Hegemonic Silence and the Nuclear Question

By Marcus Kahn

Imagine a NASA rocket loaded with astronauts reaches another galaxy. They find a planet inhabited by billions of advanced sentient beings and begin to observe them from above. The scientists learn that these beings, delineated into warring factions, have developed a technology capable of destroying their world hundreds of times over, and have set those weapons up in such a way that not only can they be launched at a moment’s notice and detonated within minutes, but are also prone to error and entail massive risk. But when the scientists tune in to the planet’s communications, conversational and broadcasted, they become deeply perplexed. The inhabitants barely speak of the suicidal threat they pose to themselves. They hardly seem to be thinking about it. This is the conundrum posed by nuclear weapons. 

How can such extreme potentialities lie largely unquestioned and undiscussed? 

The term socialization captures our gravitation to conformity, how we acquire norms through the pressures of our environment. That first day of school is scary and unfamiliar, but by the time you reach high school you are sitting and getting up according to a bell schedule without a second thought. Indoctrination adds in a directional quality; socialization that occurs along the contours of norms prescribed by dominant forces, to be internalized and replicated as unconscious obedience. By the time you graduate high school, you have received a social science education that has prepared you to support the status quo. Both terms ring true.  It may be human to err, but in an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy it is human to normalize the unconscionable and transmute it into a commonsense assumption. The comprehensiveness of this process is most evident in our apparent equanimity to the prospect of complete annihilation, in our hegemonic silence. 

The boundaries of debate around nuclear weapons are closely gatekept by the state, ostensibly in the interests of security. Information on oscillations in the nuclear weapons threat is classified, reserved for state actors with adequate clearance who distribute updates to select media outlets, if not directly to the public. What the public receives is highly filtered. 

The Kennedy administration’s public narrative around the Cuban Missile Crisis crystallized into typical presidential hagiography in the intervening sixty years despite being thoroughly contradicted by subsequent academic research (pro tip: don’t record everything you say in the Oval Office if you want to deceive the American public in perpetuity).   The visual trope of a mushroom clouds in a cartoon is more familiar than the destruction and confusion on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our imagination lacks essential context when it comes to conceptualizing the nuclear threat. 

However, even in a coherent and powerful doctrinal system, dissent and counter-narratives can slip through chinks in the institutional armor. Much like the scientific consensus around climate change, members of the scientific community have stepped outside the invisible boundaries of dominant system-supportive narratives. But these boundaries can be ideologically policed. In the 1980s, Carl Sagan published a study alongside a group of well-reputed scientists that argued even a limited nuclear war would lead to a catastrophic nuclear winter. Because their conclusions would have galvanized the peace movement and altered public perception of nuclear war planning, the scientists were subsequently marginalized and their work dismissed.  

These narrative trends skew public perception away towards deterrence strategies and away from a critical abolitionist stance. New York Times columnist David Brooks, during an uncharacteristic foray into epistemology, unknowingly identifies the scope of a doctrinal system in an article titled “How to Destroy Truth.” Brooks argues that “propositional knowledge” that “we acquire through reason, logical proof, and tight analysis” constitutes one of two reservoirs of collective knowledge. This body of knowledge is produced by “a network of institutions — universities, courts, publishers, professional societies, media outlets — that have set up an interlocking set of procedures to hunt for error, weigh evidence and determine which propositions pass muster.” To read between the lines, Brooks implicitly argues that powerful institutions determine the nature of truth in modern society. That which “passes muster” is legitimized, and if broadly accepted, eventually internalized within the canon of collective assumptions.

Currency Crisis In The West (1965)

By Hsiang Chung

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Editor’s Note from BAR: This 1965 essay appeared in Kwame Nkrumah’s journal, The Spark. If it were around today, The Spark would probably carry a warning in the US that it was “state-affiliated media.” Its editors probably wouldn’t care. The Spark was published by Kwame Nkrumah’s Bureau of African Affairs and its explicit mission was to build socialism in Ghana and to aid in fomenting working-class revolution throughout Africa.

The Spark’s content reflected this mission. The weekly paper ran essays articulating the theory of Nkrumaism and published detailed analysis of neocolonialism and imperialism, and of socialism and development. It considered the class struggle in Africa and examined anti-colonial struggles across the continent. In its pages appeared statements of solidarity with Cuba, Algeria, and Black America, and contributions from Amilcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. When W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963, an issue appeared in his honor.

For the US State Department, The Spark represented a dangerous tendency within Nkrumah’s Ghana.  In January, 1964 the US Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report titled “The Leftward Trend in Ghana .” The report noted that the US Embassy in Ghana had characterized a recent speech of Nkrumah’s “as perhaps his most extreme anticapitalist and revolutionary performance.” The speech, according to the CIA, “included [Nkrumah’s] first known specific use of such phrases as ‘class interests’ and ‘class politics,’” it criticized the US “as the citadel of reactionary opposition to progressive forces everywhere,” and it aligned Ghana with “the international ‘socialist’ fraternity.” “Subsequently,” the report continued, “[Nkrumah]  has increasingly tended to mouth the Communist-derived jargon appearing continually in The Spark.”

In their summary of the situation in Ghana, the CIA concluded that, “Barring a successful coup against his regime, it will probably be increasingly difficult for the West to maintain an effective presence in Ghana.”

Nkrumah was overthrown by a CIA-backed military on February 24, 1966.

Below we reprint an article from The Spark titled “Currency Crisis in the West.” Its author is Hsiang Chung, a Chinese economist of whom, we admit, we know little more than his name. Even so, the essay has a crystalline analysis of how monetary policy has been used as a tool of imperial and neocolonial rule. Moreover, in charting the historical reasons for the rise of the dollar’s global supremacy in the twentieth century, it establishes the historical conditions precipitating the dollar’s imminent twenty-first century fall. This is being republished for both historical perspective and relative analysis to the current state of the US dollar. It is important to note that much has changed since this was written in 1965, most notably the varying methods of imperialism/colonialism that have developed by the US and West, the fall of the USSR, and the abandoning the gold standard in 1971.

***

Hsiang Chung, “Currency Crisis in the West,” The Spark: A Socialist Weekly of the African Revolution, January 29, 1965.

The imperialist scramble for world domination is usually marked by a struggle for financial supremacy, for monetary policy is one of the heavy weapons of the imperialist countries in their drive, for expansion--a weapon they use to strangle their rivals and extend their spheres of influence.

In the struggle for monetary supremacy, an imperialist country invariably uses its political and economic power to establish a monetary bloc in which its own currency is made to take a leading position while the currencies of its colonies and dependencies as well as other states associated with it are reduced to a subordinate status.

It has to link to currencies of the monetary bloc members with its own, and at the same time to make them keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in its central bank to be used by them for “unlimited buying and selling” on foreign exchange market at fixed rates. Consequently, its commodity in capital exports will not have to suffer from the fluctuation of the currency of the monetary bloc members and it will not have to pay more for raw material imports because of the devaluation of its own currency.

Moreover, since the gold and foreign exchange reserves of its monetary bloc members are deposited in its own central exploitation, and this leads to the formation of a financial centre within its own sphere of influence over which it is able to establish its financial supremacy. That is why currency warfare in capitalist international finance is an important means in the imperialist scramble for markets, outlets, for investment and sources for raw materials, as well as an indispensable factor in their constant redivision of the capital of this world.

The Monetary System Crisis Sharpened

The deepening of the general crisis of capitalism, especially the emergence of the crisis in the capitalist monetary system, has intensified the monetary warfare among the imperialist powers. As a result of the world economic crisis of 1929–33, normal financial relations among the capitalist countries were disrupted as never before; the gold standard completely collapsed, and the monetary system of the capitalist countries became chronically unstable.

From that time onwards, in their efforts to maintain currency stability, and to ward off the crisis in the monetary system, monopoly capitalist groups in the imperialist countries were compelled to resort to government intervention on a larger scale than before and adopt such measures in the field of international finance as  moratoria on foreign debts currency depreciation, foreign exchange  restrictions and control etc., in order to consolidate their position in the better struggle for markets and spheres of influence. However, all the steps, which were designed to shift the crisis onto others failed to extricate the imperialists from their plight, but instead made the struggle still sharper and more complicated.

Following the end of World War II, as a result of the formation of the socialist camp and the upsurge of the national liberation movement the areas dominated or exploited by the imperialist countries have become smaller and smaller. In this predicament, the inter-imperialist struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become more acute and currency has been used on a still larger scale as an instrument in defeating their adversaries. Not only have they subjected the currencies of their colonies and dependencies to their own as in the past; they have also exerted great efforts to make their own currency the dominant one within the shrinking imperialist camp. At the same time, the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism has been accomplished by an intensified crisis in the monetary system, and the imperialist countries have been forced to take further steps to intervene in various forms in the field of international finance. However, whenever they are taken by the strong to bully the weak or the weak to counteract an adversary’s pressure, the steps are bound to aggravate the imperialist monetary struggle, and make it more severe than was the case before World War II.

Domination vs Independence

The characteristic of postwar inter-imperialist relations is that US imperialism has increasingly endeavored to consolidate and extend its dominant position while the other imperialist powers refused to reconcile themselves to US control from which they have done all they can to free themselves. This rivalry between US imperialism and the other imperialist powers struggle between domination and independence— is also reflected in capitalist, world finance.

During World War II, US imperialism amassed enormous wealth and greatly expanded  its productive capacity and export trade. In the early post-war years, Washington took advantage of the temporary disappearances of three fascist countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan from the capitalist world arena of competition and of the heavy destruction suffered by the two old imperialist powers, Britain and France; it went all out for economic expansion abroad and consequently had a huge surplus in its balance of international payments and piled up vast gold reserves. In 1938 the US gold reserves amounted to $14,594 million or 56.1 per cent of the gold reserves of the capitalist world. In 1948, they jumped to $24,399 million, or 70.3 per cent of the capitalist world’s total. During this period, the other capitalist countries incurred huge deficits in their international accounts with the United States, resulting in a serious “dollar shortage” and massive gold outflows to the United States.

In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the gold reserves of Britain, the sterling area and the West European countries dropped from $9,511 million to $5,707 million, and their share of the capitalist world's gold reserves fell from 36.6 per cent to 16.4 per cent. At that time the disruption of domestic production, the heavy increases in budgetary deficits, and the impact of deficits in the payment of international payments brought about serious currency depreciation in most of the capitalist countries except the United States. Under the circumstances, the governments of these countries were constrained to their foreign exchange restrictions and controls to achieve, and to stabilize the value of their currencies by artificial means. The result was that they’re currencies became “soft”, i.e., could not be freely converted into other foreign currencies, they were in no position to compete with the dollar, a hard currency which was freely convertible.

Shift in Economic Power

This shift in economic power was much to the advantage of US imperialism in its greedy bid for world leadership. It has made every effort to form a big dollar bloc to dovetail plans to build an unprecedentedly big empire in the world. In addition to adopting political, military, economic and other measures, US imperialism, in order to fulfill this grandiose plan, must take the following steps in the monetary field. On the one hand, it needs to consolidate the external value of the dollar and maintain its “free convertibility” so that fixed exchange rate between the dollar and other currencies can be preserved, and the dollar can have the same status as gold in the capitalist world's current reserves.

