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Editorial: Why North Korea Needs Nuclear Weapons

25 Apr

By Stephen Gowans

Is North Korea’s recent nuclear test, its third, to be welcomed, lamented or condemned? It depends on your perspective. If you believe that a people should be able to organize their affairs free from foreign domination and interference; that the United States and its client government in Seoul have denied Koreans in the south that right and seek to deny Koreans in the north the same right; and that the best chance that Koreans in the north have for preserving their sovereignty is to build nuclear weapons to deter a US military conquest, then the test is to be welcomed.

If you’re a liberal, you might believe that the United States should offer the DPRK (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name) security guarantees in return for Pyongyang completely, permanently and verifiably eliminating its nuclear weapons program. If so, your position invites three questions.

• Contrary to the febrile rhetoric of high US officials, the United States is not threatened by North Korea. North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability is a defensive threat alone. The DPRK’s leaders are not unaware that a first-strike nuclear attack would trigger an overwhelming US nuclear retaliatory strike, which, as then US president Bill Clinton once warned, “would mean the end of their country as we know it”. Since a North Korean first-strike would be suicidal (and this is not lost on the North Korean leadership), whether Pyongyang has or doesn’t have nuclear weapons makes little difference to US national security. What, then, would motivate Washington to offer genuine security guarantees? It can’t be argued that US national security considerations form the basis of the guarantees, since the threat to the United States of a nuclear-armed North Korea is about the same as a disarmed North Korea—approximately zero.

• How credible could any security guarantee be, in light of the reality that since 1945 Washington has invested significant blood and treasure in eliminating all expressions of communism and anti-imperialism on the Korean peninsula. The argument that the United States could issue genuine security guarantees would have to explain what had transpired to bring about a radical qualitative shift in US policy from attempting to eliminate communism in Korea to détente with it.

• Why is it incumbent on North Korea alone to disarm? Why not the United States too?

The conservative view, on which I shall not tarry, is simple. Anything North Korea does, except surrender, is blameworthy.

Finally, you might lament Pyongyang’s nuclear test for running counter to nuclear non-proliferation, invoking the fear that growth in the number of countries with nuclear weapons increases the risk of war. But this view crumbles under scrutiny. The elimination of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq didn’t reduce the chances of US military intervention in that country—it increased them. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s voluntary elimination of his WMD didn’t prevent a NATO assault on Libya—it cleared the way for it. The disarming of countries that deny the US ruling class access to markets, natural resources, and investment opportunities, in order to use these for their own development, doesn’t reduce the risk of wars of conquest—it makes them all the more certain.

The radical view locates the cause of wars of conquest since the rise of capitalism in the drive for profits. This compulsion chases the goods, services and capital of corporate-dominated societies over the face of the globe to settle everywhere, nestle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere, irrespective of the wishes, interests, development needs and welfare of the natives. If territories aren’t voluntarily opened to capital penetration through trade and investment agreements, their doors are battered down by the Pentagon, the enforcer of last resort of a world economic order supporting, as its first commitment, the profit-making interests of the US ruling class.

