Sunday, October 31, 2021

Sudan Coup Prompted by Failures in Washington’s Foreign Policy

DEMANDS ON THE INTERIM GOVERNMENT CREATED AN UNSUSTAINABLE TRANSITIONAL PROCESS

October 28, 2021

Reprinted from Fighting Words Sudan Coup Prompted by Failures in Washington’s Foreign Policy – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

Sudan unrest after military coup Sudan unrest after military coup. | Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Abayomi Azikiwe

A military coup was carried out in the Republic of Sudan on October 25 as the contradictions within the Sovereignty Council (SC) burst asunder.

This coalition of political and military interests was formed in the aftermath of tumultuous political events between December 2018 and June 2019.

The Chair of the SC, Maj. Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan engineered the removal and detentions of the interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok along with several other leading cabinet ministers within the transitional regime. Events leading up to the military coup can be traced back to the announced arrest of 40 people including military officers and civilians on September 21 ostensibly for plotting a seizure of state power.

A very limited and sketchy amount of information was published about the personalities and motivations of those arrested in September in what was described by Prime Minister Hamdok as a preemptive act. Differences among the political and military leadership of the SC had become well known over the last several months. The attempted coup in September was blamed on the supporters of former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir who remains in detention in Sudan pending the outcome of criminal charges levelled against him. Also, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands has warrants out for the arrest of al-Bashir yet he has not been extradited by the administrations which have governed since April 2019.

An agreement between the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) which led the demonstrations against the former administration of ousted President Omar Hassan al-Bashir beginning in December 2018, and the Transitional Military Council headed by al-Burhan and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (aka, Hemeti), created the political atmosphere for the formation of an interim administration. Hamdok, an economist who has held several administrative and diplomatic posts, was selected to be the political face of the SC.

During the early morning hours of October 25, reports emerged from Khartoum that a military coup was underway. Hamdok had been moved to an undisclosed location while the media remained silent on the rapidly unfolding events.

Later Gen. al-Burhan made a videotaped statement to the people of Sudan and the international community acknowledging the removal of Hamdok and other officials of the interim government. He claimed that the actions of the military were designed to carry out the ideals and objectives of the “December 2018 Revolution.”

Such an assertion is counter-intuitive since it was the military under the direction of the generals that seized power from President al-Bashir in April 2019. These actions were taken by the military in order to stave off a genuine popular revolution in Sudan.

Soon enough the military revealed its brutal and undemocratic character by carrying out a massacre of protesters on June 3, 2019. The attack on demonstrators occupying areas around the Ministry of Defense in the capital of Khartoum resulted in more than 100 deaths. Hundreds of others were wounded and injured while assaults on women and youth continued for several hours.

The October agreement which jump-started the SC set a timetable of 39 months for the transfer of power to a civilian government after multi-party elections. This deal resulted in placing Gen. al-Burhan as chairperson for the first 21 months. Later the civilian members of the SC were slated to take over the leadership of this alliance. The events since October 25 have aborted this accord, known as the Draft Constitutional Declaration, while at the same time placing the negotiations for the end to rebel insurgencies in Darfur, Blue Nile, North and South Kordofan in jeopardy. A Juba Agreement was signed in South Sudan in October 2020 between the transitional administration and various rebel groups aimed at bringing the armed elements into a political process.

After it became clear that a coup had occurred on October 25, the Associated Press reported that:

“As plumes of smoke rose, protesters could be heard chanting, ‘The people are stronger, stronger!’ and ‘Retreat is not an option!’ Social media video showed crowds crossing bridges over the Nile to the center of the capital. The U.S. Embassy warned that troops were blocking parts of the city and urged the military ‘to immediately cease violence.’ Pro-democracy activist Dura Gambo said paramilitary forces chased protesters through some Khartoum neighborhoods. Records from a Khartoum hospital obtained by The Associated Press showed some people admitted with gunshot wounds.”

One day after the coup it was reported that at least seven people had been killed and 140 injured in demonstrations across the country. Mass demonstrations began almost spontaneously after the announcement of a coup. Internationally, the African Union, the United Nations as well as the U.S. have issued statements opposing the military takeover.

Another Failure in U.S. Africa Policy

For decades now the political affairs of the Republic of Sudan have been a preoccupation of the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Prior to the partition of the country in 2011, Sudan was the largest geographic nation-state in Africa. The country of 50 million was becoming an emerging oil-producing state maintaining ties with both the West and the developing countries.

During the 2000s, Sudan had good relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China through trade agreements and other forms of bilateral and multilateral relationships. However, international pressure from the U.S. under the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, sought to balkanize and destabilize the country. The U.S. engineered the creation of the Republic of South Sudan along with Britain, the former colonial power, and the State of Israel. Today, both North and South Sudan are in economic and political turmoil. The governments in Khartoum and Juba in the South are beholden to the whims and caprices of imperialism and its allies.

Since the overthrow of al-Bashir, the monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have pledged monetary assistance. The U.S. then pressured Hamdok into accords that are at extreme variance with the priorities and needs of the Sudanese people.

Hamdok and al-Burhan knelt to U.S. pressure and revoked without any legitimate authority, the Israel Boycott Act of 1958 which prohibits recognition and trade with Tel Aviv. In addition, the interim government accepted a proposal from the administration of President Donald Trump to pay hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to survivors of victims of terrorist acts carried out in 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania and in 2000 in the Port of Aden off the coast of Yemen. There was no concrete evidence presented to the international community which could link the government of al-Bashir, which was toppled, to these bombings. Yet the people of Sudan will be forced to pay restitution for crimes ostensibly committed during a previous deposed administration.

This reckless disregard of the political and economic sovereignty of Sudan could only serve to weaken its national institutions and foment social chaos among the working class, youth, women’s organizations and professional associations. The coup has been condemned by numerous opposition groupings including the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) which has called for mass resistance against the putsch.

Biden Administration Maintains Same Imperialist Policy

The current administration of President Joe Biden has paid limited attention to foreign policy. His orientation has been quite similar to that of his predecessors Obama and Trump. Biden has continued and enhanced the hostility towards China, Iran, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Cuba, Venezuela, among other states. The potential for an international conflict over the strategic control of geo-political regions could very well erupt in the coming months. The failure of the Biden administration to intervene constructively in the Horn of Africa is fostering greater discord and instability.

With the seizure of power by the Sudanese military, this scenario lays focus on the need for a political revolution in the country along with several others. Despite the promises of monumental economic and security assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Sudanese people continue to be mired in a cycle of declining wages, rising prices and political uncertainty.

It will be up to the workers, youth, women, professional associations and genuine political parties to build a coalition of popular forces that can secure victory over the military apparatus and construct a domestic and foreign policy independent of Washington and Wall Street. The intervention of the military in governmental affairs is once again becoming widespread on the African continent. In Chad, Mali and Guinea, similar developments have taken place. The African Union must address this crisis in order to prevent a further deterioration of the security situation on the continent.

Africa Condemns the Continuing Imperialist Legacy of France

ALGERIA RECALLS ITS AMBASSADOR FROM PARIS

October 27, 2021

Reprinted from Fighting Words Africa Condemns the Continuing Imperialist Legacy of France – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

By Abayomi Azikiwe

France for centuries had been involved in the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism making it one of the leading imperialist powers to emerge from the tumultuous conquering of large swaths of territory throughout the world.

It was against the rulers of France that the Africans on the island of Hispaniola won their national independence proclaiming the state of Haiti in 1804.

The enslaved Africans in Haiti waged a twelve-year revolutionary war that defeated France along with interventions by Spain and Britain. Haiti, the first Black Republic founded by former enslaved people, set the stage for the modern-day proliferation of neo-colonialism.

After independence under a world dominated by imperialism, the former colonial powers seek to dominate the oppressed peoples through economic and military means. Haiti was subjected to a blockade from both the United States and France during the early and middle decades of the 19th century. It was not until the Civil War in the U.S. that Haiti was recognized politically by Washington.

As early as 1825, France sent a flotilla of warships to the Caribbean to demand the payment of “indemnity” by Haiti to Paris for the loss of property and the profits which they would have accrued if the slave system had not been overthrown. Haiti had been the most prosperous of all the slave colonies during the 18th century.

Successive Haitian governments were forced to make payments to the former colonial power of France while its own economic development was stifled. France demanded from the people an arbitrary 150 million francs in unjustifiable claims over wealth which was stolen from the indigenous and African people victimized by European imperialism. The invented financial obligations to Paris were later reduced to 90 million francs in 1838. Today the value of these payments would exceed US$20 billion.

France refused to recognize Haiti if these payments were not made as the imperialist power collected the last indemnity payment in 1893. Subsequently, the government of the U.S. facilitated the acquisition of Haiti’s treasury in 1911. It would take until 1947 for Haiti to be released from the interest payments to the National City Bank of New York, now known as Citibank.

Today Haiti is still impacted by the legacy of French and U.S. interference in its internal affairs which involved several military occupations along with the exploitation of the labor of the people. The kidnapping of 17 missionaries from the U.S. and Canada during mid-October must be viewed within the broader context of the recent assassination of President Jovenal Moise, the deployment of Pentagon military forces to the embassy in Port-au-Prince, the deportation without due process of thousands of Haitian migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. and the failure of the Haitian politicians to establish a stable successor administration.

Algeria Withdraws Ambassador and Bans France from Using Air Space

Another major historical struggle against French imperialism occurred in the North African state of Algeria between 1954-1962. France had colonized Algeria beginning in 1830 exploiting its natural resources and the labor of its people.

France’s tenure in colonial Algeria left a trail of massacres as people continued to demand their fundamental human and political rights. By 1954, the most advanced elements in Algerian society took up arms against the occupying military and political elites. During the course of the war, reports indicate that more than one million Algerians lost their lives.

In recent weeks, French President Emmanuel Macron made statements which attempted to deny the brutal colonial legacy of Paris in Algeria. France formerly controlled many colonies in Africa including the modern-day states of Senegal, Guinea, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Djibouti, Tunisia, Congo-Brazzaville, Madagascar, among others.