This would provide favourable conditions for New York to become the capitalist world’s sole international financial centre.

On the other measures both at home, and in the currency blocs, they control in order to check economic penetration by their competitors. US imperialism therefore found it necessary to do the utmost to intervene in their international financial policies and foreign exchange systems, thus enabling it to maintain normal trade relations with them, and paying the way for its further economic expansion.

In effect, this US imperialist rapid plan is nothing but a refurnished version of the currency blocs established by Britain, France, and other old imperialist powers in their colonies and spheres of influence. But in order to ward off the strong opposition of other imperialists, the United States had to resort to more covert and slyer tactics in pushing forward this plan in the capitalist world.

Price of Gold Kept Down

In the first place, relying on its substantial gold reserves, US imperialism artificially kept down the price of gold in its dealings with other governments or their central banks. It is common knowledge that as early as 1934 the US government prescribed the external value of the dollar, i.e., the parity between the dollar and gold, at $35 an ounce. But since the latter part of the 1930s and particularly since World War II, the value of the dollar has been frequently devalued internally because of inflation. In 1948 the purchasing power of the dollar was only 57.8 per cent of what it was in 1939. In 1963 it further dropped to 44 per cent. In order to stabilize the external value of the dollar by artificial means, the U.S. government, irrespective of the frequent devaluation of the dollar internally, has always exchanged it for gold at the official rate of $35 percent ounce in its dealings with other countries. And so the external value of the dollar has long been out of tune with the extent of its internal devaluation while the price of gold has been greatly kept down.

Other capitalist countries were then suffering from a widespread “dollar shortage” and they virtually had very little or no dollars with which to buy US gold. Therefore, keeping the price of gold down actually meant compelling other capitalist countries to sell gold cheaply to the United States in order to make good their dollar deficits. This increased the surplus in the US balance of international payments, and gave it the opportunity to rake in gold at a low price made it difficult for the latter to relieve their “dollar shortage”. And this also became a pressure under which they had to accept the Marshall plan and other types of “aid,” and thus subject themselves to enslavement by US imperialism.

Another major aim of US imperialism in keeping down the price of gold is to irrigate the same role as gold to the dollar, whose external value was artificially stabilized, and serving as a world currency. Since the currencies of most other capitalist countries were unstable and their foreign exchange reserves, along with, and in preference to pound sterling. This facilitated US imperialism control of their currencies in one way or another, and it’s becoming the biggest International exploiter in capitalist world finance.

Washington’s Building Tactics

In the second place, in the early post-war years, Washington spread such false ideas as “the elimination of foreign exchange control,” “the stabilization of exchange rates,” and “avoidance of competitive currency depreciation.” These were designed to compel other countries to abandon their foreign exchange restrictions and controls, and relatively stabilize their exchange rates in a way advantageous to the United States. It pushed this policy in order to ensure that the proceeds of America commodity exports and the remittance to the United States of profits from overseas investment may be protected from other countries’ foreign exchange restrictions.

It is true that US imperialism, at least on the surface, has not imposed downright control over the currencies of its “allies.” In reality, however, it did all it could to achieve this purpose by bullying tactics and cajolement. As mentioned above, Washington compelled the recipients of its “aid“ to accept such terms as the introduction of free convertibility within a certain period of time and the scrapping of their foreign exchange controls and restrictions.

A notable example of this took place when Britain received a big US loan amounting to $3,750 million in 1945 and two years later was compelled to introduce free convertibility for the pound sterling, which lasted for only five weeks. Of great importance is the fact that the International Monetary Fund set up in the early postwar years— a major instrument of US imperialism in the international monetary field— dangled the bait of short term loans before member states in order to induce them to accept conditions involving the loss of national sovereignty. These included the abolition of foreign exchange, controls and restrictions, the definition of the foreign exchange value of a currency in terms of the dollar containing a specific weight of gold and the obligation to obtain the funds agreement to specific changes in foreign exchange rates.

Struggle Between Dollar and Pound

All these measures were naturally resented by other imperialist powers. However, West Germany and Japan were then dominated by Washington, and it was on the basis of formulas prepared by the US government that the exchange rates for the West German mark and the Japanese yen were established. Inflation of considerably serious proportions and a rapid deterioration in the balance of international payments overtook France and Italy; the franc and the lira were frequently devalued; it was difficult for them to compete with the dollar. Only the pound sterling could initiate limited counter- offensives against it. Although Britain’s power has declined since World War II, it still has the backing of the sterling area in international finance, the pound remains the reserve currency of sterling area countries and a number of other capitalist countries in the world network of overseas banks, which was set up by Britain in the last century, retains considerable influence. In these circumstances, the struggle between the dollar and the pound was naturally the most prominent one in the imperialist currency warfare.

The comprehensive system of foreign exchange restrictions and control set up by Britain in the sterling area was a powerful fulcrum strengthening British imperialist exploitation of the commonwealth countries and checking US economic penetration. And it was a serious handicap to US imperialist expansion in the capitalist world.

In the first few years since World War II, by means of loans, “aid” and pressure by different US controlled international organizations, Washington devised every possible means to compel Britain to open the door to the sterling area, and restore the free convertibility of the pound so as to pave the way for the control of the whole sterling area, including Britain itself. For a time British imperialism refused to take orders from Washington and adopted delaying tactics. But in 1949 a pound was devalued by 30.5 per cent against the dollar, followed by a corresponding currency to valuation by 35 other capitalist countries–to a large extent the result of pressure from Washington.

Nevertheless, Britain and other imperialist powers, wherever possible, dealt Washington’s high-handed policy, a rebuff. The sterling area and the currency blocs of other imperialist countries—such as the franc bloc—clung stubbornly to their spheres of influence. Moreover, on the question of the price of gold, because gold produced in the sterling area makes up more than 70 per cent of the total annual production of the capitalist world, Britain and South Africa have more than once battled for a rise in the gold price as a countermeasure to US control. They eventually succeeded in wrestling some concessions from Washington and were permitted to sell their gold for industrial purposes on the free market at a higher price than the official US price of $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund's demand for the abolition of foreign exchange controls, and for the institution of a fixed parity between the dollar and other currencies were ignored by many countries. France and Italy, for instance, did not institute fixed exchange rates until the mid-1950s. This shows that, despite Washington’s desperate efforts to put the capitalist world's monetary system under its control, other imperialist powers have been unwilling to accept permanent subordination, they have exerted every effort to free themselves from the claws of the dollar. With the shift in the balance of forces between the United States and other imperialist powers, both Washington’s efforts at domination in the monetary field, and the other imperialist’s resistance are growing more intense.

No More Dollar Dominance

With the advent of the 1950s and the aggravation of the uneven development of capitalism, new changes have taken place in the balance of forces among the imperialist countries. Propped up by the United States, West Germany, Italy, and Japan, have recovered from their position as defeated countries. The power of France has steadily increased, enabling it gradually to speak on equal terms with the United States. Although it keeps getting weaker, Britain too has no desire to be at the mercy of Washington. US dominance, which was attained during and immediately after World War II, has begun to falter.  

This shift in the balance of forces which is unfavorable to US imperialism is also reflected in international finance. After the war of aggression against Korea broke out in 1950, deficits began to appear in the US balance of payments and outflow of gold started, because its policies of war and aggression made it increasingly difficult for its trade surplus and proceeds from overseas investment to meet its huge military expenditures, foreign “aid” commitments and private capital export.

A similar situation recurred during US economic crisis of 1953–54. After 1956, taking advantage of the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt, the United States sold a large amount of oil and cotton to Western Europe, and this helped to bring about a turn for the better in the US balance of payments. However, from 1950 to 1957, the US gold flow to other countries amounted to $1,700 million. Added to this were mounting short term debts, and the annual rate of deficit in its balance of payments averaged about $1,200 million. During the same period the gold reserves of other capitalist countries increased by $3,700 million and their dollar reserves by $6,400 million. By the 1950s, the widespread “dollar shortage” of the early posts were years had virtually become a thing of the past.

A New State

After 1958, a new state was reached in the struggle between the United States and other imperialist powers to strengthen their respective positions in world finance. On the one hand, as a result of its intensified policies of war and aggression, US imperialism had to spend on an average more than $10,000 million a year for its overseas military expenditures, foreign “aid” and private capital export. This led to an increase in the serious dollar crisis, which was manifested in the form of balance of payment deficits, and of gold outflows. The dollar crisis and the recurrent economic crisis erupted either simultaneously or alternately.

Whatever methods it uses, it is impossible for US imperialism to prevent a continual deterioration in the position of the dollar. On the other hand, with the rapid growth in their political and economic power, the tremendous improvement in the balance of payment, and the big increase in their gold reserves, other major capitalist countries, and particularly several of the Common Market Six with France and West Germany as their nucleus, were able greatly to strengthen their currencies on the international finance market. From 1958 to 1962 the gold flowing from the United States to other countries totaled $6,800 million. These rises in the short term debts owed to other countries made for an average annual rate of deficits of about $3,000 million from 1950 to 1957. At the same time, the increase in the gold reserves of other capitalist countries amounted to $8,700 million. If increases in foreign exchange holdings are added to this the total increase in their gold and foreign exchange reserves during the period was $14,500 million. Most of these increases went to West European countries. France’s increases amounted to $3,400 million, Italy’s $2,200 million, and West Germany’s $1700 million. Next came Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Dollar Crisis— Incurable Disease

By 1963, the incurable disease of the dollar crisis remained serious. The deficit in the US balance of payments in that year still stood at $3,000 million. At the end of December, its gold and foreign exchange reserves totaled $32,179 million, of which gold accounted for $19,790.million, or 47% of the capitalist world's total. Thus US gold reserves are far below their pre-war level while those of the West European countries are far above it.

A Fraternal Hand: The American Tradition of Socialist Democracy and Chinese Socialism

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
​
Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[12]

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
​
To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
​
[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
​
[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Carlos edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). 

In Brazil's Class War, Will Lula Fight Back?

[Photo credit: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images]

By Bernardo Jurema

It’s not an exaggeration to say that, with Lula da Silva's razor-thin victory over incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil dodged a bullet. As it has in other countries like Hungary or India, another term of far-right rule would have meant a more reactionary police and military, accelerated environmental destruction, further evisceration of individual rights, and a serious blow to the prospects for restoring democracy. It’s also fair to say that the world dodged a bullet, given the Bolsonaro government's fervent support for mining and other extractive activities that threaten the Amazon rainforest, a crucial link in the global climate system. 

Although the final result was very close, with Lula at 50.9% and Bolsonaro at 49.1%, Lula won by a large margin among the poorest segments of the population. The former president carried 977 of the 1,003 least developed cities. And a poll right before the second round of voting showed Lula winning the lowest income bracket with 61% to Bolsonaro’s 33%.

