The Struggle between the Future and the Past: Where Is Cuba Going?

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Republished from Monthly Review.

I have two favorite sayings. One draws upon the dialogue in Shakespeare’s Henry the VI part 2 when Jack Cade envisions that the effect of his plot will be that “all the realm shall be in common.” To this, comrade Dick responds, “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

I’ve replaced this statement with “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the economists.” It’s not the result of many years of surviving in economics departments filled and overfulfilled with neoclassical economists. After all, there were none that I can recall who wanted a realm in which all would be in common. Rather, my priority came from of observation of economists in countries oriented toward building socialism.

Whether it was observing upon visits to the Faculty of Economics of the University of Havana that the Marxists had been sequestered in the Department of Economic Development while the real teaching of economics was in the Micro and Macro departments. Or learning that at Karl Marx University in Budapest the basic text was Samuelson. Or that Milton Friedman and his ilk were celebrated in their lectures in China. Or that I found Russian economists commenting on tendencies toward egalitarianism “as alien to the proletariat.” Many reasons to reach for my guns.

Yet, who could blame them? If when these countries were facing significant economic problems, the choice was between dogmatic incantations of Marxism drawn from “real socialism” versus a self-confident belief in the magical properties of the market, the attraction of the best and brightest students to the latter would not be astonishing. No surprise that Vietnamese students told me the most boring classes they had in economics were those in Marxism, taught by the worst professors who simply read from the textbook.

But remember what they were learning and going on to teach and advise. The idea of the market has as its premise separation–separation between buyer and seller, separation between sellers, separation between buyers. Separation, atomism, alienation–what is the place of these in trying to build socialism? In the struggle to the death between the Future and the Past that is Revolution (as Fidel said), what is their place? [1]

Marta’s Questions

How can we judge the progress of that struggle between the Future and the Past? In her A World to Build (and in the closing section of her speech upon receiving the Libertador Prize for this book), Marta Harnecker posed a series of concrete questions about left governments in Latin America under the heading, “a guide to judging how much progress is being made”:

• Do the governments mobilize workers and the people in general to carry out certain measures, and are they contributing to an increase in the people’s ability and power? Do they understand the need for an organized, politicized people, able to exercise the necessary pressure that can weaken the state apparatus and power they inherited and thus drive forward the proposed transformation process? Do they understand that our people must be protagonists and not supporting actors? Do they listen to the people and let them speak? Do they understand that they can rely on the people to fight the errors and deviations that come up along the way? Do they give the people resources and call on them to exercise social control over the process? To sum up, is the government contributing to the creation of a popular subject who is increasingly the protagonist, one who is assuming governmental responsibilities? [2]

All these questions have as their premise an earlier one posed in that chapter, what is “the attitude to economic and human development?” In particular, she asks if governments understand that “human development cannot be achieved with a paternalistic state” but only “through practice and creating spaces in which popular protagonism is possible?” [3]

Certainly, these are important questions when posing the question of progress to the Future. And so, we might appropriately ask, what do neoclassical economists have to say about these? Nothing at all. There is no measure within neoclassical economics for the development of human capacity as the result of protagonism. Indeed, the closest approach to such a measure is to consider the effects of investments by paternalistic governments. For neoclassical economists (witting and unwitting), the atomistic individual is not an actor except when responding (in Veblen’s words) to: “the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another.” Recalculating pleasure and pain, that individual instantaneously maximizes. And that is all. [4]

Revolutionary Practice

In contrast, Marta’s emphasis on protagonism as central to the development of human capacities should be familiar to all Marxists (including Marxist economists). Having hailed Hegel’s outstanding achievement as that of conceiving “the self creation of man as a process” and human activity “as man’s act of self genesis,” Marx logically went on to reject the “materialist doctrine” that, by changing circumstances for people, you change human beings. No, he insisted, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self change can be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionary practice.” In short, there are two products of human activity–the change in circumstances and the change in human beings. Unfortunately, that second product, the human product, is often forgotten even by Marxists. [5]

Over and over again, Marx explained that, through their struggles, workers transform both conditions and themselves. His message to workers in 1850 was that “you will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.” [6] Over two decades later (after the defeat of the Paris Commune), he continued to stress the inseparability of human activity and self-change: the working class knows that “they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” [7] “Through practice and creating spaces in which popular protagonism is possible” is an investment in human capacity.

This was, too, the key point in Chapter 10 of Capital, where Marx explained how, in the struggle over the Ten Hours’ Bill, the working class developed as a class in their struggles against capital’s drive for absolute surplus value. We see there “the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement,” how workers moved from “passive, though inflexible and unceasing” resistance into open class protest, how they were transformed. In this, he echoed Engels’ argument that “the working man, who has passed through such an agitation, is no longer the same as he was before; and the whole working class, after passing through it, is a hundred times stronger, more enlightened, and better organised than it was at the outset. [8]

The second product, however, is not only the result of struggle. As Marx noted in the Grundrisse, in the very act of producing, “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.” [9] Similarly, the recognition of the worker as outcome of his own labour is present in Capital’ s discussion of the labour process–there the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” [10]

Yet it must be recalled that human activity always occurs under particular social relations, and this necessarily affects the particular nature of the second product. Consider, for example, the worker produced as the result of activity under capitalist relations of production. Where “it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker,” a particular second product emerges. Head and hand become separate and hostile in this capitalist inversion, “this distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production,” and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.” Through its destruction of existing (and potential) capacities, capital produces the workers it needs. It produces workers who are fragmented, degraded, and alienated from “the intellectual potentialities of the labour process,” a “working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.” With workers produced as such under capitalist relations of production, the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.” [11] Working under capitalist relations is dis investment in human capacity.

Under a different set of productive relations, however, Marx envisioned a quite different second product. In contrast to the society in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of capital for its growth, in Capital Marx explicitly evoked “the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.” [12] In contrast to the worker under capitalist relations, who “actually treats the social character of his work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him,” here associated producers expend “their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.” In this “inverse situation,” rather than the crippling of workers, here workers develop their capacities: “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.” [13]  It follows, too, that through this collective protagonism, the second product is a growth in the workers’ capacities and thus their productivity. [14] Underlying Marx’s critique of capitalism was his conception of the possibility (and, indeed, the necessity) of a different society.

The Future We Want

My second favourite saying, which I’ve repeated many times in various forms, is that if we don’t know where we want to go, no road will take us there. We do know, certainly, where we don’t want to go. It is not to a society in which we are directed and subordinated from above. Nor is it one where we are separated and compete with each other in our own self-interest. Rather, the Future we want is the association of free and equal producers that Marx called a communal system.

Begin with communality, Marx proposed, and “instead of a division of labour…there would take place an organization of labour,” where the producers, “working with the means of production held in common,” combine their capacities “in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.” [15] In this system, Marx explained in the Grundrisse, “communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production,” and the activities undertaken by the associated producers are “determined by communal needs and communal purposes.” [16]

In such a society, communal ownership of the means of production and communal production for communal needs is what Hugo Chavez called ‘the elementary triangle of socialism’–social ownership of the means of production, social production by workers, for the purpose of satisfying social needs). In such a system, its results are premises of the system as “is the case with every organic system.” [17] Just as capital produces its own premises in their “bourgeois economic form” once it has developed upon its own foundation (i.e., once “it is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth”), so also once the communal system has developed on its own foundations, it proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth, producing and reproducing its own premises in their communal form. [18]

Not only reproduced, however, are communal ownership, communal production and communal consumption. The critical premise that is reproduced in this organic system is communal social relations, communality. By acting within these relations, people produce themselves in a a particular way–one described by Emily Kawano as characterised by “solidarity, cooperation, care, reciprocity, mutualism, altruism, compassion, and love.” [19]  Homo solidaricus develops her capacities by relating to others out of solidarity. If I produce consciously for your need, Marx reasoned, I know my work is valuable: “in my individual activity,” he proposed, “I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.” Thus, the second product of our activity in communal society is the development of rich human beings for whom their own “realisation exists as an inner necessity.”  [20] With “free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production,” Marx envisioned the production of “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” [21]

Communal relations, however, do not arise from consciousness nor from revolutionary decrees calling for a battle of ideas. Rather (as István Mészáros points out in his close study of the Grundrisse), true sociality is the product of real conditions, “under fully developed communal conditions.” The conscious social relations characteristic of the communal system “can only be produced in reality itself; or to be more precise, in the material and cultural intercourse of the individuals’ communal social existence.” [22] Their consciousness is the product of their protagonism within the radically restructured social metabolic order as an “organic whole,” i.e., as a circularly self-sustaining “organic system” the constituents of which tend to reciprocally reinforce one another. [23]

Once that communal system rests upon its own foundations, “the social individuals active in the communal system of production and distribution determine for themselves how they allocate the total disposable time of their society in fulfilment of their own needs and aspirations” [24]. In order that “objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development,” they plan. [25] In this process, they reinforce and reproduce their social relations, and their productive capacities increase “with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.” [26]

We are describing the communal system as an organic system. As Marx commented about capitalism, “In the completed bourgeois system, every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition; this is the case with every organic system.” [27] Similarly, the completed communal system contains within itself the conditions for its own reproduction; viewed “as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal,” it is understood as “a process of reproduction.” [28] The begged question, though, is how does the new organic system we want, this system of community and communal relations, emerge?

Contested Reproduction between the Future and the Past

Organic systems do not drop from the sky. They develop upon their own foundation through a process of producing their own premises in place of the historic premises they have inherited. Given our grasp of the premises of the communal system, can we gain any insights from Marx into the process of becoming that organic system?

Considering the draft programme for the German workers party for their convention at Gotha in 1875, Marx challenged its idea that in the society with common ownership of the means of production, “the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.” Nonsense, he insisted. Before it is possible to talk about the portion of the proceeds of labor intended for individual consumption, we must talk about the deductions from the total product. These include provision for replacement of the means of production used up plus an “additional portion for expansion of production” (i.e., investment), and funds for reserve in the event of natural calamities. These, he described as “an economic necessity.” In addition, however, he described several deductions from the total product which are not economic necessities but which, rather, point to the development of the new society.

First is “the general costs of administration not belonging to production,” and the second is “that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs.” Both are characteristic of the old society but they change, and their developments are essential to understand Marx’s view of how the communal system becomes. In the case of the first, he proposes that “this part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops.” In the case of the second (which includes schools and health services), he projects a quite different path: “From the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society and it grows in proportion as the new society develops.” [29]

Why is the deduction in the first case considerably smaller from the outset and diminishing with the development of the new society? The point is central. Four years earlier, Marx had learned much from the Paris Commune, “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.” [30] Those costs of administration, he argued, are considerably restricted because the state immediately ceases to be “a public force organized for social enslavement”; “from the outset,” state functions are “wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society.” [31] Had this struggle been successful, in place of the old centralized government, “all France would have been organized into self-working and self-governing communes.” And the result would be “state functions reduced to a few functions for general national purposes.” [32] “As the new society develops,” the state would be converted more and more (in the words of the Critique) “from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.” [33]

In short, as this new society develops, new organs, self-working and self-governing communes, are increasingly created in place of the “systematic and hierarchic division of labour” in which state administration and governing are treated as “mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste—state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists.” These self-governing spaces for protagonism of the producers become an essential condition for the development of their capacities.

This is one side of the transformation implied by the Critique’s discussion of the deductions from the total social product. In the case of the second deduction, that related to the common satisfaction of needs, Marx proposed that “from the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops.” Thus, the new society moves immediately to expand considerably its provision of use-values for common satisfaction of needs. More and more is deducted from what is available for individual consumption; more and more “what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society.” In short, as the new society develops, our claim upon the output of society is increasingly as a member of society. It’s a point that Mészáros reinforces; considering the ratio between private consumption funds and public funds, he proposes that this must be “regulated by the conscious decisions of the associated producers themselves, and that an improving ratio of public funds “may become in fact a measure of the advancement of the society in question.” [34] The measure of the development of the new society is the expansion of the commons at the expense of individual claims.

But as Mészáros well understood, such new relations of distribution do not rest in midair. Crucial is “the decision making process itself”–“a substantively democratic decision making by the associated producers themselves.” [35] Underlying an increase in the ratio of distribution toward the common satisfaction of needs implies a change in their productive relations from one in which they interact as individuals focused upon their private consumption to one in which they function self-consciously as members of society. Communality develops as the new society involves producers directly in a conscious process of planning as “determined by communal needs and purposes.”

It is essential to understand that this new society develops through a process in which both circumstances and human beings are transformed. For one, it creates new organs for cooperatively planning the distribution of society’s labor in order to satisfy “the worker’s own need for development.” Rather than doing so through a state superimposed upon society, it proceeds through democratic self-management of production and “self-working and self-governing communes.” [36] With the increasing emergence of “genuinely planned and self managed (as opposed to bureaucratically commanded, from above) productive activities,” people are able to develop their potential; the result (as the Critique indicates) is that “the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly.” [37] The combination of the deduction for investment, the reduction of the deduction for state administration and the increased capacity of the producers as the result of their protagonism has as its result increasing social wealth.

However, Marx understood that this can not occur overnight. While this new society begins to develop “from the outset,” it emerges from the old society “ in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” Rather than producing its own premises, in the interregnum between the Future and the Past the new system begins by inheriting “historic” premises and presuppositions. Accordingly, the process of becoming the new organic system is one of transcending those historic premises: “Its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.” [38]

In short, there is a struggle between the Future and the Past. The Future must subordinate the elements inherited from the Past. From the perspective of the Future, the new system is defective as it emerges from capitalist society. “But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.” So, what were the defects Marx identified in his Critique of the Gotha Programme? What historic premises must the society subordinate?

Marx answered that as the new society emerges from capitalism, there is a “bourgeois limitation”–a continuation of “bourgeois right”; “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right” has not yet been “crossed in its entirety.” That continuation of bourgeois right, that birthmark from the old society was the principle that “the individual producer receives back from society–after the deductions have been made–exactly what he gives to it.” [39]

Consider the premises that the new society inherits. Characteristic of capitalist relations is “the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power.”[40] There we can see the inherited defect: transformation of the means of production from capitalist property into common property still leaves the individual producers as “owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power.” The right of property is not immediately crossed in its entirety, and it is this that must be subordinated if the new society is to develop upon its own foundations.

In this new society as it emerges from capitalism, the producer does not yet act to satisfy communal needs and purposes. Rather, the owner of labor-power expects from society “exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour”; that is his right as owner entering into exchange. The characteristic from the old society remains “obviously the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.” [41]

Marx did not hesitate to describe this principle inherited from the Past as a defect. The equality involved in this exchange, he pointed out, “tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges.” Thus, the quid pro quo between the owner of “the personal condition of production” and society is by its very nature “a right of inequality”! To the extent to which this society is marked by this defect, this bourgeois right, it generates a process of producing and reproducing inequality.

One-sidedness is the problem with this principal of equal exchange. Years earlier Marx had criticised bourgeois economists as one-sided because they look at the producer “only as a worker [and do] not consider him when he is not working as a human being,” Almost four decades later, he returned to this distinction between the worker and the human being as a whole. Thinking about this communist society as it emerges from capitalism, Marx declared that the problem with this principle of equal exchange is that it considers the members of this society “from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are considered only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else in them ignored.” [42] The principle of “to each according to his contribution,” in short, is one-sided; its defect is that it considers the needs of members of society only as workers and not as human beings. Neither their differing needs (e.g., the size of families) nor their differing capacities (thus, “one will be richer than another”) are relevant. Entitlement here is based solely upon the individual quantum of labour provided.

How different this is from growing entitlement simply as a member of society! It is no small irony that the defect that the new society must subordinate has been subsequently embraced by many Marxists as “the socialist principle,” the principle to be followed in a distinct stage, socialism. In contrast to Marx’s emphasis upon the process by which the new society develops, the concept of this socialist stage is distinguished solely by the nature of distribution within it–the necessity of distribution in this stage in accordance with contribution as a material incentive. This substitution of a unique stage based upon distribution occurs despite Marx’s insistence that it is ‘a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.” Marx criticised “vulgar socialism” for following the bourgeois economists in treating “distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.” [43]

Remember the second product. What kinds of people are produced in relations in which individuals expect and demand an equivalent for their activity? For Marx, the relations of distribution are not independent of the relations of production. One of the most outstanding insights of Mészáros concerns this link between relations of production and relations of distribution. Considering the regulating principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” he points out that all attention is to the second half, the side of distribution. “The first half is usually, and tellingly, forgotten. However, without the neglected part, the second has no chance of being taken seriously.” Indeed, Mészáros continues, “unless the individuals can contribute to the production of social wealth according to their ability–and that means: on the basis of the full development of the creative potentialities of the social individuals–there can be no question of meeting the requirements of the second half, i.e., the satisfaction of the individuals’ needs.” [44]

Without investigating their relations within production, we lose sight of why the creative potential of the producers is fostered or thwarted. Neither the “stagist” followers of “real socialism” nor neoclassical economics focus upon the importance of the relations of production. In the case of the first, it is presumed that state ownership of the means of production is all that needs to be said and that the self-management and protagonism by social individuals that develops the capabilities of their species is a matter for a later stage, communism. In the case of the second, relations of production are a “black box,” and reliance upon individual self-interest as communicated by markets ensures both the efficient allocation of resources and economic growth.

There is no mystery why “real socialism’ has failed to develop the human capacities required to move in the direction of communality. Characterised at its best by a social contract which provides specific benefits (like subsidised necessities and full employment) for workers in return for their acquiescence to direction from above, this relation of conductor and conducted discourages protagonism in production and society. [45] Ultimately, the failure of this relation to develop human capacity and productivity led in the Soviet Union to attacks on the social contract for what Gorbachev called “serious infractions of the socialist principle of distribution according to work” and fostering “a mentality of dependence.” [46]

Given their orientation toward material incentive, neoclassical economists have no difficulties with “the socialist principle.” Indeed, they are especially keen to exorcise anything deemed to interfere with the proper functions of the market; if steps to the market are constrained, the failure to reach the Promised Land is clearly the result of ignorance. More, more market is their mantra. Thus, in the Soviet case, economists played a central role in attacking the central allocation of resources between enterprises on the grounds that it was necessary to move to horizontal relations (i.e., the market) between them. Such a profound restructuring (perestroika), they argued, would update the relations of production so they no longer fettered development of productive forces. Further, they opposed “the parasitic confidence in guaranteed jobs”–a relatively small reserve army of labor being seen as a cure for laziness and a way to restore “a personal interest in hard efficient labor.” As part of their attack on that social contract, too, they called for ending food subsidies and allowing prices to be determined by the market as well as commodification of healthcare. On the other hand, they did not challenge the subordinate positions of workers. From the perspective of a communal system, they did not merely support existing defects; rather, those economists were the ideological spokesmen of a return to the Past. [47]

Between the Future and the Past, there is contested reproduction. [48] For the new communal system to develop, it must subordinate the elements of the Past. As Sam Bowles indicates, material incentives “crowd out social preferences” (which include motives such as intrinsic pleasure in helping others and aversion to inequity–in short, solidarity). [49] When relying upon material incentive, the Past tends to crowd out the Future. It’s why Mészáros provides his powerful rejection of commodity exchange and the market. And it is the point underlined by Che in his Man and Socialism in Cuba(and as the twentieth century subsequently demonstrated)–relying upon the material self-interest of producers to build the new society is a dead end. [50]

A dead end if you are trying to build the communal society of the Future but not one if your goal is to return to the Past.  For neoclassical economists, the interactions of atomistic self-seekers through markets spontaneously lead to the best of all possible worlds; accordingly, the role of a political instrument (assuming there is any) is to remove any barriers to markets. By contrast, the path to the Future cannot develop spontaneously. Of course, the solidarity characteristic of communal society cannot be imposed; however, people can be guided to learn from their own practice that solidarity is common sense. [51] To build the new society consciously requires a political instrument; However, as Marta wrote when we were in Venezuela, it is essential to avoid the “verticalism that stifles the initiative of the people” and to develop a political instrument “whose militants and leaders are true popular pedagogues capable of stimulating the knowledge that exists within the people.” [52]

Reflections on the Cuban Revolution

No country has faced greater obstacles in trying to build a post-capitalist society than Cuba. Criminal blockades, sanctions, invasions, imperialist terrorism, externally supported internal subversion, the loss of lifelines, natural disasters such as hurricanes and drought–and, still, Cuba persists (as does some of the marvelous solidarity that marked its early years). But, like every society in the interregnum between capitalism and community, Cuba has been and continues to be characterized by contested reproduction (or what Fidel called the struggle to the death between the Future and the Past.).