In response the Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune withdrew the country’s ambassador from France. Later it was announced that the French military would not be allowed to utilize Algerian airspace. The tensions between the two countries had worsened as well due to the hosting of a reception to honor those Algerians who fought against their own people on behalf of France during the revolutionary war of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Al Jazeera reported on the diplomatic row saying:

“The moves also come amid tension over a French decision to sharply reduce the number of visas it grants to citizens of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. ‘Following remarks that have not been denied, which several French sources have attributed by name to [Macron], Algeria expresses its categorical rejection of the inadmissible interference in its internal affairs,’ the statement said, adding the French comments were ‘an intolerable affront’ to Algerians who died fighting French colonialism. ‘The crimes of colonial France in Algeria are innumerable and fit the strictest definitions of genocide,’ it said. French daily Le Monde reported that Macron made critical remarks about Algeria during a meeting on Thursday (October 7) with French Algerian descendants of the Harkis, Algerians who fought on the French side during Algeria’s war of independence. According to Le Monde, Macron said Algeria was ruled by a ‘political-military system’ and described the country’s ‘official history’ as having been ‘totally re-written’ to something ‘not based on truths’ but ‘on a discourse of hatred towards France.’ The newspaper added the French president made clear he was not referring to Algerian society as a whole but to the ruling elite.”

On October 17, France recognized its role in a massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961. The Algerians were demonstrating in alliance with the National Liberation Front (FLN) which led the mass and armed struggle against French colonialism. 60 years ago, the French police opened fire on thousands of demonstrators killing at least 120, injuring and arresting many more.

A report published by the Associated Press stressed:

“’The repression was brutal, violent, bloody’ under the orders of Paris police chief Maurice Papon, Macron said in a statement released Saturday (Oct. 16). About 12,000 Algerians were arrested and dozens were killed, ‘their bodies thrown into the Seine River,’ the statement said…. Papon later became the highest-ranking Frenchman convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity for his role in deporting Jews during World War II…. The Movement against Fascism and for Friendship between People, or MRAP, deplored that Macron’s statement did not include ‘any word about the context of the Algeria war, any word on colonialism, nothing about archives… even less about reparations.’ Earlier this year, Macron announced a decision to speed up the declassification of secret documents related to Algeria’s 1954-62 war of independence from France. The new procedure was introduced in August, Macron’s office said.”

Rather than improving the post-colonial relationship between Paris and Algiers, Macron appears to be making it worse. Such a set of affairs in recent weeks indicates the unsustainability of French foreign policy in Africa going forward.

Other Attacks on French Neo-colonialism

The politico-military crises of governance in the West African states of Mali and Guinea are further indications of the inability of France to maintain a consistent diplomatic approach to its former colonies. Over the period since 2020, there have been two military coups in Mali and another one in Guinea.

Those involved in the military seizures of power from civilian governments had maintained close ties with the French and U.S. governments. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has operations inside Guinea and Mali as well as several other countries in the West Africa region.

Pentagon defense colleges have provided training to the military coup makers in Mali and Guinea. The current military president of Guinea, Lt. Col. Mamady Doumbouya, was a former member of the French Foreign Legion and at the time of the coup in early September, he was involved as a special forces officer in maneuvers with AFRICOM forces. Although the U.S. and France claim that their governments had no involvement in the coup, their approach to the new military regime has been largely the same as before the putsch.

The regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), composed of 15 member-states, has been rebuked by both the Guinean and Malian military leaders. Business interests based in France and the U.S. conducting mining operations in Guinea, have not paused their economic activities.

Yet two interesting events have occurred in recent weeks that should be viewed alongside the diplomatic struggle between Algeria and France. An Africa-France Summit was held in early October in Montpellier where youth confronted Macron over his policies towards the continent.

Radio France International (RFI) reported on this event noting that:

“Kenyan civil society member Adele Onyango asked Macron to look at France’s troubled relationship with Africa, demanding an examination of inefficiencies, gaps in integrity, and unethical behavior. ‘We as Africans feel the pain of colonization every single day,’ Onyango said. ‘The air of denial that France chooses to sit in is uncomfortable not only for Africa but also for France… How can you trust the source of your pain when the source doesn’t acknowledge it?’ she added. Onyango evoked what she considered France’s double standard—claiming to stand for human rights, while collaborating with agencies, leaders and individuals whose position on a wide range of societal issues in Africa is less than clear.”

Finally, a military-appointed prime minister in Mali on October 8 accused France of training a terrorist organization inside its territory. This grouping was said to have been instrumental in the post-2011 destabilization of neighboring Libya, where a Pentagon-NATO bombing campaign resulted in the destruction of the government of the late leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi who was killed at the aegis of Washington a decade ago on October 20.

Pars Today reported on the allegation emphasizing:

“Mali’s Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga told Sputnik on Friday (Oct. 8) that French troops had created an enclave in Kidal, a town in the desert region of northern Mali, and handed it over to a terrorist group known as Ansar al-Din. ‘Mali has no access to Kidal, this is an enclave controlled by France,’ he said, adding that the Malian military was banned from entering the territory. ‘They have armed groups trained by French officers. We have evidence… We do not understand this situation and do not want to tolerate it,’ the Malian prime minister said. Maiga further said that the alleged terrorists that are operating in the country ‘came from Libya, and who destroyed the state of Libya? It was France with allies.’”

Therefore, the youth along with the African military juntas see the contradictions within French foreign policy. It will be up to the masses of people around the world to unite against this colonial and neo-colonial project bringing it to a resounding conclusion.

Federal Rental Assistance Belongs to the Millions Facing Eviction

DISTRIBUTION OF CERA MONIES REMAINS MIRED IN BUREAUCRATIC ENTANGLEMENTS

October 14, 2021

Reprinted from Fighting Words Federal Rental Assistance Belongs to the Millions Facing Eviction – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

Detroit demonstration blocks Woodward Avenue on Oct. 8, 2021Detroit demonstration engaged in civil disobedience along Woodward Ave. on Oct. 8, 2021Detroit demonstration closes entrance to downtown on Oct. 8, 2021

Detroit demonstration blocks Woodward demanded action from city government, Oct. 8, 2021

By Abayomi Azikiwe

Since March 2020 the economic situation in the United States has taken a sharp turn for the worse with an estimated 20 million losing jobs in various sectors of the economy.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic which is still very much in evidence during the final quarter of 2021, many industries including manufacturing, education, healthcare, construction, entertainment, agriculture, etc. have not returned to their same levels of production and operations prior to the spring of last year.

With the collapse of an estimated 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses where the bulk of job growth has occurred since the previous recession beginning in 2007-2008, workers have been scrambling to meet their monthly expenses. Enhanced unemployment benefits authorized under the previous administration of President Donald Trump and continued under Joe Biden, have now been suspended placing millions in an even more unstable social situation.

The COVID Emergency Rental Assistance (CERA) program was enacted in 2021 to provide direct payments to landlords and utilities firms for tenants unable to meet their obligations under lease and usage agreements since the advent of the pandemic. CERA monies can be granted to cover delinquent rent payments up to 18 months in arrears. The U.S. Treasury says that $46 billion has been allocated for the program under two separate bills.

Despite these stated objectives by the federal government, state and local agencies in many municipalities have failed to implement the program in a timely fashion. Many renters and landlords complain that they do not have access to information on how to apply for funding.

Moreover, for those who have managed to apply, delays in being notified about their eligibility could take many months. Local authorities and agencies in some cases have attached additional requirements for eligibility over and above those mandated by the federal government.

The urgency of the situation was magnified when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a judgment in late September claiming that the House of Representatives and the Senate would need to pass additional legislation to extend a moratorium on eviction due to a public health crisis, the most severe in more than a century. Dominated by conservative jurists, three of whom were appointed by Trump, the highest court has consistently turned its back on the working class and oppressed.

In many urban areas the rising costs associated with housing, utilities, water services, food and transportation have continued at a rapid rate. Even mainstream economists are warning of escalating inflation which can further complicate any purported economic recovery in the U.S.

When the Supreme Court struck down the previous moratorium extension and the Democratic majority in both legislative branches failed to act, these decisions inevitably have a disproportionate impact on African Americans and other people of color communities. Many are already being priced out of apartments and homes in major cities due to the phenomenon of rising rents and the inherent racism within the mortgage industry.

An article published by the Brookings Institution during September emphasized:

“In the Supreme Court’s latest decision that will disproportionately hurt Black Americans, the justices heard arguments from Alabama landlords who had previously petitioned to lift the CDC’s eviction moratorium and were denied. They returned to federal court in early August, requesting an order that would allow evictions to resume. Led by the Alabama Association of Realtors, they argued that the CDC exceeded its authority when it instituted an eviction moratorium to assist renters during the pandemic. This time, the court agreed—deciding against tenants’ rights to protection from the COVID-19 pandemic, and in favor of landlords’ profit.”

Therefore, Alabama landlords were able to overturn a moratorium which has proven to be a life-saving measure for millions. Such decisions follow a pattern of the Court since 2013, when the Shelby v. Holder decision, also emanating from Alabama, essentially nullified the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Supreme Court in recent months has also upheld voting restrictions passed into law in Arizona which are clearly aimed at restricting access to the franchise.

Moratorium NOW! Coalition Wages Campaign to Ensure CERA Funds Are Distributed

In Detroit since September 1, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition working in conjunction with other housing advocacy organizations, such as Detroit Eviction Defense, Detroit Action and the Detroit Will Breathe youth-led movement, have intensified mass pressure on the city administration officials to ensure that the CERA funding is distributed and that no one is evicted due to the current public health and consequent economic crises. Two press conferences and rallies held on September 1 and 8 drew considerable attention from the corporate media which covered the events.

Points which have been articulated include the fact that many people in the area are not even aware of the CERA funding and how to access the assistance. Secondly, the administration of corporate-imposed Mayor Mike Duggan has not waged a public relations and marketing campaign to raise awareness about the potential for people to remain in their homes.