Lula shied away from presenting a clear economic program during the campaign, explaining that “we don’t discuss economic policies before winning the elections.” He made vague promises to increase public spending, with a focus on infrastructure and social welfare. His main pledges were directed toward the segment of society that supported him most heavily. Lula called for removing Brazil from the Hunger Map, increasing the minimum wage, boosting employment, and improving access to healthcare. 

The challenges Lula now faces cannot be overestimated. He will take office on January 1st, 2023 under circumstances remarkably different from those of twenty years ago when he began his first term. With a global recession on the horizon, interest rates are on the rise worldwide and Brazil's largest trading partner, China, has seen its demand for commodities subside. On top of that, the outgoing Bolsonaro leaves in his wake "shaky public finances, with debt projected to reach almost 89 per cent of gross domestic product next year, and an economy forecast to slow sharply."

How will Lula address this poor state of affairs? A cursory look at his economic transition team raises some red flags. The team was led by Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, a former rival of Lula’s Workers' Party, who is socially conservative, economically liberal, pro-police, and anti-labor. He was handpicked by Lula in a clear nod to Faria Lima (Brazil’s Wall Street), signaling to the market and conservative voters that "there would be no radical economic measures." As Glenn Greenwald noted in 2018, "For the powerful, it is impossible to dream of a better guardian of the status quo [than Alckmin].” 

Other members of the transition team included André Lara Resende, who headed Brazil's public investment bank under the center-right government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Resende infamously played a key role in repressing the 1995 oil workers' strike. He served on the transition team alongside Pérsio Árida, a longtime economic advisor to Alckmin who, in 2018, supported then-President Michel Temer’s radical neoliberal government. Árida has publicly opposed taxing large fortunes, instead backing privatization and neoliberal reform efforts. 

These neoliberals were counterbalanced in the transition team by members of a  "developmentalist" profile, who favor state planning and expanding public spending. Guilherme Mello, a professor at the University of Campinas Institute of Economics (known as the main intellectual hub of dissent against neoliberal orthodoxy), was one of them. Mello has since been appointed as the new Secretary of Economic Policy at the Ministry of Finance. Another developmentalist member of the transition team was Nelson Barbosa, who served as Minister of Finance from the end of 2015 into the first months of 2016 under the Rousseff government.

Most members of the transition team will not go on to become ministers or even occupy government posts. But the team nonetheless helped set the terms of political possibility, offering a choice between neoliberalism and developmentalism. While such a choice is hardly auspicious in the face of the climate crisis, Brazilians can at least be cautiously optimistic that developmentalists in the administration will pursue redistributive policies. 

Thanks to an historic commodities boom, redistribution efforts during Lula’s first two terms in office passed with relatively little friction. But what if the extractivist pie stops growing? These days, any redistributionist policies will almost certainly require some degree of confrontation. From the transition team, there is no clear vision of what must be done in terms of economic policy. As Roberto Andrés, an urban planner at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, has rightly pointed out:

“There will hardly be a favorable economic scenario for a new stage of inclusion without class struggle. It will be necessary to take from the richest to raise the level of the poorest. A tax reform that corrects the unfair Brazilian taxation may be the first step. To do so, the new government will have to face the dissatisfaction of the privileged classes, who will lose income. If it fails to do so, it runs the risk of not delivering the improvements it promises to the poorest."

On December 9th, Lula announced Fernando Haddad as his finance minister. Haddad previously served as Lula’s Minister of Education from 2005 to 2012. In that role, Haddad’s signature achievement was the PROUNI program, which expanded scholarship opportunities for poor students. This policy is a microcosm of Haddad’s conciliatory politics. While PROUNI helped disadvantaged pupils access higher education, the influx of government money was a major boon to private universities. 

For his second stint in a Lula administration, Haddad looks set to continue placating private interests. Recent comments suggest he’s open to privatizing airports and highways, saying that public-private partnerships “have to get on the agenda.” Despite this pro-business rhetoric, the markets reacted negatively to Haddad’s appointment. As one financial analyst explained, worries abound that Haddad will work to expand public spending and increase the national debt. In an attempt to quell these fears, Haddad recounted his time as Mayor of São Paulo, during which he reduced municipal debt and strengthened the bond market.

The new finance minister’s agenda appears syncretic, embracing the full spectrum of beliefs found in the transition team, from mild center-left Keynesianism to hardcore neoliberalism. Similarly mixed are the plans of Bernard Appy, the new special secretary for tax reform. While Appy seeks commonsense adjustments to Brazil’s notoriously anti-poor tax structure, his fixation on taxing consumption promises to preserve substantial regressivity.

There are also concerns to be had about Gabriel Galípolo, who will serve as the executive secretary of Lula’s economic ministry. Previously a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Galípolo is close with corporate interests. In the past year, he has served as a mediator between the Workers’ Party and big business.

Galípolo won’t be alone in representing the financial sector within Lula’s economic ministry. O Globo, a Brazilian daily newspaper, reports that “at least one more member of Faria Lima” will receive an appointment. A countervailing influence, however, takes the form of Aloízio Mercadante. A close Lula ally and noted center-left Keynesian, Mercadante has been nominated to chair the National Bank for Economic and Social Development, a key instrument for long-term financial planning.

In addition to internal ideological disputes, the incoming Lula administration also faces external constraints. As journalist Diego Viana explains, the government will be “under siege by the Right, who are ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness.” This leaves little room for radical experimentation. It is mostly likely, Viana says, that the administration will “insert some distributive policies within an essentially traditional political economy.”

Seeking compromise has been a Lula trademark ever since his days as a union organizer in the 1970s. With Brazil now at a crossroads, it remains to be seen how much longer this balancing act can persist. Given the combination of the climate crisis, the rise of the far Right, and a looming global recession, only bold action is commensurate with the urgency of the moment. But that not only goes against Lula’s realpolitik penchant; it also would not be consonant with the balance of power, whereby the reactionary forces of agribusiness and finance are very strong, while working-class social movements find themselves demobilized, demoralized, and under constant attack.

Such a context calls for measured and realistic goal-setting. According to Viana, “What Lula needs to deliver, first and foremost, is to not be succeeded by another fascist like Bolsonaro. In addition, the coalition that elected Lula expects stability in employment, prices, and exchange rates. That can be achieved. But is it enough to obtain the most important outcome?”

Maybe not. But, to paraphrase Peggy Lee, that's all there is for today. 

Bernardo Jurema is a Brazilian political scientist based in Germany. He earned his PhD from the Free University of Berlin and has worked for international organizations and think tanks throughout Latin America and Europe.

Decolonisation Is A Material Struggle

[Pictured: Frantz Fanon is one of the most articulate thinkers on anti-colonial liberation movements, colonial and post-colonial studies.]

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. . .”

—Amilcar Cabral

Decolonisation is not a theoretically eloquent dance to nowhere. It’s the awakening of a sleeping people taking over the means of production. It  is the material struggle of the last becoming the first, qualitatively supplanting the ideologies of the ruling class with the revolutionary ideas and cultures they have developed during the great showdown between the people’s army and the minions of private property. Decolonisation is the fire and fury unleashed unto the world in a historical encounter that is inevitable in this epoch of neocolonialism and capitalism-imperialism – and with this, an inauguration of another way of being.

At this point we must clarify that we do have a philosophical component to this fight. A war of world-views and of the class, race and gender elements whose reactionary hegemonies in the life of the mind must be challenged with progressive ideas and theories to win the material struggle. Our only clamour is that to philosophise  without  changing the materiality of social life will give no credence, no power, no reality to these progressive values and world-views we today are busy talking, writing and theorising about. We must learn the art of merging theory and practice within the organised masses of our people to win the ideological war at hand in this long protracted struggle. That in a nutshell is the thesis of this essay. Let’s move on, then, and hold this conversation.

Land, bread, and water – not a complex intellectual discourse on the ontologies and epistemologies of colonialism and its antithesis – are the deepest interest of the masses. Our people are today clamouring and hungered in the billions by the constant extraction and oppression of corporations, and as such, are caught either in the whirlwind of a vicious cycle of wage slavery or in the labour reserves of big capital. For a mass like that, it would be disingenuous to come with a decolonial program that is not rooted in qualitatively changing the objective material conditions. It would be basically fighting a futile battle against ideas and ideologies that are informed ever deeply by the superstructure that owes its lifeblood to the ever-thriving exploitative economic base that sucks the life, blood, and depths of the third world soils. That’s to say, if the program isn’t materialist and practice-base, it’s more useless than a toothless, clawless, caged lion.

To thin the mist of history a bit, let’s remember that when the righteous masses of the colonised Global South were being rallied in the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryears, the revolutionary leaders didn’t expose them to a program of fighting against mere racist ideas. They didn’t come with a complex decolonial philosophical program and neither did they busy themselves with the frivolous endeavours of competing in speaking and writing a language the masses will never understand nor decipher. They came with a simple program and named the enemy. The program was, let’s win self-determination so we shall no more live under the shadow of another human being as subservient economic and political slaves. That our enemy today is the coloniser and he must be booted out by any means necessary. And our people understood that. They yielded whatever little weapons they had, and as they sharpened their machetes, their determination to become an independent people who would win a glorious fight so their conditions are bettered permanently knew no bounds.

Kwame Nkrumah (pictured on a Soviet postage stamp) was a Ghanaian politician and coined the term “neocolonialism”. Photo credit: by Mariluna. Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository.

The decolonial program then must today be based on where we are today. What contradictions are inherent within our nations and people. It must be class conscious. It must be materialist. It can wear a dashiki and glorify ancient Egypt, but it still must be dialectical. It must invest in winning over the productive forces of our people in an organised fashion to reclaim what rightfully belongs to them and walk the long road to the progress and happiness of all of humankind. It must study yesterday, but not get caught in it. It mustn’t be romantic. It must waste no time in endless masturbatory insults on classic colonialism, but to study objectively the gains made in the liberation struggles, and use those facts in fighting to win against neocolonialism and the comprador class that has risen from amongst us. It must be a mass-based program whose focus is the creation of a people’s popular history that is classless and communist; anything less than this is but a waste of time and an attempt at marching into a dead end. Because great ideas that have no bearing in changing the conditions of the people are just that: great ideas – nothing else.

Decolonisation is about land. Therefore, our nationalism is righteous, whether it be the nationalism of the indigenous of the Americas, the peoples of Africa, or the aborigines of Australia. It’s about winning the land back and building independent societies from the ravages of settlers to the adventures abroad of big money. Today the masses are calling for expropriation of land without compensation as part of an active decolonial program, because without land, everything else fades into thin air whiles the starvation, the sickness, the clamour, and the squalor spiral ever on in the shantytowns, slums and favelas. Decolonisation is winning the land to honour the resolve of our ancestors yesterday and descendants who will survive the beautiful tomorrows yet to come. To this vein we stand today with the fighting people of occupied lands from Azania to Palestine in their righteous struggle for their lands.

Decolonisation isn’t woke, it’s a nightmare.