The Cuban Revolution. though, began with an advantage: at its outset it was able to draw upon the Soviet Union both for economic and political support and for an economic model based upon several decades of Soviet experience. Whether the latter was an unequivocal advantage, on the other hand, is questionable. [53] After several decades of Cuba’s own experience, Fidel Castro confessed:

Here is a conclusion I’ve come to after many years: among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone actually knew how to build socialism.  It seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in electrical systems.  Whenever they said: “That’s the formula,” we thought they knew. Just as if someone is a physician.  You are not going to debate anemia, or intestinal problems, or any other condition with a physician; nobody argues with the physician.  You can think that he is a good doctor or a bad one, you can follow his advice or not, but you won’t argue with him. [54]

There was, however, one leader of the Cuban Revolution who did openly argue. In his too-brief existence in Cuba after the revolution and in the material world, Che Guevara challenged the basic tenets of the Soviet economic model. As President of the National Bank of Cuba and then as first Minister of the newly-created Ministry of Industries, Che developed a system of management (known as the Budgetary Finance System) in which state-owned industries were treated as divisions of a single large firm; it was a system that differed significantly from the received Soviet model of autonomous state enterprises with their own budgets (the Auto-Financing System or Economic Calculus). [55] In particular, the debate over these two systems came into the open in 1963 and revealed differences over the focus upon material and moral incentives. To understand Che’s argument, it is essential to consider his perspective as a whole:

Che’s Tenets

1. The Goal and the Path

Having begun studying Marxism, including Capital and the Communist Manifesto in his late teens and Lenin’sState and Revolution in university, Che’s understanding of the goal for revolutionaries was clear–-the fully developed communist society, the free association of producers that Marx envisioned. [56]  It was not defined simply by abundance but, as well, by new conscious relations among people, a new consciousness toward society. For Che, communism was: “a phenomenon of consciousness and not solely a phenomenon of production.” Accordingly, it could not be arrived at “through the simple mechanical accumulation of quantities of goods made available to the people.” [57]  Indeed, he insisted that “we fight poverty but we also fight alienation.” [58] And, for that process, Che saw centralized planning as critical–it is “the point at which man’s consciousness finally succeeds in synthesizing and directing the economy toward its goal: the full liberation of the human being within the framework of communist society.” [59]

2. Characteristics of the Period of Transition

Of course, as Che well knew, you can’t leap from capitalism to the new communal society. There necessarily is a period of transition in which elements of the old interact, interpenetrate and, indeed, collide with elements of the new. As the result of such interaction, the elements of neither system exist in their pure form. Consider, for example, the law of value, which reveals the way capitalism is spontaneously reproduced though the market. Che argued that “it is impossible to analyse the law of value separate from its natural medium, the market. In fact, the capitalist market is itself the expression of the law of value.” Unfortunately, as Tablada noted, nearly all the literature on the political economy of the period of transition lacked original conceptual tools suited to the topic. By applying Marxist categories that pertain to capitalism outside their context, that literature distorted the very object of study. [60]

One implication is the lack of clarity as to what is to be done in this society in which elements of the old and new coexist. For Che, rather than extrapolating from the static analysis of Capital, the central need is to build the Future: “We understand that the capitalist old categories are retained for a time and that the length of this period cannot be predetermined, but the characteristics of the period of transition are those of a society that is throwing off its bonds in order to move quickly into the new stage.” Not surprisingly, Che rejected the Soviet Manual of Political Economy which argued that “it is necessary to develop and use the law of value as well as monetary and mercantile relations while the communist society is being built.” [61] Why develop, Che asked! Behind the thinking of the Manual, he proposed, was “an erroneous conception of wanting to construct socialism with capitalist elements without really changing their meaning.” That was a gradual path back to capitalism–a path that “obliges new concessions to economic levers, that is to say retreat.” [62]

Characteristic of the period of transition between the future and the past is, as we have stressed, contested reproduction. Whereas Che argued the necessity to cast off the elements of the old society as quickly as possible, he recognized that there were movements in the opposite direction. Looking in 1964 at the resolutions of the Polish Communist Party, for example, he commented that “the solution they are proposing for these problems in Poland is the complete freedom of the law of value; that is to say, a return to capitalism.” [63]

3. The Struggle Against the Past

Especially in underdeveloped countries, “the temptation is very great,” Che noted, “to follow the beaten track of material interest as the lever with which to accelerate development.” However, we must remember that material interests come from capitalism and are remnants of the Past. “We do not deny the objective need for material incentives, although we are reluctant to use them as the main lever.” In fact, “the tendency should be, in our opinion, to eliminate as fast as possible the old categories, including the market, money and, therefore, material interest–or, better, to eliminate the conditions for their existence.” [64]

Che was very clear as to why:

The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc.) can lead into a blind alley. And you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn.

You may build an economic foundation this way; however, he predicted that the one produced “has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness.” [65]

And that was the point! Building on material interest, “a lever we unfortunately have to use, a remnant of the old society,” produces people without socialist consciousness. The result of building upon individual material self-interest is to produce people fit for capitalism. That is why Che stressed the importance of the second product: “to build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man.” [66]

4. The Struggle for the Future

“One of the fundamental aims of Marxism,” Che indicated, “is to eliminate material interest, the factor of ‘individual self-interest’ and profit from man’s psychological motivations. [67] To this end, he stressed the importance of building a socialist consciousness–one in which workers “feel part of a great collective effort that the nation must make and so we can be as integrated as possible in making this effort, everyone with their own varied way of thinking, and each with their own varied convictions, but trying to incorporate themselves into work that is alive.” [68]

Recognizing themselves as part of a whole to which members of society have a social duty, though, is a change that “will necessarily be prolonged and cannot be expected to be completed in a short period of time.” It will neither be automatic as a result of the development of productive forces, nor will exhortation alone transform people. “You cannot change how people think by decree. People have to change their way of thinking by their own conviction.” [69] Accordingly, as Helen Yaffe details at length in her study, within the Ministry of Industry Che attempted to build in reality spaces for protagonism in which people learn through practice.

In Production Assemblies, for example, all members of a factory (at least 70 percent for a meeting to occur) regularly came together to discuss the plans and progress of the work and to audit the work of administrators. These were, Che indicated, “part of the life of the factories” and were meant to motivate workers to participate in management of production. [70] Further, given that the Ministry of Industry used the Budgetary Finance System which rejected the boundaries between state companies (boundaries characteristic of the Auto Financing System), Committees of Local Industry (CILO) were encouraged to coordinate and rationalize local resources–a step important for decentralizing production and for worker management. By decentralizing and creating work habits independent of any material incentive, “the working class has to be preparing itself to take up management work in the shortest time possible.” Che proposed; in particular, such inter-factory cooperation is as an attempt “to create the consciousness of one factory.” As the ministry official overseeing these committees commented, “most important about the CILOS was the sense of belonging, that each unit was part of that big Cuban factory.” [71]

As well as these initiatives, Yaffe calls attention to the Committee for Spare Parts (created for workers to invent solutions for the lack of spare parts following the Revolution), the Advisory Technical Committees (involving an average of 10 percent of the workforce) and The Plan of Integration in which specialist work brigades moved throughout the ministry to assist in solving problems. She concludes this account by describing these policies as “aimed to integrate workers into the management of production, to harness their experience and creativity to resolve problems and rationalise production and to induce them to identify with the means of production as their own.” [72]

No discussion of Che’s proposed path to struggle for the Future, however, would be complete without stressing his strong advocacy of voluntary labor. Just as masses had mobilized successfully in October 1962 (during the Missile Crisis) and October 1963 (after the damage done by Hurricane Flora), Che called for “the Spirit of October” to be created “all year, every month, every day”; that spirit was one of “considering one’s work at any moment as a fundamental task for the country, whatever it is, however humble or simple it is.” Within the ministry itself, Che created the Red Battalion consisting of brigades of ten ministry workers in each, all pledged to a minimum of 80 hours of voluntary labor in six months, and through friendly competition and emulation (in which Che participated) brigade members went well beyond this. [73] In particular, he argued, “emulation must be the fundamental basis for developing socialist consciousness and for making gains in production and productivity.” [74]

5. The Need to Walk on Two Legs

For Che, you build a socialist consciousness through practice, by creating spaces for collective protagonism. In contrast, he described direct material interest as an economic lever as “the great Trojan horse of socialism.” [75] Reinforcing the alienation and self-orientation inherited from capitalism, it points backward. This self-orientation, however, has “preponderance in people’s consciousness” in the period of transition; accordingly, he believed it was necessary to find ways to help material interest to wither away.

One way was to use material interest to guide people into viewing their work as a social contribution and duty. With salary classifications (established after job evaluation), workers in the Ministry of Industry could get bonuses by exceeding the established norms but could never get an income which was appropriately that of the next salary group. Nevertheless, they could take classes and develop their capacities: “for example, going to a school where your salary is paid and where you come out with a new qualification. On returning to the factory this new qualification is automatically converted into an increase in salary. That means that it is a material incentive; the only thing is that the material incentive is not derived directly from the relationship between the work and what is received for the work.” [76]

More important than trying to subvert material incentive, though, was necessity that the individual learn to “identify with his work”–for which voluntary labor was the “school that creates consciousness.” To transform work from “a disagreeable human necessity… into a moral necessity, and internal necessity” was essential, and Che argued that the main responsibility for combating material incentive as the main lever rests with the Party: “the role of the vanguard party is precisely that of raising as high as possible the opposing banner, the banner of moral interest, of moral incentive, of the men who fight and sacrifice themselves and expect nothing more than the recognition of their compañeros.” [77]

An increase in consciousness and in production could go hand in hand. Che maintained “that the development of consciousness does more for the development of production in a relatively short time than material incentives do.” [78] But the important thing was balance–the necessity to walk on two legs. Changing consciousness, he insisted, was essential as part of the “dual aspect of the construction of socialism. Building socialism is neither a matter of work alone nor of consciousness alone. It combines work and consciousness–expanding the production of material goods through work and developing consciousness”. [79]

In this light, Tablada argues that for Che the “plan should incorporate and unite two elements:

• creating the basis for economic development of the new society, as well as for economic regulations and controls;

• creating a new type of human relations, a new man.”

To reduce the plan to an economic notion, “would be to deform it from the outset.” [80] Like Marx, Che understood that the nature of the human product depends upon the relations within which people interact. Socialist consciousness would not follow automatically from development of production. Rather than the specific measures he conceived at the time, Che’s legacy is the recognition that, if the Future is to prevail, it is essential to create the conditions in which a socialist consciousness develops.

Updating: “The Guevarista Pendulum” and Path Dependency

Obviously, the goal and the path to that goal at that time were quite clear for Che. Whether he would have adjusted or changed entirely his specific measures in the more than half-century after he left Cuba and the material world, we will never know. Still, we can consider post-Che developments in Cuba in the light of his tenets.

In her chapter on Che’s legacy in Cuba, Yaffe explores phases in the economic history of the Cuban Revolution, portraying them as “a pendulum swinging between what is desirable and what is necessary.” The “Guevarista pendulum,” she proposes, “reflects Cuba’s ability to push forward with its socialist development, creating innovative new social and political forms, without falling back on capitalist mechanisms to solve economic problems.” [81]

Whether these have been swings of a pendulum (with its regularity) and whether each of the subperiods (that she classifies as “swing away” or “swing towards”) are indeed swings, there can be no doubt that there have been significant changes in the Cuban path. In particular, following Che’s departure, the Soviet planning mechanism with its focus upon material interest became increasingly dominant and became official with the adoption in 1976 of the Economic Management and Planning System. Within 10 years, however, that model was strongly rejected beginning in 1986 in what became known as “Rectification.”

Rejected were the familiar perverse patterns characteristic of “Real Socialism,” patterns that Che understood well. [82]  Speaking on October 8, I987, Fidel stressed that Che would have been “appalled” by what had emerged in Cuba. He would have been appalled that there were “enterprises prepared to steal to pretend they were profitable” and that would “cheat to fulfill and even surpass their production plan.” He would have been appalled by the idea “that voluntary work was kind of silly” and at the paths “that lead to all the bad habits and the alienation of capitalism.” Che would have said, “It’s exactly as I warned, what’s happening is exactly what I thought would happen.” If only we had studied Che’s economic thought, Fidel argued, we would have been better equipped, and he appealed to party members and to “our economists to study and familiarize themselves with Che’s political and economic thought.” [83]

The potential implied by Rectification may be seen from the decision of the party in 1990 to open a wide discussion in advance of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party. This generated proposals from the population synthesized by Juan Valdés Paz as “demands of: decentralization, debureaucratization, destatization; and of greater popular participation.” [84] What would have developed had Cuba been able to proceed at that time along this path, however, will never be known.

While Rectification produced the momentum for the creation of Popular Councils, new local participatory bodies, their potential (and that of Rectification itself) was not realized because of the need to respond immediately to the crisis produced by a powerful external shock–the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet bloc after 1989. Cuba lost 80 percent of its trade, its oil imports dried up (leading to both a drastic decline in domestic production and lost revenue from re-exports) and to a fall in national income by about one-third. “Everything to the Front!” meant a struggle for survival, which miraculously was won. During the “Special Period,” marked by starvation, an imposed shift to organic agriculture and serious difficulties in urban and national transport, Cuba turned increasingly to tourism as a source of hard currency to pay for necessary imports. With the inflow of hard currency from the tourism enclave and remittances from Cubans abroad to which was added increasingly support from Chavez’s Venezuela in return for Cuban medical and sports services, the first few years of the 21st Century marked a definite economic improvement. [85]

This also was a period, though, in which there was a major political development–the Battle of Ideas. Buoyed by the success of the mass mobilizations in the campaign for the return of the kidnapped boy, Elián González, Fidel stressed the importance of ideas as the main tool with which to fight U.S. imperialism. In particular, the program focused upon education and youth–especially the less privileged. Having noted in February 2003 that despite the gains offered to all citizens, “the Revolution has not been as successful in its struggle to eradicate differences in the social and economic status of Cuba’s black population,” Fidel pointed out that one aspect of this was inequality of access to higher education: “The possibility of studying, obtaining higher qualifications or a university degree was the exclusive privilege of the more knowledgeable and economically powerful sectors. It was only the exception among the poor who was able to beat the system.” Now, as the result of the Battle of Ideas, “we have made an old dream come true: the universalization of higher education…. This program has given unheard of opportunities to young people and adults who were not previously able to attend higher education institutes but who now can join in the revolutionary aim of having all citizens, regardless of the work they do, obtain a comprehensive education.” [86]

There were many other aspects of the Battle of Ideas including very large investments in education (expanded training of teachers to reduce the size of classrooms to 20, training of art teachers and the availability of computers, TVs and VCRs for primary and secondary classes, etc). Perhaps the most inspiring part of this campaign, which (in the words last year of La Tizza Collective) “enabled Fidel to raise the self-esteem of young people, especially among the most disadvantaged, and succeed in reconnecting them with the revolutionary project” was the creation of the “social workers.” [87]

In his speech in December 2004, Fidel indicated that the new social worker schools had already graduated more than 21,000 youths, who now “constitute a veritable detachment of social support and solidarity.” Some of the activities of this group, mostly young women from disadvantaged backgrounds, fell into categories normally thought of as social work–e.g, going into communities to seek out and work with disaffected youth and doing a nationwide door-to-door survey which discovered 37,000 elderly people living at home and in need of personal attention. But other activities were unique and linked them directly to the needs of the revolution; for example, they were charged with replacing every domestic incandescent light bulbs in the country with an energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulb. More dramatically, more than 10,000 social workers were assigned to take over 2,000 petrol stations for several weeks and monitored the delivery of fuel from the refineries. The exercise revealed that half the revenue from fuel sales was being lost to theft and corruption. [88] Although the Battle of Ideas was disdained by some who “totally lost sight of its meaning–thousands of young people in marginalized areas” were reconnected with the revolutionary project. [89]

However, Fidel was soon forced to step down from his presidential duties for health reasons. The implications were soon apparent. Within a few years, Cuba embarked upon a path that Jose Luis Rodriguez, former Minister of the Economy, described as “a period of profound change.” [90] The initial signals appeared in Raul Castro’s’ first major speech as Acting President in July 2007, where he spoke of the need to “change concepts and methods that were appropriate at one point but have been surpassed by life itself.” [91]

In the following two years, a series of what Raul called “unnecessary prohibitions” affecting consumers were removed, idle state land was distributed in usufruct to individuals and cooperatives, and state barber shops were turned over to their workers. Stressing the unsustainability of the state budget, Raul pointed to the need to cut expenditures due to the effect of hurricane damages and the world economic slowdown [which affected both tourism and revenues from nickel exports]. As an indication of direction, the party paper, Granma, reported in September 2009 that the government would begin the process of closing 24,700 workplace cafeterias, and it ran a signed editorial in October, arguing that the libreta, the monthly ration book, should be replaced by subsidies going only to those in need. [92]

In the next year, the Cuban government proceeded further along this path: lengthening the maximum term of land leases to foreign investors from 50 years to 99 years, announcing [via the Trade Union Federation] that a half million workers in the state sector would be laid off by April 2011, loosening requirements for licensing private entrepreneurs and, finally. in November 2010, releasing a draft of the lineamientos, the Guidelines for economic policy upon which the Economic Policy Commission of the Party had worked at length. These proposed guidelines were meant to set out profound changes in concepts and structures underlying the Cuban model, changes described as the “updating” of the Cuban model. [93]

Raul left no doubt as to the significance of the intended changes. Speaking to the National Assembly on December 18, 2010, he argued that “It is necessary to change the mentality of the cadres and of all other compatriots in facing up the new scenario which is beginning to be sketched out. It is just about transforming the erroneous and unsustainable concepts about socialism, that have been very deeply rooted in broad sectors of the population over the years, as a result of the excessively paternalistic, idealistic and egalitarian approach instituted by the Revolution in the interest of social justice.” As an example, he pointed to the libreta, the ration book: “Quite a few of us consider the ration card to be a social achievement that should never be gotten rid of.” While its establishment was meant to ensure people had necessities, it was now the source of many problems; “it is an evident expression of egalitarianism that equally benefits those who work and those who do not.” These were among the many problems to be addressed in the Guidelines, and he concluded that “We either rectify–because we no longer have time to keep on skirting around the precipice- or we will sink.”

