any US president would be tasked with such a role and responsibility.

Yet, what the liberal media apparatus and ruling class has spent the last four years doing to Trump—much like the West has historically done to Hitler—making him out to be an ‘exceptional’ evil, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, as a means of separating themselves from (what is largely described as exclusively Trumpian or Hitlerian) political crimes, represents an incredibly grotesque and ahistorical deliberation on the part of the elite. In other words, Hitler was not the first Hitler and Trump is not the first Trump. And they certainly won’t be the last. Trump, just as Hitler was, is not the exception but the rule of what white-supremacist-patriarchal capitalism is capable of, and what this system is willing to do (or produce) to maintain its naturalized order and rule. And if we allow them to continue to exceptionalize what Trump is doing, or has done up until this point—even if he’s doing it in unorthodox ways—we will be bamboozled yet again as yet another, more effective, less blatant Trump will inevitably rise.

What Hitler did, and what Trump is currently doing—as in their (racialized) political, economic, and war crimes—are not exclusive or unique to either of them as individuals, despite what Western (revisionist) history and the professional liberal media class would like to have us believe. But instead, racial terror, violence, and genocide, is and always has been the point of the Western (and American) project. It is built into the fabric of the of the West—it is all Euro-American’s have ever known, culturally and politically. And they will, as we have seen, continue their terror and violence because the political economy is sustained on such; until the entire project is brought to a halt. The global capitalist political economy is predicated on and sustained through racialized violence, and cannot be attributed solely to any one individual leader or figurehead. When I say that Hitler, or Trump in this case, are not exceptional evils, despite both being individually evil and worthy of our condemnation: it is to say that every western leader—namely in the context of US presidents—has blood on their hands. And all have, both individually and collectively, terrorized and massacred countless people, as their policies and upholding of US hegemony, by means of imperialism, [neo]colonialism, and global capitalism, has directly and indirectly led to such deadly consequences.

“When I switch on my radio and hear that black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. And finally when I switch on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been introduced and legalized, I say that truly they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead.”

— Aime Cesaire

I would like to preface the rest of this by stating that when I speak of Hitler, it is not just in the context of the individual—but an idea, as Aimé Césaire would describe it, both abstract and material, that is innate to western civilization and the maintenance of the regime which has global implications. Hitler was, quite literally on record, inspired by the United States’ treatment of Black and Indigenous people in America. But, the US, and the West at-large, has exceptionalized him, as if they are morally and politically above his crimes. How is what Hitler, and now Trump, did and are actively doing so unspeakable to the professional liberal apparatus, when such crimes have always been committed against racialized people on a global scale? How can we take seriously the largely performative outrage and condemnation that the Hitlers or Trumps of our world have incited in liberals when similar crimes have been enacted on racialized persons on a global scale by political leaders such as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama, all of whom they admire? What is Hitler to the African, whose enslavement, rape, theft, dispossession, and exploitation served as a template for what would be exported to other colonized nations and peoples for the purposes and demands of Western capital? What is Hitler to the Palestinian whose terror and ongoing genocide is being supported and funded by the US (and every single one of our politicians)? What is Hitler to the Iranian, Korean, or Chinese whose subjugated positionality is that of the result of US imperialism and global capitalism? What is Hitler to any racialized, imperialized, or colonized nation or peoples who have reaped the consequences of Euro-American capital and rule?

“During the Second World War the country became incensed against the Japanese—not against the Germans. The Germans were never incarcerated, the Japanese were. And now the Iranians and other people like that. Europe had nothing against Hitler and neither did [America] until he turned his guns against them.”

— James Baldwin

Fascism is not something that can be simply born or defeated via electoralism—in countries that are capitalist, colonialist, and/or imperialist from their inception, as was such in the case of the US and Germany. An able and willing fascist participant can absolutely run for office, uphold such an order, and maybe even advance it in a wide variety of ways. But there has not been a case in which fascism begins or ends with said individual or political act of simply voting. So while yes, the ruling class technically “allows” its subjects the illusive option to vote for and “elect” (with conditions, of course) whomever will be the upholder of said system, it is the system itself — that makes way for the empowerment and upholding of individuals, ideologies, and violence—that needs undoing, not just the figurehead representing it. Which, again, is what makes it ncessary to expose the liberal exceptionalizing of Trump’s regime of violence—because the capitalist ruling class will easily relieve Trump of his duties of upholding the white-supremacist fascist order and replace him with someone who will effectively maintain the white power structure with grace and class, just as liberals like it, in a way that is socially acceptable to the vast majority of American people (and the West at large). Because the vast majority of Americans are simply unaware of the extent to which political violence is exported globally. And the amount of violence, terror, and death that elected leaders—from the self-proclaimed progressives to the unabashed neo-conservatives—are directly responsible for.

To reiterate, the inevitable ascension into the fascist order began when Europeans set foot on the shores of West Africa—not the 2016 general election in the US. Germany, for example, alongside the Euro-Americas, enslaved and massacred Africans with impunity centuries prior to the unfortunate birth of Hitler, the individual, and yet we are to believe fascism began with Hitler? Or, in the American sense, with Trump in 2016? Despite the incessant crimes of capital, which as we know, as Marx taught us, “[came] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” throughout history, including such crimes that birthed the bastard child of Europe now known as America? If it took multi-country war and an immeasurable amount of bloodshed led by the USSR to defeat the fascist beast in Germany—never mind the reluctance on the part of the US to get involved until Germany threatened US hegemony with its prospects of expanding its rule on a global scale—how are we supposed to believe that fascism is something to be defeated by merely checking off a box?

America was born as a nation, as an ideological extension of a European bourgeois political, cultural, and libidinal desire to expand new markets to generate more capital—even if it meant resorting to the utmost diabolical means. Hitler is not dead. As the US's values, institutions, global legitimacy, and grip on the world—namely the colonized world—is in decay, there is far too much evidence of just this fact. And everything we are seeing that the professional liberal class has duplicitously yet meticulously attributed solely to Trump and his ilk, whether in reference to the political repression happening across the country on the part of the carceral police state, the neglect of millions of citizens in a midst of a global pandemic and economic turmoil, or the hypervisibility of armed white militia groups, is simply a product of white-supremacist capitalism and its reaction to, and delaying, its inevitable demise.

The state at-large, and its upholders—whether in the form of the institutionalized agents or vigilantes—is reacting to the desires and needs of capital and whiteness. And regardless of who is president, these contradictions will continue to rise in these times because the needs of capital and whiteness largely come at the expense of the non-white and super-exploited, rendering it unsustainable and almost always in a constant state of flux and turmoil, and constantly in need of protection and adaptation. Hitler is not dead.

“We must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.”

— Aimé Césaire, discourses on colonialism

Fascism—as well as the personification of such in the form of Hitler and Trump—is the inevitable outcome of a global capitalist system whose entire economy is predicated on constant racialized war, terror, and violence, and unsustainably expanding and creating new markets to achieve such a feat. Hitler is not dead. Fascism is simply “capitalism in decay.” If we want to end, or even remotely challenge fascism, we must work to eradicate capitalism.

The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positing of [neo]liberalism as in-opposition or an alternative to the fascist order. When in actuality, history has shown us that it is in cahoots with, if not, an actual strand of fascism in and of itself. Liberal democrats often spout rhetorical devices such as, “there is no middle ground; pick a side.” Such statements are not to emphasize the crucial sociopolitical moment we find ourselves in, which necessitates that we choose between fascism or socialism—in the face of pending climate doom and deteriorating material conditions—but to guilt us into voting for Democrats over Republicans.

It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule—who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large—while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates. There have been constant claims on the part of liberal democrats—and those sympathetic to their politics—of radicals being “child-like” and expecting “purity” for wanting a world without constant racialized violence, demanding political representatives that aren’t subservient to capital but to our material interests, and refusing to engage in lesser of two evils every election cycle. It is quite clear that liberal establishment democrats—and the opportunists who serve their rule—are categorically irrelevant to the dispossessed, colonized, racialized, super-exploited, and wretched of our world, beyond their attempts to postpone and/or flat-out hinder our drive to build a better world, and redirecting our aims back into the arms of the establishment.

Liberal democrats obediently assume their role as the “left-wing” of fascism—the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops.” The covert fascists versus overt fascists. But at the detriment to us all, the fact still remains that they are both still cops and they are both still driving a fascist system to its inevitable conclusion. Democrats represent the only publicly legitimized and acknowledged political “left” party despite being overwhelmingly ideologically right wing. They allow and endorse mild concessions that will help keep the racialized, colonized, dispossessed, and super-exploited slightly comfortable enough—at the expense of one another and persons in the Global South and Third World—to remain complicit in their subjugation. They will even give impassioned monologues on social media, or in front of the cameras, yell at Republicans’ blatant political violence—while doing nothing materially to actually offer resistance or represent an opposition to said violence beyond rhetorical moral grandstanding. While Republicans don’t even pretend to care about providing subjects of their rule crumbs through these concessions. They don’t pretend to care about whether or not you vote because they accept and relish in their bad cop role. But ultimately, both parties truly cannot exist and flourish without one another. They are both incredibly useful, in their own way, as agents of capital, to the sustainment and growth of fascism.

I’d argue “centrism,” “conservatism,” and “republicanism” are not even economic ideologies—in fact, their ideology largely rests on the premise that they have none—beyond the rule of capital. So why else—beyond the aforementioned reasons—would you need two parties? Both parties are one in the same—just differ in tactics and approaches—but are united under the banner of upholding economic [neo]liberalism, i.e., capitalism. Which is why the rhetoric of “we have a choice between neoliberalism or fascism”—which has been an ostensible liberal talking point—as if, again, neoliberalism is, or could ever be, an alternative, reprieve, or in-opposition to fascism. How could something that has historically worked in cahoots with fascism be an alternative to its rule?

The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized—especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations—in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand. The fascist order will remain intact regardless of who is elected into office on November 3rd—despite the hand-wringing and finger-pointing over which party is more at fault for white-supremacist capitalism’s ills being exposed. The public perception and liberal media coverage of certain events and political violence will adjust accordingly. What we are seeing now, and have been seeing for the last four years is simply a declining empire doing anything and everything it can to maintain its tight (but loosening) grip on its own people—as well as the rest of the world. As evidenced by not just the uprisings and rebellions happening across the country and the world at-large, but the failed coup d’etat attempts—namely in Venezuela and Bolivia—which the professional liberals condemned, not from an anti-imperialist stance but because of Trump’s inability to do imperialism effectively.

If Trump is Hitler, what is Obama to people of Libya? Or Syria? Or Pakistan? What is George W. Bush Jr. to Iraqis? What is Bill Clinton to the people of Sudan? Yuglosavia? What are any and all of them to migrants who have been caged and deported, or Black people who have been executed by police in the streets on a daily basis, or workers who have been left without means to sustain basic life, or tens of millions who are surveilled each and every day? These things occurred long before Trump and will continue to escalate long after Trump.

The empire lives. For now. And Hitler is not dead.

Bernie Sanders and the Left: What Happened?

By Mick Armstrong

Republished from Red Flag.

Bernie Sanders inspired hope among millions of working-class Americans appalled by the dire state of US politics. With his attacks on the billionaire class, his talk of socialism and his program of Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage and free university tuition at last, there seemed to be an alternative to far-right Republicans like Trump and despised pro-big business Democrats like Hillary Clinton.

Sanders tapped into a mood for change in an increasingly polarised US society. On the one hand, there was the growth in support for Trump and various far-right conspiracy theorists and outright fascist groups. On the other hand, there was a sustained increase in the number of people favouring some sort of socialist alternative to capitalism. As early as 2011, a Pew Research Center poll showed that most young people had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism.

Sanders’ two presidential campaigns built on and reinforced these sentiments. His support was particularly strong among young people, a majority of whom now reject capitalism. This was an important development in a country where there is no equivalent to the Australian or British labour parties and where socialist ideas of all stripes had long been marginalised by the Cold War anti-communist consensus. A further reflection of this trend was the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, which now claims something like 70,000 members.

Socialists and Biden: an exchange

You don’t have to scratch too deeply beneath the surface to understand why this shift occurred. The 2007-08 global financial crisis resulted in millions of US workers losing their jobs and/or their homes. But the banks and the giant financial corporations that caused the crisis were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by Democratic President Barack Obama. Workers’ taxes paid for those handouts. The US, like most of the Western world, has become an incredibly unequal society. The minimum wage is derisory. Today’s young people are set to be worse off than their parents’ generation. Compounding all that are endemic racism and militarism: the unrelenting police shootings of Blacks and the long decades of murderous wars from Iraq to Afghanistan, justified by rampant Islamophobia.

The bind was that there were limits to Sanders’ politics, which constrained and eventually reversed the radical potential of his campaign. By the standards of most other Western capitalist societies, Sanders was a moderate social democrat. He was, for example, nowhere near as left wing as Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. Sanders could seem much more radical than he actually was because of the abysmally right-wing nature of US politics. While his program put forward important individual reforms, it was not an anti-capitalist program and Sanders never called for getting rid of capitalism.

Sanders is not an opponent of US imperialism. He is a strong advocate of a hardline US stance against China, is pro-Israel and has longstanding connections with sections of the military industrial complex. From early in his political career in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was a strong backer of the police. So, unsurprisingly, he has refused to support the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police.