It’s a messy, habitual, continuous nightmare that plagues both coloniser and colonised in the suburbs and shantytowns. Because the coloniser and colonised are old friends, they have become synced in their anticipations of the dreadful end. An antithesis whose contradiction will only be resolved in the burning-down-to-the-ground of the master’s house. The happiness of the coloniser is the wretched state of the colonised, and vice versa. Theirs is a dialectical relationship that can never be woke, since the day it wakes up it will result in the eternal sleep of the benefactor. So the work today is to awaken the beast within the neocolonial peripheries and remind it of the ending of the friendship. That it won’t be transformed into a complaining Philosophy or a harmless aesthetic, but a program of action whose basis is righteous indignation at the forces of oppression that have stolen the land underneath their feet. For the day the third world wakes up, the first world goes to an eternal sleep filled with the nightmares of the afore time colonised – again, the dialectic, but overturned, this time, to serve the ones that rightfully deserve it.

Decolonisation, then, is to organise for socialist revolution. It’s not academic conferences and coffeehouse bullshit. It is scientific in its analysis and materialist in its theory. It doesn’t beg to be heard in ivory towers, because it’s catching fire in the working class and peasants quarters of the Global South. It is calculated in its advance and its highest development is found in the proletarian and peasant movement that denounces the labor aristocrats of the colonial metropole as it marches forward in seizing production and changing the tide of consumption. Knowing it has nothing to lose but its shackles and in winning worlds it will bring forth the historically-needed economic, social, cultural, political destiny of the world to a radiant beginning(s). It’s the great poetry in motion of a people finally taking ownership of their own dance as they walk into a newness hitherto unseen by the reactionary forces of a decadent world; a reality of their own making, becoming and being in a zeitgeist that’s made through fire, hail, and brimstone.

To conclude, our decolonisation today must sit and converse with the people in a language they understand. It’s a striving at naming and knowing the enemy and the friend of the colonised. It must know that we will never mentally decolonise without winning over the economic base and replacing the ideologies of the bourgeois superstructure with that of the progressive masses. It’s primary insofar as land, bread, and water remain the province of the private. It’s popular, messy, beautiful, poetic, bloody, and in the end, worthy of the final becoming of humankind in its continuous motion and movement to happiness and progress as it enters the vortex of the very eternal.

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Revisiting Eric Williams' 'Capitalism and Slavery' and Dismantling the Accepted Narratives of History

By John Burns

Republished from Monthly Review.

When British capitalism depended on the West Indies,” Eric Williams wrote in 1938,

they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery.

Williams had no time for sentimental views on the abolition of slavery. The history he dealt in was more honest, more straightforward, and unafraid to confront the accepted narratives, wherever these might be found.

And confront he did. His 1945 work, Capitalism and Slavery, systematically destroyed the traditional, rose-tinted views of abolition in the UK, replacing the cozy and humanitarian with the cold and pragmatic, substituting empathy and egalitarianism with hard economic necessity. In Williams’s view, the United Kingdom reaped the immense benefits of slavery—for centuries, in fact—and dropped the practice only when it no longer served its lucrative purpose. To look at the facts in any other light is simply a pretense.

There are voices of humanitarianism within Williams’s work. There are voices of empathy, of egalitarianism. There are people whose consciences are clear, who’s hearts are true, people who fought against slavery and the British Empire’s grim association with it. There are all of these things because there were all of these things in real life. These voices existed in Georgian and Victorian Britain, and so they are present in Williams’s writing. It’s just that these voices, these notes of discord, were lost in a far larger choir. Those making all the noise—those who truly influenced governors and policymakers—were motivated by very different factors, such as economics, geopolitics, imperialism, and capitalism.

Williams received his early education in his native Trinidad and Tobago, then still part of the British Empire. As a student, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he excelled as a student and refined many of ideas that would characterize his later work. In 1956, Williams formed the People’s National Movement (PNM), becoming the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago that same year, and eventually led the country to independence in 1962. He continued to serve at the helm of the new nation right up until his death in 1981 at age 69, in the nation’s capital, Port of Spain.

His achievements as a freedom-minded politician and global head of state may have overshadowed his earlier work in academia, but these two aspects of his career cannot be separated. His clear-eyed and honest approach to history, and to his own people’s place within that history, shaped the path he would take in the following decades. By deconstructing UK attitudes to the slave trade, and its eventual abolition, Williams laid the foundations for dismantling British imperialism in the Caribbean. His contribution to our historical understanding, and to nationhood for Trinidad and Tobago, are inextricably linked.

Williams’s ideas are not new anymore. Capitalism and Slavery was written largely as a doctoral thesis in 1938, refined and published in 1945, and has been discussed for decades since. But Penguin’s relaunch of the book in 2022 is the first mass-market edition of the work to hit the shelves in the United Kingdom. It has, deservedly, become a bestseller.

But why does this matter now? Because we are still in danger of falling under the sway of accepted truths and fantastical narratives of history. The book is a timely reminder that history is a science that helps us better understand the culture and politics of our own age—it is not sculptor’s clay, ready to be molded into whatever shape or form best suits our own blinkered, and often prejudiced, aesthetic vision. History does not owe us anything. It is not ours to manipulate or distort.

In June 2020, the statue of enslaver Edward Colston was toppled by demonstrators in Bristol—a city that appears again and again in the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, thanks largely to the profits from the trade in sugar and enslaved people that flowed across its docks. This trade was so lucrative that Bristol became the Crown’s “second city” until 1775. It was men like Colston who helped achieve this status—hence the statue.

Colston had been, but his work as a merchant, slave trader, and subsequently, a Member of Parliament is etched into the stone upon which Bristol stands. He was almost three centuries dead by time his bronze likeness was lobbed into the Bristol Channel, and he likely had very little opinion on the matter.

Fortunately for Colston, there were plenty of people in 2020 who did have opinions on the matter. History—their history—they cried, was being erased. The “armies of wokeness” and “politically correct groupthink” were destabilizing the proud heritage of the United Kingdom, they claimed. Sure, Colston traded in slaves, but it was a different time, and Colston was a great man—a true hero of the city and its people—not to mention the criminal damage, public order offenses, or the rights of the sculptor himself.

This is an example of historical distortion and manipulation at work, pursuing ends that are nothing short of racist. History has provided us with a figure—Colston—whose great wealth led to the rise of one of the UK’s most important cities. History has provided us with the facts regarding the sources of that wealth—the slave trade; the theft of dignity from our fellow human beings. History does not provide us a way with which we can separate the two—we cannot have one without confronting the other. Erecting a statue to Colston—celebrating Colston for his efforts and his achievements—means erecting a statue to the slave trade, too.

Nor does history provide us with icons who are beyond reproach. By searching history for unimpeachable icons—symbols of a particular set of values or ethics—we are destined only for failure. If, in response to our disappointment at finding flawed human beings in lieu of the pristine icons we seek, we resort to mythologizing and hagiography, we play a very dangerous game, indeed. In another of the twentieth century’s great social texts, Women, Race and Class, Angela Y. Davis examines the relationship between feminist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the “women first, negroes last” policies of Democratic politician Henry Blackwell.

Blackwell spoke in support of women’s suffrage in the South, asserting that “4,000,000 Southern women will counterbalance 4,000,000 negro men and women”, retaining the “political supremacy of the white race.” Davis writes about the “implicit assent” of Anthony and Stanton to Blackwell’s racist logic as she explores the troubling and complex nature of women’s suffrage during its gestation.

Like Williams and his deconstruction of accepted beliefs regarding abolition, Davis’s analysis of racist attitudes in the women’s suffrage movement leads to an awkward confrontation. Stanton and Anthony made incredible contributions to the rights of women in the United States, and this should never be forgotten—but to turn a blind eye to the gross inequality that formed the backdrop to the movement is to deny this injustice altogether, leaving us with a flawed and incomplete understanding of our own history.

This approach—this honesty, this meticulousness—is found within the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, too. This is not simply an attack on the white establishment of the United Kingdom and their forbears in the heyday of the empire; this is a methodical analysis of the key drivers behind the rise and fall of the British slave trade. Williams’s work is certainly not an attack on abolition—a critical moment in establishing of a better world for all human beings—but neither does it seek to perpetuate false ideas of who and what made the moment of abolition a reality.

Two centuries before the slave trade reached its peak, the very concept of slavery was decried by the uppermost echelons of power in the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth I herself said that enslavement would “call down the vengeance of heaven,” and yet, by the eighteenth century, all sorts of mental gymnastics were deployed to justify the trade. Church leaders, Williams said, proposed that slavery could bring “benighted beings to the chance of salvation,” while conservative thinker Edmund Burke—himself a rigorous supporter of religion’s place in society—expounded on the slaveholder’s right to maintain ownership of “their property”, that is, the human beings they had paid for. It seems ethics and morality are not absolutes, and can be manipulated to support economic prosperity.

When such leaps of logic and desperate justification can support the rise of the slave trade, why should these moral contortions suddenly cease? Why should the voices of humanity win the day, defeating the barbarism of trans-Atlantic slavery and achieving a resounding—if delayed—moral victory? The answer is simple: they didn’t. Williams foreshadows the eventual collapse of the trade by presenting the views of contemporary economists Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, who declared the trade to be expensive and inefficient. In the end, it would be economics, not ethics, that would defeat the United Kingdom’s plantations and slave ships.

If the going was good, the slave trade would continue, no matter how many horrific acts were perpetrated on the shores of Africa and on the islands of the Caribbean. When the market stopped being profitable—when the fiscal engine driving slavery forwards started to cough and sputter—the trade would cease. The laws of business and enterprise, as cold and inhuman as they are, were far stronger than any moral outrage.

More than eight decades have gone by since Williams completed his doctoral thesis, and it is pleasant to think that we have moved on a great deal since those days. After all, Williams was then a subject of the British Empire. Now, the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago—along with the citizens of other former colonies—are free to determine their own path in the world. In 1965, the United Kingdom passed the Race Relations Act, outlawing discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”—a positive step towards a better, more welcoming nation.

But we should not wrap ourselves too tightly in this comfortable blanket of pleasant thought. In 1968, three years after the Race Relations Act was passed, Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech in Birmingham. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, division and discrimination led to violent flashpoints as riots ripped through urban centers. In 1993, the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence exposed the systematic racism at the core of UK policing. In 2018, the so-called Windrush Scandal, overseen by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, saw immigrant UK citizens stripped of their rights and their dignity. The fight against discrimination and prejudice is far from over, and no amount of historical airbrushing can compensate for this.

This is why Williams’s work is so relevant today: It reminds us to question the comforting and convenient narratives of accepted history. Twisting historical narratives to fit our own agenda—to reflect our own view of what Britain represents—is deceitful at best, and dangerous at worst. A more critical, clear-eyed, analytical approach to the past is necessary if we are to truly understand the challenges of the present.

John Burns is a freelance writer and editor from Nottingham in the United Kingdom, now residing in Yunnan, southwest China.

Sources

• “Collections Online: British Museum,” Collections Online | British Museum. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 2020).

