Liberals, Leftists, and the Ukraine War

[Pictured: Ukraine’s notorious Azov battalion, which is known for its neo-Nazi ideology. Photo credit to Vladimir Sindeyeve/NurPhoto]

By Chris Wright

To be a leftist in the United States is a dispiriting experience, but in the last year one of the more dispiriting things has been to see the attitude of many leftists themselves on a subject of crucial importance: the war in Ukraine. The consensus of the Washington establishment remains that the U.S. must support Ukraine against Russian aggression, in the form of providing enormous amounts of military aid. Progressives in Congress largely share this consensus, having voted for military aid and even cravenly retracted their letter to Biden in October that suggested he pursue diplomacy. Outside the halls of power, too, many leftists effectively support Washington’s policies. To be sure, they add the qualification that one must also oppose American imperialism—but when they’re supporting a U.S. proxy war that is providing pretexts to increase military spending and expand NATO (an instrument of U.S. power), this is an empty qualification. The sad fact is that there is little vocal advocacy in the U.S. today for the only moral position, namely to engage in immediate negotiations to end this horrific war.

Instead, most liberals, conservatives, and even some leftists seem to support Antony Blinken’s rejection of any ceasefire or negotiations that “would potentially have the effect of freezing in place the conflict, allowing Russia to consolidate the gains that it’s made.” In other words, negotiations have to be postponed until Russia is in a weaker position than it is now. In fact, the official U.S. war aim is “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says. That means Russia has to be so devastatingly weakened—preferably defeated—that its capacity to wage war is destroyed. This, in turn, means that the war must go on for a very long time, perhaps “to the last Ukrainian,” as John Quigley speculates. Zelensky, who seems “heroically” willing to countenance the ongoing destruction of his country, is now even insisting that Russia give up Crimea.

All this is madness, and ought to be seen as such by any clear-eyed opponent of the U.S. empire (which is vastly more global, hegemonic, and dangerous to the world’s population than today’s Russia). Before accepting complete defeat, Putin—whom, after all, we’re supposed to view as a bloodthirsty monster—would likely wage total war on Ukraine, possibly including use of nuclear weapons. So anyone who defends the U.S. war aim (and Ukraine’s current war aims, as stated by Zelensky) is advocating the destruction of Ukraine and, perhaps, nuclear war. Aggression should indeed be opposed, but not at the expense of human survival or the survival of millions of Ukrainians.

However strenuously it has been denied by Western supporters of this war, Russia has legitimate grievances (as opposed to U.S.-led wars since the 1960s) that must be addressed in order to end the killing. It isn’t a simple matter of “evil imperialism vs. a wonderful pacifist democracy,” which is the narrative we’re fed by mainstream media. Scores of experts, including even Cold Warriors like George Kennan, have discussed the many provocations from the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine that brought on Putin’s invasion, and we needn’t rehash the whole history here. What is at stake is, in large part, a clash of rival powers—a global, imperialist one (the U.S.’s) and a relatively minor regional one (Russia’s) that pales in comparison—which means there is no morally pure outcome, as there rarely is in politics. A peace settlement will have to be a compromise, which, like most compromises, will doubtless leave all parties somewhat unhappy but at least will end the slaughter. Russia, for example, may well end up retaining Crimea (which it annexed in 1783—until 1954) and certain other small strips of territory it has gained. Left-liberals who wring their hands about how this would teach the lesson that aggression sometimes pays would do well to reflect on another fact: if, somehow, NATO and Ukraine manage to inflict a terrible defeat on Russia, this will teach America that unfettered military expansion—and incitement of war—is a great way to crush one’s enemies, and it will apply the lesson to China.

It’s worth noting, too, that it isn’t only a confrontation of great powers that is at stake, or the survival of millions of Ukrainians and their country’s physical infrastructure, or an atrocious empowerment of the U.S. military industry. The longer this war goes on, the more damage is done to the natural environment, including efforts to combat global warming. In just the first seven months of the war, the fighting released 100 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, as a report by Chatham House notes, “across the world, countries are building or reopening coal power stations and investing in oil and gas development.” Soaring energy prices have led to a “gold rush” for new fossil fuel projects. Oil companies are making record profits. Are we supposed to care more about punishing Russia than leaving a livable world to our descendants?