Widespread organized discussions in workplaces, communities and social institutions produced many amendments and additions to the Guidelines but the most striking result of this consultation was significant opposition to the end to the libreta and to the reduction in state employment–not surprisingly since universal subsidized necessities and full employment had been part of the Cuban social contract since the early days of the Revolution. [94] As Raul had understood with respect to the libreta, many Cubans looked upon this as “a social achievement that should never be gotten rid of.” [95] Taking that opposition into account, the party decided to proceed on these measures—but to do so only gradually.

Other goals in the Guidelines approved by the 6th Congress of the Communist Party in 2011 include reduction of state ownership and employment, the encouragement of a broad sector of non-state ownership and management, the expansion of markets and the role attributed to them, a new focus upon individual material incentive, the creation of a free labor market and the potential for accumulation by small and medium-size private enterprises. In his article, “A Lot Done but Much More to Do,” Cuban economist Juan Triana praised “the political and ideological assimilation of the need for change” and argued that, among these, “the changes to be introduced in the state enterprise system are clearly the most significant because the country’s economy and a substantial portion of employment are concentrated in these.” Those changes involve increasing economic and financial autonomy–effectively the self-financing of state enterprises, “an old unattained goal dating back to the 1970s when Cuba began its first ‘opening’ under the Management of the Economy System.” [96]

Taken as a whole, it is not surprising  (as Al Campbell notes) that “a deep fear of supporters of Cuba’s half-century effort to begin to construct socialism–and an equally fervent hope of its opponents–is that the present reforms will take Cuba back to capitalism.” [97] Recalling Che’s view in 1964 about the decisions of the Polish Communist Party, there can be no doubt that this would have been his fear. Campbell proposes, though, that there are important barriers to the restoration of capitalism. Perhaps the most significant at this time is the determination of the Party leaders to prevent this and to build instead a “prosperous and sustainable socialism.” The point is illustrated by Raul’s statement that “I was not elected President to restore capitalism in Cuba nor to surrender the Revolution. I was elected to defend, maintain, and continue improving socialism, not to destroy it.” [98]

Even if you know where you want to go, however, it doesn’t mean that you will get there. Once begun upon this path with the goal of a prosperous and sustainable socialism, might it lead somewhere else? How, indeed, would this path differ from one in which the conscious goal is capitalism? As in the case of unstable dynamic systems, slight variations when beginning upon a path may lead ultimately to major differences in outcomes. [99] And once upon a path, it may be very difficult to leave it. Path Dependency is a well-known concept in economics and studies of institutional change that explains how choices once made may make it easier to remain on a path rather than to change paths. Consider the possibility of ending up in what Che called that “blind alley. And you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn.” Initial steps matter: indeed, “History matters” is the point regularly made with respect to path dependency. [100]

In the case of the “updating” of the Cuban model, in short, the path may lead to other than the announced goal precisely because, rather than reconsidering the path, the logical response to every barrier may appear to be further (and faster) steps. And this would be more likely if there is an organized current that advances this as rationality. Cuban economists play such a role. As Anthony Maingot proposes, “it is arguably the economists who have been the most important organic intellectuals of this search for reform.” We can understand his perspective from his statement that the new that “cannot be born” is not socialism. “Today, it is decidedly just the reverse in Cuba.” [101] Is the “old” that is dying, then, the Cuban model or is it socialism?

Consider the advice of Cuban economists. Much like neoclassical economists in capitalism who defend their theories in the face of unpredicted results, their answer may be–we just haven’t gone far enough! In this respect, Cuban economists, like their Soviet counterparts, may act as spokespersons of capital–always inclined to propose another step in the direction of capitalism in the name of (their) science versus dogma. [102]

Omar Everleny, for example, recently exclaimed, “If only the reforms economists have been proposing for decades are finally set into motion.” But they might not be accepted, however, because of “firmly rooted political and ideological beliefs among the leadership circle.” Similarly, Juan Triana referred in 2021 to 30 years of a deep economic crisis,”30 years postponing and delaying necessary changes in the economic sphere, ignoring the existence of objective laws, which in the end are imposed,” and he noted among the reasons for this, putting “particular organizations above the interests of the nation.” For his part, Pedro Monreal had complained in 2007 that “academic economists like himself,” unlike those who work on the state plan and within ministries, are not listened to. Influence in this respect is “never a question for technical professionals…. They are decisions which basically correspond with political questions.” More recently, Triana praised the “updating” because there is finally clarity with respect to the acceptance of the need for foreign investment, but it still faces “indisputable prejudices that are difficult to remove quickly.” [103]

Science versus dogma.  Economic problems, Everleny insists, “can only be overcome with economic solutions” That requires, however, “bold decisions and the courage to break with dogmas.” But what are the prejudices, ideological premises, and dogmas that these economic scientists have bemoaned?  Very simply, the existing “Cuban model,” the model currently in the process of “updating”–for which there has been “A Lot Done but Much More to Do.” [104]

To attempt to describe the existing Cuban model briefly is certain to offend both those who understand it intimately and those who have a pre-determined conception of it. However, without such an attempt, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of “updating” and its prospects. Led by its Communist Party, Cuba has been able to defeat over 60 years of counter-revolutionary efforts by the strongest power on earth, U.S. imperialism. In its attempt to build socialism, the Party has used state planning to develop key sectors, provided full employment (via the state), ensured universal free education, universal free healthcare and universal subsidized necessities (thus, an egalitarian ideal). Its model of socialism refers mainly to the State (rather than to self-governing and self-managing processes), and it is a variety of the “conductor-conducted” model in which the self-conception of the orchestra conductor is that “without me, there would be chaos.” [105] Accordingly, the party leadership conceives of its responsibility as that of ensuring the survival and realization of the goals of the Revolution and, to this end, has mobilized masses to battle the effects of natural disasters and for the purpose of consultation on party proposals.

The current path of the “updated” Cuban model is the product of two forces. On the one hand, there is the tendency for a growing reliance upon market forces, the creation of both a significant capitalist sector and reserve army of labour, increased opening to foreign capital and the freeing of state firms from state direction. On the other hand, on the part of top party leadership, there is caution about uncontrolled spontaneous processes (given the omnipresent threat of imperialism) and the mirror of this caution by those lower in the hierarchy, practiced in following rules and explaining, accordingly, “no, no es possible.” As a result, projected reforms are slow, and the pattern has been one of delay, bumps, and reversals along the path, [106]

But along the path to where? “Updating” the Cuban economic model while preserving the responsibility of the State appears to be a path in the direction of the “market socialism” (or whatever other euphemism one prefers) of China and Viet Nam. That should not be a surprise as Cuban economists have long been enamored of the models and experience of those two countries. [107] Of course, there is the begged question of whether Cuba could proceed successfully copying their path. Unlike China and Vietnam, Cuba does not have large reserves of population in the countryside to draw upon as a cheap source of labor for export-oriented activity nor is it likely to have the same access to U.S. markets as those countries. [108]

In any event, the future path of the updated model cannot be considered in isolation from its past and present. The long-standing Blockade and its tightening (as with the Trump-Biden measures) has severely limited access to the hard currency which is essential for importing necessities (such as food and oil) and left it vulnerable to the fortunes (or lack of same) of  international allies which in the past reduced Cuba’s international payment deficits. But the past also means that we cannot ignore the long-standing results of the Party’s interpretation of its responsibility upon Cuba’s economic performance–as in the inefficiency of State farms and state requirements upon agricultural production and the lack of the opportunity for protagonism by workers in State firms, which has meant alienation and low productivity in industry. [109]

Unfortunately, Cuba has now suffered yet another external shock. Not only the pandemic and its internal effects plus the crippling of tourism in this period but, as well, countries like Brazil that have expelled Cuban doctors, and the U.S. has created new barriers to the flow of remittances to Cuba. The result has been a disastrous effect upon Cuba’s trade balances and State budget deficits. Add to that the effect of Cuba’s “own goal” in carrying out its long-needed monetary reordering, its currency reform, at the very time of an economic crisis. The result is what German Sánchez Otero, former Cuban ambassador to Venezuela, described in 2021 as a “perfect storm”–one characterized by “an overwhelming increase in the prices of food and other essential items, significant shortage of medicines, rising corruption, mini-mafias related to illicit businesses, inefficiencies and weaknesses of management cadres, and the inefficiencies of institutions at different levels, to name a few.” [110]

It’s hard not to compare the effects of this external shock to the last one, which ushered in the Special Period. In addition to shortages and that “overwhelming increase in the prices of food and other essential items,” there have been bee-stings of electricity blackouts because of oil shortages, day- long queues to buy basic necessities like bread and the rise in prices of public services (e.g., Havana transport saw a price increase of 500 percent). In February 2022, Oscar Fernández compared this situation to the Special Period, noting that “the magnitude of the crisis is not yet so great or at least the accumulated decrease may not be so great, but the impacts may be similar, even worse for many families, because social coverage, say social guarantees, the cushion on which disadvantaged families fall in this context,  it’s much thinner than the one most of us fell on during the ’90s.” [111]

Without question, the current economic situation is very dire. Cuba needs to deal with its serious shortages of food and fuel; however, those problems can not be resolved overnight, and the immediate problem takes the form of the extreme shortage of the hard currency needed to import necessities. In response, the government has attempted to collect all available MLC (Moneda Libremente Convertible, or Freely Convertible Money) by creating MLC stores that sell consumer goods not otherwise available. However, in order to concentrate all available MLC in government hands, it decided not to establish a formal mechanism to permit those with only peso income to convert this into MLC at the official exchange rate (of 24 pesos to the dollar). As a result of an excess demand for MLC, the value of the peso has been driven down in the informal or black market (to an estimated 100 pesos to a dollar); this has accelerated inflation (and further reduced real wages) well beyond that already existent as the result of the monetary re-ordering that occurred in January 2021.To already existing inequality, it has added more.

And that brings us to speak about the special tragedy of the current situation; in a country whose revolution valued egalitarianism, inequality has increased since the 1990s. In his talk at the Martin Luther King Centre on October 15, 2020, Juan Valdés Paz called attention to this pattern and predicted that “When we get to 2025, we will have a much more unequal society than the one we have now, than the one we have today.” But he stressed that inequality, though growing, is not the real issue. Rather, the problem is that this pattern of inequality “already contains a considerable strip of poverty” And that is growing: “we have more and more poor people. There is no policy for poverty, what’s more, the word poverty does not appear in a single official speech. There is not a Cuban official who dares to say poverty.”

And the situation is worse: “because blacks and mulattoes are overrepresented in that poverty line, they are overrepresented in the worst indicators: the lowest income, poverty, homelessness, the worst jobs, etc. Therefore, there are objective tendencies for the issue of raciality to become a socialist problem for us and a base for the enemy on which he is acting with great energy.” [112] Just as poverty is not discussed in polite company, neither is the issue of race. As Esteban Morales, the recently deceased Afro-Cuban scholar commented, “Our economic statistics do not allow to cross color, with variables of employment, housing, wages, income, etc. This prevents us from investigating, in-depth, how the standard of living of the different racial groups is advancing. Especially those who were previously disadvantaged.” The obvious point: “as long as the racial issue is not treated systematically and coherently, at a comprehensive level, and is reliably reflected in our statistics and in our media, we cannot aspire to socially advance the country on the subject.” [113]

Precisely because of the lack of official statistics, the study of the “re-stratification” of Cuban society carried out by Hansing and Hoffmann provides some interesting information. Based upon extensive interviews and sampling, they argue that not only has there been growing inequality since the 1990s but that it is most marked on the basis of race. They estimate that, while 95 per cent of Afro-Cubans report a yearly income below CUC 3,000, only 58 per cent of white Cubans fall into this lowest income category. Further, income levels above CUC 5,000 are limited almost exclusively to white Cubans. [114]  In terms of bank accounts, among white Cubans, 50 per cent of respondents reported having an account, while “among Afro-Cubans, this figure was a mere 11 per cent.” So, who receives remittances, giving themaccess to MLC stores? Hansen and Hoffmann note that, according to U.S. census data, of the over 1.8 million Cuban-Americans, 85 per cent are white. [115]

Will updating and the shift to the market make things better or worse? Mayra Espina Prieto and Dayma Echevarría point out that the updating process omits consideration of the problems of poverty, inequality of race and gender and the social mechanisms that reproduce in a structural way the processes of social exclusion. Because the platform of the updating process is insufficient in this respect, they conclude that “the reconfiguration is accompanied by a widening of equity gaps and the resilience of poverty and disadvantage.” [116]

Updating, in short, provides more to worry about. There was a point, Juan Valdés Paz noted, when state employment accounted for 95 percent of the total. Now, it is at “75 percent and there is a commitment by the State not to employ more than 60, that is, to be the employer of no more than 60 percent of the nation’s workforce. That means that almost a million more workers still have to be shed.” Presumably, jobs for the rest would be provided by self-employment, micro/small/ medium private firms [the last employing no more than 100 workers], family enterprises and cooperatives. So far, though, establishing the legal framework for these (especially for workers in private firms and non-agricultural cooperatives) has been very slow. [117]

But assume this is all resolved, and Cuba manages to be able to march along its updating path. What is the new that is being built? There is a “problem, which curiously we don’t talk about,” Valdés Paz notes. As Marxists, “we never ask ourselves how the socio-class structure of Cuban society evolves.” Yes, it means the emergence of a bourgeoisie; it means “that the socio-class structure of the country is evolving in a very different way from how Cuba socialism built it until the 1980s.” And he adds that “the social structure is moving toward greater stratification, diversity, complexity of new and different dynamics to those we have known, with ‘X’ political effects.” [118]

The Shock Doctrine and the Path

On July 11, 2021, Cuba received another shock–this time an internal one. Organized and spread by counterrevolutionaries (both external and internal) under the slogan #SOSCuba, high numbers of people came into the streets to demonstrate. The sad fact is that the call to protest fell upon fertile ground–people who were suffering from that perfect storm. For example, the protests began when hundreds of people demonstrated in San Antonio de los Baños (in Artemisa province) over prolonged and constant power outages but, given the high incidence of Covid-19 there, it was also marked by the slogan, “We want vaccines!” [119]

As Helen Yaffe details, the residents were responding to an appeal on the Facebook page of “Danilo Roque” (with the decapitated head of Diaz-Canel, the Cuban President, as his profile picture), who had called upon Cubans to take to the streets several times since 2019 to no avail. However, as he told a journalist, “Then the situation worsened with COVID-19 and the lack of medicines”; accordingly, given the summer heat and the spread of covid, the blackouts created that “opportune occasion,” said Roque. “My team and I decided that this was the moment to strike, given that the government was concentrating on COVID-19 .” [120]

Live streamed on social media (on sites like Cuba Decide, set up in Miami in 2015) , the protests spread throughout the country, occurring in at least six provinces out of 14, and peaking in Havana, where an estimated 3,000 people marched, many chanting antigovernment slogans. There were many instances of violence–stone-throwing between protestors and counter-protesters (who responded to Diaz-Canel’s statement on tv, “Let the revolutionaries take to the streets”). Police cars were overturned in several places, a children’s hospital was stoned, and MLC stores were attacked and looted (with videos showing people taking appliances, mattresses, soap and toilet paper).

While Diaz-Canel’s immediate description of the protests as a “soft coup” speaks to the goal of the instigators, it is important to recognize that, while most of the Cuban population continues to support the government, “the protests originated in the working class neighbourhoods with the greatest social problems.” [121] Nothing like this had happened in Cuba since the protest on the Malecon during the Special Period, and that had dispersed after Fidel appeared at the protest.

A few days after 11 July (but presumably written before), Sánchez Otero described Cuba as in a state of “pessimism, and uncertainty spread among many people who identify as revolutionary and patriotic.” Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the government turned to those who are never uncertain–-the economists. In interviews one month after July 11, Triana explained who was at blame: “We see what happens when the application of policies does not fulfill its mission and does not meet the expectations of part or all of society, when they delay unnecessarily, when the bureaucracy usurps time that does not belong to them. That an objective situation existed internally that could lead to something like this was very evident.” (On this occasion, both Triana and economist Henry Colina expressed approval, on the other hand, at the recent inclusion of economists in the process of developing policies and measures especially during the presidency of Diaz-Canel.). [122]  The message was clear: as noted earlier, in January Everleny chimed in, “If only the reforms economists have been proposing for decades are finally set into motion”! [123]

You can’t let a good crisis go to waste, and this was an opportunity to push harder on the chosen path. Everleny’s proposals to curb inflation include “Getting rid of red tape and decisions that come from “superior bodies” to guide state-led companies,” “Allowing private owners or foreign companies to invest in the retail market, getting rid of the State’s monopoly on retail stores, and allowing private firms” to import without state intermediaries.”  Similarly, in the next month, among proposals to alleviate the economic crisis made by six economists interviewed by the Cuban journal Revista Alma Mater, the following appeared regularly:  open consumer goods markets to foreign corporations [as in Panama], increase foreign direct investment, and eliminate the state monopoly on foreign trade. In a proposal more far reaching, Antonio Romero proposed replacing “the still existing mechanism of centralized planning of the economy, which in practice consists of the centralized allocation of resources, which are perennially scarce.” Similarly, in his blog, Pedro Monreal proposed that “the emerging business fabric seems to be incompatible with a centralized planning scheme.” [124]

As Everleny put it, “The government should think more about how to open the economy, create more markets, like countries such as China and Vietnam, where the economy has played a different role due to the contribution of the private sector.” In this context , it is interesting to point out parallels to the proposals of an open opponent of the Cuban Revolution, Elias Amor Bravo, a Cuban economist teaching in Spain: ending controls and subsidies, reducing state pressures on the economy, letting salaries be determined by the market, privatise state-led companies in an orderly fashion, join the IMF and World Bank and finally that, “Cuba will need to do a 180º, and go back to orthodox economics, such as Vietnam or China. Collectivist adventures have reached their end.” [125]

The “shock doctrine” in capitalism refers to the use of crises and shocks to push aside existing barriers to the advance of neoliberal policies. Within Cuba, external and internal shocks have been used by economists to advocate overcoming the government’s hesitation in advancing along what we might call the capitalist road. There is nothing inherent, however, in the political effect of a shock because it all depends on the correlation of forces. A shock potentially provides an opportunity to leave the existing path. Has it done so in Cuba?

What did the Cuban government learn from July 11? They didn’t learn how they were suffering as the result of the Blockade or the sanctions or the effects of the pandemic upon tourist revenue they were dependent upon to import necessities. They didn’t learn that U.S. was actively pushing for regime change or that it worked with counterrevolutionary forces in Cuba to this end. They knew all this (as we should). What they learned can be seen by what they immediately proceeded to do.