• Samuel Earle, “‘Rivers of Blood’: The Legacy of a Speech That Divided Britain,” Atlantic, April 20, 2018.

• “Edward Colston Statue: Four Cleared of Criminal Damage,” BBC News, January 5, 2022.

• “Eric Williams,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Chris Matthews, “Purge of Edward Colston’s Name in Bristol Continues,” Daily Mail Online, April 27, 2022.

• Matty Edwards, “‘A Monumental Moment in History’: Cable Readers React to the Colston 4 Being Cleared,” Bristol Cable, April 22, 2022.

• “Race Relations Act, 1965.” Legislation.gov.uk. Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin Books, 2022).

Whose lessons? Which direction?

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

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

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

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

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

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

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

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

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

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

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-communism is the enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Lula’s Victory Means Relief for Venezuela

By Joseph Lobodzinski

Lula's victory on October 28th was an electoral win for leftists both in and outside of Brazil. The pink tide that has swept many right-wing leaders across Central and South America from power once again crested to wash out the crazed fascist Jair Bolsonaro. 

There are many reasons to celebrate this triumph. Lula has pledged to end the Bolsonaro administration’s massive deforestation efforts, promising to protect the rights and livelihoods of the millions of indigenous peoples who call the Amazon their rightful home. Lula’s pledge will also prevent approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon being released into the Earth’s atmosphere.

However, there is reason to temper hopes. Despite Lula’s win, Brazil’s right wing secured a majority in the national congress and have vowed to block any of his progressive policies. The Vice President-elect of Brazil, Geraldo Alckmin, is a social democrat who has been labeled as a “pro-business centrist,” highlighting the fact that the incoming presidential administration will take a more “pragmatic” and “means-tested” approach to governance.

Despite these issues, Lula's win is another step in the beginning of a new era — one in which Brazil and other Latin American countries will begin normalizing relations with Venezuela.

The recent pink tide has brought forth more leaders who are either actively advancing diplomatic relations with Venezuela, or who are — at the very least — open to doing so.

In Colombia, leftist President Gustavo Petro, elected earlier this year, has taken the most ambitious approach toward working with President Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela. In late September, the two countries reopened cargo trade, and their borders, for the first time in seven years. A few weeks later, on November 1st, Maduro welcomed Petro in Caracas, inaugurating the reactivation of flights between the two countries.

In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who hosted Maduro in Mexico City for his 2018 presidential inauguration and has refused to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recently urged the United States to restore relations with Venezuela. Since the decision by the US to impose draconian sanctions, Venezuela’s economy has collapsed, creating a massive humanitarian catastrophe. Unable to obtain housing, food, and medical care, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have left the country, triggering a migration crisis that has left thousands stranded in Mexico as they seek entry into the United States. While the US agreed to take in 24,000 asylum seekers, last month, the Department of Homeland Security inexplicably deported 1,700 Venezuelans back to Mexico.

Lula’s victory, however, may facilitate the amelioration of this dire situation. Like in other countries, Brazil’s executive office holds significant power to shape foreign policy and direct trade agreements. Not only should Lula’s administration be able to reverse the diplomatic approach of its delusional predecessor; they should be able to convince other nations — specifically, the United States — to normalize relations with Maduro and lift sanctions through appropriate avenues of economic leverage, such as placing an exports tax on some of the $31.3 billion of goods shipped to the US from Brazil.

The timing could not be any more relevant. With relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia souring after the latter seemingly convinced other OPEC members to follow its lead in cutting oil production as an act of retaliation for Western opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US has now been left scrambling to find an alternative source of crude oil.

This has led all eyes to fall on Venezuela.

Both Biden and Maduro have supposedly signaled their openness to normalizing relations, whether by directly stating it or by opening certain diplomatic avenues. 

Maduro has been forward, auctioning off some of the 300 billion barrels of oil in his nation’s reserves to the West, including a three-million barrel sale to Italy earlier this year, leading to global leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron meeting with Maduro at COP27 to begin “proposing dialogue” between their countries.

Earlier this year, US senior officials began negotiating with Maduro over the possibility of relieving sanctions. Now several months into the process, the prospect of reaching an agreement seems increasingly likely.

In exchange for cash and sanctions relief, all Maduro has to do is agree to a “clean” presidential election in 2024 and return to stalled negotiations with the Unitary Platform, his liberal-democratic opposition.

However, this is all tentative. As history shows, the US will do anything to obtain the natural resources it needs to drive its economy. In the case of Venezuela, if throwing the opposition under the bus or launching another imperialist coup provides access to their oil reserves, either may happen.

Then there’s Lula.

Lula’s established relationship with both Maduro and countries such as the United States makes him the best mediator for a decent deal.

Lula has had solid diplomatic relations with Maduro dating back to his initial presidency from 2003–2011, and both have already agreed to resume a “cooperation agenda” between their two countries. Lula’s respect among Western powers like the United States is also quite notable. This relationship was recently exemplified by the Biden administration’s immediate recognition of Lula’s electoral victory.

What all of this ultimately means is that Lula can lead the charge of providing sanctions relief for Venezuela, as well as restarting their economy through the oil sector. Lula can influence the United States to begin lifting sanctions and reversing some of its hostile diplomatic stances toward the Maduro government. In return, Maduro would take steps toward “free” elections and resume oil sales to the United States, giving him the money he needs to rescue his country.

Regardless of how this diplomatic situation plays out, it is important to remember that the people of Venezuela need to be alleviated of their current strife. After years of trade embargos that have caused poverty to skyrocket, creating a massive humanitarian crisis, any means of bringing this to an end should be considered.

And while it looks like the US is once again getting away with geopolitical hostage-taking by placing another country with leftist sympathies under the gun of despotic sanctions, we should be cautiously optimistic that Venezuela — with the help of Brazil — may be able to lift the imperialist boot from its neck.

Joseph Lobodzinski is a University of Michigan alumnus and leftist writer covering international politics, American social movements, labor, and the environment.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Power of Ownership

[Musk family wealth came from property ownership throughout Africa, including Apartheid South Africa and Zambia, where Errol Musk owned an emerald mine like the one pictured above]

By Carl Beijer

Republished from the author’s blog.

Last month, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and immediately disbanded its entire board of directors. This may have surprised you if you get your ideas about power from the populist right, who have been telling us that “power has passed from individual bourgeois business to a new ruling class” — the so-called “managerial elite.” Evidently, their “cultural power” with its full arsenal of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” couldn’t do a damn thing to save them in the end.

Even their enormous incomes couldn’t help them! These are no blue collar workers; these are multi-millionaires with astronomical salaries. “Heterodox economists” like Lévy and Duménil tell us that capitalism is over and we now live in the age of “managerialism”, in which “the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers”; but Musk had no problem whatsoever kicking some of the highest paid managers in the world to the curb.

Capitalist discourse loves to dismiss Marxist economics as a kind of obscurantist and contrarian analysis that no sensible person could possibly take seriously, but look at how everyone is talking about Musk right now and it’s obvious that we all know exactly what happened. He won because he took ownership of Twitter. That is what allowed him to crush the assembled power of the professional managerial class — Twitter’s corporate governance structure, the complex of NGO professionals and celebrities and academics who protested his takeover, all of it — on a whim. Taking ownership was his coronation, and the moment it happened everyone knew that his opponents would never prevail.

If you take one lesson from the Musk takeover, it should be this: capitalists can do this whenever they want. And even the highest-level managers and corporate executives know it, which means that they can only either defer to ownership or risk getting fired. This is a point I spelled out a few months ago when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon resigned:

Whether or not he has plans to exercise that power [majority ownership of the the WWE] is beside the point; at any given moment, shareholder Vince can decide to appoint a new board that will re-appoint him as CEO. And the very possibility that he could do this gives him the exact same power over management that shareholders have when Vince pleads that he only fired wrestlers because he’s a publicly traded company.

Private ownership confers a unique form of power unlike anything else in our politics. It matters more than professional titles, than academic degrees, than cultural norms and values, than the power of free speech and public reason. Even the state’s victory against it isn’t assured. And there is no form of power concentrated in fewer hands.

Nor is there any form of power that we meet with less skepticism. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how we talk about Musk’s power-play moving forward. You’re going to see a lot of talk about how Musk is a bad apple, one of those dreaded right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. You’re going to hear about the rising tide of fascism, driven by vague hatreds of egalitarianism and freedom. You’re even going to hear some talk about “corporate” power, as if Twitter’s board would still be in control if it were structured slightly differently. But what you won’t hear is skepticism of the basic legal, political, and economic institution — private property — that actually keeps Musk in control.

Indian Secularism and Right-Wing Politics

By Yanis Iqbal

The rapid rise of neo-fascist politics in India has foregrounded issues relating to the politico-ideological valences of religious traditions and the desirability of secularization. Does communalism owe its strength only to a specific political structure or is it also rooted in the tendential exclusivity of popular religiosity? Is the contemporary Right’s vitality to be blamed only on the manipulation of religious sentiments or do religious systems also provide normative nourishment to xenophobic zealotry? Is it the failure of progressive religiosity that has elicited religious extremism or is it the presence of desecularized cultures – in the form of the extended influence and importance of religious institutions, ideologies and identities – that accounts for deeply engrained communal prejudices? While the first parts of these questions assume that Indian communalism is linked to the misuse of religion and can be neutralized through a more democratic invocation of pre-existing religious resources, the seconds parts of these questions complicate the apparently harmless status of religion, drawing attention to how a modernist emphasis on secularization can more effectively counter neo-fascist revivalism. Currently, what dominates the Indian political landscape is the critical traditionalism of the former. In the Hinduism vs Hindutva debate, for instance, the main emphasis was on the articulation of the liberal-democratic arguments within the traditions of the Indian past against the masculinist faith system of the Sangh. This entire discussion ignored Aijaz Ahmad’s warning about how Indian communalism is not just a form of cultural assertion but a totalizing project of national hegemony, which can consequently be countered only through the construction of an alternative national project encompassing all the levels of society:  

If communalism for the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] is really only the cutting edge for the popularization of a fascist national project which has come about to challenge and displace the Centre-Left power blocs that had previously contended for hegemony, then it necessarily follows that the posing of secularism against communalism is necessary but insufficient; that the posing of the more humane and subversive traditions within the belief systems of the Indian past against the Sangh’s masculinist and market-friendly Hinduism is necessary but insufficient; and that it is not possible in fact to challenge a fully articulated fascist national project without posing against it a superior national project capable of organizing what Gramsci once called the ‘national-popular will’. 

One of the major weaknesses of critical traditionalism that prevents it from creating a full-fledged project of national hegemony is its passive reliance on the public significance of religion, as evident in the debate on Hinduism and Hindutva, wherein the political relevance of religion as a spiritual compass remained unquestioned. This stance forces the proponents of critical traditionalism to remain more or less subservient to the institutional complexes associated with the types of religiosities found in India. This article will critically analyze religion in the context of Indian politics to highlight why modernist values, in particular secularization, serve as more effective responses to communalism than the neo-traditionalist refashioning of religious traditions. 