During a press conference held by Duggan on September 17 the Mayor said that the City of Detroit has money, over $100 million of course provided by the federal government, to assist people in avoiding evictions and homelessness. However, nothing beyond what Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other groups have repeatedly stated as it relates to what must be done to avert an even deeper social calamity in the city has been realized. Moratorium NOW! Coalition and its allies have assertively engaged the relevant authorities in control of the pandemic relief funding to demand that the resources get to the people who need them.

In a draft of a letter sent to the Mayor’s Office and each member of the eight-person City Council, Moratorium NOW! Coalition noted for the record that:

“IN THE WAKE OF THE SUPREME COURT OVERTURNING THE MORATORIUM ON EVICTIONS, PEOPLE NOW FACE EVICTIONS WHILE STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. OUR LOCAL OFFICIALS DID NOT EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE THE INFORMATION ABOUT CERA FUNDS OR DISTRIBUTE THEM TO THE PEOPLE WHO NEED HELP NOW. WE DEMAND THAT DETROIT’S MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS: PLACES A MORATORIUM ON RENTAL EVICTIONS DUE TO NON-PAYMENT OF RENT DURING THIS ACTIVE PANDEMIC; IMMEDIATELY MOUNT A MASS MEDIA CAMPAIGN TO INFORM DETROIT RESIDENTS ABOUT THE CERA PROGRAM; PROVIDE RESIDENTS THEIR APPLICATION STATUS WITHIN 3 BUSINESS DAYS OF RECEIPT BY A CERA PARTNER. IF THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE WITH THE LEVEL OF PARTNERS/STAFF THE CITY OFFICIALS WILL ENGAGE MORE PARTNERS AND/OR STAFF TO ENSURE DETROITERS IN NEED OF RENTAL ASSISTANCE RECEIVE HELP IN A TIMELY MANNER.”

Although there has not been any direct response to the letter from the City’s administration’s bank-compliant political leadership, there have been some positive developments in the struggle to halt evictions in Detroit. The 36th District Court has adjourned eviction hearings pending the outcome of approval for CERA funds. The Right to Counsel coalition has worked to provide legal assistance to those working through the complicated maze of the local legal system.

Moratorium NOW! Coalition attached to the letter sent to the Mayor and City Council provisions within the existing municipal charter providing for the authorities to exercise emergency measures amid a public health crisis or otherwise. These are politically charged demands which penetrate the dilemma facing the majority African American population of Detroit. The city’s residents have no say in the actual governance of the municipality while billions in their tax dollars are routinely funneled to the multinational corporations and banks who in effect dictate the operations of local government.

Residents Stage Civil Disobedience Demanding an End to the Status Quo

Detroit grassroots community organizations staged a rally and street blockage on Friday October 8 at Grand Circus, the main entrance into downtown Detroit from the north. The action was called by Charlevoix Village Association (CVA) based on the east side. Other groups heeded the call including Detroit Will Breathe, Moratorium NOW! Coalition, among others.

These activists marched into the center of Woodward Avenue impeding traffic for two hours while over 25 police cars stood nearby. The organizations demanded the repayment of in excess of $600 million in property taxes overpayments which extend back to the Great Recession.

Other demands included an end to evictions and property tax foreclosures calling for federal COVID assistance funding to be utilized to strengthen legacy residents, which included senior citizens, some of whom living with disabilities were present in the direct action on October 11. Later in the month, more demonstrations are planned to protest the opening of an office by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Detroit, which they are touting as a “model” for urban revitalization.

On October 29, there will be an action to demonstrate against a $500-a-plate breakfast at the Detroit Athletic Club as a fundraiser for the mayor in his campaign for re-election on November 2. The corporate-controlled media in the city has, in obvious collaboration with the administration and its billionaire backers such as Dan Gilbert and Illitch Holdings, totally ignored that there is even a municipal election coming up in a matter of weeks.

The situation in Detroit mirrors other urban areas throughout the U.S. All of the major cities require political interventions from the representatives of the working class and nationally oppressed to organize for fundamental social transformation of their areas as well as the country as a whole.

Localizing Reparations During an Era of Intensified Repression

AFRICAN AMERICANS WERE VICTIMIZED BY ENSLAVEMENT, LEGALIZED SEGREGATION AND CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION WHICH WAS SUPPORTED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

October 14, 2021 

Reprinted from Fighting Words Localizing Reparations During an Era of Intensified Repression – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

By Abayomi Azikiwe

A New York Times Sunday edition article on September 26 devoted an entire page, excluding an ad for luxurious furniture, to an examination of various efforts in the United States to initiate measures aimed at addressing historic discrimination and institutional racism.

Reparations, the demand for material and monetary compensation for the exploitation and national oppression of African Americans from the periods of colonial and antebellum enslavement right through the enactment of legalized segregation (Jim Crow) to the contemporary unequal social status and police misconduct, has gained considerable attention over the last five decades.

The New York Times begins its report with a focus on Detroit where during the post-World War II years, thousands of African American families were forcibly removed from the lower east side in the areas known as Black Bottom, Paradise Valley and others. In the mid-1950s, utilizing eminent domain, the white administration ordered people to leave certain areas of the city with almost no provisions for relocation or restitution.

Later, by the early 1960s, people living, working, worshiping, and conducting business along Hasting Street and neighboring areas were told to leave so that the Chrysler and Fisher Freeways could be constructed. These highways were designed in part to transport whites from their places of employment in the city out to the suburbs where homes and business complexes were being built. The Times article says that over 43,000 people were dislocated from the eastside within a decade.

In 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act, also known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, was passed and signed into law by the then administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It should be noted that the defense component of the legislation was enacted under Eisenhower who was Commander of the European Theater during World War II for the U.S.

A group of lawyers and political activists within the Detroit Democratic Party apparatus have placed a proposal on the upcoming November 2 ballot which would establish a taskforce to examine what reparations would look like in the city. The language on the proposal is quite vague and there has been no real discussion on how issues such as the displacement of Black communities, by not only the existing municipal administrations at the time, but more importantly, acknowledging that these policies stemmed from the profit motives of real estate firms, banks, the automotive industry and the federal government.

Since the 1950s, the population of the city of Detroit has declined every single census period to the present. From its peak at 1.8 million people in 1950, some 70 years later the number of people estimated to be living in Detroit is 637, 601. With the encouraged abandonment and forced removals of approximately 1.2 million residents over seven decades, any task force looking at reparations would demand a program for repopulation of the city with a principal focus on African Americans and other nationally oppressed groups dislocated by the combination of private and governmental forces.

Yet the current economic trajectory of the corporate interests and their imposed-Mayor Mike Duggan does not include the reconstruction of Black communities in Detroit as part of their agenda. Even though the existing administration may not directly oppose the proposal on the November ballot, the question remains as to what type of approach will the taskforce take in recommendations to ameliorate the present situation stemming from a historical legacy of policies which negatively impacted African Americans.

After being forced from Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, many within the African American population relocated to the westside area of Virginia Park. It was in this very neighborhood that the 1967 rebellion erupted on July 23rd of that year. This uprising was the largest of its kind initiated by African Americans up until that time. The Rebellion ushered in a period of resistance within the auto industry, schools and colleges, neighborhoods and unrepresentative political structures.

The election of the Detroit’s first African American Mayor Coleman A. Young was a direct result of the struggles emanating from housing discrimination, dislocation, super-exploitation within industry, corporate media distortions, the fight against police brutality and policy neglect from the successive municipal and federal administrations. Since the period of 1974-1993 when Young was in office, the consistent erosion of any semblance of political power in Detroit among African Americans is an apparent social reality.

Other Local Efforts for Reparations

An announcement by the City of Evanston, Illinois, located north of Chicago, said that it would enact a reparations program by providing housing assistance grants to African Americans. The city leaders say they are recognizing the discrimination in housing which has existed for decades in major urban areas and their suburbs.

These efforts have drawn criticism from both whites as well as people within the African American community. The conservative whites are claiming that any project to assist Blacks represents “preferential treatment” and “reverse discrimination.  On the other hand, many African Americans contend that the realization of any genuine form of reparations extends far beyond the role of local governments and must hold the federal government and the multinational corporations accountable for their role in the oppression and exploitation of African Americans.

The New York Times article from September 26 reports that:

“’There are a number of detours away from what I would call true reparations, and one of those are these alleged local programs,’ said William A. Darity, Jr., an economics professor at Duke University who has studied reparations for decades. Mr. Darity argues that an adequate reparations program, totaling about $11.2 trillion for an estimated 45 million Americans — more than 13 percent of the U.S. population — who would qualify for it, can only exist on the federal level. Where cities plan to get these funds to support a local reparations program remains to be seen. Some of these local officials are looking for answers that don’t automatically equate to a huge cash payout.”

In Tulsa, Oklahoma where the centenary of the 1921 race massacre was recently commemorated, the demand for reparations is rising from the community. Over 300 African Americans were killed on May 31-June 1 when white racist mobs including police, elected officials and national guard troops destroyed churches, homes, small businesses and social organizations which dislocated thousands.

For years the City of Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma deliberately withheld information about the race massacre and instead described it as a “riot.” Three survivors of the 1921 murderous spree in Tulsa are demanding reparations for their suffering and loss of generational wealth.

The Oklahoman newspaper wrote on this question in May emphasizing:

“Across the United States, renewed calls for reparations to help right decades-old racial injustices have been part of a racial reckoning that seemed to gain momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

“As the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is commemorated and survivors of the tragedy are honored, a demand for justice in the form of reparations will continue to be part of the conversation. Damario Solomon-Simmons, lead attorney for a landmark reparations lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and other entities, said the case for reparations has successfully been made in other situations across the country, and reparations for massacre survivors and their descendants are long overdue.”

Reparations and the Existing Power Structure in the 21st Century

Many scholars have documented the causal relationship between the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and the advent of industrial capitalism. Writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, among many others, have long ago made the case for the rejection of the false narratives enunciated by the beneficiaries of exploitation and national oppression.