These serious limitations of Sanders’ politics were glossed over or apologised for by most of his supporters on the left. Such an approach meant that newly radicalising young people were not educated in clear-cut anti-imperialist politics—vital for socialists in the US, which remains the number one imperialist power in an increasingly conflict-ridden world.

Furthermore, while Sanders called for building a movement, it was a movement aiming to get him and other progressive Democrats, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, elected to office, not a movement of workers and youth to fight in the workplaces and on the streets for major reforms or to challenge capitalism.

Is this the most important election ever?

The bigger problem limiting the radical potential of the Sanders’ campaign was that it remained trapped within the framework of the Democratic Party—the number two party of US imperialism. Born as the party of the southern slaveholders, the Democrats have always served the interests of the rich and powerful and of US military might. From Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Johnson to Clinton to Obama, Democratic presidents have waged war after war of pillage and plunder.

Attempting to reform the Democrats is an utter dead-end for socialists. What is vitally needed in the US is a genuinely radical working-class political alternative to the Democrats. Sanders could have helped build such an alternative if, after his defeat in the 2016 primaries, he had run as a social democrat against both Clinton and Trump. But despite facing a brutal dirty tricks campaign by the Democrats’ corporate establishment, Sanders offered no alternative to his many supporters. He called on them to back the despicable Clinton.

Despite his supposed “independent” status, Sanders incorporated himself deeper and deeper into the Democratic mainstream after the 2016 elections. He tried to build, not a left-wing alternative to the Democrats, but a mildly progressive faction very much loyal to this party of big business.

To prove his loyalty in the 2018 midterm elections, Sanders campaigned for liberal, centrist and right-wing Democratic candidates. And from the outset of the presidential primaries, Sanders made it clear that he would back whoever won the Democratic nomination, even a hardline conservative like Joe Biden. Although he was again savagely done over by the Democratic establishment, Sanders remained true to his word. Indeed, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have gone out of their way to praise Biden.

In order to get on board left-wingers hostile to Biden, Sanders and other liberal Democrats have painted Biden as some sort of saviour of workers’ interests against Trump. This is despite Biden making it crystal clear that he will not back any of Sanders’ policies and focusing his campaign on making concessions to right-wing Republicans worried that Trump’s behaviour discredits US imperialism’s standing in the world.

So rather than working for a break from the Democrats, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have acted as a safety valve for US capitalism’s B team. They have tried to channel a growing radicalism, especially among young people, back into the discredited Democrats. Following this same trajectory, the Democratic Socialists of America have been increasingly incorporated as the progressive wing of the Democrats.

Sanders has joined a long line of past liberals, progressives and social democrats who have helped prop up the Democratic Party in the face of mass upsurges of disaffection by giving it a seemingly radical face. These various progressives have played and continue to play a vital role in maintaining the stability of US capitalism. Their role is one of the key factors in explaining why US workers don’t have their own party independent of the two mainstream capitalist parties, even a pathetically inadequate one like the British or Australian labour parties.

Socialists should not vote for Joe Biden

The other significant negative impact of the Sanders’ campaign has been on the politics of sections of the socialist left. Thrown off balance by the surge of support for Sanders, important sections of the socialist left threw themselves largely uncritically into his campaign. They embraced it as a get-rich-quick scheme for mass influence. Softening their socialist politics to fall in behind Sanders did nothing to advance working-class struggle or mass campaigns like Black Lives Matter or to build the revolutionary left. It strengthened the hand of the reformists and liberals who dominated and set the political terrain of Sanders’ campaign.

Numerous leftists abandoned the longstanding stance of the radical and revolutionary left in the US—from the syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to the early US Communist Party to the Trotskyist movement—of not voting for candidates of either of the two dominant capitalist parties. Initially many on the left, including leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, proclaimed that it was “Bernie or bust”—that they would campaign only for Sanders and not for a right-wing corporate Democrat like Biden.

But abandoning the socialist principle of not supporting candidates of openly capitalist parties in order to back Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez became a slippery slope. If you were prepared to vote for Sanders running as a Democrat on a mild social democratic program against Trump, it is no great further stretch to vote for the lesser evil Biden against the “fascist” Trump. Indeed, many of the former supporters of “Bernie or bust” have now caved in to the relentless campaign of the Democrats and the liberal establishment to back Biden.

But falling in behind Biden and the Democrats will do nothing to strengthen the hand of workers and the oppressed to resist the harsh attacks they will inevitably face, whoever sits in the White House after the presidential elections. Moreover, it will do nothing to counter the threat from the right, which has grown in the very soil of the harsh neoliberal capitalism championed by Democrats such as Biden.

What is vitally needed in the US is a fighting socialist movement to champion mass struggles like the Black Lives Matter movement and to build broader working-class resistance. Those struggles won’t be advanced by tailing the Democrats, no matter how seemingly progressive, but only by building a militant working-class political alternative.

One Hundred Years of Indian Communism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from International Development Economic Associates.

A theoretical analysis of the prevailing situation, from which the proletariat’s relationship with different segments of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry is derived, and with it the Communist Party’s tactics towards other political forces, is central to the Party’s praxis. A study of this praxis over the last one hundred years of the existence of communism in India, though highly instructive, is beyond my scope here. I shall be concerned only with some phases of this long history.

While the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928) analysed the colonial question, advancing valuable propositions like “Colonial exploitation produces pauperization, not proletarianization, of the peasantry”, it put forward a line of action for Communist Parties that was sectarian in character; indeed the period following the Sixth Congress, often referred to as the Third Period, is associated with sectarianism. It was at the Seventh Congress in 1935, in the midst of the fight against fascism, which had claimed Ernst Thaelman, Antonio Gramsci and many others among its victims, that this sectarianism was rectified and the need to form united fronts was emphasized. The Seventh Congress tendency was translated into the Indian context by the Dutt-Bradley thesis calling for the formation of an Anti-Imperialist People’s United Front.

The economic programme suggested for such a front included the right to strike, banning reductions of wages and dismissals of workers, an adequate minimum wage and 8-hour day, a 50 per cent reduction in rents and banning the seizure of peasant land against debt by imperialists, native princes, zamindars and money lenders.

Communists being clandestine members of the Congress (the Indian case differed from South Africa in this respect where dual membership, of the SACP and ANC, was possible), and working in cooperation with the Congress Socialist party, were the outcome of this understanding.

This phase came to an end with the German attack on the Soviet Union. The Communist Party’s understanding that the nature of the war had changed because of this attack, though striking a sympathetic chord among many leading Congressmen, was officially rejected both by the CSP and the Congress, which actually launched the Quit India movement at this very time (in which many Communists who had been members of the Congress were also jailed for long periods).

With independence, the question of the nature of the new State and the relationship with the bourgeoisie came to the fore. It caused intense inner-Party debate and ultimately divided the Party. The CPI(M)’s theoretical position, enshrined in its programme, took off from Lenin’s position in pre-revolutionary debates within the RSDLP, a position that was to underlie, one way or another, all third world revolutionary programmes in the twentieth century. Lenin’s argument had been that in countries where the bourgeoisie came late on the historical scene, it lacked the capacity to carry through the anti-feudal democratic revolution, for fear that an attack on feudal property could well rebound into an attack on bourgeois property. It therefore could not fulfil the democratic aspirations of the peasantry. Only a revolution led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry, could carry the democratic revolution to completion, by breaking up feudal property, smashing feudal privileges, and redistributing land. This, far from holding back economic development, would in fact make it more broad-based by enlarging the size of the home market through land reforms, and also more rapid, by accelerating the growth of agriculture.

The post-independence Indian State’s eschewing of radical land redistribution, and its encouraging feudal landlords instead to turn capitalist on their khudkasht land, along with an upper stratum of the peasantry that acquired ownership rights on land from large absentee landlords, was reflective of the bourgeoisie’s entering into an alliance with landlords. Since it was a bourgeois-landlord State under the leadership of the big bourgeoisie, that was pursuing capitalist development, which in the countryside entailed a mixture of landlord and peasant capitalism, the task for the proletariat was to replace this State by an alternative State formed by building an alliance with the bulk of the peasantry, and to carry the democratic revolution forward, eventually to socialism. While the bourgeoisie had ambitions of pursuing a capitalist path that was relatively autonomous of imperialism, it was, the Party noted, collaborating increasingly with foreign finance capital.

Two aspects of this characterization deserve attention. First, it recognized that while capitalist development was being pursued, it was not under the aegis of imperialism. The bourgeoisie was by no means subservient to imperialism, a fact of which the use of the public sector against metropolitan capital, economic decolonization with the help of the Soviet Union, in the sense of recapturing control over the country’s natural resources from metropolitan capital, and the pursuit of non-alignment in foreign policy, were obvious manifestations. Developing capitalism at home in other words did not mean for the post-independence State joining the camp of world capitalism.

Second, the State, while it manifested its class character in defending bourgeois and landlord property and ushering in capitalism, including junker capitalism, did not act exclusively in the interests of the bourgeoisie and the landlords. It appeared to stand above all classes, intervening even in favour of workers and peasants from time to time. Thus while it presided over a process of primitive accumulation of capital, in the sense of the landlords evicting tenants to resume land for capitalist farming, it prevented primitive accumulation in the more usual sense, of the urban big bourgeoisie encroaching on peasant agriculture or artisan production. On the contrary, it not only reserved a quantum of cloth to be produced by the handloom sector, but also intervened in agricultural markets to purchase produce at remunerative prices, an intervention of which the agricultural capitalists, whether kulaks or landlords, were by no means the sole beneficiaries. Likewise, a whole array of measures for agriculture, such as protection from world market fluctuations, subsidised inputs, subsidized institutional credit, new practices and seed varieties being disseminated through State-run extension services, though they conferred the lion’s share of benefits on the emerging capitalist class in the countryside, also benefited large numbers of peasants.

The capitalist development that was pursued was thus sui generis. It was a capitalist development from within, not necessarily with the blessings of imperialism, and, notwithstanding increasing collaboration, often even at the expense of metropolitan capital. Because of this peculiar character, it did not cause an unbridgeable hiatus within society, i.e. within the ranks of the classes that had fought imperialism together during the anti-colonial struggle. Put differently, while the bourgeoisie betrayed many of the promises of the anti-colonial struggle, such as land to the tiller, it did not as long as the dirigiste regime lasted, betray the anti-colonial struggle altogether. This is also why the Party while putting itself in opposition to the regime, supported many of its measures, such as bank nationalization, the development of the public sector and its use for recapturing control over natural resources from metropolitan capital, FERA, and others.

This sui generis character of the capitalism that was being developed has misled many into thinking that it was an “intermediate regime” that presided over it and not a bourgeois-landlord State; but this mistake itself is testimony to its sui generis character. This development could not last for at least four reasons: first, the collapse of the Soviet Union that had made such a development trajectory at all possible; second, the fiscal crisis that the post-independence State increasingly got into inter alia because of massive tax evasion by the bourgeoisie and the landlords; third, the formation of huge blocks of finance capital in the banks of the advanced capitalist countries, especially after the “oil-shocks” of the seventies, which went global after the overthrow of the Bretton-Woods system (itself partly engineered by this finance capital), and which took advantage of the fiscal crisis to push loans to countries like India; and fourth, the fact that the dirigiste regime could not garner the support of the poor, notwithstanding its many pro-poor achievements compared to the colonial period.

The neo-liberal regime under the aegis of the now globalized finance capital represents the pursuit of capitalism of the most orthodox kind, as distinct from the sui generis capitalism of the dirigiste period. The State under neo-liberalism promotes much more exclusively the interests of the ruling classes, especially the corporate-financial oligarchy that gets closely integrated with globalized finance capital, and directly also of globalized finance capital itself (owing its fear that there may be a capital flight otherwise). An unbridgeable hiatus now develops within the country, with the big bourgeoisie aligning itself much more closely with metropolitan capital, having abandoned its ambition of relative autonomy vis-à-vis imperialism.

The neo-liberal regime withdraws to a large extent the support it extended to petty production and peasant agriculture, making it much more vulnerable. A process of primitive accumulation of capital is unleashed upon peasant agriculture not from within the rural economy (through landlords evicting tenants) but from agri-business and big capital from outside; likewise the neo-liberal State facilitates an unleashing of primitive accumulation upon the petty production sector, for instance through demonetization and the shift to a GST regime. Reservation of products for this sector is abandoned. The displaced peasants and petty producers move to towns in search of employment, but employment becomes increasingly scarce because of the abandonment of all constraints on technological-cum-structural change in the economy which the system of licensing had imposed earlier. The swelling reserve army of labour worsens the lot of the organized workers. The fate of the peasants, the agricultural labourers, the petty producers and organized workers get inextricably linked, and this fate worsens greatly, leading not only to a massive widening of economic inequality but also to an accentuation of poverty.

At the same time however neo-liberalism has entailed the shift of a range of activities, especially in the service sector (IT-related services) from the metropolis to the Indian economy which inter alia has increased the growth rate of GDP in the economy. This poses a fresh challenge before the Party because of the following argument.