The problem was apparent: marginalized neighborhoods, youth and especially youth from marginalized neighborhoods. So, the immediate response, as Yaffe recounts, was “Resurrecting a program of the Battle of Ideas of the early 2000s, on 26 July 2021, the Union of Young Communists launched new Youth Brigades of Social Works.” On 5 August they began to visit homes in the 302 poorer neighborhoods, and “Within five weeks of the protests, 3,400 university students, young teachers and other professionals had joined these brigades.” [126] Further, as the governor of the province of Havana reported in November, in 4 months, “more than 2,300 young people have joined the study and a similar number of jobs have been granted.” [127]

It was also decided to reveal to the nation what the party leadership had known. On October 13, 2021, Michael Hernandez reported in OnCubaNews that he had attended the premiere in 2014 of Cancion de Barrio, the documentary made from 2 years of Silvio Rodriguez’s concerts in marginalized neighborhoods. “The cinema collapsed at the end of the projection. Tears, closed applause, cheers. Also surprises among the spectators when suddenly realizing that this Cuba existed behind the walls of privileges or social segmentation.” Why was he writing about this seven years later? Simply because this film, which had been censored for seven years, was suddenly shown on Cuban TV at prime time! The widespread public reaction was that of “astonishment, of pain in the heart, of unprecedented surprise.” And the appropriate questions were “Why didn’t they show the documentary after its theatrical release and wait seven years for its massive screening? Who is responsible for an act of censorship that denied Cubans the possibility of thoroughly soaking up their reality?” [128]

The lesson the Party learned was summarized in Diaz-Canel’s closing speech to the Central Committee on October 24, 2021. “In the face of the dissatisfactions in our population” he said,” we will be attending the population properly, working in the neighborhoods and reactivating the mechanisms of popular participation.” It was, indeed, essential “to win the time lost due to routine, schematism and the lack of link with the base.” As he subsequently noted upon visits to neighborhoods and communities in December, we have to begin with the local diagnosis of the problems that have to be solved: “Everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people.” Furthermore, there was the special necessity to reach youth: “If youth do not receive differentiated attention, the continuity of the Revolution is at risk.” [129] Very simply, there was a failure in the Party’s work.

Yet another thing the Party learned is that the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs) in their current form were not adequate to their mission. “Our mission was, is and will always be the defense of the Revolution, from our neighborhoods and cities,” stressed Gerardo Hernandez, Hero of the Republic (as one of the Five) in his role as National Coordinator of the CDRs. However, he acknowledged that” there are problems with the functioning of the base” including places where “there is no volunteer work, collection of raw materials and other tasks that the organization traditionally assumed.” Accordingly, in prioritizing 65 neighborhoods, he argued it was necessary to “revitalize” the CDRs and to strengthen their structures and missions; in particular, he pointed to the need to pay attention to social problems, especially those that generate inequalities and alerting organizations and institutions about their obligations, promote prevention work, strengthen revolutionary vigilance to face problems from their inception, and promote work with children, adolescents, and youth.

New in the planned revitalization of the CDRs is the need to incorporate young people beginning at the age of 16 and to find ways to select activists to serve social networks and to strengthen revolutionary surveillance systems, “taking into account the modes of action of the counterrevolution.” Renewal of members and functions was necessary under these new conditions. In particular, noting the role of elderly members in the CDRs, Gerardo Hernandez stated clearly that “there is a lot of experience and teachings to take from them, but we are interested in many more young people joining.” [130]

Was the shock of July 11, then, sufficient to jar Cuba from its existing path and onto a path less likely to lead in the direction of Viet Nam and China? Not immediately on its face. Objective 3 of the Economic and Social Strategy (ESS) for 2022 adopted by the IV Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party did “give priority to people, households and communities in situations of vulnerability.” However, the other 4 named objectives for the ESS referred to economic reforms, stabilizing the electricity system, transforming the state business system and to decentralizing to allow municipalities more autonomy. The main subject of the Plenum, too, was evaluation of the implementation of the Guidelines for 2021-2026, i.e., its progress along the “updating” path. [131] Even if this was not the intent of the Plenum, however, did the effect of July 11 point in a new direction?

Changing the Path

Given the apparent perspective of the party leadership, the influence of economists and the international environment, Cuba’s chosen path seems to be in the direction realized in Viet Nam and China. It is far from arriving there at this point, and whether Cuba’s situation (e.g., its demographics and the U.S. impatience for regime change) ever would permit it to match that success is uncertain. However, the advice of Cuban economists for the updating of the economic model promises, if followed, to lead to capitalism with Cuban characteristics.132

What, on the other hand, might lead to a socialist Future? Elements of such a path have been identified above. They include Marx’s emphasis upon the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change (“revolutionary practice”) and his vision of a society of “self-governing and self-working” communes (rather than a state characterized by a “ systematic and hierarchic division of labour” in the hands of “a trained caste”). They can be found in Che’s argument on the necessity to build socialist consciousness through socialist practice rather than through self-interest, in Fidel’s plea that Cuban economists study Che, in Mészáros’s rejection of commodity exchange relations and his emphasis upon the necessity for the “development of the creative potentialities of the social individuals” and in Marta’s attention to the importance of spaces in which people can develop their capacities through their protagonism. Fidel’s statement in 1979 made the point well: “Development is mainly attention to the human being, who must be protagonist and the end of any development effort. [133]

Were Cuba to step boldly to remove barriers to the advance of agricultural cooperatives by freeing them to make their own way, by finally removing restrictions to the development of non-agricultural coops (and privileging them relative to capitalist firms), by introducing real worker management processes into state firms (as well as private firms), and by realizing the potential of popular councils, it could create spaces that can unleash the collective creative energy of people and move onto a socialist path, a path which develops both productive forces and socialist consciousness . [134] Is this a fantasy?

Marxists have an unfortunate record in predicting the Future–especially when it comes to forecasting the next economic crisis or the final gasp of capitalism. The combination of analysis and hope may lead (as it did for Marx) to an overestimation of the significance of certain phenomena and the failure to grasp that of other factors. So, it is with a recognition of this tradition that I approach this discussion of a possible Future for Cuba.

There is definitely the suggestion of an alternative path in the speeches of Miguel Diaz-Canel as President of Cuba and First Secretary of the Party. The current strategy recognizes, he told the April 2022 meeting of the Council of Ministers, that based upon the situation in Cuba and the world, there will always be new measures and ideas to put into practice; however, “there is a premise that cannot be ignored in any scenario.” This essential premise is that “the solutions and transformations that are proposed have to respond to socialism and have to be seen from the Marxist perspective. [135]

Consider the party’s response to problems in communities. After listening to residents in vulnerable neighborhoods following July 11, Diaz-Canel stressed the importance of not bringing ready-made solutions to them. We are not there “to intervene in the neighborhoods; we are going to support the neighborhoods and the diagnosis, proposals, ideas have to come from them…we are going to help channel all of this and work with the people, with the actors who are in the neighborhood, which will allow us to articulate well the concepts of participation and democracy.” In fact, these concepts of participation and democracy represent a departure from existing practice. The problems in the neighborhoods, he explained, demonstrated the need “to revive practices and experiences that were put in practice at another time and have proven their worth.” [136]

Several months later, Diaz-Canel returned to the same theme when visiting communities. Arguing that the concepts he was advancing originated with Fidel, he insisted that “everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people.” [137]  Further, concluding the discussion at the Central Committee meeting in October 2021, Diaz-Canel emphasized the need to develop “a genuine, inclusive, democratic and participatory process that defends that concept of popular power that we were discussing here.” It means, he pointed out, that the party should become “pedagogues when interacting with society, not only in the way we transfer our contents, but also in the way we learn from that interaction.” That concept of popular power, he continued, requires “spaces to debate and propose, that after debating and proposing there are spaces to implement, and that after debating and proposing, actions are implemented, then there will also be transparency to control, to exercise popular control, to be accountable and to advance.”

That emphasis upon everything starting “from the participation of the people” would constitute a significant change in direction. In order to be able to do this, the First Secretary of the Party insisted, demands “strengthening and updating the work of our mass organizations” [138] Such an updating of party practice (were it to occur) would change the nature of the relation of the party to society. It means, as Marta argued, that “political cadres should fundamentally be popular pedagogues, capable of fostering the ideas and initiatives that emerge from within the grassroots movement.” [139] Further, if everything is to start from the people, it means that consultation (however salutary it has been recently) is not enough. As German Sánchez wrote, “Only by respecting the role of the people as the main actor in the real process of decision-making (and not as subject of consultation) will we have the ability to get out of the labyrinth.” [140]

So far, the renewed focus upon protagonism and popular control does not seem to have extended beyond communities, in particular to workplaces. While Diaz-Canel earlier had talked about the “importance of expanding democracy on the basis of popular control and the active participation of workers” in state companies, his point at the time was to reduce theft–in that “this leads to a greater sense of belonging and a brake on the occurrence of criminal acts and corruption.” [141]  July 11 revealed a serious problem in neighborhoods to which the party has had to respond quickly, but it has not felt the same urgency to concern itself with the lack of a “sense of belonging” and the existence of alienation within workplaces that have long plagued productivity and pride and contributed significantly to Cuba’s economic straits. This, too, requires “updating.”

In the struggle to the death between the Future and the Past in Cuba, we can see two concepts of “updating.” The first is the updating of the economic model, which expands the role of the market, allows the development of private capital, emphasizes the attraction of foreign capital, would close unprofitable state companies, encourages individual material incentive and produces people fit for capitalism. As Che stressed, “wanting to construct socialism with capitalist elements without really changing their meaning” is a path that “obliges new concessions to economic levers, that is to say retreat.” That path does not build socialist consciousness.

The second is the updating of the concepts of participation and democracy in which the Party takes responsibility for encouraging and facilitating collective protagonism. Recall in this respect, Che’s view of “the role of the vanguard party”–not to focus upon economic self interest but “precisely that of raising as high as possible the opposing banner, the banner of moral interest.” Insofar as updating the economic model does not rely exclusively upon material incentive but stresses protagonism in workplaces, communities and society as a whole, there is the possibility of following Che’s emphasis upon balance–the simultaneous development of productive forces and socialist human beings. [142]

The Cuban Revolution now faces a very serious challenge because its desperate need for hard currency to be able to import food and fuel has been exacerbated by the effects of the war in Ukraine. So far, Cuba has demonstrated its remarkable ability to respond to enormous challenges (development of agroecology and its latest success being its independent development of vaccines). [143] Perhaps July 11 can be the shock that allows Cuba to change its path from that advocated by its economists. Were it to ignite protagonism with a national campaign such as Rectification and the Battle of Ideas, Cuba could build socialist consciousness and update the Revolution.

Notes

1. “Understand above all and first of all, that a revolution is not a bed of roses, a revolution is a struggle to the death between the Future and the Past.” lanic.utexas.edu

2. Marta Harnecker, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 161. See also Marta Harnecker receives Libertador Award for Critical Thinking – YouTube.

3. Not incidentally, these questions were formulated when Marta and I were advisers in Venezuela, 2004-2011.

4. See my discussion of “the atomism of neoclassical economics” in Michael A Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), chapter 1.

5. Extended discussion of this question may be found in “Never Forget the Second Product,” Chapter 5 of Between Capitalism and Community, , Ibid..

6. Karl Marx, “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne,” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol..11, 403.,

7. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol 22, 335.

8. Friedrich Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question” (1850), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 275.

9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973): 494.

10. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 283..

11. Marx, Capital, 1: 548, 643, 799. 899.

12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 772

13. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 1981): 178; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: 447.

14. Michael A. Lebowitz, “Protagonism and Productivity,” Monthly Review, November 2017.

15. Marx, Grundrisse: 172; Marx, Capital, 1: 171.

16. Marx, Grundrisse: 171-2.

17. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: 85-9; Marx, Grundrisse: 278.

18. Marx, Grundrisse: 278, 459-60.

19. Emily Kawano, Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People & Planet.

20. Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works,, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975) 227–28; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels,,, Collected Works, , vol. 3, 302, 304.

21. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: 78-81; Marx, Grundrisse: 158–59.

22. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press: 1995), 756.

23. Ibid., 789.

24. Ibid,. 764.

25. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 711.

26. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works. Vol.2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 24.

27. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 278.

28. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 711.

29. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 22. An extended analysis of this document may be found in Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), Chapter 2, “Understanding the Critique of the Gotha Program.”

30. Marx, Civil War in France in Marx and Engels, On the Paris Commune (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 75.

31. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, op.cit., 68–73.

32. Karl Marx, “First Outline of The Civil War in France,” in Marx and Engels, op.cit, 155–56.

33. Marx, Critique, 32.

34. Mészáros, op.cit., 836.

35. Ibid.,. 836.

36. See Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), in particular Chap. 6, “Making a Path to Socialism.”

37. Mészáros, op. cit, 761; Marx, Critique, op cit, 24.

38. Marx, Grundrisse, 459–60, 278.

39. Marx, Critique, 23,24.

40. Ibid., 25.

41. Ibid.., 23.

42. Ibid., 24; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 241.

43. Marx, Critique, 25. Those who rely upon Marx’s Critique to support their argument for the treatment of socialism as a stage say nothing about Marx’s point about the “deductions,” his critique of inequality or his point about “the fuss” about distribution made by “vulgar socialists.”

44. Mészáros. Op.cit, 817.

45. See Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).

46. Ibid., 138.

47. See the section, “The Class Perspective of the Economists” in Ibid. 120-28.

48. To label the period as one of “transition” presumes the triumph of the Future.

49. Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.,50. See also Michael A. Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021, chapter 8, “Beyond Atomism.”

50. Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1989), 92.

51. Marta and I were privileged to observe how Hugo Chavez’s encouragement of initiatives from below enabled people (through communal councils and in recovered factories) to develop strength, pride and dignity–characteristics that continue today where they build communes in Venezuela in response to his message, “comuna o nada.” What remains of Chavism is best followed in Venezuelanalysis[https://venezuelanalysis.com]. See also Cira Pasqual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, Venezuela: the Present as Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).

52. Marta Harnecker, “ Ideas for the Struggle,” 2016, www.oldandnewproject.net; see also Lebowitz, 2020, op.cit , Chapter 12, “ The Political Instrument We Need.”

53. Note the effect of the lack of protagonism of the working class in “real socialism” , Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” op.cit.

54. Fidel Castro, Speech speech at the University of Havana, November 17, 2005, www.cuba.cu

55. Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Chapters 1-3 passim.

56. Carlos Tablada, “La creatividad en el pensamiento económico del Che,” Rebelión, 25 November 2004.

57. Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism (Pacific and Asia: Pathfinder, 1989), 93.

58. Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: the Economics of Revolution (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,2009), 63.

59. Tablada, Che Guevara, op.cit, 121.

60. Ibid., 122, 126-7, 133-4.

61. Yaffe, op.cit., 56.

62. Ibid., 250-1.

63. Ibid., 49.

64. Tablada, Economics, op.cit, 135-6, 193; Yaffe, op.cit, 56.

65. Tablada, op.cit, 136.

66. Ibid., 193, 136.

67. Yaffe, op.cit, 63.

68. Ibid., 131.

69. Ibid., 171, 133.

70. Ibid., 146-8.

71. Ibid,.133, 149-50.

72. Ibid., 138-9, 144-5, 161.

73. Ibid., 207-16.

74. Tablada, op.cit., 200.

75. Yaffe, op.cit, 249.

76. Ibid.., 85.

77. Tablada, op.cit.,172,178, 194.

78. Yaffe, op.cit., 67.

79. Tablada, op.cit., 201.

80. Ibid., 121-2.

81. Yaffe, op.cit., 263.

82. Cf., Michael A Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: the Conductor and the Conducted” (New York: Monthly Review Press), 2012.

83. Tablada, op.cit., 41-51.

84. Juan Valdés Paz, “Cuba: los cambios institucionales que vendrán,” December 5, 2015 La Haine (Paper, 2011).

85. It is generally acknowledged, though, that the increased reliance upon markets led to an increase in inequality at this time.

86. Fidel Castro Ruz, Speech to Young Communists League 8th Congress, Havana, 5 December 2004. Juan Valdés Paz recalled in 2020 that another factor was unemployment.: they told Fidel “we have 12 percent unemployment” and Fidel said “unemployment in socialism? Juan Valdés Paz, “Las instituciones cubanas tienen una serie de graves desviaciones,” Talk at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, Marianao, Havana, La Tizza, Dec 3, 2021.

87. La Tizza Collective, “We Must Return to the Future,” (published July 15, 2021 in Spanish in Cuba), Monthly Review, Vol 73, no. 8 (January 2022).

88. Marce Cameron, “Cuba’s Battle of Ideas,” Green Left Weekly, Np. 667, May 10, 2006. I recall well seeing recent social work graduates, all dressed in white, file proudly onto the balcony at the Palace of Conventions in Havana where they were applauded by the participants in the 2003 Globalization Conference.

89. La Tizza Collective, op.cit;; From the perspective of an economist, however, the period was marked by “irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies.” Pavel Vidal-Alejandro, “Cuban Macroeconomic Trends and the Pending Monetary Reform.” Cuban Studies, No. 47 (2019), pp. 279, 286. University of Pittsburgh Press. Similarly, Julio Carranza, another leading Cuban economist, noted that the Battle of ideas “brought back inoperative and limited forms of economic management” in addition to its a very positive dimension from a political and ideological point of view. Cuba News, July 17, 2021.

90. José Luís Rodríguez, “The Recent Transformations in the Cuban Economy,” international Journal of Cuban Studies , Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter 2013).

91. Raul Castro Ruz, http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2007/07/27/nacional/artic01.html; Philip Peters, “A chronology of Cuba’s ‘updating’ of the socialist model,” International Journal of Cuban Studies , Autumn/Winter 2012, Vol. 4, No. 3/4,

92. Peters, op.cit.

93. Peters, op.cit. These changes are not referred to as “reforms” nor by the Russian term for restructuring, “perestroika.”

94. See the discussion of the social contract in “real socialism” in Lebowitz, 2012, Chapter 2.

95. Among other valued social achievements of the Revolution are universal free healthcare and universal free education.

96. C. Juan Triana Cordovi and Stephen Wilkinson, “A Lot Done but Much More to Do: An Assessment of the Cuban Economic Transformation So Far,” International Journal of Cuban Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter 2013),119, 127-8.

97. Al Campbell, “Updating Cuba’s Economic Model: Socialism, Human Development, Markets and Capitalism,” Socialism and Democracy, 2016 Vol. 30, No. 1, 18.

98. Campbell, op.cit.,18-26; Raul Castro, op.cit, 2010.

99. See the discussion of Leontiev’s explanation of why it is necessary to write history backwards in Lebowitz, 2020, Chapter 10, “How to Find a Path to Community.”

100. Classic examples often cited in relation to path dependency include the continued dominance of the Qwerty keyboard on computers over the Dvorak layout [despite the superiority of the latter], the small railway gauge initially adopted for railways over wider ones that allow for greater speed, the victory of the VHS format over the Betamax as the result of contingent initial steps.