The growth and prosperity of capitalism and imperialism in Western Europe and North America is not due to the superiority or ingenuity of the white ruling class. The profits accrued from African enslaved labor and colonial exploitation provided the economic basis for every major industry which emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, in the 21st century, a reckoning on the part of the oppressed is mounting.

With specific reference to Detroit, the African American community has played a leading role in the development of the reparations demand. The Nation of Islam (NOI), which was founded in Detroit in the early 1930s, later during the 1960s called for the allocation of substantial portions of land within or outside the U.S. where African Americans would form their own nation. The NOI believed that the descendants of slave masters owed a debt to the former enslaved, mandating that this independent Black state be subsidized by the federal government for 20-25 years.

Later in Detroit during March 1968, over 500 delegates to the inaugural conference of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) demanded the granting of five southern states to Blacks in the U.S. to form their own territorial nation. The following year, in April 1969, the National Black Economic Development Conference was held at Wayne State University in Detroit. A Black Manifesto was drafted by former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Executive Secretary and International Affairs Coordinator, Dr. James R. Forman, and adopted by the gathering of several hundred people.

Forman’s Black Manifesto began with a resounding call for Black Liberation and Socialism in the U.S. The document demands the payment of $500 million to $3 billion in reparations which would be utilized to build educational institutions, media and publishing outlets, cooperative housing and agricultural programs. Forman became an executive board member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and the International Black Workers Congress (IBWC) which grew out of the post-Rebellion work of the Black proletariat within the auto plants, service sectors, communities and schools of Detroit.

In 1989, African American Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Detroit submitted House Resolution (H.R.) 40 which would set up a research committee to study the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans. The bill was reintroduced every year until his departure from Congress. As a result of the mass demonstrations and rebellions of 2020, the bill has gained new life after recently being voted out of committee for the first time in 2021.

These actual historic examples of the demands for reparations must be studied in order to place the contemporary emphasis on localized efforts in their proper perspective. The call for reparations cannot be divorced from the continuing struggles against national oppression, capitalism, imperialism and the need for socialist construction.

Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses – October 22-25, 2021

INTERNATIONAL PANEL OF JURISTS CONVENE TO OVERSEE TRIBUNAL ON ABUSES AGAINST BLACK, BROWN AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

October 14, 2021

Reprinted from Fighting Words Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses – October 22-25, 2021 – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

Photo: Paul Robeson delivers “We Charge Genocide” document to the U.N. in 1951.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, October 6, 2021

https://www.tribunal2021.com/

@TribunalJurists21

In the spirit and legacy of the Russell Courts on Vietnam (1966-67) and Latin America (1973- 76), and the Permanent People’s Tribunals which followed (1979-present), a newly constituted panel of Jurists from the fields of law and human rights has assembled to oversee the International Tribunal on US Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples, to take place from 22-25 October 2021 in New York City and virtually. As experts in the inter-related fields of institutional and structural racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, women’s and children’s rights, minorities rights, Indigenous treaties and international law, self- determination and sovereignty processes, and the genocide conventions, the Panel of Jurists asserts itself as an independent and non-governmental body which will convene to hear testimony based on a broad indictment served to the accused US federal and state parties.

The International Tribunal itself derives from an historic legacy and trajectory, initiated by a US- based coalition, In the Spirit of Mandela. Created in 2018, the coalition recognizes and affirms the rich history of diverse activists including Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Graca Machel Mandela, Ella Baker, Dennis Banks, Cesar Chavez, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Korematsu, Lolita Lebron, Rosa Parks, Ingrid Washinawatok, and many more in the resistance traditions of Black, Brown and Indigenous Peoples. Though fully independent and separate from the In the Spirit of Mandela coalition, the Panel of Jurists recognizes the important experiences which have shaped the petitioners’ charges against US government agencies.

2021 marks the 70th anniversary of the campaign in which African American leaders Paul Robeson and William Patterson, with the support of eminent sociologist Dr. WEB DuBois, presented the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the burgeoning United Nations headquarters. A decade later, Minister Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) formed the Organization of Afro- American Unity, in part to bring the case of US human rights abuses to the attention of the UN. The Tribunal itself will be held at UN headquarters and the Church Center for the UN, but hearings and community testimony will also take place at the site of Malcolm X’s assassination, the now-refurbished and Columbia University-affiliated Malcolm and Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center in Harlem.

The Panel of Jurists is composed of nine members, with representatives including a South African former Member of Parliament; a Board Member of the distinguished Nobel Peace Laureate organization with an unprecedented dozen Nobel Peace officer awardees; a Puerto Rican legal scholar who serves as an expert for the UN Committee on Decolonization; a UN representative of the oldest inter-faith pacifist organization in the world; an internationally-accredited expert on genocide; the director of the only peoples-centered US human rights network with ECOSOC status and consistent UN advocacy; the youngest elected Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and leader of UNITY/the United National Indian Tribal Youth; and the former Chair of the United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent and a judge of the Permanent People’s Tribunal. They are majority women and majority global south rooted, from India, Eritrea, Haiti, France, Puerto Rico, the USA and elsewhere. Mini-biographies of the Panel of Jurists are attached. [below]

These jurists will preside over two days of testimonies from impacted victims, expert witnesses, and attorneys with firsthand knowledge of specific incidences raised in the charges/indictment. The Tribunal will be evaluating charges of human and civil rights violations on the basis of the following five areas:

 Police killings of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people,

Hyper/mass incarcerations of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people,

Political incarceration of Civil Rights/National Liberation era revolutionaries and revolutionaries and activists, as well as present day activists,

Environmental racism and its impact disparities and its impact on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people,

Public health racism and its traumatic impacts

As a result of the historic and systemic charges of all the above, the overarching charge of genocide is also being evaluated.

The Panel of Jurists will announce its Verdict following deliberations and discussions, planned for delivery at the United Nations on Monday, 25 October 2021.

——-

2021 International Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses Panel of Jurists

Chief: Her Honorable Magdalene Moonsamy (South Africa), former Member of Parliament (ANC); attorney-director of the Women’s Justice Foundation; Admitted Attorney of the South African High Court; lecturer of the Law Society of South Africa’s Legal Education and Development (LEAD) school

Dr. Vickie Casanova-Willis (USA), Executive Director, US Human Rights Network; past president, National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL); founding member of Black People Against Police Torture; Co-organizer of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (US Visits); co- author of multiple historic policy-shaping reports including the first UN Universal Periodic Review raising the issue of US Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO

Kassahun Checole (Eritrea/USA), CEO and publisher, Africa World/Red Sea Press; renowned Pan Africanist and Pan American scholar; lifetime advisor of the Association of Concerned African Scholars and the African Studies Association

Sherly Fabre (Haiti/USA), International Fellowship of Reconciliation United Nations Representative; member, Muslim Peace Fellowship/Community of Living Traditions; co- founder, Proyecto Faro

 Professor Mireille Fanon Mendès-France (France), former Chair of the United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent; former Commissioner of the 2020 International Commission on Inquiry (Systemic Racist Police Violence against US People of African Descent); Judge of Permanent Peoples Tribunal; Co-Chair of the Frantz Fanon Foundation

Dr. Alexander Hinton (USA), Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University; UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention; Distinguished Professor of Anthropology

Chairman Brian Moskwetah Weeden (Mashpee Wampanoag), Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe; Bear Heart from Eel Clan; Co-President/Trustee of the United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY); Co-Vice   President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) Youth Commission 

Binalakshmi “Bina” Nepram (Manipur/Northeast India), Founder-Director, Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network; Founder-Director, Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples, Gender Justice and Peace; Board member of the International Peace Bureau (1910 Nobel Peace Laureate)

 Wilma E. Reveron Collazo (Puerto Rico), long-standing member and leader, Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Bar Association); former Executive Director of the Puerto Rico Center for Research assigned to the United Nations Office of Information on the Right to Self Determination; former Senior Staff Attorney, American Civil Liberties Union of the African Union; Deputy Chair of the African Peer Review Mechanism, an instrument

Contact: Special Advisor to the Panel of Jurists: Matt Meyer, Secretary-General, International Peace Research Association

internationalpeaceresearch.sg@gmail.com

SFSU Faculty Hearing Committee Upholds Grievance by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

PRESS RELEASE

October 19, 2021 

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi. | Photo: mondoweiss.com

PRESS RELEASE: October 14, 2021 – FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION

ACADEMIC SPEECH AND FREEDOM ON PALESTINE – IMPORTANT RULING AGAINST SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY CONCERNING THE POWER OF BIG TECH OVER ACADEMIA

In a decision with major implications for campuses across the country, on Thursday a panel of three faculty members at San Francisco State University (SFSU) upheld a grievance filed by Dr. Rabab Abduhadi, founding director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) program, regarding violations of Professor Abdulhadi’s academic freedom.

The grievance seeks redress for the failure of SFSU to protect Dr. Abdulhadi and the AMED program from the arbitrary cancellation by Zoom and other social media outlets of her online open classroom, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.” The University is bound by contract, law and AAUP policy to protect academic freedom rather than subcontracting the responsibility to private companies. Further, universities must maintain structural independence from the whims and demands of partisan lobbying organizations, including Zionist groups like the Lawfare Project and the Israeli government aligned app, ACT IL, both of which played a prominent role in the manufactured outrage campaign that led Zoom to cancel Drs. Abdulhadi and Tomomi Kinukawa’s open classroom in September 2020. The panel’s finding confirms both the University’s surrender of its responsibility to the overreach of private tech giants into academic affairs and its complicity with Zionist and right wing groups aiming to silence Palestinian voices on campus. In its decision, the faculty panel affirmed that: “San Francisco State University has inflicted harm upon Dr. Abdulhadi (and co-instructor, Dr. Kinukawa) and that her academic freedom was, in fact, violated. We characterize this harm in two ways: 1) that the university did not provide adequate support to Dr. Abdulhadi against the actions of the corporate entity, Zoom, and, more importantly against the outside organization, Lawfare Project.”