Marx in his Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy had talked of a mode of production becoming historically obsolete when the relations of production characterizing it become a fetter on the development of productive forces. A conclusion is often drawn from this that as long as productive forces continue to develop, that mode of production continues to remain historically progressive. An obvious index of the development of productive forces is the rate of growth of the GDP, whence it follows that as long as this growth remains rapid, opposing a regime in the name of its inequity and exploitative character is historically unwarranted. The Communists on this argument should not oppose neo-liberal globalization, but should join other political forces in accepting it, albeit critically.

This argument however cannot stand scrutiny. Economic historians agree that Russia before the revolution was experiencing unprecedented rates of economic growth, especially industrial growth, and the advanced capitalist world as a whole had witnessed a prolonged boom; yet Lenin had no hesitation in calling capitalism of that time “moribund”. In short to take GDP growth as the marker of the historical state of a mode of production is a form of commodity fetishism; it seeks to locate in the world of “things” phenomena that belong to the world of “relations”.

While other political forces accepted neo-liberal globalization, the Party accordingly steadfastly opposed it. It, along with other Left political forces, stood by the workers and peasants who are victims of neo-liberal globalization instead accepting it as a sign of progress, as many Left formations in other countries have explicitly or implicitly done.

This has brought practical problems. Under the dirigiste regime one measure that separated Communists from others was land reforms. When a Communist government came to power, its task was clear, namely to carry out land reforms. But when land reforms have been completed to a significant extent, the next task is not clear. While industrialization is required, what form it should take and in what way it should be effected, are matters on which the state governments (where Communists are typically located) have very little say within a neo-liberal regime. Hence, Communist state governments within such a regime are often forced to mimic, to their cost, other state governments for effecting industrialization. This is an area where much more thinking and experimentation needs to be done.

Neo-liberal globalization itself however has reached a dead-end, a symptom of which is the mushrooming of authoritarian/fascist regimes in various parts of the world, for the preservation of moribund neo-liberal capitalism, through a combination of repression and of distraction of attention towards the “other” as the enemy. Overcoming this conjuncture is the new challenge before Indian Communism in its centenary year.

"It is Totally Naive to Want to Humanize Capitalism": An Interview with Frei Betto

[Photo: Frei Betto meets with Fidel Castro in the 1990s]

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, better known as Frei Betto, is a recognized Latin American progressive reference and one of the main figures of the Theology of Liberation. A writer, journalist and Dominican friar, he was imprisoned for four years during the military dictatorship in Brazil, which he opposed with body and soul. During his work as a friar he met, in the favelas of Sao Paulo, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of whom he was an advisor, and in whose government he participated in the Zero Hunger program. He has written more than 60 books, including Fidel and Religion. Conversations with Frei Betto (1985); Mysticism and Spirituality (1997); The Artist’s Work. A Holistic Vision of the Universe (1999); and The Lost Gold of the Arienim (2016).

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

I believe that the pandemic is nature’s revenge, resulting from years of human domination and devastation. Absolutely everything that we have been doing for the last 200 years, the search for profit and the maximum exploitation of nature’s resources without any care for environmental preservation, results in a lack of control of the chain of nature, which is completely disrupted by human intervention. Many speak of the “anthropocene”, that is, the era of total human intervention in nature; but I prefer to call this situation “capitalocene”. In other words, the total hegemony of capital, of the search for profit, for gain; all of which causes a total imbalance in the natural environment.

This whole process of environmental devastation is the fruit of private capital gain. The problem is not the human being; the problem is neoliberal capitalism. And we must remember that nature can live without our uncomfortable presence; we cannot, we do need nature.

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

In my country, the situation is catastrophic because we have a neo-fascist government. I call President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Bagman”, I even gave him this nickname before the Economist Magazine did. Brazil is in a total fire, in the Amazon, and in other areas, and the president has no interest in improving the situation or changing the course of what we are experiencing. Everything that means death suits him. We are living under a genocidal and lying government.

He is so brazen that in his last speech at the UN he said that the culprits for the fires in the Amazon are the peasants, the small farmers of the area and the indigenous people. For this reason there is no doubt that here in Brazil we are living a catastrophic situation managed by a neo-fascist government, which is using more and more religious fundamentalism to legitimize itself. Health matters as little as education. Bolsonaro knows very well that an educated people is a people that has a minimum of critical consciousness. And so it is better for him that the people have no education at all so that they can continue as guides to an ignorant mass. Of course not because of the masses themselves, but because of the conditions of education that are not properly offered to the people. As if all this were not enough, we are now back on a map of hunger, with a tremendous number of people who do not have the minimum necessary of the nutrients provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In short, we are in a tremendous situation. We’ll see what happens in the municipal elections in November.

What scenario do you envision?

I think the elections will be an interesting thermometer to evaluate how our people look at it. But the truth is that, in this, I am not very optimistic. The pandemic has helped a lot so that Bolsonaro has the hegemony of the narrative, because public demonstrations do not exist, they are prohibited, or they are not convenient, so only the voice of the government is heard.

By voting in favor of the political trial against former President Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to the memory of the Army torturer, Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra. His behavior should not be surprising. But what explains that he still maintains a considerable level of popular support?

I have two explanations for this situation. First, the right wing has mastered the electronic system of digital networks, which I prefer not to call “social” because they do not necessarily create sociability. I believe that many people on the left, progressive, have not yet mastered this mechanism. And also, since the owners of these platforms are favorable to sectors close to the government, many use algorithms and other devices to disseminate fake news and all kinds of lies. This has a lot of force because today people find out much more about the news and facts through the digital networks than through the traditional press. This is the first factor. The second factor is related to the mobilization of the poorest people by conservative evangelical churches. And then there are people who have abdicated their freedom to seek safety. That is the proposal of the global right: that each person should abdicate his freedom in exchange for his security.

In the face of the latter, and the hegemonic narrative it describes, what about the voices of the left?

On this we, these who feel part of the left, have a certain responsibility because we have abandoned the work of the base. We have abandoned work with the poorest people in this country. In the thirteen years that we have been in government we have not increased that base work, and this space has been occupied by those evangelical churches and some conservative fundamentalist Catholic sectors. These churches have made a lot of progress. And this also has to do with a project of the United States intelligence since the 1970s. In two conferences that took place in Mexico, the CIA and the State Department already said that the Liberation Theology was more dangerous than Marxism in Latin America and that a counteroffensive had to be made. This counteroffensive comes from the appearance of these electronic churches that were exported to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places.

Religion is the first system of meaning invented by the human being. There is no other sense more powerful and globalizing than religion. That is why so many people today are seeking to master this system. And we, who are progressives of the Theology of Liberation, have done here in Brazil an intense and very positive work at the base between the 70’s during the military dictatorship and also during the 90’s, but after that have come two very conservative pontificates, those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. These were 34 years of demobilization of the basic church, of that church of the basic ecclesial communities; they were 34 years of prejudice against the Theology of Liberation. All of this opened space for this counteroffensive by the evangelical right.

Do you argue that “there is no future for humanity outside of socialism?” How do you build socialism at this juncture?

We must not wait for the end of capitalism to build socialism. We have to build socialism within the capitalist system, that is, to begin popular initiatives of economic solidarity, of sharing goods, of strengthening popular bases. That is where we are starting, there is no other way. We cannot return to the Leninist concept of an assault on the Winter Palace. We have to denounce the capitalist system but create effective alternatives to this system, as far as possible from the popular bases. In that way I believe that we can manage to break this system in the long term, but we have to have initiative and pressure and political forces. This is a long-term, essential task, and I don’t see any other way out at this juncture.

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

There are many initiatives from popular sectors in different places. In Brazil, the Landless Movement has initiatives that are typically socialist. Recently, with the tremendous rise in the price of rice in Brazil, the MST, which is a big rice producer, has not raised its prices and had a terrible sale. Many people were able to discover the advantages of their family farming, where services and profits are shared among the families that are settled or camped. They are small initiatives that we have to strengthen, and look for spaces in the governments again, because it is very important and immense to work from the government, as we have done during the presidencies of Lula and Dilma.

Unfortunately, we have not taken advantage of all the possibilities, and above all, we have not done work, which for me is fundamental, that has to do with the political literacy of the people. We should have invested much more in that. If we have another opportunity to return to the government we will have to face that work, which is fundamental. If on the one hand the thirteen years of the Workers’ Party government promoted many social advances in Brazil – and they are the best in our republican history – but on the other hand, we have not worked on the political literacy of the people, the strengthening of the popular movements, and the democratization of the media.

There are those who argue that capitalism must be humanized. Is that possible?

It’s a totally contradictory idea. Humanizing capitalism is the same as taking the teeth out of the tiger, thinking that this will take away its aggressiveness; it is totally naive to want to humanize capitalism. There is no possibility of that; capitalism is intrinsically evil. Its own endogenous mechanism is a necrophiliac mechanism. It is a system that feeds on those who work, on those who consume, on the poor. It is a question of arithmetic: if there is not so much wealth there is not so much poverty; if there is not so much poverty there is not so much wealth. It is impossible to humanize capitalism; it is a very naive postulation and unfortunately there are still people who believe in this myth.

How do you generate democratic awareness? How do you work on the democratization of society in times like these?

By means of communication systems -digital, printed, audiovisual, etc.-, translating into popular language many of the concepts disseminated in the mass media. Simple people often do not understand concepts such as public debt, foreign investment, exchange rate fluctuations, and market mechanisms. This requires methodology – which Paulo Freire teaches – and popular education teams.

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

Maybe he will have the opportunity because they are reviewing his judgments and convictions, filled with so many prejudices. Hopefully, he will have the possibility to be a candidate again; it is our hope here.

Can you imagine a less conservative Catholic Church, attentive in fact to the proclamations it defends?

As I said, the Catholic Church has spent 34 years of conservative pontificates that have demobilized much of that popular work of the ecclesial base communities, the raw material of Liberation Theology. This does not come from the heads of theologians, it comes from the bases. All of this has been demobilized. It may be different times since the changes proposed by Pope Francis, but still the intermediate hierarchy between the bases and the people who have power in the church has not been totally changed. We still have a large number of bishops and priests who are very conservative and who do not want to get involved in the popular struggles, are afraid or in search of their comfort, their convenience, and do not want to put themselves at risk. There is a lot of work to be done, but there are sectors of the Catholic Church and of Latin America that are very committed to these struggles for the defense of the rights of the poorest, of human rights; this is very strong in many sectors.

How do you think about the immediate future?

I believe that in the immediate future there is going to be an exacerbation of individualism. The pandemic has required cutting off face-to-face relationships, so people are going to be increasingly isolated, with fewer opportunities to connect with each other and to come together in the streets, in the unions, in the social movements, at least until a vaccine comes to take us out of this situation. And here again the importance of knowing how to manage the digital networks appears. We, the progressive left, have to learn more and more to manage these networks and to change them, because we know that many of them are there only to favor consumption or even linked to services of espionage, intelligence, control of the people. There is a lot of struggle to be done around this because it is a factor that came to stay. Many people are informed through these digital networks. We have to create groups with the ability to dominate these networks, to disprove the fake news and disseminate the truth, the real facts. This is the only way we can do a virtual job of political education.

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

Yes, of course. Liberation Theology has opened its range to other topics that are not only social struggles, but also addresses the issue of ecology, questions of nanotechnology, astrophysics, cosmology, and bioethics. The problem is that we have rather lost the popular foundations, which were the basis of the Theory of Liberation. These foundations have been lost during these 34 years of conservative pontificates. Our main task is to return to the bases, to return to the slums, to return to the peripheries, to return to the poor people, to the oppressed, to the excluded, like black people, the indigenous, the LGBT. We all have to be in this struggle; that’s where we have to walk.

Are you optimistic?

I have a principle and that is we have to save pessimism for better days. We can’t play into the hands of a system that wants us to be quiet, depressed, discouraged; we have to keep fighting. History has many twists and turns. I have been through a lot of things, some very tremendous, others positive. The prison under the Vargas dictatorship, the strength of the popular movements, the election of Lula, the election of Dilma… I am optimistic, yes. We cannot consider any historical moment as definitive.

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

Sinophobia, Inc.: Understanding the Anti-China Industrial Complex

[PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS]

By Qiao Collective

Republished from the Qiao Collective.

The United States’ alliance is barreling towards conflict with China. In recent months, the U.S. government has taken unprecedented steps to upend normal relations with China: sanctioning Communist Party of China officials, banning Chinese tech companies like TikTok and Huawei, interrogating and surveilling Chinese students and scientists, and even forcing the Houston Chinese consulate to close.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls it an end to “blind engagement” with a Chinese state he labels an existential threat to the “free world.” And the other members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance—Canada, New Zealand, and the UK—are by and large caving to U.S. pressure to take parallel measures to isolate China.

Yet the Western policy doctrine of “great power competition” with China has not been accompanied by a robust public debate. Instead, this blustering state rhetoric has coincided with public views of China hitting historic lows. Thanks in part to racist corporate media coverage which blamed China for the spread of COVID-19, unfavorable views of China are skyrocketing.

Pew Research reported in July that unfavorable views of China had reached “new highs” in the U.S.—more than doubling from 35 to 73 percent between 2005 and 2020. Australian trust in their northern neighbors is even worse: in 2020, 77 percent of Australians expressed distrust in China, compared to just 38 percent in 2006.