101. Anthony P. Maingot, “Epistemic ‘Organic Intellectuals’ and Cuba’s Battle of Ideas,” Yumpu.

102. Lebowitz, 2012, Chapter 5, “The Conductor and the Battle of Ideas in the Soviet Union.”

103. Omar Everleny, “How Can we Reduce Prices and Stop Inflation in Cuba,” Havana Times, January 29, 2022; Helen Yaffe, “Che Guevara’ Enduring Legacy: Not the Foco but the Theory of Socialist Construction,” Latin American Perspectives, March 2009, Vol. 36, No.2; C. Juan Triana Cordovi and Stephen Wilkinson, “A Lot Done but Much More to Do: An Assessment of the Cuban Economic Transformation So Far,” International Journal of Cuban Studies, Vo.5, No. 2 (Winter 2013); Juan Triana in “Desafios de Consenso Economia,” Revist a Alma Mater, August, 9, 2021.

104. Triana and Wilkinson, op.cit.

105. See the “Overture: The Conductor and the Conducted” in Michael A. Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: the Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press (2012), 21-7.

106. One egregious example is that co-operatives have been accepted and promised for many years as a form of social property. However, economist Oscar Fernández recently commented that, “unfortunately there has been no strength or political will or knowledge to promote cooperative solutions.” Revista Alma Mater, “Economía cubana: Cuatro preguntas urgentes,” Cuba y la Economía.

107. German Sánchez Otero, “The Communist Party of Cuba and Present Challenges: Reflections on the Eighth Party Congress,” Monthly Review, Vol. 73, No. 8 (January 2022), 38.

108. Stephen Wilkinson, “Neither Beijing nor Hanoi but a Cuban Market Socialism?,” International Journal of Cuban Studies, Autumn/Winter 2012, Vol. 4, No. 3/4, Note Sánchez’s devastating caveat re the idea of copying China and Vietnam. Op.cit, 38-9.

109. Among other characteristics that need to be recognized are demographic factors such as an aging population (especially in agriculture), low birth rates (in part as the result of housing shortages, with several generations cohabiting) and emigration of young people.

110. German Sánchez Otero, “The Communist Party of Cuba and Present Challenges: Reflections on the Eighth Party Congress,” Monthly Review, Vol. 73, No. 8 (January 2022), 36-7. As Cuban Ambassador, German Sánchez was close to Chavez and author of books on him.

111. Revista Alma Mater, “Economía cubana: Cuatro preguntas urgentes,” Cuba y la Economía., op.cit.

112. Juan Valdés Paz, “La institucionalidad Cubana tiene una serie de grave desviaciones.” La Tizza, December 3. 2021.

113. Esteban Morales Domínguez, “The Census, Skin Color and Social Analysis,” Portside, September 11, 2021. See also by Morales, Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and La Problematica Racial en Cuba(Havana:Editorial Jose Marti, 2012.)

114. The CUC, the convertible peso, meant to mirror the U.S. dollar, was discontinued as part of the currency reform.

115. As Hansing and Hoffmann point out, the implication of this racial differentiation (although under-reported by the government) can not be overstated. They cite in this respect Esteban Morales, who stated, “The Cuban population is treated as a homogenous mass. This is an error of incalculable dimension.” Katrin Hansing and Bert Hoffmann, “Cuba’s New Social Structure:: Assessing the Re-Stratification of Cuban Society 60 Years after Revolution,” German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) (2019), No. 315 (February 2019), http://www.jstor.com/stable/resrep21213 See also Katrin Hansing. “When Racial Inequalites Return:Assessing the Restratification of Cuban Society 60 Years After Revolution,” March 20, 2020; Rafael Betancourt, “The Social and Solidarity Economy’s Contribution to Building Socialism in Cuba,” On Cuba News, July 9, 2020.

116. Mayra Espina Prieto and Dayma Echevarría León, “El cuadro socioestructural emergente de la ‘actualización’ en cuba: retos a la equidad social” ( The Emerging Socio-Structural Framework of the ‘Update’ in Cuba: Challenges to Social Equity), International Journal of Cuban Studies , Vol. 12, No. 1, (Summer 2020), pp. 29-52.

117. One problem finally presumably resolved) has been the delay in authorizing non-agricultural cooperatives involving professionally-trained people. Cuba has produced many university graduates. However, as I argued in my talk at the University of Havana in November 2016, there is “moral depreciation of human capacity that has been built up, all other things equal, if it is not used.” It would not be surprising if this were a source of discontent among youth. Lebowitz, “Protagonism and Productivity,” op.cit.

118. Juan Valdés Paz, “· Las instituciones cubanas tienen una serie de graves desviaciones,” Talk at the Martin Luther King.Jr. Memorial Center, Marianao, Havana, La Tizza, Dec 3, 2021. Valdes Paz comments there about Cuban economic advisors: “Comrade Marino Murillo can talk for two hours about any number of problems without mentioning any social implication. The social never appears when economists speak.”

119. A similar example was in in Manzanillo, where young teenagers were protesting after the area had been without water for seven days. Communistas, “From Cuba: A Description of the Protests,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

120. Helen Yaffe, “Cuba After the July 11 Protests, “ American University, Washington, DC. Yaffe reports that slogans and placards calling for protests apparently appeared on websites at 9.a.m (before the protests in San Antonio).

121. Communistas. Op.cit.. The same point was made by the La Tizza Collective, which noted that the “most marginalized sector” was mobilized by “the political agenda of the counterrevolution.” “We Must Return to the Future,” Monthly Review, Vol. 7 3, No.8 (January 2022), 23-4

122. “Desafios del Consenso,” op.cit

123. Everleny, “How Can we Reduce Prices and Stop Inflation in Cuba,” op.cit.

124. Revista Alma Mater, “Economía cubana: Cuatro preguntas urgentes,” Cuba y la Economía. https: elestadocomotal.com.

125. Vicente Morin Aguado, “How Cuba Can Rise from the Ashes Post COVID-19?,” Havana Times, May 12, 2020.

126. Yaffe, op.cit

127. CubaNews, November 21, 2021.

128. Michael Hernandez, OnCubaNews, October 13, 2021.

129. Diaz-Canel, “We are ready and willing to do everything to defend what is most sacred, what unites us” , CubaNews, Oct 26, 2021;. Díaz-Canel in Las Tunas and Holguín: “Everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people,” CubaNews, December 10, 2021;.Díaz-Canel:” Developing a policy for attention to youth is among the most important government projects underway, Granma February 23, 2022/

130. Fidel Rendon Matienzo, “The CDRs will carry out the process of revitalizing and strengthening their missions.” ACN [Cuba News Agency], 01 April 2022 ; Yenia Silva Correa “The country grows in its neighborhoods,” | internet@granma.cu April 1, 2022; Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, We have to revitalize the organization with creativity and enthusiasm,” ACN, September 28, 2021.

131. Yaima Puig Meneses, “Cuba will not stop its development,” CubaDebate, April 27, 2022.

132. Valdes Paz commented that “we have many social democrats: ‘in the end the empire is not so bad, we have to solve it, that is inevitable, we have to be objective, we have to be realistic…’ and a discourse begins to appear in the name of ‘realism.’” op.cit.,

133. Carlos Tablada, ““La creatividad en el pensamiento económico del Che,” op.cit.

134. See also interview in 2014, Michael A. Lebowitz, “Cuba Needs to Unleash Creative Energy,” Havana Times, March 28, 2014.

135. Yaima Puig Meneses, “Díaz-Canel: The transformations of the economic-social strategy have to respond to socialism” | internet@granma.cu, April 25, 2022

136. CubaDebate: “Cuban President: We are going to support the neighborhoods, not to intervene in them” , translated by Walter Lippman,Cubanews, August 18, 2021

137. René Tamayo,” Díaz-Canel in Las Tunas and Holguín: Everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people” Cubadebate, 09 December 2021. Translated by Walter Lippman, Cubanews 12 December 2021

138. Diaz-Canel, “We are ready and willing to do everything to defend what is most sacred, what unites us.” Op. cit., Recall Marta’s emphasis on the need for space for the popular protagonism that builds human capacity, See also Lebowitz, “The Political Instrument as Revolutionary Pedagogue,” 171-5, Lebowitz, (2020), op. cit.

139. Harnecker, “Ideas for the Struggle,” op.cit.; Lebowitz, Ibid,

140. German Sánchez, op. cit, 41.

141. “Educate to strengthen internal control and crime prevention,” Granma, April 27, 2021 This doesn’t mean that Diaz-Canel does not himself support a general extension of democratic participation from below in the workplace. Indeed, in a recent interview, he summarized his position as “We are defending the need to increasingly expand democracy on the basis of people’s participation and control in our society.” Manolo De Los Santos, “We Will Prevail: A Conversation With Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canal,” Counterpunch, April 8, 2022.

142. Recall here Marta’s questions posed at the beginning of this essay.

143. Mauricio Betancourt, “The effect of Cuban agroecology in mitigating the metabolic rift: A quantitative approach to Latin American food production,” Global Environmental Change, June 25, 2020.

Directing the Moderate Rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and Propaganda Warfare

By Ben Arthur Thomason

A decade into Syria’s catastrophe as one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century, we can take greater stock of its effects not just on geopolitics and Syria itself, but on imperial management strategies, information warfare, and popular culture, particularly when considering the interventions by the West and its regional allies. A key pillar of Western imperialist projects next to the hard power of bombs and economic sanctions is the soft power of diplomatic maneuvering, media and cultural imperialism, manufacturing public consent for war, and inventing realities to maintain ideological hegemony. The complementary dialectic between hard and soft power in the US led imperial project in Syria built on historical ventures in Muslim majority countries and evolved propaganda and civil society hybrid warfare strategies that may become foundational for 21st century warfare.

Complementing hard and soft power: the UK FCO media and civil society consortium

Early in the Syrian conflict, through a scheme code-named Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to flood Syria with weapons, many of which ended up on the black market or in the hands of extremist groups. In an echo of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, where Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan were supplied with billions of dollars in arms including Raytheon manufactured anti-aircraft guided Stinger Missiles, the US and its allies supplied Syrian rebels, including Salafist groups like the Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zenki Movement, with Raytheon produced anti-tank guided BGM TOW missiles.

Supplementing the hard-power pressures of sanctions and lethal aid to militants was a soft power strategy that combined diplomatic pressure, propaganda, and civil society programs. Western governments and NGOs funded, supplied, and trained pro-opposition Syrian journalists, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. Pro-rebel outlets that sprung from this support were needed because Western journalists largely stayed out of reporting from rebel-held Syria for risk of being kidnapped or killed, despite the purported moderation of the Western backed Free Syrian Army and attempts to downplay the strength of extremist forces in Western media. Perhaps the most important organization, at least that we have significant documentation of right now, was a consultancy firm, Analysis Research Knowledge (ARK), and their search and rescue and media production group, Syria Civil Defence (British spelling), popularly known as the White Helmets.

Figure 1- An example of ARK’s “rebranding” projects for armed militias to sell the “moderate rebels” image (CPG01737 ARK 1.3.1, n.d.: 1)

ARK’s modern form was established as ARK FZC in 2011 and is based in Dubai, though its roots go back at least to 2009 when it was formed in Beirut, Lebanon as ARK Group or ARK Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates avoided full involvement in the arming and support of Syrian militants, instead opting to become an important partner in diplomatic and civil society efforts against the Assad government. ARK was started by former British Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) employee Alistair Harris, who got his start serving in the Yugoslav Wars. Contracting under the UK FCO, ARK first established a program for collecting and documenting alleged war crimes and set up an opposition media program called Basma Syria (Basma meaning smile in Arabic). In 2012 ARK, led by employee James Le Mesurier, a former UK military intelligence officer who also got his start in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars, established the search and rescue teams that would become the White Helmets. The group sold itself as a grassroots citizen activist humanitarian group and became media darlings in the West. 

The White Helmets were the bridge between the civil society and propaganda aspects of these soft-power pro-rebel operations. Not only did they provide services such as search and rescue, medical transport, fire suppression, and post-battle clean-ups and reconstruction, they filmed and photographed themselves doing all these things. They were often first on the scene reporting on bombings, skirmishes, and alleged chemical weapons attacks. The most famous accusations against the White Helmets, lobbed by Russian and alternative Western media, were that they collaborated with terrorist groups and staged fake attacks and/or rescue missions. Yet perhaps the more interesting and revealing thing about the White Helmets that can be confirmed is that they were a key part of a wider propaganda and civil society operation to support anti-Assad forces in Syria and justify and encourage foreign intervention led by corporate contractors working under the UK FCO.  

As the military war dragged on, Western backed militias needed to administer the areas they conquered as well as fight an information war. Since these rebel-held spaces were too dangerous for Western journalists, Western states raised a local media infrastructure through local proxies. US and European NGOs and governments funded, trained, and supplied outlets like Aleppo Media Center while ARK and its fellow UK FCO contractors set up their own media outlets like Basma, Moubader, and Syriagraph, establishing TV, radio, and magazine production for themselves or partner organizations. Other FCO contractors like Albany Associates Ltd identified and trained select spokespeople from and developed communication strategies for violent sectarian Salafi militias like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. One prominent ostensibly grassroots media outlet for the Battle of Aleppo, Revolutionary Forces of Syria, was directly run by an FCO consortium member that partnered closely with ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), directed by Richard Barrett, former director of counterterrorism at MI6. These outlets then fed propaganda to their “well-established contacts with numerous key media organisations [sic] including Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Orient, Sky News Arabic, CNN, BBC, BBC Arabic, The Times, The Guardian, FT [Financial Times], NYT [New York Times], Reuters and others.”

Figure 2- One of several maps of Syria showcasing ARK’s media and civil society operations in Syria. “ICSP Beneficiaries” refer to local Free Syrian Police units while “Media Stringers” refer to freelance journalists trained and or employed by ARK (ITT Lot C – Technical Response)  

UK FCO contractors like Adam Smith International and ARK tried to create civil society infrastructure to provide essential services that could compete with Syrian state services. They set up a Free Syrian Police (FSP) as well as municipal governance, education, and sanitation services, while the White Helmets provided emergency fire, transportation, and rubble clean-up services. The FSP alone received hundreds of millions of dollars through US and European funding and had its own scandals of corruption and connections with terrorist groups. The White Helmets alongside media outlets set up with extensive help from Western governments and NGOs like Aleppo Media Center, or media outlets directly run by Western government contractors like Revolutionary Forces of Syria, audio-visually recorded and disseminated these services from local Arabic speaking audiences to global, particularly Western Anglophone audiences. For ARK, their civil society services and “media products” were one and the same. The US and European states spent over $1 billion on these media and civil society initiatives refined through constant polling, focus groups, data analysis, and target audience segmentation to maximize their media and public opinion impact.

Figure 3- ARK “Project Schematic” showing how civil society initiatives immediately became propaganda for local and Western audiences. The events for September-November were planned by ARK to both provide rebel governance and turn their services into pro-rebel, anti-regime propaganda. (ARK 1.2.1 Methodology, c2017)

Target Audiences: The Home Front

The White Helmets became the star group of this initiative not just because they provided local services and produced propaganda at the same time; they also gave the opposition to Assad a singular humanitarian face that could shroud the sectarian and theocratic violence that characterized the bulk of the Western backed armed opposition that eventually coalesced into ISIS. Among Western media and celebrities, that’s exactly what the White Helmets became. 

The program of influence peddling and manufacturing public consent for intervention in Syria made it to the highest levels of Western entertainment with the 2016 Oscar winning documentary The White Helmets, profiling the ARK created group. The documentary created a narrative of Russian and Assad military devils bombing helpless civilians who relied on angelic White Helmets as their only line of defense, scrubbing all rebel militias from the conflict except ISIS. It was made possible by the cheap labor of the White Helmet workers, with whom ARK had previously produced several Arabic-language documentaries, the money and government connections of oil and industrial interests through philanthropies like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the enthusiastic endorsements of US and UK media. The organization that led the impact campaign for the documentary and the White Helmets targeting celebrities and the media as well as Western halls of power was The Syria Campaign (TSC). TSC was started and heavily funded by a Syrian expat, US educated billionaire oil CEO and major UK Tory party donor, Ayman Asfari, whose company was convicted and fined in 2021 by a UK court for paying millions of dollars in bribes to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE for oil contracts. Even before the Syrian Civil War started Asfari had his hands in dirty influence peddling with the UK who led the propaganda and civil society war against Syria, the UAE, who served as a regional conduit for those efforts, and the Saudis, who helped lead the hard power militia war against Syria.

While The White Helmets documentary tugged at viewers’ heartstrings over the brutality of Syrian and Russian air power, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets pushed for the US and its allies to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. This was the same kind of intervention that was instrumental in lynching Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and throwing that country into chaos and strife it still has not emerged from. Despite the risk of inciting a hot war with Russia that a no-fly zone in Syria implied, this policy was pushed by powerful political leaders, including the 2016 Democratic party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Cynical weaponization of real and alleged atrocity stories to justify intervention and create easy good vs. evil stories for the benefit of US backed rebel factions in Muslim countries is not new. Journalist Joel Whitney (2016) showed that the weaponization of refugees and training pro-rebel activists to encourage and film atrocities has historical precedent in Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan. The resumes and CVs from leaked UK Foreign Commonwealth Office documents also point to these programs repeating and building off each other through history, particularly in the destabilized Muslim majority regions of the world in the past 30 years. Several prominent employees with leadership roles in these government contractors in Syria have long resumes before joining ARK and other FCO contractors. Their employee profiles demonstrate a pattern of receiving military, media, civil society, and government transition positions in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, sometimes in that order and often including several sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria as well. These ventures have occurred before and will continue.

Many details of the Western propaganda and interference schemes in Syria are still unknown, locked in classified internal government and corporate documents. Yet the few leaks and investigative reports we have reveal an extensive, well-funded, years-long propaganda and disinformation warfare campaign waged first against the Syrian government but perhaps more intensely against Western publics. Through groups like the White Helmets and the media they produced, Western governments and corporations backed up their multi-billion-dollar effort to flood Syria with weapons and fighters with propaganda and civil society campaigns worth about a billion dollars. These facilitated rebel administrations on the ground and helped sell a simplified whitewashed narrative of the Syrian Civil War and build war fervor for Western intervention. This built off historical precedents, committed by the same people who engaged in similar campaigns in other Muslim majority countries. 

It must be said that these efforts failed in important ways. While nearly all Western mainstream corporate media and politicians fell in line behind the White Helmets and the consortium’s pro-intervention narratives, war weary Western publics, particularly in the US and UK, were skeptical and unconvinced. Outlets like the Syria Campaign, the Guardian, and the BBC were quite troubled by the popular pushback they got which, despite their best efforts, could not be smeared as all Moscow agents or their useful idiots spreading disinformation. Russia and Syria did have their own propaganda strategy to counter Western media, and this is an inevitable reality of modern warfare. Their tactics included accusations against the White Helmets that, while containing important grains of truth, were overly simplistic and designed to paper over the brutal acts they engaged in as belligerents in a generally brutal war. Yet it is striking that, after so many criminal imperialist adventures in the region, public skepticism and disillusionment toward institutional narratives pushing humanitarian intervention in another Muslim country would be dismissed by political and media professionals with such pious Cold War style deflection and finger-pointing. These went so far as to include a sting operation and media smear campaign led by yet another organization created by ARK against academics investigating Western intervention in Syria. This ideological disciplining of public discourse is particularly outrageous when critical investigations into what Western states and their allies were doing in Syria without substantial, if any, public consent or knowledge reveal disturbing patterns of violence, manipulation, and good-old fashioned corruption and self-aggrandizement.