This is to say nothing of the large-scale food insecurity the war has fostered, the cost-of-living crises that are impoverishing millions, and the displacement of refugees. These problems cannot be solved until the war ends. And it can end only with negotiations. One expects neocon vampires like Anne Applebaum, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan—not to mention Biden administration officials like Blinken and Victoria Nuland—to experience throes of ecstasy over any war that projects American power, but when even progressives and some leftists are vehemently defending U.S. proxy wars and effectively dismissing the idea of negotiations, it is clear that America’s moral and intellectual rot runs very deep indeed.

Liberals and leftists who continuously support efforts to enflame the conflict ought to be embarrassed that the most vocal advocacy of the antiwar position today is from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and right-wing libertarians. It’s time that the left reclaimed its antiwar traditions.

The US Blockade on Cuba is a Violation of Democracy

By Calla Walsh

The only criteria to be invited to Biden’s so-called Summit for Democracy last week was to be a lapdog of US imperialism, not to be a real democracy. Instead of uplifting true people’s democracies which have dynamic, mass participation — such as those in Cuba and China — Biden’s summit promoted the overthrow of these governments.

As Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said, “The US Democracy Summit was selective and virtual, as virtual as its own “democracy,” a reflection of its own international moral isolation.” He is right. The US is increasingly isolating itself, and it is clearer each day that its hegemony is in decline. On the other hand, countries like China and Cuba are overcoming the US attempts to diplomatically isolate them by practicing true internationalism and paving the way to peace and multipolarity. The US is doing everything it can to stop these inevitable changes, rather than address the needs of its own population.

Biden used the Summit to prop up US regime change operations under the guise of democracy promotion. Foundations like the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front group, are some of the most blatant examples of how the US uses “democracy” as a weapon to undermine real democracy in the name of democracy. Over the past 20 years, the NED and USAID have allocated over $250 million USD to programs targeting Cuba. These programs aim to mutate real economic dissatisfaction in Cuba into violent anti-government protests. They have especially targeted Cuban cultural groups and youth groups, with the CIA notoriously infiltrating the underground hip hop scene in Cuba and fomenting counter-revolution. These protests have been utter failures, because people in Cuba are dissatisfied by the US blockade, not by the Cuban government.

But the US is still trying to fulfill the original goal of its blockade, which, in the words of the State Department itself, is “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Over 60 years of the longest and most severe unilateral sanctions in the world have been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and decrease of tourism to Cuba, but more significantly by Trump’s hawkish policy towards Cuba, which saw the reversal of Obama-era normalization policies, the addition of 243 new sanctions on Cuba, and the readdition of Cuba to the so-called “State Sponsors of Terrorism” List. In spite of his campaign promises to revert to Obama-era policy, Biden has kept nearly every single one of Trump’s added sanctions and doubled-down on the fallacy that Cuba is a terrorist state. Biden could change this designation with the stroke of his pen.

The blockade is not about restoring democracy in Cuba, despite the US attempts to portray it as such. No, these sanctions are designed to force Cuba into a return to capitalist dictatorship. US laws condition the lifting of sanctions on the complete destruction of Cuba’s revolutionary political and economic systems. For example, the “Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,” commonly known as the Torricelli Act, requires that, for sanctions to be lifted, Cuba must change its Constitution, return US property that was legally nationalized by Cuba, move “toward establishing a free market economic system,” and hold elections for a new government. It promotes US intervention by “[authorizing] the President to provide assistance to promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba.” So, the “Cuban Democracy Act” is about tearing apart Cuba’s existing democracy and replacing it with what the US deems to be fair elections.

The blockade is not about forcing Cuba to give its people a greater say in their democracy. Cubans already have one of the most robust democracies in the world. Rather, the blockade is about exerting maximum economic pressure on Cuba, to enable the US to impose their so-called model of democracy on Cuba, meaning democracy for the US ruling class to seize and exploit Cuba’s people and resources.

Reports published by the US government on their plans to remodel Cuba into a capitalist state have even modeled Cuba’s transition after the neoliberalization of Eastern Europe during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where economic shock therapy caused a huge drop in life expectancy and rise in disease and poverty. The US wants to reverse the accomplishments of the Revolution, and force Cubans back into the poverty they lived in under the yoke of the US. These policies are in blatant defiance of international law. They are a gross violation of Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.

Not only is the blockade a violation of Cuba’s democratic rights, but it is also maintained against the democratic will of the US people and the 96% of the countries on Earth which vote year after year to condemn the blockade in the United Nations. A consistent majority of US citizens support normalizing relations with Cuba and lifting sanctions, especially for vital products like food and medicine, but we don’t get any say in the continuation of the blockade.