As the U.S. and other Western nations are mired by the crises of COVID-19, unemployment, wage stagnation, and systemic racism, the fictitious “China threat” should be the least of our worries. After all, China has made clear time and time again that it wants peaceful relations and cooperation with the U.S, and China’s foreign policy principle of a “community of shared future for humankind” is enshrined in the Communist Party constitution. Make no mistake—the New Cold War on China is a one-sided escalation for conflict led by the U.S. and its allies.

The fact that Western public opinion on China is marching in lockstep with the State Department’s call for Cold War aggression reflects the convergence of state, military, and corporate media interests which monopolize our media ecosystem. Behind the State Department’s bluster and the military “Pivot to Asia” exists a quiet, well-oiled machine that is busy manufacturing consent for war on China. Too often, the hawkish policy stances it enshrines are taken as objective ‘truth’ rather than as pro-war propaganda working in the interests of weapons corporations and political elites.

We call it Sinophobia, Inc.—an information industrial complex where Western state funding, billion dollar weapons manufacturers, and right-wing think tanks coalesce and operate in sync to flood the media with messages that China is public enemy number one. Armed with state funding and weapons industry sponsors, this handful of influential think tanks are setting the terms of the New Cold War on China. The same media ecosystem that greased the wheels of perpetual war towards disastrous intervention in the Middle East is now busy manufacturing consent for conflict with China.

By saturating our news and newsfeeds with anti-China messages, this media machine is convincing average people that a New Cold War is in their interests. In reality, the hype of an imagined ‘China threat’ only serves the interests of the political elites and defense industry CEOs who stand to profit from this disastrous geopolitical escalation.

Who’s Who in Sinophobia Inc.

In order to mount a sustained challenge to the New Cold War on China, the anti-war movement must develop a critical media literacy with which to see through this imperialist media machine. A close eye reveals that a handful of think tanks, pundits, and “security experts” show up time and time again in corporate media coverage of China. What’s more, these “independent” experts have explicit ties to the weapons industry and the state departments of the U.S. and its allies.

The Australian Strategic Policy (ASPI) is one such actor. It’s been called “the think tank behind Australia’s changing view of China” and decried by progressive Australian politicians as “hawks intent on fighting a new cold war.” But despite its right-wing slant, ASPI saturates Western media across the political spectrum—from Breitbart and Fox News to CNN and the New York Times. The broad legitimation of think tanks such as ASPI is one factor behind today’s bipartisan support for imperialist aggression on China.

From national defense and cybersecurity to human rights allegations, the China hawks of ASPI weaponize a variety of issues in support of their call for military buildup vis-a-vis China. ASPI and its staff have called for visa restrictions on Chinese students and scientists, alleged a secret Chinese biological weapons program, and claimed China is exploiting Antarctica for military advantages. No matter how outrageous the allegation, ASPI finds warm welcome in a media ecosystem hungry for controversy and a geopolitical climate inching closer to military aggression on China by the day.

When it comes down to it, that’s exactly what ASPI wants. ASPI executive director Peter Jennings unabashedly describes himself as a “national security cowboy,” saying that “Australia needs more cowboy and less kowtow.” As Australian PM Scott Morrison has pushed record defense spending, Jennings called for even higher targets, saying “if we’re sliding towards war, the money must flow.”

This belligerent attitude towards military confrontation makes sense in the context of ASPI’s financials. Despite being cited as a ‘non-partisan expert’ on all things China, when it comes to the profits of war, ASPI has skin in the game.

That’s because ASPI—like many of the biggest players in Sinophobia, Inc—receives major funding from the Australian military and U.S. weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, ASPI received 69% of it’s funding—over AU$7 million—from the Australian department of defense and federal government. Another AU$1.89 million came from overseas government agencies—including the Embassies of Israel and Japan, the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department and the NATO Strategic Comms Center. Far from being a non-partisan counterbalance to imperialist state agendas, the same governments pushing geopolitical aggression on China are in fact ASPI’s primary funders.

Disturbingly, another AU$1.1 million came from defense industries and the private sector, including Lockheed Martin ($25,000 for a “strategic sponsorship”) and Northrop Grumman ($67,500 for an “ASPI Sponsorship”).

In a blatant display of their conflict of interest, the same weapons corporations sponsoring ASPI’s anti-China call to arms are also supplying the New Cold War on China. In 2016, the Australian department of defense awarded Lockheed Martin a AU$1.4 billion combat “combat system integrator” contract as part of its Future Submarines program to “stand up” to China. Under the same program, defense contractor Naval Group—which contributed a $16,666.68 “ASPI Sponsorship” in 2019-2020—was awarded a $605 million contract for submarine design.

The scope of potential profit from stoking military conflict with China is enormous. Under the auspices of the “Pivot to Asia,” the U.S. has ramped up arms exports to allies such as Japan and Australia as part of a new anti-China containment doctrine. From weapons exports totalling $7.8 billion to Australia and $6.28 billion to South Korea between 2014 and 2018 alone, to loosened regulations allowing military-drone exports to India, these bloated deals are an absolute windfall for U.S. weapons manufacturers.

Every dramatic report on the ‘China threat’ funnels towards the same result: more warships in the South China Sea, more reconnaissance planes sent into China’s airspace, and more missile and anti-missile stations across U.S. ‘allies’ and client states in the Asia-Pacific. The New Cold War on China means billions in profit for U.S. weapons manufacturers, who quietly fund the ‘research’ that provides the justification for increased military buildup vis-a-vis China.

A cycle of perpetual war

This vicious cycle of the military-industrial complex drives Sinophobia Inc. Having watched this convergence of corporate media, weapons manufacturing, and State Department interests manufacture consent for the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we should be able to recognize the pattern. But so far, it looks like the same toolkit is working yet again.

First, ‘independent’ security experts such as ASPI, funded by Western governments and their weapons industries, provide ‘irrefutable’ evidence of the so-called China threat.

Second, these reports are picked up, cited, and amplified by the corporate media and then absorbed by the general public.

Third, Western nations and their allies cite these reports on the ‘China threat’ to justify their own geopolitical ambitions and military aggression towards China.

And finally, defense departments award billion dollar contracts to weapons corporations to equip the militaristic “Pivot to Asia”—completing the cycle by padding the pockets of the very corporations funding the think tanks we started with.

Of course, ASPI is just one of several heavy hitters in the anti-China industry. Stalwarts of the D.C. security realm like the Center for Strategic & International Studies and the Council and Foreign Relations are similarly obliged to their state and military industry donors.

The Center for Strategic & International Studies has been described as one of the most influential think tanks in the world. Its dramatic reports on Chinese military operations and Chinese “foreign influence” campaigns garner headlines in Forbes, New York Times, and even left-leaning outlets like Politico. Bonnie Glaser, director of CSIS’s “China Power Project,” is a particularly sought-after commentator on China. She’s demonized Chinese subsidies to domestic industry, called Belt and Road Initiative a plan to bring countries into “China’s orbit” and “see authoritarianism strengthened,” called to “push back” against China’s foregrounding of Marxism as an alternative to free market neoliberalism, and called “many of the the things the Trump administration has done to highlight the threats that China poses…correct.”

None of these corporate media op-ed features, interviews, and press quotes bother to mention that CSIS counts among its “corporation and trade association donors” Northrop Grumman ($500,000 annual contribution), Boeing, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin ($200,000-$499,999 annual contribution), and Raytheon ($100,000-$199,999 annual contribution).

Even worse than simply accepting military industry funding, CSIS has held closed-door meetings with weapons industry lobbyists and lobbied for increased drone exports for the products of war manufactured by funders such as General Atomic and Lockheed Martin.

But instead of calling out this conflict of interest, corporate media uncritically lifts up these think tanks as supposedly ‘impartial’ security experts. Only a handful of independent news platforms bother to point out these ‘third-party’ interests in paving the way to perpetual war. Instead, these think tank employees are held up as objective experts and lavished with media attention, making them go-to sources for comments and editorial features on all things China.

According to mainstream media, there’s no conflict of interest: only a pending conflict with China to drum up support for.

A bipartisan revolving door

The incestuous relationship between the Pentagon, security think tanks, and the private weapons sector goes far beyond dirty money. High-level diplomats themselves frequently move back and forth from their posts in the defense department to the boards of weapons corporations and policy institutes, wielding their insider insights to help weapons corporations rake in federal money.

The revolving door of the military-industrial complex crosses party lines. Take Randall Schriver, a China hawk hand-picked by Steve Bannon to serve as the Trump Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Schriver was the founding president of the Project 2049 Institute, a hardline security think tank funded by weapons giants like Lockheed Martin and General Atomics and government entities including the Taiwan Ministry of National Defense and the National Endowment for Democracy. Predictably, under Schriver’s leadership, Project 2049 called for increased arms sales to Japan and Taiwan while sounding the alarm on the supposed threat of a “flash invasion” of Taiwan or a “sharp war” with Japan.

Not to be outdone, foreign policy veterans of the Obama Administration got rich forming ‘strategic consultancies’ dedicated to leveraging their insider status to help weapons corporations win federal contracts. Michèle Flournoy, a favored pick for a Biden administration’s defense secretary, served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012 and has overlapping roles as a founder of corporate geopolitics consultant group WestExec Advisors, and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank preaching expertise on “the China challenge” and the “North Korea threat” with the help of funding from the usual state and military industry suspects.

Given this resumé, it comes as no surprise that Flournoy has decried the “erosion of American deterrence” and called for new investment and innovation to “maintain the U.S. military’s edge” in Asia, a clear assurance that a Biden administration would mean new and growing contracts to old friends in the security industry.

Enemy number one

The cogs of the military-industrial-information complex have ensured that the debate on China is all but nonexistent. Anti-China posturing has become a defining issue of the November presidential election. But there is effectively zero policy distinction between the approaches espoused by the Biden and Trump camps—only a rhetorical competition playing out in campaign ads and stump speeches to prove who can really be ‘tougher on China.’

The revolving door of Sinophobia Inc. makes certain that whether Republicans or Democrats come out on top in November, the weapons contracts will continue to flow.

Despite incessant fear mongering over the looming threat of ‘Chinese aggression,’ China has been explicitly clear that it does not want conflict with the U.S., let alone hot war. In August meetings with the European Union, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi called for renewed cooperation, proclaiming that “a Cold War would be a step backwards.” Where the U.S. pursues unilateralism, sanctions, and the threat of military intervention to get its way, China has invested in international organizations, stepped up to fund the World Health Organization in the absence of the U.S., and promoted pandemic aid, cooperative vaccine development, and helped nations suffering under U.S. sanctions fight COVID-19.

Make no mistake: there is no supposed “mutual escalation” or “inter-imperial rivalry” here—U.S. aggression in military buildup, propaganda and economic sanctions is a one-sided push for conflict and war in spite of China’s repeated calls for mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and continued engagement premised on recognition of China’s national sovereignty and dignity.

U.S. political elites have turned to Sinophobia as a bogeyman to distract from the failures of capitalism, neoliberalism, and a violent U.S. empire that invests more in perpetual war than in basic health care and infrastructure for the American people. That’s what makes Sinophobia Inc. so effective: mass discontent fomented by an unresolved pandemic, rising unemployment, and American anxieties over the future can all be shunted onto the ‘real’ threat: China.

Sinophobia Inc. is working overtime to convince average Americans that China—and not white supremacy, capitalism, and militarism—is the ‘real enemy.’ It’s working: 78% of Americans blame China for the spread of COVID-19—more than blame the Trump administration itself for its handling of the pandemic. That’s why Congress has rubber-stamped a record defense budget for 2021 while declining to pass pandemic aid, eviction moratoriums, or other protections for American workers.

As Sinophobia Inc. draws us closer to war on China every day, it’s up to all of us to jam the gears of this war machine. That means a critical eye to the information apparatus busy manufacturing consent for a war that will only serve the bottom line of the American empire and the corporations that it serves.

The self-fueling war machine of think tanks, governments, and weapons corporations is chugging along, convincing the masses that conflict with China is in the national interest. But it’s clearer than ever that it’s the CEOs of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that stand to profit—at the expense of the rest of us.

The Left, the Election Crisis, and the 'Elephant in the Room'

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.

The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.

This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.

This crisis has been building for a long time.  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.

What will the working class do?

The working class is the elephant in the room. In the past, when communist and socialist political parties were strong, especially in developed imperialist countries with large working classes, when a political crisis developed in the ruling class, the response by a militant communist would be: “What is the working class going to do about this?”  Communist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, or Harry Haywood would ask their comrades: “How can the working class intervene in this crisis to defend its own class interests?”

During the times when these noted revolutionaries were active in Germany, Italy, and the U.S., it was understood by all the cadre and militants in the working class that the working class was ultimately the only class that could change the big equation — and finally, end capitalism. Moreover, it was understood that if the working class did not intervene during a political crisis, something very bad might happen, like the faction within the capitalist class prevailing that was considering the desperate option of turning to fascism.

On the other hand, there was the prospect that if the working class intervened in the political crisis in a correct and strong way, the political crisis could be turned into a revolutionary crisis, meaning that the working class would exploit the differences within the capitalist class, as well as its instability and weakness, to  make a socialist revolution.