The Canadian Government Embraces the "Working Definition" of Antisemitism

By Morgan Duchesney

The Canadian government’s current enthusiasm for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” is troubling, given the Canadian government’s traditional indifference to Israel’s illegal occupation of conquered Palestinian territory and ongoing defiance of International Law. By offering uncritical support for this “working definition”, the government encourages the false notion that even accurate criticism of Israel state policy is a form of antisemitism. 

According to Allan C. Brownfeld in the 2022 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), “It is a sleight of hand. The trick is to enforce a set of boundaries around criticism of Israel without investigating whether these boundaries bear any relation to boundaries on the ground.”

 While this “working definition” has not entered the Criminal Code of Canada, the Canadian Human Rights Act or provincial human rights codes, Canadian government rhetoric strongly suggests the possibility it might. 

According to a 2022 WRMEA article by Michael Beuckbert, former “...Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau declared that Canada ‘categorically’ rejects the “apartheid label,” following the 2021 release of Amnesty International and human Rights Watch reports which both concluded that Israeli officials are committing the crimes against humanity of “apartheid” and “persecution” against the Palestinian people.”

Before its 2016 adoption by the IHRA, this little-known “working definition” was a favourite cause of the former Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) whose membership included Irwin Cotler, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a man with strong ties to the IHRA. Prior to its 2011 disbandment, the CPCCA’s lobbying created a lasting chill among Canadians who publicly criticise Israeli misconduct and Canadian government complicity. 

The IHRA “working definition” is a product of the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. Aside from its indifference to the Israeli government’s illegal actions and mistreatment of Palestinians, this Declaration seems a well-intentioned and necessary tool to combat actual antisemitism, especially Holocaust denial.

“The IHRA…was initiated in 1998 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson.” In  2000 the IHRA adopted the, “…Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (or “Stockholm Declaration”) as the founding document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance…The declaration was the outcome of the International Forum convened in Stockholm between 27-29 January 2000 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson. The Forum was attended by the representatives of 46 governments…” Canada recently reaffirmed its past commitment to the Declaration.

As well, the Declaration is currently supported by the following organizations: United Nations, UNESCO,OSCE/ODIHR, European Agency for Fundamental Rights, European Union, Council of Europe and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. 

The 2015 Budapest IHRA Plenary developed the current “working definition.” subsequently, in 2016, the Bucharest Plenary convention of the IHRA adopted the following non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism: 

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Examining the Definition 

This article’s main focus is “working definition” points concerning the Israeli state. These points appear italicised in their entirety and are followed by critical commentary revealing both the irony and hypocrisy of Israeli state exceptionalism. In this author’s opinion, the definition’s points on generalized antisemitism are valid and necessary tools to reduce hate.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

While Israel has a right to exist, its official behaviour is often racist, violent and contrary to UN Resolutions and the Geneva Convention. Since 1947, the Israel state has ignored over 70 UN resolutions, invaded and conquered parts of Jordan, Syria and Egypt and imposed permanent martial law on over 2.9 million Palestinians in the occupied territories. As well, over 1.8 million Gaza Palestinians endure an Israeli-blockaded existence of violence, poverty and environmental pollution.

Unfortunately, the Israeli state openly opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and has often denied the existence of a Palestinian people. Oddly, the IHRA authors refer to “a” State of Israel” rather than “the” state, which is suggests Zionist support for an ever-expanding Biblical Israel.

Israel’s right to “self-defence” is loudly proclaimed by Israeli and Canadian officials. Conversely, when Palestinians in the occupied territories exercise their lawful right to resist martial law, their violence is routinely-condemned as terrorism. 

Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. 

The Canadian government’s response to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine and past annexation of Crimea differs radically from its response to the Israeli government’s many violations of the Geneva Convention and its defacto annexations of Palestinian territory. According to a recent report by the organization, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East,  

“...just days after the invasion (of Ukraine), Canada imposed significant sanctions on Russia, targeting both the country itself and specific Russian-occupied or annexed territories. In contrast, Canada has implemented free trade with Israel, including its illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.”

Rather than apply high ethical standards to its dealing with Israel, the Canadian government refuses to challenge its belligerent ally or take concrete action to discourage Israeli government misconduct. 

Among those who benefit from this stance are Canadian government-sponsored organizations like the Canada-Israel Industrial Research & Development Foundation (CIIRDF) who provide administrative support and channel public funds to businesses operating in one or both countries. As well, government bodies like Defence Research and Development and Canada and Export Development Canada are deeply involved in facilitating business ties between Israel and Canada.

As this author wrote in the 2020 Peace and Environment News (PEN), 

“Operation Proteus is the Canadian military mission in the West Bank, part of the U.S. Security Coordinator Office in Jerusalem and aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Behind the façade of peace enhancement, Canada is committed to supporting and training the security forces of the PA, a collaborationist administration whose governance of the Palestinian areas of the West Bank primarily serves the interests of local elites and the Israeli state.”

Over 2.6 million Palestinians under military occupation are forbidden from voting although they pay Israeli taxes. In spite of its official opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation, Canada respects Israeli tax law in the West Bank, a de facto acknowledgement of sovereignty.

Occasional PA disputes with the Israeli government do not alter the fact that Israeli intelligence and border services depend on PA security forces to crush both violent and peaceful resistance by Palestinian democracy advocates. This includes imprisonment, torture and transfer of prisoners to indefinite detention in Israel. 

Again, from this author’s 2021 PEN article, “Nizar Binat’s June 24 death at the hands of PA security forces is a harsh reminder of the PA’s attitude toward Palestinians who dare to criticize their authoritarian policies and security cooperation with Israel. Binat had been a candidate in the PA’s overdue parliamentary elections recently cancelled by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas over "uncertainty if Israel would allow the election to proceed in Jerusalem."

Canada’s government should not support any nation inflicting martial law on conquered people. Aside from the 1947 UN Resolution that created it, the State of Israel has ignored nearly 70 UN Resolutions, mostly pertaining to its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and mistreatment of Palestinians both within Israel and the occupied territories. 

According to Human Rights Watch, “At least five categories of major violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law characterize the occupation: unlawful killings, forced displacement, abusive detention, the closure of the Gaza Strip and other unjustified restrictions on movement, and the development of settlements, along with the accompanying discriminatory policies that disadvantage Palestinians.” 

Writing in the 2021 WRMEA, Allan C. Brownfeld included these paraphrased remarks by the late Desmond Tutu, former archbishop of apartheid South Africa, “What Tutu found ‘not so understandable’ was what Israel did to another people to guarantee its existence. ‘I’ve been very deeply distressed in my [2008] visit to the Holy Land. It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints, suffering like us…”

As this author also wrote in 2021, “Nineteen [now 20] years ago the Israeli state chose to keep the conquered territories of Gaza, Golan and the West Bank rather than accept the Arab League Peace Initiative. This proposal from the major Arab states offered the ‘…establishment of normal relations in the context of a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for the…full Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967, in implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338…’”

Real peace was possible but Israeli government chose a policy of permanent militarism and illegal territorial expansion facilitated largely by U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support.

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion. 

Conversely, Israel contains many radical Hebrew religionists, including West Bank settlers and clergy, who are also, “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming” of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” Rather than prosecution or even sanction, these groups enjoy military protection and financial support from the Israeli State.

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations. 

Approximately 70 Canadian-Israeli dual citizens currently serve as unpaid volunteers in the Israel Defense Force (IDF). According to a 2019 CBC article, “Neither Global Affairs Canada nor the Department of National Defence nor Public Safety Canada currently keeps track of the Canadians serving in the Israeli military.” Worse still is the fact Canadian taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing this “Canadian Foreign Legion.”

As the author wrote in the spring 2015 Leveller,

“Revenue Canada offers charitable status benefits to organizations that provide financial and moral support to active duty IDF soldiers. These include Disabled Veterans of Israel or Beit Halochem…and the Israeli-based Lone Soldier Center. 

Additionally, elite Canadian business figures like Gerry Schwartz and Heather Riesman provide up to $3 million yearly in post-military scholarships to Canadian IDF volunteers.”

While Canada and Israel are formal allies, that situation could change and create conflicts of interest for Canadian-Israeli dual nationals who might reasonably be expected to choose a side during hostilities. Such a choice would reasonably apply to the dual nationals of any state.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. 

The Israeli state’s policies of illegal expansion, cynical use of PA collaborators and its violent marginalization of a subject population are reminiscent of Apartheid South Africa to anyone with even a casual knowledge of history. However, highlighting these Israeli offenses is often presented as a graver matter than the offenses themselves. 

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel. 

Israeli mistreatment of its Palestinian citizens and occupied subjects has gradually weakened international support for Zionism. This includes Jews and younger evangelical Christians, formerly a bloc of faithful Zionists. Also, by falsely claiming to represent all Jews, the Israeli government may pretend that any persecution of Jews outside Israel is automatically linked to Israel. 

Conclusion

Supporters of the Canadian government’s uncritical enthusiasm for the IHRA “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” are by, extension excusing censorship and exceptionalism. 

Effective opposition to Canada’s role in Israeli misdeeds is hampered by corporate media coverage that routinely portrays Palestinians a, terrorists. The Israeli state is presented as a model democracy whose noble intentions sometimes go awry, in Gaza and the occupied territories.

A more comprehensive understanding of the lingering Israeli-Palestinian divide may be derived from alternative press reporting, social justice organizations, and a wide reading of Middle East history. The resultant knowledge will empower those who oppose the Canadian government’s cynical support for Israel and other nations who trample human rights.

Morgan Duchesney is a Canadian writer and Karate teacher whose work has appeared in Humanist Perspectives, Adbusters, Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, Shintani Harmonizer, Victoria Standard and the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to political writing, Morgan has published martial arts work and short fiction. 

Web Site: http://honeybadgerpress.ca

Contact: morjd@sympatico.ca

Sources

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/canada-holocaust/canada-pledges.html

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/why-is-the-israeli-military-still-recruiting-in-canada

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/un-officer-reported-israeli-war-crimes-before-deadly-bombing-widow-1.703087

https://www.cjpme.org

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration

http://http://honeybadgerpress.ca/node/247

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/10/trudeau-speech-latest-example-of-weaponizing-antisemitism-to-defend-israel/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-passports-the-disguise-of-choice-for-international-dirty-deeds/article8282163/

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Brownfeld, A.C. “Unravelling of American Zionism Sharply Divides American Jews.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: January/February 2022.

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Pappe, I. A History of Modern Palestine 2nd Edition: 2006.

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

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

By Julien Charles

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

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

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

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

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

Chronic Resentments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addicted to Conflict

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

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

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

The Real Enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selective Outrage

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Gives Us Hell But It’s A Liberated Africa That Can Douse the Flames

By Mark P. Fancher

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

African Liberation Day is a reminder that African descended people make progress when joined together in international unity. Internationalism is essential.

When U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2007, the only thing more offensive than its use of proxy African soldiers to carry out imperialist missions was the appointment of a Black man, William E. (“Kip”) Ward, to lead AFRICOM operations.

After Ward stepped down, white men assumed leadership of AFRICOM. But now, yet again, AFRICOM will be headed by a man of African descent. Lt. Gen. Michael Langley will assume the role of training and directing the armed forces of African countries to militarize Africa and plunder the continent’s resources for the benefit of foreign governments and corporations. The publication Stars and Stripes reported that for Langley “a top priority will be countering militants in the East African country of Somalia.”

The cynical use of Africans to control and exploit Africa is surpassed in its odiousness only by a willingness of Africans like Ward and Langley to engage in the enterprise. Those committed to Africa’s liberation have long been aware of the importance of ensuring that members of African communities decline such collaboration with oppressors. To that end, in 1963, the Organization of African Unity proclaimed May 25th as African Liberation Day - a day when the African World might orient itself to a serious commitment to achieving Africa’s genuine independence.

Although the commemoration of African Liberation Day throughout Africa and the African diaspora has become an ever-growing tradition, this year, in the wake of the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, there are no doubt many Africans born and living in the U.S. who can’t bring themselves to think of Africa’s plight when their personal circumstances seem so precarious. If the only problems were violent white supremacists, prospects for survival might not seem so bleak. But the anti-Black hostility has manifested in so many ways that signal that help is not on the way from any of the quarters from whence Africans in America might expect it.

Specifically, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a police bullet was fired into the head of Patrick Lyoya at point-blank range making him one of the latest of a very long series of Africans killed by cops and affirming yet again that not only are Africans unable to look to the police for protection, but that the police themselves are an enemy force.

Less blatant, but no less concerning, is the U.S. government’s seeming indifference to the international dilemma of WNBA star Brittney Griner, a captive in Russia, purportedly for drug-related offenses, even as the U.S. State Department fought more efficiently and vigorously for the release of others. In fact, it took weeks for the U.S. to even acknowledge its belief that Griner had been wrongfully detained. Concern is not limited to the plight of Griner as an individual, but it is also for the unmistakable message that a U.S. government that should presumably protect its nationals can’t be counted on if the person in question is Black.

It is not surprising then that persons of African descent in the U.S. might perceive themselves to be adrift, alone, vulnerable and unprotected even by the government entities charged with keeping them safe. The perceived intensity of the danger means that calls to work for Africa’s liberation may not resonate. While this is understandable, historically, the challenges of Africa’s diaspora have not deterred engagement in internationalist service.

The list of revolutionaries who have emerged from communities under stress but who have nevertheless thrown themselves into Africa’s struggles is long. Frantz Fanon left colonized Martinique to struggle alongside those fighting for Algeria’s independence. Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) physically relocated himself from the U.S. where Civil Rights and Black Power struggles raged to become a vital member of the Democratic Party of Guinea. Che Guevara was not content with his sterling service to the Cuban revolution, and he fought in Congo and ultimately Bolivia where he was captured and killed.

In fact, some of the most important internationalist service to Africa has been rendered by Cuba, even in the face of extreme pressure from not only western imperialism but also from the Soviet Union. Of Cuba’s assistance to the efforts to liberate Angola, Piero Gleijeses, a Johns Hopkins University professor explained:

“In early November 1975, as South Africans were advancing along the coast, Angola sent a desperate appeal request to Cubans for help. The military mission also told Fidel [Castro] that the Cubans had to do something, because Luanda was going to fall. On November 4, Fidel decided to send troops to Angola. The Soviet Union was miffed, because it didn’t want the Cubans to intervene. It showed its annoyance by not assisting in the dispatch of Cuban troops to Angola. Until 1975 or 1976, the Cubans arrived by ship and old transport planes.”

Cuba went on to play a vital role in the liberation of Angola and the fall of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa. Cuba’s sacrifices for Africa neither began nor ended in Southern Africa. Even after its military forces withdrew from the region, they were replaced by brigades of Cuban physicians and other medical personnel deployed throughout the continent.

For Black people in America, internationalist service can be not only as noble as that rendered by forebears, but it can also be pragmatic. This is because Africans are not only a numerical minority in the U.S., but also a powerless minority. Meanwhile, Africa’s population is exploding. Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze explained that by 2050, Africa’s population will account for nearly 25 percent of the population of the planet. He said:

“In the 2040s alone, it is likely that in the order of 566 million children will be born in Africa. Around midcentury, African births will outnumber those in Asia, and Africans will constitute the largest population of people of prime working age anywhere in the world.”

It just makes good sense for Africans in the U.S. to see themselves as part of that mass of humanity. This does not even consider the potential of Africa to seize control of the continent’s natural resources and to use them for the benefit of Africans worldwide. Such global sharing and collaboration will happen more organically if the African diaspora participates not only in reaping the benefits of the power that flows from control of Africa’s natural wealth, but also in the struggle on the front end to make such control a reality.

While a united and socialist Africa, with all its resources could be a powerful social, economic and political engine for communities throughout the African diaspora, as a practical matter it would need to do nothing to impact them. The mere existence of a powerful, unified Africa would be a deterrent to every police officer inclined to kill brothers like Patrick Lyoya. When the Brittney Griners of our communities might find themselves in international predicaments, the State Department would likely turn somersaults if necessary to assist them because of the need to curry favor with a powerful Africa. In the end, Africans in America need to make Africa a primary focus of their struggles despite the many hardships and challenges presented by the U.S. It just makes good sense.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of organizations with which he is affiliated. He can be contacted at mfancher[at]comcast.net.

A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A US puppet takes control in Somalia as drone war escalates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia and the Ukraine Crisis: The Eurasian Project in Conflict with the Triad Imperialist Policies (2014)

By Samir Amin

Republished from Monthly Review.

This was originally written by Samir Amin in 2014, at the time of the Maidan Coup in 2014. It provides insight into today’s conflict in the region.

The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the U.S., Western and Central Europe, Japan—hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control over the planet through a combination of:

1. so-called neo-liberal economic globalization policies allowing financial transnational capital of the Triad to decide alone on all issues in their exclusive interests;

2. the military control of the planet by the U.S. and its subordinate allies (NATO and Japan) in order to annihilate any attempt by any country not of the Triad to move out from under their yoke.

In that respect all countries of the world not of the Triad are enemies or potential enemies, except those who accept complete submission to the economic and political strategy of the Triad—such as the two new “democratic republics” of Saudi Arabia and Qatar!  The so-called “international community” to which the Western medias refer continuously is indeed reduced to the G7 plus Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Any other country, even when its government is currently aligned with the Triad, is a potential enemy since the peoples of those countries may reject that submission.

2. In that frame Russia is “an enemy.”

Whatever might be our assessment of what the Soviet Union was (“socialist” or something else), the Triad fought it simply because it was an attempt to develop independently of dominant capitalism/imperialism.

After the breakdown of the Soviet system, some people (in Russia in particular) thought that the “West” would not antagonize a “capitalist Russia”—just as Germany and Japan had “lost the war but won the peace.”  They forgot that the Western powers supported the reconstruction of the former fascist countries precisely to face the challenge of the independent policies of the Soviet Union.  Now, this challenge having disappeared, the target of the Triad is complete submission, to destroy the capacity of Russia to resist.

3. The current development of the Ukraine tragedy illustrates the reality of the strategic target of the Triad.

The Triad organized in Kiev what ought to be called a “Euro/Nazi putsch.”  To achieve their target (separating the historical twin sister nations—the Russian and the Ukrainian), they needed the support of local Nazis.

The rhetoric of the Western medias, claiming that the policies of the Triad aim at promoting democracy, is simply a lie.  Nowhere has the Triad promoted democracy.  On the contrary these policies have systematically been supporting the most anti-democratic (in some cases “fascist”) local forces.  Quasi-fascist in the former Yugoslavia—in Croatia and Kosovo—as well as in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, Hungary for instance.  Eastern Europe has been “integrated” in the European Union not as equal partners, but as “semi-colonies” of major Western and Central European capitalist/imperialist powers.  The relation between West and East in the European system is in some degree similar to that which rules the relations between the U.S. and Latin America!  In the countries of the South the Triad supported the extreme anti-democratic forces such as, for instance, ultra-reactionary political Islam and, with their complicity, has destroyed societies; the cases of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya illustrate these targets of the Triad imperialist project.