The SFSU panel’s ruling has tremendous significance beyond its own campus and teaching about Palestine. With the growth of online learning, university teachers and students have become increasingly dependent on corporate media platforms such as Zoom, Google and Facebook. Advocates express alarm at the growing power of these corporate entities to censor the content and timing of classroom speech and activities, especially those deemed by university administrators as controversial. As Dima Khalidi, the director of the advocacy organization Palestine Legal, has written: “[such] attempts at censorship also have consequences not just for movements supporting justice in Palestine, but for racial, Indigenous, gender, immigrant, economic and LGBTQIA+ justice movements challenging government repression and overreach within the United States and globally.”

Dr. Abdulhadi has been a luminary among international Palestinian intellectuals, known for her original scholarship on Palestinian women’s movements and her pioneering pedagogy integrating Palestine into a critical, community-focused ethnic studies framework. She has won numerous awards for her scholarly and civic leadership, including the Georgina M. Smith Award for “exceptional leadership” in 2020 from the American Association of University Professors .

SFSU has shown its bias against AMED and in favor of Zionist organizations through its open collaboration with groups such as International Hillel and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN). These groups conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and have as their stated mission to suppress support for Palestinian rights on campuses and to exceptionalize the complaints of Jewish students above all others, including Muslims and anti-Zionist Jews. The decision will now be placed on the desk of SFSU President Lynn Mahoney, who will have three weeks to uphold the panel’s findings. If she does not, the grievance will go to arbitration.

For further information and interviews, contact:

Rabab Abdulhadi* – rabab.abdulhadi@gmail.com; 914-882-3180 (cell) *Please text first

Omar Zahzah – omarmzahzah@gmail.com; 562-896-3313 (cell)

Rosalind Petchesky – rpetches@gmail.com; 917-378-5683

Harry Soloway – sologant@gmail.com; 914-815 2479 (cell)

Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org

Women’s Reproductive Rights March in Detroit Joins Efforts Around the United States

October 13, 2021

By Fighting Words Staff Women’s Reproductive Rights March in Detroit Joins Efforts Around the United States – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

Women and their allies gathered in downtown Detroit for a rally and march on Saturday, October 2, 2021.

The manifestation was one of over 600 gatherings throughout the country held to protest the restrictive abortion laws passed recently by legislatures in Texas and Mississippi and signed into law by the governors of those states.

Activists believe that these developments, which have been upheld by the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, are setting the stage for the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade of 1973.

The event was called by the Wayne State University College Democrats and supported by many other organizations such as Detroit Will Breathe, 313 Care Collective, Where We’re Needed,  Planned Parenthood, State Senator Stephanie Chang, Moratorium NOW! Coalition and many more.

Beginning with a rally outside 36th District Court, the crowd then left for a march to several locations in the downtown area including Greektown, Campus Martius, Spirit of Detroit and the Federal Courthouse.

Speakers continued to voice their support along the way at selected stops. The march concluded back at 36th District Court featuring additional speakers and an open mic.

Detroit Activists Rally in Support of Haitian Migrants

October 12, 2021

By Fighting Words Staff  Detroit Activists Rally in Support of Haitian Migrants – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

There were two public actions over the weekend of September 24-26 demanding an end to the racist and brutal treatment of migrant workers and their families from Haiti.

On Friday, September 24 the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) held a picket line outside the Immigration Building located on East Jefferson Avenue and Mt. Elliott during rush hour.

The demonstration was pulled together in less than two days. Many cars passing along the streets blew their horns in solidarity. One African American photojournalist parked his vehicle to join the protest and later took pictures.

In downtown Detroit on Sunday, September 26, there was another gathering in front of City Hall organized by the Caribbean Community Services Center and the African Bureau on Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA). Several political officials addressed the Sunday action including State Senator Stephanie Chang, Councilwoman Raquel Castenada-Lopez and a representative from the staff of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

Both public protests demanded asylum for Haitian migrants, the abolition of Title 42, and the immediate end to brutality and racism directed towards Haitians and all migrants of African descent.

U.S. Cold War with China Heats Up

October 2, 2021

Photo: Shanghai’s Nanpu Bridge

Reprinted from Fighting Words U.S. Cold War with China Heats Up – Fighting Words (fighting-words.net)

President Joe Biden is pursuing military and economic attacks on China’s growing socialist economy. Pictured is Shanghai’s Nanpu Bridge. | Photo: YouTube

By Chris Fry

When the Chinese giant privately-owned Evergrande property developer company failed to pay its bondholders on Sept. 23 some $83 billion that was due, financial analysts around the capitalist world called this China’s “Lehman Brothers” moment.  Lehman Brothers was the U.S. investment banking firm whose collapse in 2008 triggered the Great Recession, when millions lost their homes and jobs. But it is apparent there is a stark difference between the two events.

After Lehman Brothers failed, Wall Street and its political minions in Congress and the Bush White House immediately looted the public treasury to prop up the rest of the investment banks, declaring that they were just “too big to fail”. People who were left homeless and jobless were largely left to fend for themselves. This sparked the popular “Occupy Wall Street” movement, with young activists militantly confronting these capitalist giants, often facing off against police.

In China, protestors there too have demonstrated in front of the conglomerate Evergrande’s headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China. But instead of attacking the protestors like cops across the U.S. did, the Guardian newspaper on Sept. 24 describes a much different government response:

Economists said that if Beijing were to become involved, it would most likely focus on making sure families get apartments they have already paid for, rather than trying to bail out banks or other creditors.

China’s housing regulator is stepping in to protect funds earmarked for housing projects from being diverted to creditors, Bloomberg reported. The Evergrande funds must first be used for construction to ensure project delivery, it said, citing people familiar with the plan.

This difference explains the ever-increasing attacks on the Chinese government and its people by Big Business, the Pentagon, all of Congress and the Biden White House, to the point of the U.S. and its allies parading fleets of warships off China’s coast, imposing more and more extreme sanctions and tariffs, and coercing more and more countries into new military alliances.

Capitalist “democracy” versus socialist “autocracy”

Biden has somewhat shifted from Trump’s crudely racist “China virus” monologue (although Biden did launch a failed “investigation” of the Wuhan research lab) to his own diatribe about China’s “autocratic” rule. This has won nearly universal support among the corporate elite. But as we can see from the Evergrande example above, the Chinese government’s response to the company’s financial crisis is to not bail out the company or its investors, foreign and domestic, like was done under Bush and Obama, but to instead ensure that its worker customers get what they paid for, a roof over their heads.

Biden himself as Vice President was knee deep in the rescue of the auto companies during the Great Recession, where workers’ pay and benefits were cut, and thousands of younger workers were and are suffering under the “tier” arrangement, while the auto giants amassed huge profits.

Biden has proclaimed his massive infrastructure proposal, which would provide billions in profits to corporate contractors, as being necessary to counter China’s progress in developing speedy mass transit, its effective Covid response, and its many other technical and scientific achievements for the workers. Biden has also spurred new weapons programs, including the development of massively expensive hypersonic missiles. This is music to the ears of the entire capitalist class, even as they scheme how to drop progressive proposals to provide childcare, lower drug prices and particularly voting rights of the oppressed communities into the wastebasket. As Karl Marx noted long ago, capitalist “democracy” is in fact a democracy only for the capitalist class. But for the workers and oppressed, it is a thinly disguised dictatorship of the banks and corporations.

China, on the other hand, while it does have a capitalist class, and while it does still invite foreign capital into the country, has, as a workers state, tightened its leash on private companies, particularly giant tech firms. As the NY Times reported on Sept. 24:

The government has cracked down on the most successful private enterprises, including Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant, and Didi, the ride-hailing company. It has sentenced business leaders who dared to criticize the government to lengthy prison terms.

China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has urged tycoons to share their wealth with the rest of the country in an effort to pursue “common prosperity,” leading to concerns that the state could choke out the private sector and give the Communist Party even more sway in everyday life.

Not only does this directly threaten U.S. and Western profits from their Chinese investments, the contrast between the two different social and economic systems, a declining capitalist state versus a successful workers state, has created a growing panic on Wall Street. CNBC published an article with the mind-bending title: “U.S Needs to Work with Europe to slow China’s Innovation Rate, [Commerce Secretary] Raimondo said.”

“We don’t want autocratic governments like China, writing the rules of the road. We together with our allies, who care about privacy, freedom, individual rights, individual protection, we need to write the rules of the road,” Raimondo said.

“We have to work with our European allies to deny China the most advanced technology so that they can’t catch up in critical areas like semiconductors,” Raimondo said, adding that the Biden administration plans to deepen cooperation with Europe on export controls.

“We want to work with Europe, to write the rules of the road for technology, whether it’s TikTok or artificial intelligence or cyber,” she said.

Speaking of “rules of the road”, the U.S. is blocking sales of aircraft parts to China to prevent it from developing and producing its C919 jetliner, while at the same time Secretary Raimondo is demanding that China go ahead and immediately purchase Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft, whose two crashes caused China to suspend its purchase until its safety is tested.

So technical innovation that conceivably benefits the workers and oppressed not only in China but around the world must take a backseat to U.S. imperialist hegemony. Yes, that’s capitalist democracy!

A falling out among thieves and China’s countermove

To threaten China, Biden formed an Anglo-Saxon military alliance called AUKUS (Australia – United Kingdom – U.S.) To sweeten the deal for Australia, whose largest trading partner is China, and particularly for U.S. weapons contractors, Biden enticed Australia to drop its $66 billion contract with France to build diesel submarines, to instead purchase U.S. made nuclear powered submarines that can sail undetected off the Chinese coast for indefinite periods.

France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called this a “stab in the back”. France’s Prime Minister Macron took the unprecedented step of calling home its ambassadors from both the U.S. and Australia.

The day after the AUKUS was announced, China applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), currently composed of 11 nations around the Pacific Rim. Originally formed by Obama, when it was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to counter China’s growing economic influence, Boss Trump withdrew the U.S. from this alliance. Even the U.S. corporate media says this China application is a “smart move”. If CPTPP rejects China’s application, member states will have to explain why they oppose membership of the most powerful economic nation in the region, even though it would benefit the living standard of all the workers there.