A Historical Analysis of Religious Tolerance

In India, secularism was established as a popular ethic of religious tolerance, with the notion of tolerance itself being consecrated as forming the cultural core of an ancient and stable Indian civilization. This meant that the necessity of secularization never arose. Satisfied with the primordially defined concept of an unchanging religious-spiritual-cultural essence, the Indian political class never attempted to initiate changes within a heavily religious civil society, considering secularism to be a state of affairs ready at hand to be used in an expedient manner. “In the Indian context,” writes Achin Vanaik, “the overdetermination of the notion of secularization by the idea of tolerance did mean that the question of the secularization of civil society was never posed in the same way as in the West. Whether Indian civil society was, could be or needed to be secularized were effectively non-questions since, for most, the tolerance (i.e. secularism) of Indian society was treated as axiomatic, despite the communal horrors of Partition”. To what extent is this notion of tolerance historically accurate? In the traditional Indian societies, the political authority of the state was marginal, composed of local arrangements of power based on access to land and temple, regional kingdoms and a far-removed grand empire, whose grandiose spatial spread was matched by its superficial penetration into different areas. The third case of power arrangement needs further elaboration. The reign of the great empires of India – the Mauryas (1st century BC), the Guptas (4th century AD), the Delhi Sultanate (12th-16th centuries AD) and the Mughal Empire (16th-18th centuries AD) – was witness to the existence of smaller units of political authorities that practiced diverse forms of vernacular cultures. The imperial center was always embedded in a wider system of multiple regional structures. This dual arrangement was an outcome of the peculiar characteristics of Indian society: 1) in a religiously diverse country, organized political power had no other option than to maintain some distance from the dominant religious group for the sake of stability and peace; and 2) the geographical vastness of the areas made it difficult for imperial agents to forcefully impose on them a completely uniform system of political rules and cultural codes. These concrete imperatives manifested themselves in the theological principles of Hinduism and Islam. In the Manusmriti, we find “a fundamental distinction between the king as the human agent and the law as the superhuman abstract order leads to a theory of restrained rulership and a conception of fairness of treatment towards different types of subjects.” The realm of kingship has various obligations to and relations with the morally transcendent sphere of spirituality. Since society is the embodiment of spirituality, the social order – consisting of different castes – is said to be prior to the state, with the rulers being tasked with the protection of socio-cultural customs. Hindu political theory articulates this subordination of the king’s legislative function to the social order in “the relation between the political ruler and the social practices of the caste order. The ruler’s power is executive or administrative; it cannot make fundamental rules of social conduct or change them. The rules of the caste order as a system of social relations are thus impervious to the constant fluctuations of royal power.” The self-regulating permanence of “deep social life” is to be distinguished from the unstable power dynamics of dynasties, kingdoms and individual rulers, which “affect the lives of a very small number of individuals who are born, by their caste fate, to endure the impermanence and aggravations of a life of political power.” A similar Islamic political theory of restrained rulership and a legislatively powerless state can be seen in the structure of Mughal rule. Its theological precepts derived from the Persianate Islam of the Khorasan region, which had to deal with the conquest of non-Islamic rulers. Relying upon a specific reading of Aristotle, the Muslim intellectuals of this version of Islam asserted that the duty of the ruler, regardless of his own individual faith, was to ensure the development of conditions that would allow the flourishing of his subjects. The royal authority was to work toward the creation of a society that guaranteed not just mere sustenance but also human development. “Living as human beings – not just zoe [life of biology] but bios [life of language and politics] – required conditions in which subjects could use their intellectual and spiritual capacities. On the basis of this interesting derivation from Aristotle, they were able to assert that the task of the non-Islamic ruler was to preserve the religious practice of his Islamic subjects.” Basing themselves on this unique Aristotelian interpretation of Islamic rule, the Mughals practiced forms of toleration that incorporated the religious beliefs of the Hindus. In sum, both Hinduism and Islam established a system of political authority that recognized itself as being conditioned by the constraints of society. While recognizing this historically specific feature of the pre-colonial state, it is important not to advance the theory of “segmentary state,” according to which the grandiose verbal claims of pre-colonial states only hid the empirical reality of near-total lack of authority. In the words of Irfan Habib, “[i]t is held that the British conquest was the product of a ‘revolution,’ by which the East India Company merely replaced the titular Indian state as a partner of the local elites, and the British conquest was thus not really a conquest at all!” Here, the question of centralization is conflated with that of the strength of state power. It is presupposed that a state capable of maintaining sovereignty over its territory has to be centralized in terms of administrative structure and socio-cultural practices. In opposition to this, we need to insist on both the strength of the pre-colonial state and its distance from society – something inconceivable within an analytical perspective mired in European notions of sovereignty. Sudipta Kaviraj articulates this succinctly: 

In terms of their external relations with other kingdoms or empires, these [pre-colonial] states were certainly ‘sovereign’ over their territories; but we cannot simply assume that in their internal relation with their subjects these states exercised the familiar rights of sovereignty. It is essential to understand the difference between actual weakness of a state and its marginality in principle. The relative autonomy of the social constitution from the state did not arise because the state was weak, and would have invaded social rules if it could muster the necessary strength. Rather, it accepted a marginality that was a consequence of its own normative principles. The marginality of the pre-modern state was a social fact precisely because it followed from a moral principle which guided the relation between rulers and subjects.

The lack of a clear locus of political authority in pre-colonial formations meant that the state could not act decisively on behalf of the society. Instead of actively attempting to implement its favored political programme, the pre-colonial state had to respect the internal regulations and practices of social groups as long as taxes and revenues were paid. Hence, a segmented societal architecture relied for its sustenance upon the multiple, dispersed and stable rituals of community social life. This is what is meant by ancient pluralism. Unlike the modern culture of individual rights, such pluralism was restricted to the mere fact of coexistence, with the normatively stronger attitudes of inter-religious respect being generally absent. In the words of Kaviraj: “Coexistence of numerous local communities which would have liked to impose their ways on others had they the power to do it, is not equal to a situation of pluralism-tolerance. It is a pluralism which represents a powerless intolerance.” This model of ineffectual intolerance rather than positive ideological tolerance is evident in the actual workings of the much glorified “composite culture,” in which liberal nationalists give a modernist flavor to the interaction between Hindus and Muslims through a retrospective imputation of secular values to past traditions.  According to Kaviraj, the Muslim control of “the upper layers of political authority” and the Hindu control of “commercial, craft and other productive practices” gave rise to “an effective protocol of trans-active relations for the prosecution of everyday business.” These “transactions in mundane matters like commerce and administration” were strictly separated from the domestic space of family, where spiritual exclusiveness remained dominant. Further, “because the mundane is less important than the sacred for pre-modern mentalities,” the public domain of material transactions was considered less important than the private domain of familial spirituality. “[T]he temple and the mosque, the household puja and namaz remained more significant than the market and the court; and these interactions did not result in the creation of a public space under the state’s control.” Any cultural synthesis in the areas of art, architecture, music and literature was confined to the elite boundaries of the state. Despite the efforts of the Bhakti-Sufi tradition, the message of religious egalitarianism could not percolate into the concrete ethos of Indian social life, becoming ossified into otherworldly quietism. The weakness of syncretic-fusionist traditions flowed from its pre-reflective nature – it was not epistemically organized and consciously claimed by the people belonging to different religio-cultural communities. It functioned as a loose moral code liable to dissolve when extended into spheres of society explicitly concerned with power equations. Javeed Alam writes that the pre-reflective compositeness of folk traditions “was not aligned with contending orthodoxies in a way as to be taken as necessarily acceptable when consciously thought about. Once the orthodoxy felt the danger and began intervening, by whatever modalities from above, they more or less succeeded…in pushing back or defeating most of these trends”. The spirit of religious equality and universalism propagated by the Bhakti-Sufi tradition was a systematization and popularization of the everyday experience of demographic diversity and cultural heterogeneity that formed the core of pre-colonial India. More particularly, it was concretely rooted in the material experience of religiously diverse people coming together for the purposes of commercial and administrative work. People skilled in these practical activities had a tendency to think in secular terms when dealing with the phenomena and problems of their work. For instance, the government institutions, from the medieval period onwards, had officials, generals and soldiers belonging to all religions. The Muslim and Hindu rulers (Sher Shah Suri, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Shivaji, Ranjit Singh etc.) freely employed the followers of other religions, specifically in the revenue administration and the army. These rulers also made efforts to ensure that the execution of public duties by the officials was done within a nonreligious framework. Given the emergent materialism of this secular framework, it was in consonance with the spirit of social and scientific development. The Bhakti-Sufi tradition denoted a cultural radicalization of these secular-scientific experiences, extending the materialist principles found in the public sphere of work into the private sphere of religiosity. However, the domain of the private was dominated by Brahmanical ideology. Unlike the overwhelming majority of the common people, the upper castes were divorced from any kind of material labour for their livelihood. The life of Brahmins depended on intellectual exercises that did not have a practical orientation toward materialism. They were one who controlled the means of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual production, while the rest of society produced material wealth. Thus a division emerged between intellectual and physical labour, between spiritual and temporal life. Driven by cosmic ideas of a distant mental universe, rather than phenomena of the socio-material world, the Brahmins developed themselves into idealists – the most powerful example being the philosophical system developed by Adi Shankara. Insofar that this idealism was backed by the social and political might of upper castes, the developing secular-scientific culture of the working people and its cultural counterpart in the Bhakti-Sufi tradition suffered a defeat. Due to the hegemony of casteism, the working people as a whole and the cultural representatives of this class were beholden to the ideological power of Brahmanical idealism. As EMS Namboodiripad writes: “It was therefore, an unequal battle between the toiling people who were inherently materialistic in outlook and those who lorded it over them with their idealistic philosophy.” The victory of idealist philosophy led to the entrenchment of an anti-scientific outlook that ossified the social structure through a continued dependence upon closed religious abstractions. The predominance of separate religious identities in the private sphere along with growing inter-religious interaction in the public sphere meant that pre-modern forms of tolerance represented structures of coexistence in which there were neither any sharp and conflictual religious divisions nor any widely prevalent processes of cultural synthesis. This traditional society was an intersecting network of hierarchies, tolerances and intolerances: some differences were accepted, others were frowned upon, with the elites of religious communities never forgetting to draw lines of demarcations and establish diverse inequalities. 