The expression “the elephant in the room” means that people are talking around the real issue because they don’t know what to do about that issue. Very few revolutionaries are asking what the working class will do about the current election crisis because the question seems irrelevant.

Notwithstanding the amazing work stoppages that many pandemic frontline workers have engaged in to protect their safety, and the many other signs that militants in the working class are pushing back and carrying out more strikes, the working-class movement as a whole in the U.S. is weak organizationally and politically.

Thus, the expectation is that the working class is not going to intervene in defense of its class interests beyond voting for the Democrats, with some even voting for Trump. Militants should be neither angry nor frustrated with workers for voting for Biden. The way that they see it, they don’t have any other choice.

For revolutionaries, the main political battle regarding support for the Democratic Party is with other forces on the left who say that they are socialists and are opposed to capitalism, but will find some rationale, mostly fear, for supporting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for Trumpism. The Democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them.

The only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the Democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. This is true, not only in relation to the electoral struggle, but even more importantly, to the full rebirth of the class struggle against capitalism. This rebirth is already underway. However, it will not advance to the next level without the intervention of revolutionary class-conscious militants.

There’s no end to the questions surrounding the election crisis. What’s going to happen before the elections? What’s going to happen during and after the elections? How can progressives and revolutionaries respond to any development? From the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the biggest question is still: What can be done to insure that the U.S. working class begins to do all that is necessary to intervene in a crisis? Not now when it’s too weak, but soon, and the sooner the better.

Even in countries where the labor movement is close to one of the capitalist political parties, or there is a social democratic party that mostly supports what the capitalists want it to support, if an attempted coup or a fascist attack occurs the labor movement calls a general strike.

The election crisis should serve as a wake-up call. Yes, the working-class movement is weak. But revolutionaries can no longer afford to use that as an excuse to remove the working class from the discussion. Once we do that, we have surrendered.  Whatever ideas or demands revolutionaries put forward, they are of only symbolic and educational value if there is no army capable of fighting and defeating the enemy. That army is the working class, and the battlefield is the class struggle.

It should come as no surprise that many people, especially women, are saddened by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and are worried about who Trump will choose to replace her. When the working class is not organized as a class to defend its own class interests, who else can the people turn to in order to defend themselves but politicians and important individuals?

How did this happen to the working class?

Over a long period that began after the U.S. established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the world, generally speaking, the leaders of the labor movement – who were once relatively militant, and some even anti-capitalist — underwent a transformation that rendered them in many cases little more than appendages to the capitalist system.

Explaining how this happened over the course of the past three-quarters of a century is too much to go over here. But make a note:  How this happened should be studied and discussed. It’s important for every militant to know what happened.

Also important to know is that appearing to become an appendage to the system and the status quo is neither a natural nor a permanent state for the organized labor movement. It is an aberration that must — and will – be reversed. The conditions that led to the conservatism of the labor movement no longer exist, and as such, their conservatism is going to be replaced with revolutionary class struggle.

It should be noted that by and large, most of the left, including organizations that consider themselves Marxist and even revolutionary, have tended to base themselves on movements and struggles that were incorrectly seen as separate from the working class and the labor unions. The reason for this is that the labor movement seemed dormant.

Organizing and activity that seemed friendly to anti-capitalist views and organizational recruitment existed in the antiwar movement — and to some extent in the anti-racist movement and the women’s and LGBTQ2S+ movements. In truth, all of these movements are different fronts of the working-class movement, although that is not how they are viewed in most cases.

This unfortunate view is a product of the political weakness of the existing working-class movement. It’s time for such narrow and exclusionary views to give way to more inclusive and revolutionary views of who and what make up the working class today.

To some extent, the origins of these narrow and false ideas about what the working class is and who is in the labor movement are products of a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) agreement that union officials and leftists made after the anti-communist witch hunt – which forced many communists and socialists out of the unions – began to lift somewhat in the early 1960s.

The agreement was this: Radicals must stay out of the labor unions and refrain from trying to influence the working class with their radical ideas.  In exchange for agreeing to stay away from the working class, progressives and radicals could organize against the war in Vietnam and around other issues, but apart from obtaining some labor endorsements and having a few labor speakers at a rally, antiwar organizers were to stay away from the workers.

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

The examples of professional athletes protesting racism by refusing to play, and health care workers, Whole Foods and Amazon workers, and other workers walking off the job to protest being forced to work in unsafe conditions, has ignited a new struggle within and outside the organized labor movement over the need to carry out more and bigger work stoppages, and bring back the general strike.

Around Labor Day, a group of about 40 regional labor unions representing millions of workers issued a statement calling for conducting mass, nationwide work stoppages in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. While no concrete plans or dates for these actions has been announced, this development is a clear challenge to the conservative top leadership of the AFL-CIO and the unions that formed Change To Win.

This is good news, and it’s about time. These developments in the labor movement must be supported, joined, and pushed strongly by everyone who considers themselves progressive. It is nothing less than scandalous — and unacceptable — that the AFL-CIO’s top leadership has done little more than release a statement or two in response to the worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May, and the murders of others like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.

How is it possible that millions of people could be marching in the streets day after day on every continent, and yet the leaders of the U.S. labor movement cannot bring themselves to organize a one-hour nationwide work stoppage in support of this uprising?

A strategy to fuse all movements into a new working-class movement

 The scope of the election crisis is too big.  The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic is too big.  The scope of the capitalist crisis is too big.  And the scope of the racist attacks, whether by the police, FBI, or fascists, is too big to be addressed without a serious strategy towards the development of a revitalized working-class movement.  The attacks on the working class that are already underway — with much more to come — are too big for anti-capitalist radicals not to have such a strategy.

No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles there may be, it is imperative that a fusion of the mass movement in the streets develop against racism and fascism, and that it include all sectors of the working class that are either not organized or are under-organized: migrant workers, incarcerated workers, gig workers, street vendors, sex workers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, the homeless, the most oppressed people — and the organized labor movement.

It should be understood that the global uprising against racism this past spring and summer was, at its root, a working-class uprising.  The participants may not have  been conscious of this — and the uprising was not called in the name of the working class. But that does not change the fact that it was the multinational working class protesting in the streets. Going forward, future uprisings will be more class-conscious, with more of the many sectors of the working class in motion.

This fusion must come from below, and must not be led by the Democratic Party, or any other organization that is tied to the status quo and is an obstacle to real struggle. It is not necessary, and, in fact, it would be a mistake for the movement in the streets, or any other section of the working class that is not in the organized labor movement, to subordinate itself to conservative labor leaders.

The goal of fusion is to expand the working-class movement, to tear down the boundaries and antiquated conceptions that limit and divide the working class, and to push the entire working class in a revolutionary direction.

The formation of Workers Assemblies and a Workers Assembly movement may prove very helpful in this process

Whatever happens on or after Nov. 3, organizing the working class is the prize we must work for and stay focused on. We should be confident about our victory.

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism, via Monthly Review.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the ocean to life on Earth. Covering 71% of the planet’s surface, it contains 97% of the world’s surface water and is central to the great biogeochemical cycles that define the biosphere and make life possible. Marine plants generate half of the world’s breathable oxygen.

Millions of species of animals live in the ocean. Seafood is a primary source of protein for three billion people, and hundreds of millions work in the fishing industry.

The ocean’s metabolism–the constant flows and exchanges of energy and matter that have continued for hundreds of millions of years–is a vital part of the Earth System. As famed oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes, our fate and the ocean’s are inextricably intertwined.

Our lives depend on the living ocean–not just the rocks and water, but stable, resilient, diverse living systems that hold the world on a steady course favorable to humankind.(1)

The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush.… If the sea is sick, we’ll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.(2)

The living ocean is now being disrupted on a massive scale. It has changed before, but never, since an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, as rapidly as today. The changes are major elements of the planetary transition out of the conditions that have prevailed since the last ice age ended, towards a profoundly different biosphere–from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change… the implications for the ocean, and thus for all humans, are huge.(3)

Most popular accounts of the relationship between the ocean and climate change focus on melting ice and rising sea levels, and indeed those are critical issues. Greenland alone loses over 280 billion metric tons of ice a year, enough to cause measurable changes in the strength of the island’s gravity. At present rates, by 2100 the combination of global glacial melting and thermal water expansion will flood coastal areas where over 630 million people live today. Well over a billion people live in areas that will be hit by storm surges made bigger and more destructive by warmer seawater. Rapid action to slash greenhouse gas emissions would be fully justified even if rising seas were the only expected result of global warming.

Devastating as sea level rise will be, however, more serious long-term damage to the Earth System is being driven by what biogeochemist Nicolas Gruber calls a “triple whammy” of stresses on the oceans, caused by the growing rift in Earth’s carbon metabolism.

“In the coming decades and centuries, the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems will become increasingly stressed by at least three independent factors. Rising temperatures, ocean acidification and ocean deoxygenation will cause substantial changes in the physical, chemical and biological environment, which will then affect the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems in ways that we are only beginning to fathom.…

Ocean warming, acidification and deoxygenation are virtually irreversible on the human time scale. This is because the primary driver for all three stressors, i.e. the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, will cause global changes that will be with us for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years.(4)

Other marine ecologists have described ocean warming, acidification and oxygen loss as a “deadly trio,” because when they have occurred together in the past, mass extinctions of animal and plant life have followed.(5)

We will consider the elements of the deadly trio separately, but it is important to bear in mind that they are closely related, have the same causes, and frequently reinforce each other.

Part One: CORROSIVE SEAS

“Ocean acidification … is a slow but accelerating impact that will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.” —Sylvia Earle(6)

Ocean acidification has been called global warming’s equally evil twin. Both are caused by the radical increase in atmospheric CO2, and both are undermining Earth’s life support systems.

There is always a constant interchange of gas molecules across the air-sea interface, between atmosphere and ocean. CO2 from the air dissolves in the water; CO2 from the water bubbles into the air. Until recently, the two flows were roughly balanced: the amount of carbon dioxide in each element has not changed much for hundreds of thousands of years. But now, when atmospheric CO2 has risen 50%, the flow is out of balance. More carbon dioxide is entering the sea than leaving it.

That’s been good news for the climate. The ocean has absorbed about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and over 90% of the additional solar heat, half of that since 1997. If it hadn’t done so, global warming would already have reached catastrophic levels. As Rachel Carson wrote years ago, “for the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures…. Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature.”(7)

But there is a price to be paid for that service. Adding CO2 is changing the ocean’s chemistry. The formula is very simple:

H2O + CO2 → H2CO3Water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid.

Adding CO2 makes seawater more acidic.

Over the past century, the ocean’s pH level has fallen from 8.2 to 8.1. That doesn’t sound like much, but the pH scale is logarithmic, so a drop of 0.1 means that the oceans are now about 30% more acidic than they used to be.(8) That’s a global average–the top 250 meters or so are generally more acidic than the deeps, and acidification is more severe in high latitudes, because CO2 dissolves more easily in colder water.

The present rate of acidification is a hundred times faster than any natural change in at least 55 million years. If it continues, ocean acidity will reach three times the pre-industrial level by the end of this century.

Impact

Surprisingly, given that scientific concern about CO2 emissions started in the 1950s, little attention was paid to ocean acidification until recently. It was first named and described in a brief article in Nature in September 2003, and first discussed in detail in a 2005 Royal Society report that concluded acidification would soon go “beyond the range of current natural variability and probably to a level not experienced for at least hundreds of thousands of years and possibly much longer.”(9)

Those wake-up calls triggered the launch of hundreds of research projects seeking to quantify acidification more precisely, and to determine its effects. While there are still big gaps in scientific knowledge, there is now no doubt that ocean acidification is a major threat to the stability of the Earth System, one that is pushing towards a sixth mass extinction of life on our planet.(10)

Though formally correct, the word “acidification” is misleading, since the oceans are actually slightly alkaline, and the shift now underway only makes them a little less so. Even in the most extreme scenario, a thousand liters of seawater would still contain less carbonic acid than a small glass of cola.

However, just as raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 0.041 percent is causing global climate change, so a small increase in the amount of CO2 in seawater poses major threats to the organisms that live in that water. Reduced pH has already significantly changed the habitats that marine plants and animals depend on: a further reduction could be deadly for many of them.

The most-studied casualties of ocean acidification are calcifiers, the many organisms that take carbonate from the surrounding water to build their shells and skeletons. In seawater, carbonic acid quickly combines with available carbonate, making it unavailable for shell and skeleton building. Water with less than a certain concentration of carbonate becomes corrosive, and existing shells and skeletons start to dissolve.

As marine conservation biologist Callum Roberts writes, lower pH is already weakening coral reefs, and the problem will get much worse if CO2 emissions aren’t radically reduced soon.

The skeletons of corals on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have weakened measurably in the last twenty-five years and now contain 14 percent less carbonate by volume than they did before…. Ocean acidification has been dubbed ‘osteoporosis for reefs’ because of this skeletal weakening.…

If carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles from its current level, all of the world’s coral reefs will shift from a state of construction to erosion. They will literally begin to crumble and dissolve, as erosion and dissolution of carbonates outpaces deposition. What is most worrying is that this level of carbon dioxide will be reached by 2100 under a low-emission scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.(11)

About 25% of all fish depend on coral reefs for food and shelter from predators, so the shift that Roberts describes would be disastrous for marine biodiversity.