4. Therefore the policy of Russia (as developed by the administration of Putin) to resist the project of colonization of Ukraine (and of other countries of the former Soviet Union, in Transcaucasia and Central Asia) must be supported.  The Baltic states’ experience should not be repeated.  The target of constructing a “Eurasian” community, independent from the Triad and its subordinate European partners, is also to be supported.

But this positive Russian “international policy” is bound to fail if it is not supported by the Russian people.  And this support cannot be won on the exclusive basis of “nationalism,” even a positive progressive—not chauvinistic—brand of “nationalism,” a fortiori not by a “chauvinistic” Russian rhetoric.  Fascism in Ukraine cannot be challenged by Russian fascism.  The support can be won only if the internal economic and social policy pursued promotes the interests of the majority of the working people.

What do I mean by a “people-oriented” policy favoring the working classes?

Do I mean “socialism,” or even a nostalgia of the Soviet system?  This is not the place to re-assess the Soviet experience, in a few lines!  I shall only summarize my views in a few sentences.  The authentic Russian socialist revolution produced a state socialism which was the only possible first step toward socialism; after Stalin that state socialism moved towards becoming state capitalism (explaining the difference between the two concepts is important but not the subject of this short paper).  As of 1991 state capitalism was dismantled and replaced by “normal” capitalism based on private property, which, as in all countries of contemporary capitalism, is basically the property of financial monopolies, owned by the oligarchy (similar to, not different from, the oligarchies running capitalism in the Triad), many coming out of the former nomenklatura, and some newcomers.

The explosion of creative authentic democratic practices initiated by the Russian (October) revolution was subsequently tamed and replaced by an autocratic pattern of management of society, albeit granting social rights to the working classes.  This system led to massive depoliticization and was not protected from despotic and even criminal deviations.  The new pattern of savage capitalism is based on the continuation of depoliticization and the non-respect of democratic rights.

Such a system rules not only Russia, but all the other former Soviet republics.  Differences relate to the practice of the so-called “Western” electoral democracy, more effective in Ukraine, for instance, than in Russia.  Nonetheless this pattern of rule is not “democracy” but a farce compared to bourgeois democracy as it functioned at previous stages of capitalist development, including in the “traditional democracies” of the West, since real power is now restricted to the rule of monopolies and operates to their exclusive benefit.

A people-oriented policy implies therefore moving away, as much as possible, from the “liberal” recipe and the electoral masquerade associated with it, which claims to give legitimacy to regressive social policies.  I would suggest setting up in its place a brand of new state capitalism with a social dimension (I say social, not socialist).  That system would open the road to eventual advances toward a socialization of the management of the economy and therefore authentic new advances toward an invention of democracy responding to the challenges of a modern economy.

It is only if Russia moves along such lines that the current conflict between, on the one hand, the intended independent international policy of Moscow and, on the other hand, the pursuit of a reactionary social internal policy can be given a positive outcome.  Such a move is needed and possible: fragments of the political ruling class could align on such a program if popular mobilization and action promote it.  To the extent that similar advances are also carried out in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia, an authentic community of Eurasian nations can be established and become a powerful actor in the reconstruction of the world system.

5. Russian state power remaining within the strict limits of the neo-liberal recipe annihilates the chances of success of an independent foreign policy and the chances of Russia becoming a really emerging country acting as an important international actor.

Neo-liberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic and social regression, a pattern of “lumpen development” and a growing subordinate status in the global imperialist order.  Russia would provide to the Triad oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial monopolies.

In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system, attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by “sanctions” which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands of dominant monopolies of the Triad.  The current outflow of “Russian capital” associated with the Ukraine crisis illustrates the danger.  Re-establishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective response to that danger.

Further Readings

• Amin, Samir. The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. London and NY: Pluto and Monthly Review Press, 2013.

• Amin, Samir. “What ‘Radical’ Means in the 21st Century.” Review of Radical Political Economics 45.3 (September 2013).

• Amin, Samir. “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative.” Monthly Review 63.5 (October 2011).

• Amin, Samir. “Unity and Diversity in the Movement to Socialism.” Monthly Review (forthcoming in the June 2014 issue).

• Amin, Samir. “Russia in the Global System.” Translated from Arabic into Russian by Said Gafourov.

The Mecca of African Liberation: Walter Rodney in Tanzania

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Republished from Review of African Political Economy.

Karim Hirji, a Tanzanian student, was in a good mood when he went to bed on the 10 July 1969. That evening he had heard the most impressive lecture of his life at the University of Dar es Salaam. The lecture was on the Cuban Revolution and its relevance to Africa. Back in his dorm, he praised the speaker in his diary: “one could almost feel the strong conviction and deep emotions from which he spoke”. The man he admired and later befriended was Dr Walter Rodney. [1]

After being banned from Jamaica, Rodney settled with his family in Tanzania to teach history and political science at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1969 to 1974. He reconnected with the socialist students he had met during his first stay in 1966. In those days, Rodney helped them establish the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). He ran their Marxist workshops and attended their anti-imperialist protests and talks. His connections brought the likes of CLR James, Stokely Carmichael and Guyanese politician Cheddi Jagan to speak on USARF platforms. Upon his return in 1969, Rodney was pleased to see that the USARF had gained new members. Karim Hirji was one of them. He got Rodney to write the first article for the group’s magazine Cheche on African labour (Cheche took its name from Lenin’s newspaper Iskra. Both words mean ‘spark’–in Swahili and Russian respectively). Rodney thus continued agitating for socialism on campus as he had done in Jamaica. But the political climate was now more favourable for him, as Tanzania was the mecca of African liberation. [2]

Tanzania offered hope to Rodney and many radical black intellectuals. They believed the African diaspora’s fight for freedom and equality relied on the success of anti-imperialist movements in Africa. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere and his party, the Tanganyika African Nation Union (TANU) opposed imperialism as few independent African states did. Nyerere gave diplomatic and material support to every national liberation movement in southern Africa. He opened offices for the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and built military bases for them. He established training camps for the paramilitary wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, uMkhonto we Sizwe, to help it fight the apartheid regime in South Africa. Living in Tanzania enabled Rodney to deepen his understanding of guerrilla warfare and international solidarity. FRELIMO fighters taught him how to shoot a rifle when he visited their camps. He also met with delegations from Vietnam, then involved in the war against the United States and organised solidarity protests with the Vietnamese on campus.

When Rodney first visited Tanzania in 1966, he witnessed Nyerere publish his program for socialism and self-reliance, the Arusha Declaration. The president had turned his African socialist philosophy known as Ujamaa—familyhood—into a policy of nationalisation of foreign companies and land reform. He aspired to increase food production through the creation of Ujamaa villages based on collective farming. Africans no longer had to rely on volatile cash crops and aid from advanced capitalist nations to make a living. Nyerere was confident that his plan suited the interest of the peasant majority. But he had yet to convince the minuscule educated elite, made up of students and state officials, to help the peasants. Back in 1964, some elitist students had shown Nyerere their disdain for work in the countryside when they protested against compulsory national service. Afterwards, Nyerere vowed to turn the university into a battleground for his progressive ideas. [3]

By 1970, Rodney stood at the heart of the debates concerning African underdevelopment that occurred almost every night at the University. In the packed auditorium, Rodney debated a TANU Cabinet Minister on Tanzania’s economic direction. He also debated the renowned Kenyan political science professor, Ali Mazuri, on why Africa should be socialist, not capitalist. His ideas, however, did not always please Nyerere. The president replied with anger to an article Rodney published in TANU’s newspaper, which argued that African leaders who served western capitalism deserved to be overthrown by the people. Nyerere disagreed and accused him of preaching violence to young people. The regime set limits on how left-wing students and academics could be. A few months later, it banned the USARF for promoting “foreign ideology”. [4]

The ban did not change Rodney’s respect for Nyerere, nor did it discourage him from sharing his radical Marxist ideas with students. He taught a graduate course on the Russian Revolution to show his African students that they could draw lessons for their own struggle from October 1917. He made parallels between present-day Tanzania and Tsarist Russia, which both had a large peasantry and a small working class. Rodney praised the Russian Revolution as the first break with capitalism, transforming the once mainly agrarian country into an industrial power in its aftermath. Bourgeois historians, he argued, sought to discredit October 1917 because it represented the victory of organised workers allied with peasants over their class. [5]

Rodney had begun a monograph on the Russian Revolution in 1971, but he never finished it because he had more urgent matters at hand. He wanted to use Marxist theory to address the issue of African underdevelopment.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney’s involvement in debates concerning African underdevelopment in Tanzania inspired him to write his most influential book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was concerned that most African nations had not broken ties with the old colonial powers in the decade after colonialism. They had achieved political independence, but their economies remained in the hands of European and American companies. They remained poor and reliant on foreign aid because the Western ruling class stole their natural wealth (land, oil etc.) for its benefit, with help from African leaders who served them. Yet, many African intellectuals still believed that trade deals, loans and investment from advanced capitalist countries would benefit African development. Rodney sought to convince them to the contrary.

His book, published in 1972, revealed that European intervention in Africa, through the slave trade and colonialism, stifled African development. It told how the European ruling class robbed Africa of its wealth, which contributed to Europe’s prosperity and industrial growth. Rodney examined Africa’s relationship with Europe from 1500 to 1960 to elucidate the present. He opened the preface with his message for the future: “African development is only possible on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system” which had underdeveloped Africa for centuries. [6]

Rodney’s skilful use of Marx’s historical method in his book uprooted Africa from the colonial myths surrounding its past. In Chapter One, Rodney dismantled the racist idea that Africa stood outside progress by defining development as a universal and multifaceted process. As Marx and Engels did before him, he understood development as being rooted in how human beings cooperate to provide the necessities of life out of nature. He explained that when people found better ways to produce wealth by working together, they developed new forms of cooperation, new ideas and changed the form of their society. Rodney showed a sophisticated understanding of development, arguing that it did not unfold as a linear process but rather was uneven across continents and regions, as sometimes the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. [7]

Rodney dedicated the second chapter to portraying Africa’s development before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. Far from being outside of progress, Africa displayed formidable advances in agriculture, science, and art. Most societies at the time were small classless ones with low levels of production, where people had equal access to land and evenly shared resources. Africa, however, developed more hierarchical societies that resembled Europe’s feudal states in places like Ethiopia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. In these unequal societies, a ruling class owned the land and appropriated the surplus created by the exploited peasants. Rodney argued that underdevelopment was never the absence of development. It was not inherent to Africa and its people, but the historical consequence of capitalist expansion and imperialism. [8]

By the 16th century, Europe developed at a faster pace than Africa and the rest of the world, transitioning from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney argued that European powers demonstrated their superiority in maritime and armaments technology. They opened West Africa for trade with their ships and canons and transformed it into a supplier of slaves for their plantations in America and the Caribbean. In the third and fourth chapter, Rodney explored the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade on African development by engaging in the debate concerning the number of African captives. He opposed Philip Curtin’s tally that counted only 10 million enslaved from 1500 to 1870. “Because it is a low figure it is already being used by European scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of brutality”. [9] Rodney explained that Curtin’s toll failed to measure the whole tragedy because it only relied on records of slaves’ arrivals in America. The number of victims went far beyond 10 million, as some captives were smuggled, and millions more never left Africa. They died in the wars fought over slaves and more captives perished during the long journeys from the interior of Africa to the coast as well as the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ the journey across the Atlantic.

After he established the horrific magnitude of the slave trade, Rodney explained how it underdeveloped Africa. He showed that the trade stunted Africa’s demographic growth. As European powers kidnapped able young men and women, Africa lost those of childbearing age who performed the most arduous tasks on the land. With fewer people at hand, many African societies struggled to harness nature and develop. Moreover, Rodney argued that Europe’s demand for slaves made slave raiding and wars commonplace in West Africa. Societies that had hitherto coexisted in peace now turned on each other to acquire more slaves. Violence instilled fear and insecurity among Africans. It disrupted the organisation of agriculture, mining, and commerce that they had established over centuries. It destroyed crops and artisanal trade turning farmers into soldiers, and soldiers into slaves. This disruption of farming and trade even impeded the development of African regions that were not involved in the slave trade.

While the slave trade stalled and reversed African development, it contributed to Europe’s capitalist development. Rodney demonstrated that the slave trade generated enormous profits for the Portuguese, British and French empires, making fortunes for countless bourgeois merchants and plantation owners. Its wealth and magnitude gave rise to the infamous ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux. He explained how the profits and goods accrued from the exploitation of African slaves in the New World fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution. A century ago, Karl Marx had made the same point when he wrote, “without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry”. [10] At the end of chapter four, Rodney explained how colonialism emerged out of the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late 19th century. Rivalries between European capitalist firms assumed the form of a competition between nation-states for control over the world’s markets, natural resources and trade routes. Africa, which had been weakened from centuries of slave trading, fell victim to Europe’s violent colonial conquest. European ruling classes justified this conquest with racist ideology, as they claimed to be civilising savage people by converting them to Christianity. Thus, by 1900, they had divided the entire African continent into colonies. [11]

In the fifth chapter, Rodney analysed colonialism (1885-1960) as a cruel and exploitative system, whereby the European bourgeoisie extracted wealth from African workers and peasants. He assessed the oppression and suffering of African workers at the hands of the colonial state. The state ensured that Africans often worked under forced labour, while their European counterparts could freely sell their labour. Even those Africans who were able to choose their employer received miserable wages for endless hours of work. Colonial rule was even worse for the African peasant. Rodney showed how the colonial state confiscated their land through severe taxation, evictions, and warfare. It forced some peasants to abandon food production for export crops that were sold cheap. Moreover, peasants suffered at the hands of trading companies and their middlemen who offered miserable prices. Rodney, however, did not simply illustrate the horrors of colonialism. He provided case studies of multinational companies, like Unilever, and the enormous profits they acquired from robbing Africans. Moreover, he described how Africa’s contribution to capitalism went beyond monetary returns. Its raw materials supported Europe’s advancement in electronics, metallurgy and chemistry and other industries, which stood at the centre of Europe’s capitalist development in the 20th century. [12]

In the final chapter, Rodney attacked the racist idea that colonialism had benefits for Africans because the colonisers built railroads, schools and hospitals. All the roads and railways, he said, went from the plantations and mines to the coast to ship raw materials to Europe, never to encourage trade between different regions of Africa. The infrastructure that colonialists built served to entrench Africa’s unfavourable position in the world economy, as a precarious supplier of raw materials and a free market for European finished products. The colonialists had no interest in providing health care and education to Africans. Rodney established the grim tally of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation:

The Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in Eastern Angola was less than thirty years. [13]

Rodney’s historical account received support from Tanzania’s radical socialist minister A M Babu who clarified Africa’s present predicament in the postscript. “Foreign investment”, the minister wrote, “is the cause, and not a solution, to our economic backwardness.” [14] Investment went into projects designed to exploit African labour and raw materials for the benefit of the Western ruling class, never into health care and education. At best, foreign investment made fortunes for the few African leaders and businessmen, who partnered with western states and multinationals. But it failed to uplift the masses from poverty. Babu and Rodney advocated a revolutionary path to development, aimed at breaking Africa’s dependence on imperialist powers and empowering the workers and peasants. What would that path look like? Initially, Rodney thought that Nyerere’s socialism offered an answer to that question.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board.

Notes

1. Karim Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Mkuki Na Nyota, 2017).

2. Karim Hirji, Karim, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine. (African Books Collective, 2010), p.29.

3. See Mattavous, Viola, 1985, “Walter Rodney and Africa”, Journal of Black Studies, pp. 115-130. and Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010) pp.351-362.

4. Karim Hirji, 2010, p.95.

5. Rodney, 2018, p.76.

6. Walter Rodney, 2012, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Pambazuka Press, Cape Town, 2012), p.xi.

7. Rodney did not see development as a linear process. Although it was a general trend, it was uneven across continents and regions. As sometimes, the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. See Rodney, 2012, pp.7-10. For Marx’s historical materialist method, see Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) pp.42-60.

8. Rodney, 2012, pp.3-70.

9. Rodney, 2012, pp.96.

10. Karl Marx, Karl, Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (1846).

11. Rodney, 2012, pp.75-145.

12. Rodney, 2012, pp.149-201.

13. Rodney, 2012, p.206.

14. Rodney, 2012, p.284.

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

By John Bellamy Foster

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

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

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

The First Prong: Geopolitical Expansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Second Prong: The Drive to Nuclear Primacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear Winter and Omnicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between the Imperialist Crosshairs: A Defiant Man and His Revolution

By Stephen Joseph Scott

Imperial proprietorship over the small Caribbean Island of Cuba, from the United States’ perspective, has been from its earliest founding understood as a foredrawn conclusion, a predetermined inexorable; a geographical inevitable. Heads of State, from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe to John Quincy Adams et al. shared a similar conviction, “[that Cuba’s] proximity did indeed seem to suggest destiny, a destiny unanimously assumed to be manifest.”[1] Through the mid 19th century, US opinion toward Cuba was made jingoistically evident by Secretary of State John Clayton, “This Government,” he advised, “is resolutely determined that the island of Cuba, shall never be ceded by Spain to any other power than the United States.”[2] The Secretary went on to define his nation’s hardened and inalterable commitment to the possession of the island, “The news of the cession of Cuba to any foreign power would, in the United States, be the instant signal for war.”[3] These assertions were now foundational, as reiterated by Indiana Senator (and historian) Albert J. Beveridge in 1901,“Cuba ‘[is] an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union’ and ‘[is] indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself,’”[4] sentiments that were (later) codified into the Cuban Constitution by the US (after the Spanish/American war of 1898) in the form of the Platt Amendment[5] ratified in 1903. Which Louis A. Perez soberly describes as, “[An] Amendment [that] deprived the [Cuban] republic of the essential properties of sovereignty while preserving its appearance, permitting self-government but precluding self-determination,”[6] in contradiction to (Cuba’s heroic bard of national emancipation) José Martí’s 19th century grand-vision of a truly liberated and self-governing island nation. In fact, this historic outlook permeates US strategy toward Cuba for the next century; merged in a complex web of amicable approbation combined with antagonistic condemnation, defiance, resentment, and ruin - all converging at a flashpoint called the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which not only shocked and bewildered US policymakers, but, for the first time, challenged their historic preconceptions of US hegemonic (i.e., imperial hemispheric) dominance. One man stood at the center of their bewilderment, criticism, disdain, and resentment: Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. Thus, US policy then directed at Cuba, by the early 1960s, was designed to punish this man, the small island nation, and its people, for his disobedience and defiance; and, as such, was intentionally aimed at destabilizing all efforts of rapprochement, as long as he (Castro) remained alive.