A recent poll also showed that a powerful 0% of US citizens think that Cuba is a threat to the US, yet the Biden administration continues to label Cuba as “terrorist.” There is an ongoing push by extreme right-wing Miami Republicans to codify into law Cuba’s “terrorist” designation, so that it could only be reversed if Cuba agrees to destroy its socialist system and replace it with what the US deems to be “democracy.” However, the US people are resisting these hawkish policies. The National Network on Cuba is leading an effort to get Cuba #OffTheList of State Sponsors of Terrorism. For the past several years, Cuban-Americans and allies have been organizing monthly car caravans and standouts against the blockade to build “Puentes de Amor,” or bridges of love, between the US and Cuban people. In Miami, these protests against the blockade have been violently attacked by fascists aided and abetted by the Miami police.

The US labels Cuba as “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” to justify its cruel blockade. In reality, Cuban democracy is centuries ahead of the so-called democracy we have in the US. Observing Cuba’s municipal elections last November was the first time I saw real democracy, after working on dozens of elections in the US. Cuban elections are completely nonpartisan and there is no campaign spending, advertising, or lobbying allowed. Cuba consistently has much higher voter turnout than most other countries in the world. Once elected, representatives are not paid, they continue their lives as workers alongside the rest of the population, and they can be recalled at any point by voters. The workers are the state in Cuba.

In the US, on the other hand, the corporations are the state. Bribery by corporations and lobbyists is legal and in fact a guaranteed path to victory, because the candidate who spends the most money almost always wins. In the US, we are only called upon to have a say in our government when elections take place. In Cuba, elections are not the full extent of how citizens can participate, they are only the beginning. The Constitution is regularly revised with the participation of millions of citizens. Ideas are constantly being generated from the masses and laws are tested and revised with the masses. This is what real democracy looks like.

The father of Cuban Independence, Jose Martí, said, “In a time of crisis, the peoples of the world must rush to get to know each other.” This has been exactly Cuba’s approach to fighting US attempts at isolation. The US uses its huge leverage over the international financial system to bully other countries into submission, to punish Cuba, and to punish even its own US allies for trading with Cuba. Cuba’s approach to building strong diplomatic relations with other countries is based not on bullying, but on cooperation. Cuba sends doctors, not bombs.

Friendships with other countries, and the strength of the Cuban people, are how the Cuban Revolution has continued to survive. When the blockade first began, the Cuban Revolution was able to survive because of the internationalist solidarity it received from the Socialist Bloc. Since then, Cuba has returned the favor to working people across the world, including working people in the US. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba was able to survive because of the internationalist medical brigades it launched and because of its partnership with the Bolivarian Revolution. And of course, through collaboration with the People’s Republic of China on economic development.

As we speak, Cuba, along with 148 other countries, is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, collaborating on significant infrastructure and energy projects. While the US blocked vital medical supplies reaching Cuba during COVID, China supplied them, returning the favor to Cuba, which offered material aid to China at the onset of the pandemic. In November 2022, Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel visited Algeria, Turkey, Russia and China. During his visit, they signed a historic cooperation agreement formalizing a $100 million donation from China to help Cuba overcome the economic crisis resulting from US sanctions.

This is the difference between the US and China’s approaches to diplomacy and development. China’s approach is what gives us hope for a world order that is not based on US unipolar hegemony. Multipolarity, de-dollarization, building unity and cooperation will all help Cuba, and all countries being strangled by the US, to maintain sovereignty and hold back regime change.

Young people in the US like me are increasingly skeptical of US regime change propaganda. More young people see China as a friend, not an enemy, than any other generation. We see the utter incompetence of the US in their attempts to ban TikTok. We see Biden continuing the destruction of our environment while China is leading the world in reducing carbon emissions. We see that Cuba has the most progressive laws in the world on LGBTQ rights while fascists in the US are attempting a genocide of trans people. It could not be clearer which countries are the true democracies representing the interests of working people.

The Cuban Revolution has survived for over 60 years despite all odds, and we can only imagine the incredible things Cuba will do when it is able to develop free from the constraints of the US blockade. If we fight for it, then we will see an end to the blockade in our lifetimes and we will live in a truly democratic, multipolar world.

The Peru Protests and U.S. Infiltration of the Left

Pictured: Supporters of Pedro Castillo, the ousted president of Peru, protest in front of police in downtown Lima on Friday, Dec. 16, 2022. (Marco Garro/The New York Times)

By Kidus Desta

Peru has made international news in the past few months after thousands of citizens — many being indigenous and traveling from rural regions — began protesting in the capital city of Lima. Their main demand is the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, who stepped into power after former president Pedro Castillo was ousted from office and imprisoned. Castillo’s removal and imprisonment was the result of his attempt to dissolve the right-wing Congress.