Other calcifiers weakened by ocean acidification include oysters, mussels, crabs, and starfish. Of particular concern are tiny shelled animals near the bottom of the food chain: if their numbers decline, many fish and marine mammals will starve. In particular:

• Single-celled Foraminifera are abundant in all parts of the ocean, and are directly or indirectly consumed by a wide variety of animals. A recent study compared present day foraminifera with samples collected 150 years ago in the Pacific by the famous Challenger expedition. The researchers found that “without exception, all modern foraminifera specimens had measurably thinner shells than their historical counterparts.” In some types of foraminifera, shell thickness is now 76% less than in the 1800s.(12)

• Pea-sized Pteropods, sometimes called sea butterflies, live mainly in cold water. An article in the journal Nature Geoscience reports “severe levels of shell dissolution” in live pteropods captured in the ocean near Antarctica, resulting in “increased vulnerability to predation and infection.”(13) Since pteropods are food for just about every larger marine animal from krill to whales, “their loss would have tremendous consequences for polar marine ecosystems.”(14)

Interference with shell and skeleton formation may not be the most deadly effect of ocean acidification. The metabolic systems of all organisms function best when the pH level of their internal fluids stays within a narrow range. This is particularly problematic for marine animals, including fish, whose blood pH tends to match the surrounding water. For some species, even a small reduction in blood pH can cause severe health and reproduction problems, even death.(15) A growing body of research suggests that ocean acidification alone will decimate some species of fish in this century, causing the collapse of major fisheries.(16)

Only long-term studies can determine exactly how acidification will affect global fish populations, but waiting for certainty is dangerous, because once acidification occurs, we are stuck with it. A recent study confirmed that “once the ocean is severely affected by high CO2, it is virtually impossible to undo these alterations on a human-generation timescale.” Even if some unknown (and probably impossible) geoengineering system rapidly returns atmospheric CO2 to the pre-industrial level, “a substantial legacy of anthropogenic CO2 emissions would persist in the oceans far into the future.”(17)

Warnings ignored

In 2008, 155 scientists from 26 countries signed a declaration “based on irrefutable scientific findings” about “recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry and their potential, within decades, to severely affect marine organisms, food webs, biodiversity, and fisheries.”

To avoid severe and widespread damages, all of which are ultimately driven by increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), we call for policymakers to act quickly to incorporate these concerns into plans to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at a safe level to avoid not only dangerous climate change but also dangerous ocean acidification.…

Policymakers need to realize that ocean acidification is not a peripheral issue. It is the other CO2 problem that must be grappled with alongside climate change. Reining in this double threat, caused by our dependence on fossil fuels, is the challenge of the century.…(18)

In 2009, twenty-nine leading Earth System scientists identified the level of ocean acidification as one of nine Planetary Boundaries–“non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at continental to global scales.”(19)

In 2013, the always-cautious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expressed high confidence that absorption of carbon dioxide is “fundamentally changing ocean carbonate chemistry in all ocean sub-regions, particularly at high latitudes.”

“Warming temperatures, and declining pH and carbonate ion concentrations, represent risks to the productivity of fisheries and aquaculture, and the security of regional livelihoods given the direct and indirect effects of these variables on physiological processes (e.g., skeleton formation, gas exchange, reproduction, growth, and neural function) and ecosystem processes (e.g., primary productivity, reef building and erosion).”(20)

The IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, published in 2019, concludes that “the ocean is continuing to acidify in response to ongoing ocean carbon uptake,” that “it is very likely that over 95% of the near surface open ocean has already been affected,” and that “the survival of some keystone ecosystems (e.g., coral reefs) are at risk.”(21)

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that acidification is a major threat to the world’s largest ecosystem, the governments of the world’s richest countries remain silent. The word oceans only appeared once in their Paris Agreement and acidification wasn’t mentioned at all. It remains to be seen whether the next UN Climate Change Conference, which has been postponed to December 2021, will respond appropriately–if it responds at all.

Part Two of “Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean,” will be published in mid-September.

This article continues my series on metabolic rifts. As always, I welcome your comments, corrections and constructive criticism.—IA

Notes:

1. Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Oceans Are One (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010), 20.

2. Sylvia A. Earle, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), xii.

3. Jelle Bijma et al., “Summary of ‘Climate Change and the Oceans.’”

4. Nicolas Gruber, “Warming Up, Turning Sour, Losing Breath: Ocean Biogeochemistry Under Global Change,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, May 2011, 1980, 1992.

5. Jelle D. Bijma et al., “Climate Change and the Oceans–What Does the Future Hold?” Marine Pollution Bulletin Sept., 2013.

6. Interviewed in John Collins Rudolf, “Q. and A.: For Oceans, Another Big Headache.” New York Times, May 5, 2010.

7. Rachel L. Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018 [1950]), 163-4.

8. More precisely, there are 30% more hydrogen (H+) ions.

9. Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett, “Anthropogenic Carbon and Ocean pH,” Nature, Sept. 25, 2003, 365; Royal Society, Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (London: Royal Society, 2005), 39.

10. Some argue that a mass extinction has already begun.

11. Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (New York: Penguin, 2013), 108,110.

12. Lyndsey Fox et al., “Quantifying the Effect of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Calcifying Plankton,” Scientific Reports, January 31, 2020.

13. N. Bednaršek et al., “Extensive Dissolution of Live Pteropods in the Southern Ocean,” Nature Geoscience, (December 2012) 881, 883.

14. Matthias Hofmann and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Ocean Acidification: A Millennial Challenge,” Energy & Environmental Science (September 2010), 1888-89

15. This is also true of humans. Our normal blood pH is 7.4: a drop of 0.2 can be fatal.

16. See, for example, Martin C. Hänsel et al., “Ocean Warming and Acidification May Drag down the Commercial Arctic Cod Fishery by 2100,” PLOS ONE, April 22, 2020. For a summary of research on biological and other effects of ocean acidification, see An Updated Synthesis of the Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Marine Biodiversity, published by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

17. Sabine Mathesius et al., “Long-term Response of Oceans to CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere,” Nature Climate Change, December 03, 2015, 1107-14.

18. “Monaco Declaration,” proceedings of Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World (Unesco, 2008).

19. Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009)

20. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg et al., “The Ocean,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1658.

21. IPCC, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019), 59, 66.

The Protracted Crisis of Capitalism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from People’s Democracy.

THERE is a commonly-held view that the current crisis in capitalism, which has resulted in a massive output contraction and increase in unemployment, is because of the pandemic; and that once the pandemic gets over, things will go back to “normal”.

This view is entirely erroneous for two reasons. The first which has been often discussed in this column, has to do with the fact that even before the pandemic the world economy was slowing down. In fact ever since the financial crisis of 2008 following the collapse of the housing bubble, the real economy of the world had never fully recovered. Small recoveries were followed quickly by collapses; and the low unemployment rates in the United States that had prompted Donald Trump’s triumphalism, were to a very large extent explicable by the reduced work participation rate after 2008. In fact if we assume the same work participation rate in 2020(just before the pandemic), as had prevailed on the eve of the financial crisis, then the unemployment rate in the U.S. was as high as 8 per cent as compared to the less than 4 per cent mentioned in official figures.

This slowing down in turn has been a result of the operation of neoliberal capitalism which has massively increased the share of economic surplus in output, both within countries and also at the world level, by keeping the vector of real wage-rates unchanged, even as the vector of labour productivities has increased; and this increase in the share of surplus, or this shift from wages to surplus, has lowered the level of aggregate demand for consumption goods, and hence of overall aggregate demand, as workers spend more on consumption out of a unit of income than the surplus earners.

The pandemic has occurred in this context, so that even after it gets over, the world will still be stuck with the crisis of over-production which had already engulfed it well before the pandemic. To get out of this crisis it is necessary to use State expenditure, provided such expenditure is financed by either taxes on capitalists or by a fiscal deficit ; State expenditure financed by taxes on workers will not help, since workers consume the bulk of their incomes anyway, so that State demand only substitutes workers’ demand without adding to aggregate demand.

But neither fiscal deficits nor taxes on capitalists are liked by finance capital, so that State expenditure as an anti-crisis measure is ruled out. This means that, even after the pandemic is over,not only will the crisis continue, but it will do so without any counteracting measures, at least as long as neoliberal capitalism lasts. This crisis therefore marks a dead-end for neoliberal capitalism.

There is however a second reason why even after the pandemic gets over, capitalism will still remain engulfed in a crisis; and this has to do with the fact that even if the demand for consumer goods recovers to the level where it had been before the pandemic, investment goods production will still remain below what it had been, and this very fact will also ensure that even the consumer good output does not get back to the level where it had been before the pandemic. This is what happens when an economy receives a major shock, of the kind that the pandemic represents for the world economy.

An example will make the point clear. Suppose before the pandemic the economy was growing at 2 per cent per annum. Then capitalists, anticipating a 2 per cent rate of growth, would have been adding to their capital stock also at 2 per cent. If the capital stock was 500, output was 100, then investment would have been 10, and consumption would have been 90. Let the share of post-tax profits and post-tax wage-bill in total private post-tax incomes be 50:50; and let all wages and 75 per cent of profits be consumed. If government consumption (assuming a balanced budget for simplicity) happens to be 20, then this 90 of consumption would have been divided as 20 by government, 30 by capitalists and 40 by workers.

Now, suppose, for argument’s sake, that after the pandemic, consumption recovers to 90. All of it can be produced by the existing capital stock requiring no additional investment. Moreover, there is no reason why the capitalists should expect output to grow at 2 per cent next year; so they would not add 10 to capital stock as they had done before the pandemic. Let us assume that they add only 5 to capital stock, and wait to see what happens before deciding to add any further to capital stock.

Two things will happen in such a case. First, in the capital goods sector, output will be only half of what it had been before the pandemic; likewise capacity utilisation in the capital goods sector will be only half of what it had been before the pandemic. Second, even the consumption demand of 90 cannot be sustained. Assuming the same ratios as above, an investment of 5, which must equal private savings, will generate a total consumption demand of only 55 (given by 20 of government+15 of capitalists out of total post-tax profits of 20 + 20 of workers). Total output will be only 60, equalling consumption of 55 and investment of 5.

The 90 of consumption therefore, which we assumed the world economy to reach, for argument’s sake, will not even materialise. The consumption goods sector’s capacity utilisation will be 61 per cent of what it had been before the pandemic (55 divided by 90). This will be higher than the ratio of capacity utilisation in the investment goods sector compared to what it had been before the pandemic (in fact it will now be only 50 per cent of what it had been earlier).

Any severe external shock to the capitalist system has this effect, namely that investment recovers only after a long time; and precisely for that reason even the recovery of consumption, though less delayed than the recovery of investment, also takes a fairly long time.

In other words, even if there had been no crisis of over-production engulfing world capitalism before the pandemic, the sheer external shock represented by the pandemic would have kept the system mired in crisis for quite a long time. The existence of an over-production crisis predating the pandemic only makes matters worse.

This is exactly what had happened in the U.S. in the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The consumption goods sector had recovered relatively faster than the investment goods sector, as a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal which had enlarged government spending. The recovery of the investment goods sector occurred only when there was an increase in armament expenditure in preparation for the war, which is why it is said that the recovery from the Great Depression was made possible by the war.

But the New Deal had meant larger government spending which is why at least the consumption goods sector had recovered somewhat, even before the war. Globalised finance capital today does not even allow larger government spending within any economy, either by taxing capitalists or by enlarging the fiscal deficit, the only two ways that such spending can increase aggregate demand. Therefore even the depression in the consumption goods sector will last much longer that in the 1930s, so that, altogether, world capitalism will remain sunk in a protracted crisis for a very long time.

In an economy like India where the government obeys the dictates of finance capital quite slavishly, the prospects of recovery are even bleaker. None of the measures adopted by the government to revive the economy addresses the issue of demand, because the government does not understand that the crisis is because of insufficient aggregate demand. In fact, the government measures are such that they will only aggravate the deficiency of aggregate demand, thereby worsening the crisis rather than alleviating it. As the crisis gets aggravated, however, the government will resort even more strongly to repression against the working people, and intensify even further its communal agenda.

The Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism

By Vijay Prashad

Republished from Monthly Review.

In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.(1) The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled. The character of advancement and backwardness for Lenin does not only rest on the question of technological and economic development; it rests, essentially, on the nature of the mass struggle.

In Europe, Lenin wrote, the bourgeoisie was exhausted. It no longer had any of the revolutionary capacity with which it once fought off the feudal order; although even here, the bourgeoisie was pushed along reluctantly by the rising of the masses–as in the French Revolution of 1789–and it was the bourgeoisie that betrayed the mass struggle and opted for the return of authoritarian power as long as its class interests were upheld. By 1913, the European bourgeoisie had been corrupted by the gains of imperialism; the rule of the European bourgeoisie had to be overthrown by the workers.