Anti-Chinese racism in U.S. and Australia: Byproduct of U.S. conflict with China

A Sept. 14th article in the Guardian newspaper reports that a letter signed by 177 members of the Stanford University faculty demanded that the government stop using the Trump-spawned “China Initiative”, continued by Biden, which “harms academic freedom by racially profiling and unfairly targeting Chinese academics.” The letter cited the case of Doctor Anming Hu, who was recently acquitted in Tennessee, who was accused of “concealing his ties to Beijing.” The judge said:

“Given the lack of evidence that defendant was aware of such an expansive interpretation of NASA’s China funding restriction, the court concludes that, even viewing all the evidence in the light most favourable to the government, no rational jury could conclude that defendant acted with a scheme to defraud NASA,” US district judge Thomas Varlan wrote in a 52-page ruling.

The article goes on to note the rise of hate crimes against Asian people:

The recent round of calls came in the wake of growing violence against Asians in the US. According to an FBI annual report last month, the number of reported crimes against people of Asian descent grew by 70% last year, totaling 274 cases.

Ethnic Chinese in Australia are also facing increasing racist attacks, including from high government officials:

When three Chinese Australians appeared before an Australian Senate committee hearing last October, Senator Eric Abetz, of the Liberal Party, asked them whether they were willing “to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.”

After one of the witnesses asked why Chinese Australians would be singled out to declare their condemnation, Mr. Abetz bristled. “But can you not pick a side to condemn the oppressive ugliness of the communist regime in China?” he said.

Progressives in general and the anti-war movement in particular must mobilize to counter this growing threat to world peace and defend the right of Socialist China to navigate its own destiny and to demand an end to racist attacks on all ethnic Asian people. The workers and oppressed have no stake in U.S. imperialist hegemony and every reason to support the growing prosperity of the working people of the People’s Republic of China, as a fact and as an example.

C.L.R. James: Whether Through Revolution, or Imperialist Rivalry, the Fate of the British Empire Is Sealed, Greatest Empire in History Is Collapsing, (26 April 1943)

From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 17, 26 April 1943, p. 5.

Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.

After the fall of Singapore and Burma, and the Indian response to the Japanese threat, it began to penetrate into the minds of many people that the British Empire was doomed. The victories of Rommel in Egypt and the possibility of a German-Japanese junction in the Middle East made the end of the empire appear contingent on a few days or weeks of military conflict.

With the defeat of Rommel; however, and the general improvement in the Anglo-American military prospects, the empire seemed saved. Churchill crowed: “We shall hold our own,” and Cripps, who, during the first stage of the Indian crisis, seemed second in British importance only to Churchill, was thrown out of the War Cabinet. Finally, the British have suppressed the first insurrection in India and, after many years, summoned up enough courage to challenge and defeat the dietetic politics of Gandhi. Yet the empire is as fated to disintegrate as was the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War. Nothing can save it. This becomes more visible every day.

Anglo-American Rivalry

France collapsed on the battlefield in 1940. But France’s ruin was prepared by the incapacity of metropolitan France to hold the positions won in earlier centuries. This now applies with ten times as much cogency to Britain. Even if the Axis is defeated, Britain must hold her position in an air-dominated Europe; she must guard her long line of communications to the Far East; she must hold India against the Indians and against the United States; she must safeguard her position in China and Southeastern Asia against the United States; she must fight the United States in Latin America and the West Indies; she must fight the United States in Canada and Australia; she must safeguard her African colonies.

All these are, for Britain, losing battles.

To save the empire from the Axis, Britain had to pawn it and herself to Roosevelt. And the pawnbrokers in Washington are already gathering in the spoils, for one reason because the spoils are begging and praying and beseeching to be gathered in.

This did not begin yesterday. USA capital has Canada in its grip, and Canada is fighting Roosevelt’s war, not Churchill’s. An American general commands in Australia, and it is to America that Australia sends emissaries begging for help. The pro-American orientation of Australia is now decisive. It appears on the surface to be merely a question of defense. In reality, nothing would be more superficial than any such analysis. Capital concentrates by its own inherent laws, though this may take the form of open violence, as by Germany in Europe today, or military and naval necessity, as in Australia. The smaller capital gravitates naturally toward the orbit of the larger capital.

It is obvious to any child that if Britain has survived so far it is because of the support of the USA. As in war, so in the peace to come. Britain can offer nothing that the USA cannot double or treble at the stroke of a pen. The Indian bourgeoisie and the Chinese bourgeoisie know that they must find shelter and loans somewhere. And Britain’s name stinks so in the Far East, that to denounce Britain and to hold up America as the true friend of democracy everywhere, is a useful weapon for any Oriental demagogue anxious to prove that he can combine 100 per cent political independence and 100 per cent subservience to American capital. That is the role of Chiang Kai-shek, that is the stock-in-trade of Manuel Quezon, the Philippine faker, and that is the role Nehru is thirsting to play. But, in all this, whoever is in, Britain is out.

Smuts, the Jolly Good Fellow

The natural trend of capital away from Britain toward America can be seen with singular clarity, above all places, in the Union of South Africa. The tendency is most strikingly manifested there, precisely because Britain owns some three-quarters of all the capital invested in Africa, and apparently holds every strategic position.

It is commonly known that pro-British Smuts could only with great difficulty defeat the anti-British party led by Hertzog on the question of entry into the war. The Hertzog group contains rabidly pro-German elements, such as the former Minister of the Interior, Firow. That conflict between British financial and mining capital and the local farmers is insoluble. However, for many years all South Africa has hankered after the creation of a great African empire, including South Africa, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Kenya. For them this would mean a solution of many problems. For Smuts, it will mean national unity of the whites, of vital necessity in any part of Africa.

Just before the final attack was launched on Rommel, Smuts was chosen to address the empire and the unified houses of Commons and Lords. The unified legislators sang For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, duly relayed to what Churchill fondly hoped would thereby be a unified South Africa. It takes more than a male chorus to stop the concentration of capital. Even Smuts was not unified with the empire by this remarkable demonstration of British blarney.

Just at this time the British Empire was under serious fire from Wendell Willkie. And Life magazine, seeing in Smuts, the man of the moment, asked him to write an article stating-the case for the empire. This jolly good fellow thereupon expressed himself as follows: In the first place, the mother countries should remain responsible for the administration of their colonies, there should be no interference, etc. But, and here the ungrateful South African must be quoted literally: “Wherever possible, isolated colonies belonging to a mother country should be grouped into large units both for more efficient and economical administration, and for larger-scale development policies common to all. Thus British colonies ... on the African continent could be grouped with larger powers assigned to the group, and corresponding decrease of power in London.” He had probably lunched with Churchill the day he wrote this!

But Smuts, to rule, must satisfy the white colonists in South and East Africa who have been fighting with Britain over this for years. Smuts is not only putting his claim before the world. He is inviting the “Arsenal of Democracy” to come in and share in the profits of democracy in Africa. “Thus the United States of America, although no colonial power, could be on the regional control council of the West Indies or of Africa or elsewhere.” This is a particularly mean blow at Britain, which is now fighting a losing battle with the United States in the West Indies.

Smuts concludes on a note which is a direct challenge to Britain and a bid for United States support in his future attempt to dominate a large part of the African continent. “It appears to me essential that the United States should in the future have a direct say with the mother countries in the settlement of general colonial policies ...” He ends in true British fashion: “I have no doubt that such a partnership of the USA in overhead colonial controls would be cordially welcomed so far as the British Commonwealth of Nations is concerned.” Cordially welcomed, my eye! No sooner was Rommel driven out of Egypt than Colonel Oliver Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, told the Oxford Conservative Association that he was “much more interested in what Britain thought of the empire than in what the U.S. thought of it, and rejected any scheme for international administration of the British colonies after the war.”

These are brave words, but only words. The case of South .Africa shows that, as far as the dominions are concerned, the tendencies to disintegration are coming from inside, even without pressure from the United States. The First World War brought the Westminster Charter of 1926, which granted to the dominions the right of secession. The end of the present war will see the beginning of the exercise of that right. To think that such a Britain will be able to hold India is an absurdity, unworthy of argument.

Churchill’s Last Card

It is under these circumstances that Churchill throws himself into the arms of Stalin. By this means he hopes to counteract the influence in Europe of Roosevelt and his invading armies. In addition, Churchill is going to fight for his position in Southern China and the Java Sea. Stalin aims at slicing off a large part of Northern China. In these compensatory plans for plunder it seems to Churchill that he and Stalin can give each other mutual aid and comfort. Thus Britain will be able to put up a fight in Europe and Asia and have the potential strength to bargain elsewhere.

All such dreams are vain. The Russian dictator is listening to Churchill today. He will listen to Roosevelt tomorrow, and Roosevelt has already stated his willingness to go to Soviet territory to meet Stalin – a sure sign that he has something to sell. Above all, however, Stalin listens to the dictates of his own interests. Stalin is as interested as all the other groups in the scramble for the pieces of the empire. All he can get in the Middle East, for instance, he will swallow.

It is true that the balance of power demands that you do not entirely destroy your ally. But Italy was junior partner to the Allies in World War I and to Hitler in World War II. Look at Italy today as well as yesterday. But there is an even more painful example, the example of Britain itself, junior partner to America in World War II, and now compelled to seek refuge from that loving embrace in the arms, of all people, of Stalin!

A weak country like Japan, with all its interests concentrated in one area, can play a powerful role; a powerful economy like Germany’s, even after it sustains a ruinous defeat, occupies such a strategic position on the European continent that it can exercize a strong, if subordinate, influence as the tool of United States imperialism. But Britain, an island off the coast of Europe, with its interests scattered in every corner of the globe, is falling to pieces before our very eyes.

Revolution – Britain’s Great Fear

But the danger to the empire lies concretely jn the subject colonial populations. Hard enough to hold down in any case, they will be infinitely less submissive to a disintegrating “mother” country.