Boluarte has said she will not step down until the next election. This sparked controversy since the next election is not until April 2024 and many see Boluarte as an unfit representative who betrayed Castillo, her party, and the Peruvian people. In addition to Boluarte’s resignation, many protesters are demanding Castillo’s release and changes to the nation’s constitution, which they say grants Congress too much power over the executive branch.

This concern is partly why Castillo ran on creating a new constitution as president. But fulfilling that campaign promise would require the formation of a constituent assembly, which Congress blocked. Some protesters therefore see the need to dissolve Congress so that the process of drafting a new foundational document can commence.

Peru’s current constitution was created under the far-right regime of Alberto Fujimori and is deeply informed by his capitalist politics. The constitution, for example, made it harder to tax gold and copper mines. Some hope that a constituent assembly will pave the way for a new constitutional framework that expands the state’s role in the economy and allows for more taxation on mining to fund social programs that indigenous and rural communities need. 

These communities have long felt disenfranchised. Despite comprising 26% of Peru’s population, indigenous Peruvians — the rural voices of the Andes — hold just 6.92% of federal congressional seats. Hailing from the Peruvian countryside, where he formerly worked as a schoolteacher, Castillo understood the grievances of rural and indigenous Peruvians and tried to address them as president. Boluarte and her government have gone in the opposite direction, ignoring calls to convene a constituent assembly by these marginalized groups who desire a constitution that works for them.

The Boluarte administration’s approach to governance has incited widespread outrage, with 71% of Peruvians disapproving of the president’s job performance. This sentiment — along with disapproval of Congress, which sits at 88% — lays at the heart of the current protest wave. In response, the Boluarte regime has used police repression as a means to retain power. This state violence has killed at least 53 people with the youngest being just 15 years old.

Despite the reprehensible actions of their government, the Peruvian people are firmly on the side of the protesters. According to the Institute of Peruvian Studies, 60% believe the protests are justified. An identical number agree with the central demand to free Castillo and a whopping 69% want a constituent assembly. Meanwhile, only 12% believe in keeping the constitution as is — down from 19% in June 2022. 

During the protests, conservative groups have come together to counter-protest. These counter-protests have been met with skepticism because of their initial backing by the national police, who promoted the “March For Peace” on social media and asked people to attend. Attendees included conservative politicians like far-right congressman Alejandro Muñante as well as retired military and police.

Due to the United States’ history of meddling in Latin America, many are questioning whether the superpower has a hand in the recent events in Peru. Peru — after all — has abundant natural resources including minerals like copper, lead, zinc, tin, silver, and gold. Copper has become an especially important resource in recent years due to its use in energy technology, with Goldman Sachs calling it the “new oil.”

Under Castillo’s presidency, the exploitative nature of neoliberalism was challenged by his demand that these resources benefit the people of Peru. Castillo believed that Peru’s resource endowment could help fund social programs that materially improve people’s lives. But efforts to undermine this vision may have been well underway even before Castillo left office. The day before he was ousted, Lisa Kenna — US ambassador to Peru and veteran of the CIA — met with Peru’s defense minister, “who then told the country’s powerful military to turn against Castillo.” On January 18th, Kenna held a meeting with mining and energy ministers from the Boluarte regime to discuss “investments” — a euphemism for expanding the extractive reach of Western multinationals.

In a stunning betrayal of values, Boluarte has gone from leading an anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal party to overseeing a regime which serves imperialist and neoliberal interests. Such a betrayal has precedent in Latin America. In 2016, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil was impeached and replaced by her vice president Michel Temer. Temer's vision of a pro-business economy contradicted Rouseff’s plans to bolster social programs.

During a conference at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, in a speech addressed to “members of multinational corporations and the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” Temer admitted that this impeachment occurred so that he may be installed as president to cut social programs and privatize industry. This squares with Temer’s history as a US informant and aspiring challenger to Lula in Brazil’s 2006 presidential race.

As with Temer, Boluarte’s turn against her own party is primarily an act of opportunism. By siding with the far-right Congress and its imperialist allies, Boluarte has increased the odds of retaining her position of power. This unholy trinity shows how capitalist powers like the United States can undermine leftist movements in the Global South from within.

Kidus Desta is a Hampton Institute intern and undergraduate studying political science and economics at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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.