In Asia, meanwhile, Lenin identified the dynamism of the national liberation movements. ‘Everywhere in Asia’, he wrote, ‘a mighty democratic movement is growing, spreading, and gaining in strength…Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light, and freedom’. Until this period, Lenin had focused his attention on the revolutionary developments in Russia, with a detailed study of agrarian conditions and capitalism in his country and with debates over the nature of organisation in the revolutionary camp. The breakthroughs in 1911 that took place in China, Iran, and Mexico with their variegated and complex revolutionary processes, nonetheless struck him. In 1912, Lenin would write on numerous occasions of the peoples of Asia–such as Persia and Mongolia–who ‘are waging a revolutionary struggle for freedom’, and he would push his party to condemn Tsarist imperialist attacks on Persia and the ‘revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people, which is bringing emancipation to Asia and is undermining the rule of the European bourgeoisie’.(2)

Lenin had tracked developed in eastern Asia ever since the Tsarist empire opened hostilities against China by invading Manchuria in 1900 and then against Japan in 1904-05 in Manchuria and Korea. In 1900, Lenin took a strong anti-war position, arguing that even though the Tsar had not declared war in 1900, ‘war is being waged nonetheless’.(3) ‘The autocratic tsarist government’, Lenin wrote, ‘has proved itself to be a government of irresponsible bureaucrats serviley cringing before the capitalist magnates and nobles’; meanwhile, the war resulted in ‘thousands of ruined families, whose breadwinners have been sent to war; an enormous increase in the national debt and the national expenditure; mounting taxation; greater power for the capitalists, the exploiters of the workers; worse conditions for the workers; still greater mortality among the peasantry; famine in Siberia’. ‘The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer’, argued Lenin in an early demonstration of his internationalism.

The Tsarist empire, along with the European imperialists, had developed a ‘counterrevolutionary coalition’, Lenin wrote in 1908 in his reflection on the Balkans, Turkey, and Persia. How should the socialists react to this policy of imperialism? ‘The very essence of proletarian policy at this stage’, he wrote in Proletary, ‘should be to tear the mask from these bourgeois hypocrites and to reveal to the broadest masses of the people the reactionary character of the European governments who, out of fear of the proletarian struggle at home, are playing, and helping others play, the part of gendarme in relation to the revolution in Asia’.(4)
Within Europe, the oppressed nationalities–such as the Polish and the Irish–demonstrated the important spirit of democracy that Lenin had detected from Mexico to China. Unlike many other Marxists–such as Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky–Lenin fully supported the Easter Rising in English-occupied Ireland in 1916. It was in this context that Lenin wrote in July 1916, ‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.’(5) As he studied these movements with more care, the national liberation struggles no longer were seen as mere ‘bacilli’ and not ‘real’, but these movements were themselves partners in a global struggle. Lenin began to conceptualise a strategic unity between the nationalism of the oppressed and the proletariat in the imperialist states. ‘The social revolution’, he wrote in October 1916, ‘can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movements in the underdeveloped, backward, oppressed nations’.(6)

Lenin’s great advance over Second International Marxism is clarified by the centrality he placed of anti-colonial national liberation, of the struggles of oppressed nationalities by the jackboot of imperialism. For Lenin, the democratic struggles of anti-colonialism were lifted to parity with the proletariat struggles inside the advanced industrial states; it was the international cognate of his theory of the worker-peasant alliance.(7)

In 1914, Lenin published a long series of articles on the theme of ‘national self-determination’ in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment).(8) These were his longest statements on the topic, even though Lenin was to return to the idea over the next decade. Like much of Lenin’s work, this essay was not written to elaborate on the idea of national self-determination in itself; Lenin wrote the article to answer a position initially taken by the Rosa Luxemburg in 1908-09. In that article, ‘The National Question and Autonomy’, published in Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny (Panorama Social Democracy), Luxemburg argued against the right of self-determination for the Polish people.(9) Initially, Stalin responded to Luxemburg (in Prosveshcheniye, March-May 1913), but Stalin’s essay did not directly confront Luxemburg’s theses (he was more content to take on Karl Renner and Otto Bauer).(10) It was left to Lenin, the following year, to offer a full critique of Luxemburg.

Lenin argued that an oppressed nation must be allowed its freedom to secede from an oppressor state. Tsarism and colonialism not only crushed the ability of the people of its peripheral states and its colonial dominions to live full lives, but it also contorted the lives of those who seemed to benefit from colonial rule (including workers at the core of the empire). Secession, for Lenin, was a democratic right. If later, because of economic pressures, the proletariat of an independent state would like to freely unite with the proletariat of their previous colonial state that would be acceptable; their unity would now be premised upon freedom not oppression. Over the course of the next decade, Lenin would develop this argument in a series of short essays. Most of the essays, written in German, were translated into Russian in the 1920s by N. K. Krupskaya and published in the Lenin Miscellany volumes, later in the Collected Works. In 1967, Moscow’s Progress Publishers put these essays into a small book under the title, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (it is available in volume 20 of Lenin’s Collected Works). Their appearance in a book, then, was not intentional since Lenin had never written a book on the subject. This was a collection of interventions and articles that had the gist of his analysis on the question.(11) It is these interventions, however, that allow us to see the richness of Lenin’s argument about anti-colonialism and self-determination.(12)

Bourgeois Nationalism

The question of self-determination came to the fore because of the social forces unleashed by the 1905 Russian Revolution and because of Tsarist expansion into Manchuria and Korea. Different social groups within the Tsarist Empire began to make their own claims for freedom, which had to be represented in the new political parties that emerged on the partly freed up civil arena. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) had to, therefore, address the question of national self-determination frontally: how should the various people within the Tsarist empire struggle for their freedom? Must they remain under the yoke of the State, even as this State would be at some point be free from Tsarism? Luxemburg was specially involved in this debate because of her roots in the Polish Social Democratic movement, which had since the 19th century been involved in questions of freedom for Poland from the tentacles of Tsarist power. In the world of international socialism, it was often the Polish parties that made the strongest application of the idea of the right to self-determination. That was the case in 1896, when it was the Polish Socialist Party that called for the independence of Poland at the International Socialist Congress in London. At that Congress, the delegates passed a resolution in favor of ‘the complete right of all nations to self-determination and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national, or other despotism’.(13)

Polish social democrats at their own Congress (1903) and at the Congress of the RSDLP (1906) agitated to sharpen Social Democracy’s view on self-determination. Little seemed to divide the position of Luxemburg from Lenin at this time, except that in the hallways of the meetings the Poles did express their reservations against the idea of a right to self-determination. It was the working-class that had rights, Luxemburg wrote in her 1908 pamphlet, not nations. The nub of Luxemburg’s unease with the theory of the ‘right to self-determination’ is captured in a long quotation from her 1908 pamphlet,

The formula of the ‘right of nations’ is inadequate to justify the position of socialists on the nationality question, not only because it fails to take into account the wide range of historical conditions (place and time) existing in each given case and does not reckon with the general current of the development of global conditions, but also because it ignores completely the fundamental theory of modern socialists – the theory of social classes.

When we speak of the ‘right of nations to self-determination,’ we are using the concept of the ‘nation’ as a homogeneous social and political entity. But actually, such a concept of the ‘nation’ is one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that misty veil, like the concepts of the ‘freedom of citizens,’ ‘equality before the law,’ etc., conceals in every case a definite historical content.

In a class society, ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and ‘rights.’ There literally is not one social area, from the coarsest material relationships to the most subtle moral ones, in which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated ‘national’ entity. In the sphere of economic relations, the bourgeois classes represent the interests of exploitation–the proletariat the interests of work. In the sphere of legal relations, the cornerstone of bourgeois society is private property; the interest of the proletariat demands the emancipation of the propertyless man from the domination of property. In the area of the judiciary, bourgeois society represents class ‘justice,’ the justice of the well fed and the rulers; the proletariat defends the principle of taking into account social influences on the individual, of humaneness. In international relations, the bourgeoisie represent the politics of war and partition, and at the present stage, a system of trade war; the proletariat demands a politics of universal peace and free trade. In the sphere of the social sciences and philosophy, bourgeois schools of thought and the school representing the proletariat stand in diametric opposition to each other.

The possessing classes have their worldview; it is represented by idealism, metaphysics, mysticism, eclecticism; the modern proletariat has its theory–dialectic materialism. Even in the sphere of so-called ‘universal’ conditions–in ethics, views on art, on behavior–the interests, world view, and ideals of the bourgeoisie and those of the enlightened proletariat represent two camps, separated from each other by an abyss. And whenever the formal strivings and the interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie (as a whole or in its most progressive part) seem identical–for example, in the field of democratic aspirations – there, under the identity of forms and slogans, is hidden the most complete divergence of contents and essential politics.

There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the self-determination of the ‘nation’ in a society formed in such a manner. If we find in the history of modern societies ‘national’ movements, and struggles for ‘national interests,’ these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of ‘national interests’ it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the ‘nation’ (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class.(14)

For Luxemburg, the idea of the nation is an ideological smokescreen utilised by the bourgeoisie to create horizontal linkages against the vertical hierarchies of social life. It is a useful mechanism to build national economies and national polities that benefit the class rule of the bourgeoisie. That is the reason why the idea of the right to national self-determination had to be defeated.

Lenin did not disagree with the spirit of Luxemburg’s analysis. He agreed with her that the bourgeoisie’s own class power is most efficiently wielded through the national container. ‘The economic basis of [nationalist] movements’, he wrote in his 1914 reply, ‘is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed’.(15) Therefore, Lenin notes, ‘the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The profoundest economic factors drive towards this goal, and therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the typical, normal state for the capitalist period is the national state’. Here there is no difference between Lenin and Luxemburg, with both in agreement that national movements are along the grain of capitalist development, and that the advantages of nationalism in the European experience are first garnered by the bourgeoisie.

Equal Rights of Nations and International Solidarity of Workers

If this analysis is all that there is to it, and if it is correct, then Luxemburg’s antipathy to nationalism seems more coherent than Lenin’s ambivalence. But this is not all there is to it, at least as far as Lenin is concerned. Luxemburg’s approach to the idea of nationalism, Lenin suggested, reduced the national question to economics and to economic independence. It was not interested in the political question, in the hunger for freedom among people who had been colonised. Capitalism’s tendency to expansion out of the national container contained the seeds of imperialism; at a certain stage of its economic development, the national bourgeoisie sought the advantages of the nation-state; but as its dynamism pushed outwards, this bourgeoisie’s ambitions mimicked the imperial exertions of its aristocratic ancestors. It is to this end that Lenin made a distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors (the Great Russians and the English) and the nationalism of the oppressed (the Poles and the Irish). This distinction, Lenin wrote in 1915, ‘is the essence of imperialism’.(16) The nationalism of the oppressor, of the Great Russians and the English for example, is always to be fought against. There is nothing in the character of its nationalism that is worthy of support. Its chauvinism leads it to world conquest, a dynamic that not only shatters the well being of the oppressed but also corrupts its own citizenry.

On December 10, 1869, Marx wrote to Engels on the Irish question. ‘The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland’, he wrote. ‘English reaction in England has its roots in the subjugation of Ireland’ (Lenin quotes part of this in his 1914 pamphlet).(17) Drawing from Marx, Lenin wrote in his 1915 essay on self-determination, ‘The freedom of [the English] was cramped and mutilated by the fact that it oppressed another nation. The internationalism of the English proletariat would have remained a hypothetical phrase were it not to demand the separation of Ireland’.(18) Much the same kind of logic applied to Russia, whose Social Democrats were urged by Lenin to demand freedom for its oppressed nations. ‘Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland’, Lenin wrote, ‘Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although this nationalism is the most formidable at the present time, it is the nationalism that is less bourgeois and more feudal, and it is the principle obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle’.(19) It had to be confronted. Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg thought otherwise.