Although US intelligence (throughout the 1950s) provided the Eisenhower administration with a thorough history delineating the dangers of instability looming throughout the island, commanded by then military despot and “strong-man” Fulgencio Batista (who seized his return to power in an army-coup in 1952), the US foolishly continued to provide economic, logistical and materiel support to the unpopular and graft-driven dictatorship.[7] US intelligence understood the potential danger posed by “[this] young reformist leader”[8] Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries. Castro and the 26th of July movement were a defiant response to what they considered a foreign controlled reactionary government.[9] This response stood as a direct threat to the natural order of things, i.e., the US’s historic prohibition (beyond legalistic euphemisms and platitudes)[10] of any genuine vestige of national sovereignty and self-determination by the Cuban people - which undergirded a belief that, like most Latin American states, the Cuban people were innately “child-like,” incapable of true self-governance.[11] Beyond that, after the ousting of Batista, and “flush with victory,” a young Fidel Castro, on January 2, 1959 (in Santiago de Cuba), assertively threw down the gauntlet, “this time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will not be thwarted. It won’t be as in 1895, when the Americans came in at the last hour ‘and made themselves masters of the country.’”[12] Hence, as Jeffery J. Safford makes evident, this existential risk, in the minds of US policymakers, would have to be dealt with, embraced, evaluated, and analyzed (at least initially)[13] in order to maintain the desired outcome – i.e., evading Communist influence and maintaining economic “stability” through the protection of US interests on the island of Cuba no matter the cost.

In March of 1960, while naively underestimating Castro’s success and support on the island, “the Eisenhower administration secretly made a formal decision to re-conquer Cuba … with a proviso: it had to be done in such a way that the US hand would not be evident.”[14] Ultimately, US policymakers wanted to avoid a broader “backlash of instability” throughout the hemisphere by overtly invading the small island nation. That said, Castro and his revolutionaries understood the stark realities and nefarious possibilities cast over them, given the US’s history of flagrant regime change throughout the region. Castro’s accusations as presented at the United Nations, on 26 September 1960, which declared that US leaders were (intending if not) preparing to invade Cuba, were dismissed by the New York Times as “shrill with … anti-American propaganda.”[15] Furthermore, Castro was ridiculed, by US representative James J. Wadsworth, as having “Alice in Wonderland fantasies”[16] of an invasion. But Castro’s committed revolutionary coterie knew better, “In Guatemala in 1954 [Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara witnessed] the first U.S. Cold War intervention [in the region] as U.S.-trained and backed counter-revolutionary forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz…”[17] In fact, similarly, the imminent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated assault, known as the Bay of Pigs (BOPs) invasion, under the Kennedy administration in April 1961, was heavily reliant upon anti-revolutionary factions, the Cuban people, and the military, rising up to join the invaders[18] – which as history proves, and journalist/author David Talbot underscores, did not come to pass:

To avoid Arbenz’s fate, Castro and Guevara would do everything he had not: put the hard-cored thugs of the old regime up against a wall, run the CIA’s agents out of the country, purge the armed forces, and mobilize the Cuban people … Fidel and Che became an audacious threat to the American empire. They represented the most dangerous revolutionary idea of all – the one that refused to be crushed.[19]

This became an epic ideological battle in the myopic mind of US officials: the possible proliferation of an assortment of “despotic” Communist controlled fiefdoms vs. the-free-world! Indeed, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., special aide and historian to President John F. Kennedy in 1961-63, ominously warned the Executive, that “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands,”[20] had great appeal in Cuba (and throughout Latin America), i.e., everywhere that, “distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favor[ed] the propertied classes … [thus] the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, [were] now demanding opportunities for a decent living.”[21] This was the urgent and fundamental threat (or challenge) Fidel Castro and his movement posed to US hemispheric rule.

US media focused heavily on the plight of the “majority middleclass” Cuban exiles, that chose to leave the island as a result of the revolution’s redistributive polices.[22] Cubans, particularly the initial waves, were dispossessed of substantial wealth and position and often arrived Stateside in chiefly worse conditions.[23] But the essential question as to, “why the [majority of] Cuban people [stood] by the Castro ‘dictatorship’?,”[24] as Michael Parenti contends, was ignored by public officials and the press alike:

Not a word appeared in the U.S. press about the advances made by ordinary Cubans under the Revolution, the millions who for the first time had access to education, literacy, medical care, decent housing [and] jobs … offering a better life than the free-market misery endured under the U.S.-Batista ancient régime.[25]

Castro’s revolutionary ideals based on José Martí’s patriotic theme of national sovereignty and self-determination, effectively armed the Cuban people through a stratagem of socialist ideology and wealth redistribution meshed in a formula of land reform and social services (i.e., education, healthcare, jobs and housing) which included the nationalization of foreign owned businesses; as such, US policymakers believed, “His continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of ‘Communism’ and Anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more ‘weak’ Latin American republics.”[26] Fidel Castro was thus wantonly placed within the crosshairs of US covert-action.

American officials assumed that the elimination of Castro was central to the suppression of his socialist principles, as Alan McPherson demonstrates, “In fall 1961, after the [BOPs] disaster, [JFK] gave the order to resume covert plans to get rid of Castro, if not explicitly to assassinate him.”[27] Earlier in 1960, then CIA director, Allen Dulles’ hardline that Castro was a devoted Communist and threat to US security “mirrored [those] of the business world such as, William Pawley, the globetrotting millionaire entrepreneur whose major investments in Cuban sugar plantations and Havana’s municipal transportation system were wiped out by Castro’s revolution.”[28] Thus, US officials, the Security State and US business-interests were unified, “After Fidel rode into Havana on a tank in January 1959, Pawley [a capitalist scion] who was gripped by what Eisenhower called a ‘pathological hatred for Castro,’ even volunteered to pay for his assassination.”[29] Countless attempts followed, thus, killing Castro became vital to the idea of US hemispheric “stability,” i.e., capitalist economic and ideological control; and as such, Intelligence Services believed, “[The] political vulnerability of the regime lies in the person of Castro himself…”[30] Hence, the purging of Fidel Castro and the cessation of his ideas, through the punishment of the Cuban people, became not only the strategy of choice for the US, but its incessant authoritative doctrine. Accordingly, as longtime US diplomat to Cuba, Wayne Smith verifies, the US’s two overarching obsessive qualms which it believed required the eradication of Fidel Castro were: the long-term influence of his revolutionary socialist ideals in Latin America and beyond; and, the possible establishment of a successful Communist state on the island which would diminish US security, stature, image, influence and prestige in the hemisphere; and, in the eyes of the world.[31]

Through 1960-64, Castro had good reason to be on guard, “…the fact that the Kennedy administration was acutely embarrassed by the unmitigated defeat [at the BOPs] -indeed because of it- a campaign of smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost immediately.”[32] Then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy stated unequivocally, as Schlesinger reveals, that his goal, “was to bring the terrors of the Earth to Cuba.”[33] RFK went on to emphasize the point that the eradication of the Castro “regime” was the US’s central policy concern, “He informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries, ‘…top priority in the United States Government -all else is secondary- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared.’”[34]  Beyond the multifaceted covert actions directed at Cuba under Operation Mongoose, RFK and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, aided by the CIA et al., implemented a long-term multi-pronged plan of punishment, focused on Cuba through Latin America, which included disinformation campaigns, subversion and sabotage (they called hemispheric-defense-policies) that comprised a Military Assistance Program (MAP), which included economic support, subversive tactical training and materiel, devised to terminate “the threat” (i.e., Castro and his ideas) by establishing an Inter-American-Security-Force (of obedient states) under US control.[35]

With Cuba now in the crosshairs, in the early 1960s, “the CIA … played savior to the [anti-Castro] émigrés, building a massive training station in Miami, known as JMWave, that became the agency’s second largest after Langley, Virginia. In fact, it coordinated the training of what became known as the disastrous landing … in 1961.”[36] Conversely, historian Daniel A. Sjursen focuses more on JFK (than the CIA) as the culprit behind the heightened tensions amongst the three principal players. By 1962, with Cuba in the middle, both superpowers (the US and the USSR) stood at a standstill amid the very real possibility of a global conflagration which, Sjursen states, was primarily due to US bravado on behalf of a “military obsessed” young President, “In preparing for a May 1961 summit meeting with Khrushchev [Kennedy stated] ‘I’ll have to show him that we can be as though as he is….’”[37] Sjursen argues, “This flawed and simplistic thinking grounded just about every Kennedy decision in world affairs from 1961 to 1963 … and would eventually bring the world to the brink of destruction with the Cuban Missile Crisis; and, suck the US military into a disastrous unwinnable war in Vietnam.”[38] And yet, as Smith contends, Kennedy was certainly not without bravado, but ultimately, did make attempts to “defuse” the situation. Kennedy, Smith discloses, ruffled-feathers within the Security State by, 1) his desire to end the Cold War, 2) his starting of a reproachment with Castro (who was desirous of such - even if indirectly) and, 3) his goal to pull-out of Vietnam.[39] In fact, with the Kennedy-Khrushchev negotiations finalized by JFK’s promise not to invade Cuba if Soviet warheads were removed from the island – Khrushchev acquiesced, to Castro’s dismay, but tensions did diminish.[40]

Be that as it may, Philip Brenner maintains, the crisis did not go-away on 28 October 1962 for either the US or the USSR. The Kennedy-Khrushchev arrangements had to be implemented. On 20 November, the US Strategic Air Command was still on high alert: full readiness for war - with the naval quarantine (i.e., blockade) firmly in place.[41] As a result, Castro stayed open to negotiations with the US, but at the same time purposefully cautious. “At this point Castro, like Kennedy and Khrushchev, was circumventing his own more bellicose government in order to dialog with the enemy. Castro, too, was struggling, [but willing,] to transcend his Cold War ideology for the sake of peace. Like Kennedy and Khrushchev both, [he knew,] he had to walk softly.”[42] Nevertheless, Castro stressed the fact that the Soviet Union had no right to negotiate with the US per inspections or the return of the bombers, “Instead, he announced, Cuba would be willing to comply based on [specific] demands: that the United States end the economic embargo; stop subversive activities … cease violations of Cuban airspace; and, return Guantanamo Naval Base.”[43] Of course, the United States security apparatus was arrogantly steadfast in its refusal to agree or even negotiate the matter.[44]

In spite of that, a reproachment (devised by Kennedy diplomat, William Attwood, and, Castro representative to the UN Carlos Lechuga) was surreptitiously endeavored through a liaison, journalist Jean Daniel of the New Republic, who stated that, Kennedy, retrospectively, criticized the pro-Batista policies of the fifties for “economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation” of the island and added that, “we shall have to pay for those sins….”[45] Which may be considered one of the most brazenly honest statements, regarding the island, on behalf of an American President, in the long and complex history of US/Cuban relations. Daniel then wrote, “I could see plainly that John Kennedy had doubts [about the government’s policies toward Cuba] and was seeking a way out.”[46] In spite of JFK’s pugnacious rhetoric directed at Cuba, during his 1960 Presidential campaign, Castro remained open and accommodating, he understood the forces arrayed upon the President, in fact, he saw Kennedy’s position as an unenviable one:

I don’t think a President of the United States is ever really free … and I also believe he now understands the extent to which he has been misled.[47] …I know that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with....[48]

While in the middle of (an Attwood arranged and Kennedy sanctioned) clandestine meeting with Castro, Daniel reported, that (at 2pm Cuban-time) the news arrived that JFK was dead (shot in Dallas, Texas, on that very same day, 22 November 1963, at 12:30pm), “Castro stood-up , looked at me [dismayed], and said ‘Everything is going to change,…’”[49] and he was spot-on. Consequently, with (newly sworn-in) President Lyndon Baines Johnson mindful of the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was “proclaimed” a Castro devotee, accommodations with the Cuban government would be much more difficult. As such, the Attwood-Lechuga connection was terminated.[50] Julian Borger, journalist for the Guardian, maintains that “Castro saw Kennedy’s killing as a setback, [he] tried to restart a dialogue with the next administration, but LBJ was … too concerned [with] appearing soft on communism,”[51] meaning opinion polls, and their consequences, trumped keeping channels of communication open with the Cuban government. Which obliquely implies the notion that relations with Cuba might have been different if JFK had not been murdered.

With the Johnson administration bogged down in an “unwinnable war” in Southeast Asia and Civil Rights battles occurring on the streets of the US, Cuba and its revolution began to fall off the radar. By 1964, the Johnson administration, concerned with public opinion, as mentioned, took swift and immediate action to stop the deliberate terror perpetrated on the Cuban people. LBJ, in April of that year, called for a cessation of sabotage attacks. Johnson openly admitted, “we had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean.’”[52] Nonetheless, the national security apparatus (i.e., the CIA, the Joint-Chiefs and military intelligence) along with US policymakers (and US based exile groups), remained obstinate, steadfast and consistent in their goal – to punish (if not kill) Fidel Castro and his revolution, by maintaining a punitive program of economic strangulation with the hopes that Castro would be, not only isolated on the world stage, but condemned by his own people who would rise up and eradicate the man and his socialist regime – which did not occur. Of course, the termination of hostilities directive ordered by Johnson did not include economic enmity - which persisted throughout the 1960s and beyond. In fact, a CIA field-agent appointed to anti-Castro operations detailed the agency’s sadistic objectives as expressed through author John Marks, by explaining:

“Agency officials reasoned, … that it would be easier to overthrow Castro if Cubans could be made unhappy with their standard of living. ‘We wanted to keep bread out of the stores so people were hungry … We wanted to keep rationing in effect….’”[53]

The purpose of the economic blockade remained fixed from the early 60s onward: to contain, defame, discredit, and destroy Castro and his experimentation with, what the US considered, “subversive Communist ideals.”

Finally, the US’s belligerent, if not insidious, hardline-stance toward this small island nation reignited at the end of the 1960s, which included not only an economic strangle-hold, but full-blown underground sabotage operations. The 37th president of the United States, Richard M. “Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify its covert [Hybrid War] operations against Cuba.”[54] Nixon and his then National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, still believed, callously, that military aggression, violence, brutality and intimidation (coalesced by vicious economic sanctions) were the answers to America’s woes abroad. US policy toward Cuba for more than sixty-years is reminiscent of a famous quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.” Hence, Castro’s Cuba (not only America’s nemesis, but also the model of an uncompromising US global order) was the consequence of an even longer and persistent imperial US foreign policy: If the United States had not impeded Cuba’s push for national sovereignty and self-determination in the initial part of the 20th century; if it had not sustained a sequence of tyrannical despots on the island; and, if it had not been complicit in the termination and manipulation of the 1952 election, an ineradicable character such as the young reformist, and socialist, Fidel Castro may never have materialized.[55] Ultimately, the headstrong US stratagem of assassination and suffocation of Castro and his socialist revolution failed, not only by bolstering his image on the island, but abroad as well. Ironically, the US helped to create its own oppositional exemplar of resistance, in the image of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the Cuban people, i.e., the revolution - two men and a small island nation that stood up defiantly to the US led global-capitalist-order and would not relent. The US feared the Revolution of 1959’s challenge to class-power, colonialization; and, its popularity with the multitudes - thus, it had to be forcefully restricted through malicious policies of trade-embargoes, threats of violence and ideological-isolation. In fact, the Cuban rebellion courageously and tenaciously stood up to, and resisted, specific contrivances (or designs) by which the US had customarily, boastfully and self-admiringly delineated its dominant status through the forceful protection of its exploitative-business-practices (aka, the “Yankee boot”) on the backs of the Cuban people, for which, Fidel Castro and his bottom-up-populist-crusade were held ominously, insidiously, and interminably responsible.

Notes

[1] Louis A. Pérez, “Between Meanings and Memories of 1898,” Orbis 42, no. 4 (September 1, 1998): 501.

[2] William R. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860 (Washington, 1932), 70.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Albert J. Beveridge, “Cuba and Congress,” The North American Review 172, no. 533 (1901): 536.

[5] The Platt Amendment, May 22, 1903.

[6] Pérez, “Meanings and Memories,” 513.

[7] Allen Dulles, Political Stability In Central America and The Caribbean Through 1958 (CIA: FOIA Reading Room, April 23, 1957), 4–5.

[8] Ibid., 4.

[9] Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” 1953.

[10] The Platt Amendment.

[11] Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009), 58.

[12] Pérez, “Meanings and Memories,” 514.

[13] Jeffrey J. Safford, “The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April 1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (1980): 425–431.

[14] Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (London, 2000), 89.

[15] “Cuba vs. U.S.,” New York Times (1923-), January 8, 1961, 1.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA, 2011), 98.

[18] “Official Inside Story Of the Cuba Invasion,” U.S. News & World Report, August 13, 1979.

[19] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York, 2016), 338.

[20] “7. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Schlesinger) to President Kennedy,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963.

[21] “15. Summary Guidelines Paper: United States Policy Toward Latin America,” in FRUS, 1961–1963.

[22] “Cuba: The Breaking Point,” Time, January 13, 1961.

[23] Maria de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor, 2001), 75.

[24] Michael Parenti, “Aggression and Propaganda against Cuba,” in Superpower Principles U.S. Terrorism against Cuba, ed. Salim Lamrani (Monroe, Maine, 2005), 70.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Philip Buchen, Castro (National Archives: JFK Assassination Collection, 1975), 4–5.

[27] Alan McPherson, “Cuba,” in A Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Marc J. Selverstone (Hoboken, 2014), 235.

[28] Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, 340.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Buchen, Castro, 7.

[31] Wayne S. Smith, “Shackled to the Past: The United States and Cuba,” Current History 95 (1996).

[32] William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London, 2014), 186.

[33] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. quoted in Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (Chicago, 2021), 147.

[34] Ibid.

[35] The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Efforts to Contain Castro, 1960-64, April 1981, 3, Learn.

[36] Alan McPherson, “Caribbean Taliban: Cuban American Terrorism in the 1970s,” Terrorism and Political Violence 31, no. 2 (March 4, 2019): 393.

[37] Daniel A. Sjursen, A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism, and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism (Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2021), 479.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Hampshire College TV, 2015 • Eqbal Ahmad Lecture • Louis Perez • Wayne Smith • Hampshire College, 2016, accessed October 30, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBdKB8jX3I.

[40] Philip Brenner, “Kennedy and Khrushchev on Cuba: Two Stages, Three Parties,” Problems of Communism 41, no. Special Issue (1992): 24–27.

[41] Philip Brenner, “Cuba and the Missile Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22, no. 1 (1990): 133.

[42] James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York, 2010), 84.

[43] Brenner, “Cuba and the Missile Crisis,” 133.

[44] “332. Letter From Acting Director of Central Intelligence Carter to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy),” in FRUS, 1961–1963.

[45] Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals,” New Republic 149, no. 24 (December 14, 1963): 15–20.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” New Republic 149, no. 23 (December 7, 1963): 7–9.

[49] Ibid.

[50] “378. Memorandum From Gordon Chase of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy),” in FRUS, 1961–1963.

[51] Julian Borger, “Revealed: How Kennedy’s Assassination Thwarted Hopes of Cuba Reconciliation,” Guardian, November 26, 2003.

[52] Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency, Counter-Terrorism, 1940-1990 (New York, 1992), 205.

[53] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (London, 1979), 198.

[54] Raymond Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC, 1985), 76n.

[55] Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York, 2007), 91.