Colonial Modernity and the Indian Renaissance 

With the onset of colonialism, the ancient framework of coexistence came under stress. Faced with the foreign threat of the British, Indian society was forced to reflect upon its internal constitution; colonialism provided an external vantage point from which the loosely held diversity of national life had to transcend its status as a structural mode of pragmatic coexistence. In order to effectively encounter the colonial Other and protect their interests, many of the numerous communities of India began to think about their position in the socio-cultural word, thus generating diverse notions of social good. These differing notions of good were engaged in competition not just with one another but with the conception of good attached to the colonial introduction of modernity. As the elites of various religious entities organized themselves into pressure groups to negotiate with the colonial authority, the self-consciousness of the Indian people came to include a degree of community-based political coherence and national-level exchange of ideas. To take an example, the growth of new communicative infrastructures and the emergence of census-making sharpened the sense of difference between Hindus and Muslims, giving rise to the statistical imagination of majorities and minorities. Within this numerical battle, the practical behavior of ineffective intolerance was superseded by the modern capacity to orchestrate well-thought-out communal mobilizations. In such a situation of growing – and discordant – integration and the rise of modern forms of collective action in the political sphere, the local arrangements of static coexistence could no longer function as adequate methods for the resolution of various conflicts. As Alam elaborates: 

The happy coexistence of the numerous communities each living with minimal interactions though with cordial understandings could no more be taken for granted as in earlier times. This was the source enormous strains on the inherited capacities of people to handle interpersonal, intra-community, and inter-community relations. This was over and above the new competition generated by the establishment of colonial economy and administration and the struggle for share in power in the social arrangement taking shape then. The situation required interlocutors for exchange of opinions and ideas and adjudication of diverging interests and diverse notions of good between these very differently positioned worlds. Successful mediation required either people placed outside the numerous communities or those who could think beyond the limits of these communities, each of which was getting more and more unified as well as assertive. Old style dialogue as used to take place between adjacent communities enjoying local autonomy would no more do between people now more and more distant from one another and demanding things from the world which was unfamiliar to old type of transactions. All this was to sap the traditionally built-in resources including those of tolerance and mutual perseverance.

Thus, India’s interaction with colonial modernity led to novel forms of political churning whose ideological intensities and normative horizons could no longer be contained by the structural pluralism of traditional society. Ancient pluralism was only suitable for the small-scale scenario of pragmatic inter-community interaction – a form of segmented toleration propped up by the lack of a centralized political authority. With the British conquest of India, the fragmented sociological and political landscape of India had to respond to a common Other embodied in the colonial state. This process of responding to the British state as part of colonial modernity decisively changed the structural organization of Indian society. In the pre-colonial society of plural traditions, the state ruled society as a group of rulers separated from the society situated below them, lacking any substantive ideological and institutional bonds with the latter. This allowed Indian society to persist with its compartmentalized dynamic of inter-group toleration. However, with colonialism, the presence of a foreign state not hesitant to introduce deep changes in society led to the politicization of the latter; power became the major concern of different groups, with the privileged spokespeople of these groups deploying new idioms to articulate their interests. This produced the conflictual intermeshing of diverse notions of social good. In this condition, what was of prime importance was the establishment of a secular system that would ensure that the competing, and often irreconcilable, conceptions of good in public life did not lead to the eruption of conflicts. The indispensability of secularism, the need for a principle capable of democratically managing the competing notions of good, thus emerged from the internal exigencies of Indian society. But such a need was not satisfied by the peculiar logic of Indian modernity, which produced new styles of culture and politics in a highly uneven manner. The intellectual origins of modernity in India can be found not in an internal dynamic of cultural churning, but in the foreign ideas introduced by the British state and its myriad apparatuses. The recipients of these ideas were the newly emerging middle class who were roughly divided into three sections: 1) those who occupied most of the administrative posts in the colonial government; 2) those who enjoyed economic privileges owing to the landed interests that had been created by the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793; and 3) those comprador sections of Indian traders who were valued by the British for their knowledge of internal markets and sources of supply. Given the social and economic proximity of these middle class trading intermediaries and administrative subordinates to the British state, they were inevitably influenced by Western ideas. Finding themselves in a novel cultural configuration, the Indian middle class started glorifying the West and imitating the liberal trends of their British superiors – a response that first developed in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and spread to other parts of the country later. Guided by the newfound perspectives of the colonial-modern Other, the Westernized middle class of India subjected tradition to critical enquiry. This yielded some positive results: cruel social practices like sati and infanticide were abolished, irrational religious rituals like hook swinging and human sacrifices were rejected, and patriarchal regulations over women were loosened to some degree. However, the social base of these reforms was an economically exploitative middle class which mainly wanted to reconcile its traditional position of power with the modern milieu of colonial rulers. The agenda they were pursuing was one of individualistic compromise that wanted to change native culture without engendering any sort of socio-political radicalism capable of disrupting the economic programme of the British Raj. Naturally, the primary thrust of 19th century social reformers was on the Reformation of personal faith rather than an all-encompassing vision of Renaissance that could have challenged all sorts of exploitation. Insensitive to the problem of social exploitation and political subjugation, the approach of the leaders of the Renaissance toward the feudal order and colonial rule was shrouded in confusion and silence. Failure to associate with either the anti-feudal opposition of the oppressed subalterns or the anti-colonial sentiments of the Indian masses restricted the area of operation of the Indian Renaissance. Its middle class social foundation was content to merely harmonize private religious beliefs with the new conditions of colonial modernity. As such, the conceptual vocabulary of the Indian Renaissance was based on religion and caste, severely neglecting the broader theme of socio-political struggles against exploitation. Looking inwards within religiocized communities, the Indian Renaissance leaders legitimized or opposed social reforms through an interpretative dependence upon religious texts. “Almost every leader of the renaissance,” KN Panikkar writes, “from Rammohan to Narayana Guru, drew upon Vedanta as the philosophical inspiration of their social vision. It was from the influence of Vedanta that they derived their belief in monotheism and universalism.” Instead of radically transcending tradition through its incorporation into a new secular paradigm, the Indian Renaissance changed tradition through its selective reformulation, which itself was conducted in wholly religious terms. Even when conceptualizing monotheism and the unity of godhead, the Indian thinkers of Renaissance put the matter in a religious language. In the Hindu community, religious reformation relied upon the Vedas for its articulatory structure and nearly every Renaissance leader saw the propagation of the Vedas as an important goal: “Rammohan translated the Upanishads into Bengali and English, Debendranath devoted his life to the dissemination of the philosophy of Vedanta from which he earlier received enlightenment, and Keshab Chandra Sen propagated Vedanta through popular publications. Vedanta was the inspiration of Narayana Guru also, even though he belonged to a low caste and his teachings were the ideological influence of a low caste movement.” In the Muslim community, a similar influence of religiocized perspectives could be found. “Be it for a Makti Tangal in Kerala or a Syed Ahmed Khan in North India,” notes Panikkar, “reforms were to follow scriptural prescriptions. However, they tried to interpret scriptures in such a fashion that the demands of a modern society could be accommodated. It was such a perspective which informed Syed Ahmed Khan’s efforts to reconcile Islam with modernity or Makti Tangal’s attitude towards the study of languages.” The constant invocation of religion for either the approval or disapproval of reforms facilitated the growth of particularized identities that stood in antithesis to the universalist social philosophy of Indian Renaissance. Proclaiming that different religions are just varying embodiments of the same universal truth of humanity’s oneness, Renaissance ideas had tried to overcome the different regional and cultural barriers to unite people on a common platform. But these ideas were undermined by the contradictory pull coming from the strong commitment to scriptural narratives – a narrow approach that failed to transform the religious ideal of universal oneness into the socio-political discourse of equality, justice and fraternity. As the exclusivist tendency of Indian Renaissance overpowered its universalist message, a new tension emerged between the two basic ideas of Renaissance – rationalism and universalism. Having hitched the project of rationalist critique to the cultural authority of religious re-interpretations, the Indian Renaissance thinkers contributed to the entrenchment of faith as the dominant criterion for considering the validity of any change. The critical application of reason to unjust social practices was set aside in favor of a more subdued strategy of rejigging the textual coordinates of religious teachings to align them with the liberal sensibilities of the Indian middle class. While this was the general historical outcome of the Indian Renaissance, there were some cases that displayed the alternative trajectories available to the social reformers. This is encapsulated in the journey of the Brahmo movement from Rammohan to Anandamohan Bose, which demonstrates how different class interests led to different cultural strategies on the part of the Renaissance leaders. The early feudal interests of Rammohan and Debendranath circumscribed the extent to which the multiple brutalities of Indian tradition could be resisted. This gave rise to a counter-movement of the young Brahmos, which soon abandoned its former leader Keshab Chandra Sen to press for a more radical agenda, which ultimately resulted in in the formation of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in 1878 – a Brahmo subgroup that advocated for the universal liberation of all people, democratic republicanism and the welfare of labour. Inspired by Anandamohan, the young Brahmo radicals belonged to middle class and lower class families. Driven by a humanitarian desire to do something for their working class brethren, they used the legal constitutionalism of Western political theory to protest against the British policy of exploitation of Indian laborers in the tea gardens and other places. Sibnath Sastri, a leading young Brahmo, published “a poem “Sramajibi” in “Bharat Sramajeebi” 1874 Vol. 1 edited by Sasipada Bandopadhya through which he gave a call to the workers to rise and emancipate themselves from the bondage of exploitation. It may be recalled that Muzaffar Ahmed one of the founders of the Communist Party of India recognized Sivnath Sastri as one of the first enlightened persons who welcomed the need to form an organization for the working class.” These socio-political expansions of the meaning of Indian Renaissance were weak exceptions to the dominant trend of increasingly religiocized communitarian interests. 