Their difference was sharp in the second half of Lenin’s distinction. The Great powers not only annex the economies of their subjects, but they also drain their political power. National self-determination of the oppressed contains both the oppressed bourgeoisie’s plans to suborn the economic to their own ends, but also that of the oppressed proletariat’s hope to fight their bourgeoisie over how to organize their nation. ‘The bourgeois nationalism of every oppressed nation’, Lenin argued, ‘has a general democratic content which is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we support unconditionally, while strictly distinguishing it from the tendency towards national exceptionalism, while fighting against the tendency of the Polish bourgeoisie to oppress the Jews, etc., etc’. Lenin carefully worked out the formula for this unconditional support. If the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation ‘fights against the oppressing one’, then the Social Democrats would support them wholeheartedly. If, however, ‘the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism’, then the Social Democrats stand opposed to them. ‘We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressing nation, but we do not condone the strivings for the privileges on the part of the oppressed nation’.(20)

To ‘not condone the strivings’ of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations sets the Social Democrats and their class allies the crucial task that separates them from the liberals and their class allies. The Social Democrats both stand against the nationalism of the oppressed nation and against the strivings of the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation to supplant that of the oppressor nation. Workers in the oppressed nation are not to submit to the rule of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, but to confront it with as much determination as they would fight against the imperial bourgeoisie. The fight for national self-determination must not divide workers in the imperial core and in the imperial periphery. Those in the core must fight against imperial nationalism, and those in the periphery must fight against both imperial nationalism and the nationalism of their bourgeoisie. The latter have a double task, formidable for the complexity of strategy and tactics demanded of them. They are to fight both for ‘the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination’, and for ‘the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle’.(21) In other words, Social Democrats are not invested in nationalism as an end in itself. The final goal is internationalism of the proletariat, but it must go through the nationalism of the oppressed. The twin tasks of Social Democracy are then to fight for ‘the equal rights of nations and international solidarity of the workers’.(22)

A Free Union

What are the practical means by which this nationalism of the oppressed manifests itself? Lenin argued that the oppressed regions should secede from the oppressor nations, or, in other words, they need to win their independence. If Social Democracy does not call for the right to secession, its politics would ‘empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy’.(23) Plainly, the ‘self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, the formation of an independent national state’. But an independent national state is not the end of the process. It is here that Lenin carved out new terrain in the Marxist theory of nationalities and self-determination (although once more drawing from insights in Marx’s letters to Engels on the Irish question). Marxists and Social Democracy recognize the economic and political advantages of bigger geographical entities: they are both able to command more resources and larger markets, and they are less vulnerable to military conquest. The end goal is to form vibrant and genuine unions of large, non-homogenous areas,

We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.(24)

In his March 1916, Nine Theses on Self-Determination, Lenin wrote, ‘a free union is a false phrase without right to secession’.(25) Drawing from Marx on Ireland, Lenin wrote, ‘the demand for the right of secession for the sake of splitting and isolated countries’ is not an end in itself; it is towards a process ‘to create more durable and democratic ties’.(26) Further, Lenin wrote, ‘only in this way could Marx maintain—in contradiction to the apologists of capital who shout that the freedom of small nations to secede is utopian and impracticable and that not only economic but also political concentration is progressive—that this concentration is progressive when it is non-imperialist, and that nations should not be brought together by force, but by a free union of the proletarians of all countries.’(27)

To defend this right to secession, Lenin wrote in August 1915, ‘does in no way mean to encourage the formation of small states, but on the contrary it leads to a freer, more fearless and therefore wider and more universal formation of larger governments and unions of governments–a phenomenon more advantageous for the masses and more in accord with economic development’.(28) Capitalism dynamically grew to encompass the planet, and it sought out larger and larger areas of operation. This is the tendency not only for firms to agglomerate toward monopoly control over markets, but also for states to enlarge through imperial or colonial policies (this is the general dynamic identified by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism). ‘Imperialism means that capital has outgrown the framework of national states’, Lenin wrote in 1915; ‘it means that national oppression has been extended and heightened on a new historical foundation’.(29) Monopoly capital flourished in large, imperial states. Imperialism was rooted in the political economy of the time. It had to be confronted not by morality but by the growth of political movements that undermined its power, in other words, by a combination of proletarian movements and movements of the oppressed nationalities. ‘It follows from this’, Lenin argued, ‘that we must connect the revolutionary struggle for socialism with a revolutionary program on the national question’.

Luxemburg fought for the ‘freedom from national oppression’ and not for ‘the right of self-determination of nations’. For her, national oppression was just another form of oppression, and it should be confronted as just another oppressive force. For Lenin, national oppression played a specific role in the operation of imperialism, and it had to be confronted in a specific way, by encouragement of secession of the oppressed nationalities in order not to petrify their national culture as separate from that of other cultures, but to work toward a proletarian internationalist unity of the future. Lenin’s approach was not a moral approach, therefore, but one that emerged out of his analysis of imperialism and the national movements that had emerged in opposition to it. His endorsement of nationalism was not premised on the assumption that the small states would somehow undermine imperialism; it was understood that democratic states, with the proletariat in each making links with each other, would be able to take advantage of the new economic scale to forge a genuine unity.

Nationalism would not, as Luxemburg acidly put it, mean ‘the right to eat off gold plates’.(30) But it would mean, as Lenin noted, part of a three-point agenda:

• Complete equality for all nations.

• The right of nations to self-determination.

• The amalgamation of the workers of all nations.

This is ‘the national program that Marxism…teaches the workers’.

Karl Radek, the Austrian Marxist, waded into the debate in 1915 to argue that the struggle for national self-determination is ‘illusionary’ (‘Annexations and Social Democracy’, Berner Tagwacht, October 28-29).(31) One of Radek’s objections that rankled Lenin was that a truly class project would abjure democratic political demands that do not threaten capitalism. There are some democratic demands that can be won in the era of capitalism and there are others that must be struggled with even in a socialist society, Lenin argued. ‘We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and revolutionary tactics relative to all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, official elected by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, all these demands are realizable only as an exception, and in an incomplete, distorted form’.(32) Social Democracy has to ‘formulate in a consistently revolutionary manner every one of our democratic demands’ because the proletariat must be ‘educated in the spirit of the most consistent and determined revolutionary democracy’. To contest the right of national self-determination for oppressed nations is to deny them their democratic rights and to undermined revolutionary democracy.

In the USSR and in the Comintern

Lenin’s formulation from 1914-1916 enabled a clear position in practice after the Soviet revolution (1917). Two tasks presented themselves along the grain of national self-determination.

• How should the new Soviet state deal with the question of its own nationalities?

• How should the newly created Communist International (1919) confront the nationalist movements in the colonies?

On January 3, 1918, Lenin, as part of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People. It was subsequently adopted by the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets as the 1918 Constitution (the essence remained in the 1924 Constitution). The second article establishes that the Soviet Republic is based ‘on the principle of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics’. The Council of People’s Commissars had already proclaimed the independence of Finland, removed Russian troops from Persia and committed itself to self-determination for Armenia. On paper, this was unassailable. The problem is that counter-revolutionary forces in its border states, the very states that had been promised the right to secession, attacked the new Soviet state. The Soviets hastily sought alliances with these states (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia for instance), in which pro-Bolshevik forces were supported by the Soviets and counterrevolutionaries were defeated. Self-determination of the nation was a formula by which the states were afforded nominal independence if they were not hostile to the Soviets. When Bolsheviks (such as Georgy Pyatakov) in these states did argue for full dissolution into Russia, Lenin called them Great Russians and opposed them. The principle of self-determination was sacrosanct, even when the counter-revolution threatened the new Soviet state (Luxemburg, in her essay on the Russian Revolution identified this weakness, ‘While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself’).(33) In 1922, Stalin wished to curtail the rights of the new border-states through a policy called ‘autonomisation’, namely that these states would dissolve themselves into the USSR by gaining nominal autonomy. Lenin was adamantly opposed to this policy. ‘We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR and others, equal, and enter with them, on an equal basis, into a new union, a new federation’.(34) This federation was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. This principle was already there in the 1918 draft, and in the first Soviet Constitution,

At the same time, endeavoring to create a really free and voluntary, and therefore all the more firm and stable, union of the working classes of all the nations of Russia, the Constituent Assembly confines its own task to setting up the fundamental principles of a federation of Soviet Republics of Russia, while leaving it to the workers and peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own authoritative Congress of Soviets whether they wish to participate in the federal government and in the other federal Soviet institutions, and on what terms.(35)

The logic of the federation within the USSR applied similarly to the colonial question. In the 1918 declaration, Lenin had written that the new state must have a ‘complete break with the barbarous policy of bourgeois civilization, which has built the prosperity of the exploiters belonging to a few chosen nations on the enslavement of hundreds of millions of working people in Asia, in the colonies in general, and in the small countries’.(36)

When the Communist International (Comintern) met for its first meeting in 1919, the jubilation of the Soviet experience combined with the potential revolution in Europe (particularly Germany) and the emergence of working-class and peasant movements in Asia defined its outcome. The Comintern addressed the ‘proletariat of the entire world’, telling them,

‘The emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands’.(37) Nationalism of the oppressed nations barely earned a mention. The defeat of the German revolution and the setbacks in the colonies provoked a more sober tone at the second Comintern meeting (1920). Lenin’s views on the colonial (Eastern) question drew from his more capacious attitude toward nationalisms of the oppressed. It was the presence of the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy that stayed Lenin’s hand and curtailed his more ebullient support for anti-colonial nationalism. The second thesis of the Comintern emerged out of a compromise formulation between Lenin’s own draft and Roy’s emendations (with the Dutch Marxist Henk Sneevliet holding their hands to the same pen),

As the conscious express of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasize the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasize the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, privileged nations, as a counter to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.(38)

Nothing in this thesis contradictions the spirit of Lenin’s own view on self-determination, expect in so far as this makes explicit Lenin’s hesitancy over the character of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The 9th thesis said that the Comintern ‘must directly support the revolutionary movement among the nations that are dependent and do not have equal rights (for example Ireland, the Blacks in America, and so forth) and in the colonies’.(39) At the same time, the Comintern, in the 11th Thesis noted that it must engaged in a ‘resolute struggle’ against the attempt to ‘portray as communist the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries that are not truly communist’.(40) The Comintern supports the revolutionary movements in the colonies ‘only on condition that the components are gathered in all backward countries for future proletarian parties–communist in fact and not only in name–and that they are educated to be conscious of their particular tasks, that is, the tasks of struggling against the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nation’. What the Comintern ‘must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo’.(41) Lenin’s general principles articulated in his essays from 1914 onwards were enshrined in the Soviet Constitution and in the Comintern, with some alterations to fit the new situations and the new class configurations.

No surprise that radicals from the colonised world–such as Ho Chi Minh and José Carlos Mariategui–found Leninism to be the heart and soul of their political outlook. It was this anti-colonial Marxism that drew radical nationalists from the Dutch colonies of Indonesia to the French colonies of West Africa, and it was this strong theory of anti-colonial national self-determination that forged ties for the Marxist left across these worlds.(42) Little wonder then that the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’ tends to ignore Lenin, to jump from Marx to Lukacs and Gramsci, evading the fact that Lukacs wrote a book on Lenin and that Gramsci developed his own thought with Lenin in mind; the leap over Lenin is a leap not only over the experience of the October Revolution but it is a leap past the Marxism that then develops in the Third World, a leap into abstract philosophy with little engagement with praxis and with the socialism that develops–not in the advanced industrial states–but in the realm of necessity, in the former colonised world from China to Cuba. In those outer reaches, where revolutions have been successful, it is the anti-colonial Lenin that guides the way.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Notes

1. Lenin, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’, Pravda, 18 May 1913, Collected Works, vol. 19, pp. 99-100.

2. Lenin, ‘Draft Resolution of the Tasks of the Party in the Present Situation’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 456 and ‘Resolutions of the Conference. The Russian Organising Commission for Convening the Conference’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 485.

3. Lenin, ‘The War on China’, Iskra, no. 1, December 1900, Collected Works, vol. 4, pp. 372-77.

4. Lenin, ‘Events in the Balkans and in Persia’, Proletary, no. 37, 16 October 1908, Collected Works, vol. 15, p. 221.

5. Lenin, ‘The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up’, July 1916, Collected Works, vol. 22, p. 357.

6. Lenin, ‘A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’, Zvezda, October 1916, Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 60.

7. Vijay Prashad, ‘For Comrade Lenin on his 150th Birth Anniversary’, Lenin 150, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020.

8. All these articles are in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 20.

9. Horace B. Davis collected the five articles by Luxemburg from her Kraków journal Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny in The National Question. Selected Writings, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

10. J. V. Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, Collected Works, vol. 2, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953.

11. V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967.

12. Vijay Prashad, ‘Vladimir Ílyiç Lenin/Uluslarin Kaderlerini Tayin Hakki’, Marksist Klasikleri Okuma Kilavuzu, Istanbul: Yordam Kitap, 2013.

13. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 107. For a critical appraisal of Polish Social Democracy, see Eric Blanc, ‘The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893–1919)’, Historical Materialism, vol. 25, issue 4, 2017.

14. Luxemburg, The National Question, pp. 133-135.

15. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 396.

16. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

17. On 24 October 1869, Engels wrote to Marx, ‘Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to subjugate another. All English abominations have their origin in the Irish pale. I still have to bone up on the Cromwellian period, but it appears clear to me that things in England would have taken another turn but for the necessity of military rule in Ireland and creating a new aristocracy’. Marx/Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43, p. 362.

18. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 410.

19. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

20. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

21. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 432.

22. In an early formulation, Lenin argued not for the ‘self-determination of nations’ but for the ‘self-determination of the proletariat’. ‘We on our part concern ourselves with the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than with the self-determination of peoples or nations’. (‘On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social Democrats’, Iskra, 1 February 1903, Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 327). It appears that this position is close to that of Luxemburg, that nationalism of the bourgeoisie had to be opposed in all respects, and that the Social Democrats must take a class view over a national view. Over the course of the decade, Lenin changed his position–no longer was there the emphasis on the ‘self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality’. Lenin now saw the difference between the oppressor nationality and the oppressed nationality, which nuanced his stand a great deal.

23. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

24. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 412-413.

25. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 143.

26. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 165.

27. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 150.

28. Lenin, ‘Socialism and War. The Attitude of the RSDLP Towards the War’, Sotsial-Demokrat, 1 November 1914, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 316.

29. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

30. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 123.

31. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek, the last internationalist, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1970.

32. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

33. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism?, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 49-50.

34. Lenin, ‘On the Establishment of the USSR’, 26 September 1922, Collected Works, vol. 42, pp. 421-422.

35. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 425.

36. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 424.

37. ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World’, 6 March 1919, Liberate the Colonies. Communism and Colonial Freedom, 1917-1924, ed. John Riddell, Vijay Prashad, and Nazeef Mollah, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019, p. 33.

38. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 94.

39. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 97.

40. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

41. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

42. Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.