In 1914–18 they fought for Britain and then revolted; in the West Indies, Negro populations in West, South and East Africa; in Malta, in Egypt, in Ireland and in India. This time they have refused to fight. Ireland and Egypt have remained sullenly neutral. India has begun her revolt already.

A great fear hangs over India today. Gandhi’s fast and its failure mark the end of a period. Every correspondent remarks on the uncertainty which now exists. For if Gandhi loses influence in India, then, as is known far and wide, the greatest obstacle to violent action against the British will be removed.

Let us take the best possible variant for Britain, defeat of Germany, defeat of Japan. Once that danger is removed, such a revolution will burst out in India as Could never he put down by the British. Even in 1921 the British administration was paralyzed by the civil disobedience movement. It was Gandhi who, at the critical moment, stopped it with his doctrine of non-violence. We can judge of the future of India by the Chinese revolution, which began in 1911 and has had that country in turmoil for thirty years.

The Indian proletariat may achieve the socialist revolution in a reasonably short space of time. If it fails to do this, then India will split into warring groups, revolution and civil war will tear the country to pieces for years. America may intervene to restore some sort of order, i.e., suppress the proletariat, as America is intervening in Europe to suppress the revolution. But this much is certain. Britain will not, at the war’s end, proceed to lecture Indians about “Hindus and Moslems” and the ethics of fasting as a political weapon. That is over.

And as India goes, so will go Burma, the Malay States and the British East Indies. If the revolts in Egypt and the Arab world are merely as powerful as they were after World War I, Britain will not be able to resist them today. All the signs point to this fact that they will be ten times as fierce. Britain’s only hope is to seek shelter behind America, which means walking into the jaws of its enemy. Such is the colonial and anti-imperialist struggle of British capital. In addition, it faces the British proletariat at home, the most cohesive, powerfully organized, and most politically confident proletariat in the world.

It is now that we can appreciate the policy of appeasement so stubbornly pursued by Chamberlain and practically the whole British ruling class. They followed it until they could follow it no further. For Neville Chamberlain believed and said that, come what might, another war meant the end of the British Empire. He knew that it could not hold. He was correct. War or peace, defeat or victory, it is done. The only question now is whether it will fall to American imperialism or to the colonial peoples themselves. That, the struggle will decide.

But whatever the outcome, we see day by day the crumbling of the greatest organ of tyranny and oppression the world has ever seen. The tendencies we have shown will not all run in a straight line. Great historical tendencies never do. But their cumulative direction is inexorable. The Britain that will emerge from even a victorious war will be a Britain where the class struggle will be fought to a finish, until either a fascist Britain attaches itself as a Mussolinian satellite to some great imperialist power; or a socialist Britain which gives “Merrie England” to the masses of the British people and makes it possible for them to add their great contributions to human civilization.

C.L.R. James: The Way Out for Europe--(April 1943)

From The New International, Vol. IX No. 4, April 1943, pp. 116–119. Under the name J.R Johnson.

Transcribed by Ted Crawford.

The immediate question for the masses of people in occupied Europe is the struggle for food and the necessities of life. Politically they see this task as the expulsion of the German invader. On that there is no disagreement. Yet never has the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe been so urgent as it is today. The slogan is a propaganda, not an action, slogan. The whole point of the transition program was to provide steps between the concrete, immediate and the conscious struggle for socialism. Yet the socialist slogan has its place. And any political orientation which seek to place it further away and not nearer to the day-to-day political slogans rests on a deep, a profound, miscomprehension of the European crisis.

Every concrete political judgment or proposal is the outcome of three factors. There is, first, your general estimate of the situation as a whole, as, for example, when you say of Europe today: socialism or barbarism; or of Russia that it is a workers’ state. It is this which governs your estimate of the particular form which the general is taking at a given moment; as, for example, when you say today: Europe is being destroyed, or when, in 1939, we proclaimed the ruinous theory that the main imperialist aim during the coming war would be the destruction of the workers’ state. Finally, there is always the concrete issue, for example, your precise estimate of the national question in Europe, or (as in 1939), your appraisal of the invasion of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia by the Stalinist army. All of these constituents of a judgment are in actuality inextricably intermingled; they are constantly shifting and influencing each other. But by and large they have priority according to the order named. We propose to examine the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe and its connection with the national question in that continent. We begin from the premise: Socialism or barbarism.

I. The European Barbarism

The most obvious feature of Europe today is that it is being rapidly battered to pieces. Whole provinces, not only cities, are laid waste; masses of capital are produced and destroyed, or transferred from one end of the continent to the other, without any relation whatever to human needs; the economy is uprooted and shaken together as in some cyclopean rattle. Millions of people are scattered in armies all over the continent; other millions, torn from their homes, are laboring in parts near or remote; millions homeless; the vast majority know no life but that of hunted and starving rats. Europe at the end of the war will emerge into the post-war misery as ancient man emerged from a cave after a tornado. Hitler today is challenging Roosevelt and Churchill with just this: You want to go on? Good, let us go on!

Europe has been devastated before, yet never, never on a scale approaching this. But the devastation is not a mere fact, however appalling and pregnant with consequences though that is. This devastation is the climax to a period such as no previous age has ever known. The hopelessness of capitalist economy is not a matter of production charts and statistics of foreign trade. Its bankruptcy is expressed in the unending anarchy, the accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation; the civil, the national, the imperialist wars, the combination of all three. The economic system has nothing more to offer us but these in increasing measure. That is the lesson of the last forty years. That is what capitalism is today teaching to the workers on a scale and with an emphasis beyond any education by the most powerful revolutionary organization. It is no longer a question of the analysis of surplus value, or the export of finance-capital. It is life as it has been and must be. Socialism or barbarism is no longer theory. It is fact. Those who were born in 1917 (and will create the world of tomorrow) have grown to maturity in that decade before the war, which saw the world economic crisis and “the liquidation of the kulak as a class,” Japan’s attack on China and the rape of Ethiopia; the rise of Hitler and the collaboration between Hitler and democracy in the murder of Spain and Czechoslovakia. That was the decade of New Deals, Popular Fronts and the plans for four or five years which have always ended in increased misery, the decade of national sit-down strikes in the West and national boycotts in the East.

Every decade has its symbols, the manifestations which most strikingly characterize its essence. The symbols of the pre-war decade were the concentration camp and the mass political purge, the state-organized and continent-wide pogrom, the decade when Julius Streicher and the Protocols of Zion competed with Vishinsky and the Moscow Trials for the suffrage of European youth; the decade of the totalitarian radio and the totalitarian press, the decade when official murder and public cynicism made “shot while trying to escape” a universal password; all leading to the inevitable climax of the war.

How to believe that the European workers were impervious to all this? The European workers are sick to death of the old Europe. This was the basis of the politics of Trotsky, the embodiment of the socialist revolution, as it is of the politics of Hitler, the representative figure of the capitalist barbarism. Both understood and underscored the deep urge of the European masses to rid themselves of the never-ending, ever-increasing burdens, and the decisive role of the now defunct Social Democracy in crushing their fighting spirit. Both knew that the war would rapidly pose the ultimate solution.

Now as the war takes its gargantuan toll from a generation strained to the point of exhaustion even before the war began, how is it possible to believe that the European workers do not know what is happening to Europe? They do not have to read it in the papers. There under their feet and above their heads the barbarism is closing in upon them. If socialism is still to them an abstraction, the barbarism is not. As recent dispatches report in the minds of all Spaniards one thought, “What is going to happen to Spain?,” so the ghastly European reality forces upon the minds of all Europeans, “What next for Europe?”

The Coming Vacuum

This is the opinion (and the fear) of the best-informed of the bourgeois observers. To take one: In the New York Times of February 17, Anne O’Hare McCormick, their able correspondent on foreign affairs, writes an article, remarkable in more respects than one. It deserves an extended quotation. (We have added some emphasis):

The most striking thing about France today — and on this point all reporters agree — is that the people have lost the fear of the Germans that has obsessed the French mind and French policy for fifty years. Paradoxically, the France that was easily defeated has regained self-confidence under German occupation. Under the mocking eyes of the conquered the conquerors have destroyed the legend of German efficiency. They have taught the French to believe again in their own civilization, their own intelligence, even in the superiority of their own muddle-headed and hidebound bureaucracy.

This release from the Nazi spell is taking place all over Europe. It is perhaps as important as anything happening on the battlefield, because it is the result of German inability to organize and rule other countries as much as it is the effect of the retreat from Russia. It is not too much to say that as an order of life, as a uniting force in an anarchic Europe, as an ideology that attracted followers in every neighboring country, national socialism is petering out faster than German military power.

National socialism, in fact, is also in retreat. It is dying as a political force; but as it weakens it creates a vacuum which other forces are bound to fill. Will democracy more into that vacuum? Will communism? Will new and violent extremes of nationalism?

The year 1943 is not 1917. We live in an age when a leading journalist, doing her routine, estimates the possibilities of a new society in Europe with the objectivity that one gives only to the commonplace. How, again, is it possible to believe that the European workers do not know and cannot see, even though negatively, that a crisis in human affairs has been reached? Go wrong here and there can be no recovery.

The Filling of the Vacuum

The vacuum does not wait until the day of the Nazi downfall. It is in process of creation now, and as it is created it is being filled, ideologically, by the tremendous historical events of these climactic war years.

Between 1940 and 1943 Europe has seen two great historical landmarks. The first of these is the collapse of France, far more powerful in its impingement upon the European consciousness than the defeat of Germany in 1918. Unlike the years after 1871 and 1918, recovery after such a defeat, in the world of today, would entail an effort as great or even greater than the conqueror’s. In those days it was said that Europe needed a master, that Europe needed reorganization, that the unending social crisis (which had led to the catastrophe) had to be solved in some way. Russia was a cesspool of Moscow Trials, mass murder and the shocking treachery of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Perhaps Hitler’s way was the way after all. Hitler, true to his doctrines, attempted the reorganization of Europe. The most significant lesson of the present period is his ghastly failure. The task is beyond capitalism. Had Hitlerism shown the slightest ability to heal some of the old sores it would have had the continent under its domination for a generation. But the new order was quickly recognized as merely a new and more efficient machinery for the old plunder. As the people felt on their flesh what the German conquest meant, they began to struggle blindly, at first without perspective. Before two years had passed, the second great historical landmark penetrated deep into the European consciousness.