Cultural Nationalism and the Left Alternative 

Modern politics in India inherited the intellectual legacy of the Indian Renaissance, which meant that it forewent the discourse of universal citizenship in favor of a more culturally localized focus on religio-communitarian interests. The initial interaction of the Indian political class with the British was carried out not as a modality of citizenship, since the Renaissance had failed to create a non-exclusive imagination of secular identity, but as multiple attempts to build pressure groups that could both bargain with and resist the British authorities, and, unavoidably, these pressure groups reflected the actual divisions of Indian society – religion, caste and community. The entanglement of Indian politics in socio-structural fault lines was visible even in the secular Indian National Congress, whose internal workings were oriented toward striking a balance among the elites of the various religious entities and denominational communities. Given that Indian politics claimed to represent the sectional interests of different communities in relation to the colonial authority, the emerging forms of Indian nationalism were stamped with a cultural character that gave preference to the language of internally homogenous and politically meaningful religious groups. Ahmad talks about how “diverse individuals and groups subscribing to a particular religion or sect came to be defined as coherent communities and political entities precisely because groups of elites needed to claim that they represented such communities and entities.” In colonial society, the discursive predominance of community over citizenship, the invention represented by the representors, translated into a form of anti-colonialism dominated by elite Romanticism. This cultural nationalism of colonized India used revivalist nostalgia and a demand for national re-purification against the British Other, which was perceived as an agent of defilement that used alien cultural forms to violate the country’s collective India. In this narrative of past greatness, ahistorical references were made to a Golden Age when India was a landscape of Hindu purity, undisturbed by Christian and Muslim incursions. The ruling intelligentsia of a caste-ridden society such as India very frequently confused culture with religion, fueling Brahmanical generalizations of caste cultures as “national” culture. In effect, these representational strategies solidified the colonial view of Indian history, which consisted entirely of discrete ages populated by equally well-defined communitarian interests. The Indian nation was posited as an already existing incarnation of an inexhaustible reservoir of shared culture and not a concrete outcome of common citizenship and juridical equality. Nationalism among the anti-colonial leaders remained deeply cultural in its constitution, with its political and civic aspects being overshadowed by the sentiments of blood and belonging, spiritual identity, ethnic or religious essence, revivalism and purification. Generalizing this traditionalizing impulse of Indian nationalism, Ahmad notes how “the slide from dreams of cultural retrieval to religious revivalism, and from cultural nationalism to religious purification and particularity, always lurks as a real potential at the very heart of anti-colonial nationalisms of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois strata.” While the Romantic and anti-progressive imaginary of nationalism confused culture with religion and attempted to valorize India’s historical past for the purpose of defeating colonial culture, there also existed a subaltern thrust towards a materialist conceptualization of culture. Whereas the strategy of Romantic nationalism was to construct an identity between religion and culture throughout society with the help of politically homogenized communities, the strategy of subaltern nationalism was to show how cultural practices included not only religious features and meanings but also social experiences of secular struggles against material exploitation. Instead of eternalizing the essentially historical and contingent intertwinement of religion and culture, the subaltern re-fashioning of nationalism based itself on the modern subjectivity of self-reflexivity to critically highlight the internal contradictions that vertically divided the supposedly cohesive communities of religious interests. Against the class elites of religious communities who insisted upon building social identities around primordial loyalties, the Indian subalterns foregrounded the concrete intersection of religious identity with a host of other social and economic vectors, like the existence of class and caste oppressions. In broader terms, subaltern nationalism advanced a concrete understanding of the Indian social formation, grounded in an analytical perspective for which the history of the people was bound with the history of material production and hence of the classes that constituted those productive structures and its effects. This framework recognized the concrete importance of class struggle, from which flowed the necessity of a multi-cultural and multi-religious community of the oppressed, and the replacement of the elite-dominated state by a people-centric democratic community open to all the citizens of the country without any form of discrimination. Counterposed to this subaltern materialism was the cultural nationalism of Romanticists for whom real history was the history of blood, belief, belonging, race, ethnicity etc. The criteria of truth for any change in society was to be the national ethos of the country, which set its cultural subjects upon the path of divine liberation and constant purification – a permanent circling around the lost zone of a glorious past. What remained central in the minds of cultural nationalists was not the logic of class conflict and social production but the politically manipulated discourses of parochial identities and communities. 

Within the Indian anti-colonial struggle, the materialist perspective continued to exist as a subterranean force, calling in question the mainstream language of cultural myths, civilizational clashes, and collective spirit. Such questioning led to radical hostility toward the traditional status quo, and generated a very modern conception of every people’s inherent right to liberty, collective self-determination and popular sovereignty. This kind of anti-colonial social revolutionism produced a nationalism that was culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic, legally federalist and republican, with strong guarantees for individual and collective rights. Secular nationalism of this modern variety, cognizant of the need for displacing religion from its place of public importance and installing a democratic discourse of universal rights, was perceived by native Romanticists as disruptive for the unity of the anticolonial movement. What was considered more expedient was a blinkered focus on the struggle for political autonomy through a cultural movement with religious underpinnings. As a consequence, the secular politics of subaltern materialism was replaced by an elite emphasis on a common culture constituted by religions and castes. As a result, a disjunction emerged between the politically progressive objective of national independence and the culturally regressive goal of nativist rebirth. Panikkar writes: 

That a large number of people who supported and even participated in political struggles were unable to go along with temple entry or eradication of untouchability was an expression of this. A distinct gap existed between their cultural and political consciousness…at a time when political movement was the dominant force a transformation of backward elements of culture was possible only through an integration with it. As it did not happen, backwardness in culture not only continued to exercise its influence over the popular mind, it also succeeded in dominating it. What happened in India was not an integration of cultural and political struggles, but an intrusion of culture into politics. Instead of politics transforming backward culture, politics was vitiated by cultural intrusion. We find this tendency developing, even if unintended, from the time of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Ganapati festival and Gandhiji’s Rama Rajya, to assume monstrous proportions in the religion-based politics of the Muslim League and the Hindu Maha Sabha during the national movement. 

In Independent India, the weaknesses of the anti-colonial struggle are visible even today in the electoral tactics of liberal secularists, who have allowed the cultural discourse of primordial loyalties to constantly hollow out the modern message of political sovereignty. For them, nationhood is defined in a civilizational manner instead of being a common product of the anti-colonial struggle. As Ahmad writes: “Please contemplate the fact that the claim that we are a nation is, in our history, much older than the claim that we are a secular nation or that this nationhood in some fundamental way cannot be born without the abolition of colonial autocracy. Even the most secular of our nationalists continued to think of India as a primordial nation civilizationally defined, rather than a modern nation that was the product of the anti-colonial movement itself and an entity that arose out of the crucible of 15 August 1947.” Given that the Indian liberals continue to operate primarily on the terrain of culture and civilization, secular activities in civil society are mostly confined to the highly predictable invocation and idealization of the uniquely tolerant nature of the Indian religious tradition – a mechanical exercise that arises in response to the communal focus on religious conflicts and extremism. In this entire political operation, what remains constant is the undiminished primacy of religion as a moral and cultural code of political action. Both liberal secularists and right-wing fanatics agree on the status of religion as a totalizing model of existential ethic that is as sufficient as the secular and modern framework of the Indian constitution – a present-day manifestation of the cultural intrusion that took place into national politics during the period of anti-colonial struggle. In contrast to the uncritical attitude of the liberal-fascist forces to the public predominance of religion, Communists insist on displacing religion from its current status as a social totality in itself and reducing it to a mere subcomponent of a wider democratic discourse of universal values. As Vanaik says: 

Religious discourse is not communalist discourse. It only provides the alphabet, or perhaps some words, from which the ugly sentences of communalist discourse are constructed. But religious discourse must also be seen as only one kind of discourse, language or alphabet system among others in a modern, secular society. It is a discourse that must recognize its limited applicability. When it intrudes into other domains where other languages (and alphabets) are more fitted – i.e. when it becomes legitimized as an acceptable discourse on the terrain of modern politics – then it widens the field over which communal discourse operates. This is true even when, in that domain, it can be used to fight communal constructions of its ‘alphabet’. 

The Communist stance toward religiocization is visible in the controversy that the Indian Right has created over various historical events. In 1921, the Mappila Muslims of Kerala staged an armed revolt against the British authorities and their feudal allies who happened to be upper-caste Hindus. Since the landlords and peasants were from different religious groups, the revolts of the Mappila Muslims against their exploiters are regarded as communal riots, as expressions of Muslim fanaticism against the Hindus. The hidden presupposition of this communal angle is that an individual’s personality is wholly determined by a single identity, that of religious faith. “Therefore, a Hindu or a Muslim, whether he is a peasant or a landlord, a worker or an industrialist, a teacher or a bureaucrat, a politician or a scientist, is guided by a consciousness rooted in religion. An implication of this imputed univocal consciousness is that he is a member of a community of such individuals professing the same faith, regardless of the different secular vocations in which they are engaged.” Instead of revealing the multifarious constitution of the individual, and the historically diverse forces that combine to generate his/her contradictory consciousness, the Right obscures any form of concrete politics by imposing upon them the grand abstractions of religion. Instead of fighting this increasing religiocization of society, Indian liberals keep on talking about religious co-existence and harmony. This model of secularism as religious harmony is based on a unidimensional view of religion, which entirely ignores the internal differentiations that vertically divide religious communities. Each religion contains within itself multiple social, economic and cultural groups, among whom relationships are not just complementary but also contradictory. Taking into account the fact of intra-religious divisions, homogeneous religious communities don’t exist; religious categories are historically enmeshed in a network of social and economic relations. Any political position that singularly focuses upon religious pluralism substantivizes religion, giving it a solid character that it actually does not possess. The reification of religion in turn accentuates the sense of difference that is inherent in any religious identity, creating the religious base upon which communal forces can work. A Communist approach to secularism, in contrast, would de-institutionalize religion by showing how it is filled with social and cultural hierarchies that prevent the formation of a neat faith-based consensus. This shifts the emphasis from internally unified religious communities to the multiple material and ideological contradictions that sustain religion as a conflictual historical category. Since religion is no longer regarded as a complete totality but as a contingent and contradictory mode of social organization, the language of homogenous religious communities and the attendant liberal construction of inter-religious harmony becomes redundant. What matters now is the strong guarantee of universal equality that would end all forms of exploitation found in religious groups. The liberal narrative of religious co-existence and toleration no longer occupies a central place because it is superseded by a democratic narrative that transcends religious pluralism to construct an over-arching framework of justice, equality and fraternity. Within this all-encompassing discourse of modern values, secularism is re-articulated as the universal promise of citizenship, carrying within itself the “values of non-racial and nondenominational equality, the fraternity of the culturally diverse, the supremacy of Reason over Faith, the belief in freedom and progress, the belief that the exercise of critical reason, beyond all tradition or convention or institution, is the fundamental civic virtue without which other civic virtues cannot be sustained”. 

The political situation that India currently faces demands a Communist version of secularism, one that would embed the multi-religious working class in the democratic totality of secular struggles against economic exploitation and political repression. This dialectical transcendence of religious pluralism stands in contrast to liberal anti-communalism, which merely searches national tradition to find instances of religious harmony. Socialist political practice will overcome this anemic agenda of national integration and communal harmony by waging progressive democratic struggles that include within their programmatic vision the fight of the multi-religious working class against all forms of exploitation, including communal manipulation. Usually, such a socialist universalism is rarely present in democratic struggles and therefore an organic connection between secular action and democratic struggles is not formed. Panikkar notes: “Almost all voluntary organizations engaged in fighting for peoples’ rights are secular in their conviction. Yet, they all tend to remain single-issue oriented organizations without incorporating a conscious struggle for secularism in their activities. Therefore, in times of crisis their secular commitment becomes rather fragile, as happened to some trade unions in Mumbai at the time of the Ramajanmabhumi campaign.” The viewpoint of socialist universalism will remedy the religious exclusivism of democratic struggles by consciously launching a movement for secularization dedicated to combating the exploitative practices of institutionalized religious formations. This is what the Left used to do before it began eulogizing India’s syncretic traditions and interfaith unity. In the past, the Left parties would use the local idiom of folk cultures to criticize piety and blind faith, thus promoting a secularized commitment to pro-poor universalism. In the words of Praful Bidwai: “Left-wing activists in the arts and theatre would deploy satire and parody to demolish the moral claims of devotees of Ram, including the Kshatriya prince’s upholding of customary casteist dogmas and practices such as beheading a Shudra for committing the crime of reading the Vedas, or driving Sita to self-destruction in defense of male-supremacist prejudice. They would pour scorn on religion and self-styled swamis.” Today, what we need is the construction of a left-wing secular discourse that consciously recognizes itself as a subset of the discourses of democracy and equality. Oriented toward the principles of socialism, such a general democratic discourse would secularize civil society and thus combat the resurgent wave of neo-fascism.