To the masses of the people in continental Europe, the second great historical landmark of the war has been the achievements of Russia. The heroism of Leningrad, Moscow and Sevastopol; the successful defense of Stalingrad, an achievement without parallel in the whole history of war; the courage and resilience of the Russian offensive; the cohesion of Stalinist society, these things have had an indelible effect on the masses of the European people. The collapse of France, the glory of Russia, that is the kind of history the workers understand at all times, but particularly when, as in Europe, so much of their personal fate depended upon whether Russia held or not. For them Russia is Bolshevism, a workers’ state, a state without capitalists, socialism. The question of the new society against the old has been posed in Europe on a gigantic scale, so that the most inattentive pupil can read, and this at a time when the pupil strains every nerve because his future depends upon it. So that in addition to the negative consciousness of a putrescent capitalism, there is the positive achievement of Russia which stands in their minds as the antithesis of capitalist society. A revolutionist who believes that the workers of Europe are thinking of Russia in terms of Stalinist dictatorship, terrorism, the Moscow Trials, etc., does not see his activity as a reflection of the historical world, but sees the world as an embodiment of the preoccupation of the revolutionary movement. What illusions (and what distorted truths) are mingled in this estimate by the workers is another matter. What concerns us is the fact, the most potent historical fact of the present European crisis. We turn our backs on it, misunderstand it, or forget it at our peril. The vacuum is being filled. All Europe has “socialism” in the background of its mind.

“We, or Rather, Our Sons ...”

Let us ourselves approach this problem in reverse. Behind any proposal to make a change in the application of the socialist slogan undoubtedly lurks some variant of the idea that Lenin put forward in 1915. Given certain conditions of continued reaction and domination of Europe by a single power, a great national war is once more possible in Europe. No such situation as Lenin envisaged is visible in Europe today. Lenin in the course of his article used the phrase “twenty years.” It is decisive. It would (in 1915) have taken at least twenty years to impose an alien domination on modern Europe Mere conquest is comparatively easy; alien domination is something else.

Trotsky in 1938 repeated the thought with an elaboration that gives even greater clarity. In denouncing those who claimed that if Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia alone, Czechoslovakia’s national independence should be defended, Trotsky wrote as follows (The New International, November 1938, page 328):

In reality, all speculative arguments of this kind and the frightening of people over future national calamities for the sake of the support of this or that imperialist bourgeoisie flow from tacit rejection of revolutionary perspective and revolutionary policy. Naturally if a new war ends [our emphasis] in the military victory of this or that imperialist camp; if a war calls forth neither a revolutionary uprising nor a victory of the proletariat; if a new imperialist peace [our emphasis] more terrible than the Versailles Treaty places new chains for decades [our emphasis] upon the people; if unfortunate humanity bears all this in silence and submission — not only Czechoslovakia or Belgium but also France [our emphasis] can be hurled back into the position of an oppressed nation.

What Trotsky is saying is that, though this is theoretically possible, as far as he is concerned, such a perspective has no reality. He himself asks the question: “Is such an outlook excluded?” and proceeds (as if he scented danger) to answer the question all over again. If the proletariat submitted ...; if the Fourth International failed ...; if the terrors of war did not urge to rebellion; if the colonial peoples bled patiently ..., “Under these conditions the level of civilization will inevitably be lowered and the general retrogression and decomposition may again place national wars on the order of the day for Europe.”

But forthwith Trotsky pushes that possibility where it belongs: “Even then, we, or rather our sons [our very emphatic emphasis] will have to determine the policy in regard to future wars on the basis of the new situation.”

Is one single one of those historical conditions to be considered as fulfilled? Most obviously not. Under the present historical circumstances, the very reverse of “passivity, capitulation, defeat and decline,” at a time when all tensions are at their highest, the domination of France by Germany is and can only be considered by revolutionary socialists as an episode in the inter-imperialist struggle, a great, an important, a pregnant, but yet, nevertheless, basically an episode.

Absolute clarity on this is not only useful as a safeguard and line of demarcation. It carries a powerful implication that the more reactionary the steps imperialism takes, the greater the degradation it imposes upon Europe, the more concrete will become the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe.

The Nazis and “Socialism”

If we wish an instructive test of the soundness of the above, let us observe the counter-revolution in the person of these master politicians, the Nazi leaders. As the crisis deepened they called upon the workers of the world to unite; and after a long absence in which the crisis of German imperialism is made obvious, not only to the world at large but to the German people themselves, Hitler ends his speech of March 22 as follows:

In the future, the peoples with true culture will be neither Jewish-Bolshevist nor Jewish-capitalist ... The German national socialist state ... will continue to work after this war with untiring energy toward realizing its program that in its last consequences will lead to the complete removal of all differences of classes and to the establishment of a true socialist community.

At the moment when he needs to pose the national defense of Germany in its sharpest form, this greatest of agitators poses it within the framework of “socialism” and the “classless society.” Thereby Hitler shows the same unerring grasp of the mass mind in Europe today as he did of the Russian state in 1939. He knows that if even many millions of workers are not immediately conscious of socialism as the alternative to their present misery, that consciousness is just below the surface, established there by the whole past history of Europe and the movement of the objective situation. He seeks to unearth the awakening thoughts in advance, to capture them or to turn them in his direction. He seeks to associate the idea of a new society with himself and thus to rob the Marxists of their heritage. His satellites in the occupied countries follow faithfully. Pétain proclaimed the national revolution, and Laval now promises the French workers: socialism.

If these impudent scoundrels find it imperative to masquerade before the workers as the real revolutionists, the genuine socialists, why should revolutionists, at this critical juncture, propose a retreat instead of an advance with the slogan: the Socialist United States of Europe? Nothing that capitalism can do in Europe today can now suppress or dull the response to the socialist idea among the European workers. For Hitler or any other conqueror might dazzingly conquer living space. But the destruction of the idea of socialism in the Europe of this generation would require the conquest not only of space but of time as well. And that not only Hitler but God Almighty himself could not do.

Barbarism Is a Social Phenomenon

Let us finally etch into our minds some picture of what is happening in Europe today, let us struggle to grasp this first and primary manifestation of the age in which we live, the most barbarous history has ever known. This we must do, for without this background we shall continually be taking two steps backward when the capitalist chaos invites a bold advance.

The science of the Middle Ages, unable to account for the calamities which periodically overtook them, peopled the earth and sky with the angels of God and the devils of Satan contending over human destiny. That ignorance, capitalist technique and capitalist rationalism have destroyed. But the new angels and devils which they have substituted fly daily in armadas a thousand strong, dropping real fire and real brimstone, still angels and devils, but now indistinguishable from each other except by the label fascism and the label democracy. The mechanized dragons and the heavy artillery devastate the countryside, destroying in an hour the labors of a lifetime. Give them two years more and what will remain? Lyons and Bordeaux, Turin and Genoa, Essen and Cologne, Hamburg and Bremen, Warsaw and Cracow, and a hundred others that have stood for centuries will be but names and rubble. Leningrad lives, but it is a town of living skeletons and two million fresh graves. How many more offensives and counter-offensives will Europe see, with swarms of tanks, planes, guns and men, creating deserts before they call it peace? From Germany alone some five million young men, the most precious possession of the nation, are now dead, seriously wounded, incapacitated or prisoners in the Russian campaign. Once more Hitler has blasted his way into the charred ruins of Kharkov. Will he attempt another offensive in 1943? And yet another in 1944? How many millions more will strew the road to Stalingrad and then perhaps the road back again? Two more years of such warfare will create in the homes of Germany and all its satellites an abomination of desolation; the Ukraine will be a new Golgotha, a field of skulls; and Kharkov, Rostov and Stalingrad, not human habitations but collections of dead men’s bones. If not in Russia, then the full frenzy of the capitalist madness will rage in Southern Europe; or in Northern Europe; or perhaps in all three places together. Man is now being taught that he must control the devils that his own hand creates or he will perish.

Is it merely houses, factories and fields that are being destroyed? To think that would be an illusion as gigantic as the historical catastrophe that is unrolling before our eyes. These are but the embodiment of the social relations that are at the basis of society. Destroy these on the scale that they are being destroyed and you loosen every material and traditional tie which cements that society, already shaken, battered and reeling from the accumulated shocks of thirty years. Without the socialist revolution, Europe faces a post-war of famine, disease, political and social chaos and violence to which the years after Versailles will seem like paradise.

This barbarism Roosevelt proposes to discipline into some sort of capitalist law and capitalist order by means of exhausted American soldiers clamoring to go home; hastily trained administrators, manipulating puppet governments; and rations of bacon, dehydrated spinach and cigarettes. He may succeed. He may. Marxism predicts, it does not prophesy. But Roosevelt’s chances of success are for Roosevelt to advocate. That today is not our business. When everything is still to be decided, our task is to show to the workers the workers’ way out. Not bring to the fore the question of a new order? That question is out of our hands. We could argue about that five years ago, not today. History has posed the question already, is posing it even where, at first sight, is only ignorance, fanaticism and destruction. Lenin once wrote that when a worker says he will defend his country, it is the instinct of an oppressed man that speaks. The apparent paradox hides the simplicity with which genius summarizes in a sentence the most profound contradictions of the historical dialectic. The incredible intensity of the national passions displayed by both attackers and defenders at Stalingrad testify to far more than mere servile acquiescence. In this fanatical “defense of the fatherland” by the warring children of totalitarianism is concealed the hope, the determination to finish once and for all with the old sacrifices and the old suffering, to insure that this will be the final struggle and the gateway into the promised land. Thus the very violence with which the old is destroying itself is a positing of the new. Our task is to give it a local habitation and a name. Its local habitation is the power of the working class. Its name is the Socialist United States of Europe.

(To be continued)