Background

Because North Korea has long been vilified and condemned by the Western press as bellicose, provocative and unpredictable, it’s difficult to cut through the fog of vituperation that obscures any kind of dispassionate understanding of the country to grasp that the DPRK represents something praiseworthy: a tradition of struggle against oppression and foreign domination, rooted in the experience of a majority of Koreans dating back to the end of WWII and the period of Japanese colonial rule. This tradition found expression in the Korean People’s Republic, a national government, created by, for, and of Koreans, that was already in place when US troops landed at Inchon in September, 1945. The new government was comprised of leftists who had won the backing of the majority, partly because they had led the struggle against Japan’s colonial occupation, and partly because they promised relief from exploitation by landlords and capitalists. The USSR, which occupied the north of the country until 1948, worked with the KPR in its occupation zone, but the United States suppressed the KPR in the south, worked to exterminate leftist forces in its zone, and backed conservatives reviled by Koreans for their oppressions and collaboration with the Japanese. By 1948, the peninsula was divided between a northern government led by guerrillas and activists who fought to liberate Korea from Japanese rule, and a southern government led by a US-installed anti-communist backed by conservatives tainted by collaboration with colonial oppression. For the next 65 years, the essential character of the competing regimes has remained the same. Park Geun-hye, the incoming South Korean president is the daughter of a former president, Park Chung-hee, who came to power in a military coup in 1961. The elder Park had served in the Japanese Imperial Army. Kim Il Sung, grandfather of North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong-eun, was an important guerrilla leader who, unlike the collaborator Park, fought, rather than served, the Japanese. The North represents the traditions of struggle against foreign domination, both political and economic, while the South represents the tradition of submission to and collaboration with a foreign hegemon. Significantly, there are no foreign troops stationed in North Korea, but are in South Korea. North Korean troops have never fought abroad, but South Korea’s have, odiously in Vietnam, in return for infusions of mercenary lucre from the Americans, and later in Iraq. As regards repression, South Korea’s authoritarianism on behalf of rightist causes is long and enduring, typified in the virulently anti-communist National Security Law, which metes out harsh punishment to anyone who so much as publicly utters a kind word about North Korea. The South Korean police state also blocks access to pro-North Korean websites, bans books, including volumes by Noam Chomsky and heterodox (though pro-capitalist) economist Ha Joon-chang, and imprisons anyone who travels to the North.

Pressure

Since the Korean War the United States and South Korea have maintained unceasing pressure on North Korea through subversion, espionage, propaganda, economic warfare and threats of nuclear attack and military invasion. Low-intensity warfare sets as its ultimate objective the collapse of the North Korean government. Unremitting military pressure forces Pyongyang to maintain punishingly high expenditures on defense (formalized in the country’s Songun, or “army first” policy). Massive defense expenditures divert critical resources from the civilian economy, retarding economic growth. At the same time, trade and financial sanctions heap further harm on the economy. Economic dislocations disrupt food supplies, make life harsh for many North Koreans, and breed discontent. Discontent in turn engenders political opposition, which is beaten back and contained by measures of repression and restriction of civic and political liberties. In response, Washington disingenuously deplores Pyongyang’s military expenditures at a time North Koreans “are starving”; denounces Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program as a “provocation” (rather than a defense against US military threat); dishonestly attributes the country’s economic difficulties to allegedly inherent weaknesses in public ownership and central planning (rather than sanctions and financial strangulation); and chastises the DPRK for its repressive measures to check dissent (ultimately traceable to US pressures.) In other words, the regrettable features of North Korea that Washington highlights to demonize and discredit the DPRK are the consequences, not the causes, of US North Korea policy. To view US policy as a reaction to the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program, economic difficulties, and repressions is to get the causal direction wrong.

US foreign policy

US foreign policy aims to secure and defend access to foreign markets, natural resources and investment opportunities and deny communists and nationalists control because access might be blocked, limited or freighted with social welfare and domestic development considerations.

As a general rule, the American government’s attitude to governments in the Third World …depends very largely on the degree to which these governments favour American free enterprise in their countries or are likely to favour it in the future…In this perspective, the supreme evil is obviously the assumption of power by governments whose main purpose is precisely to abolish private ownership and private enterprise…Such governments are profoundly objectionable not only because their actions profoundly affect foreign-owned interests and enterprises or because they render future capitalist implantation impossible [but also] because the withdrawal of any country from the world system of capitalist enterprise is seen as constituting a weakening of that system and as providing encouragement to further dissidence and withdrawal. [1]

North Korea is one of the few countries left that commits “the supreme evil.” Allowed to develop in peace, unimpeded by military pressure and economic warfare, it might become an inspiration for other countries to follow. From the perspective of the US ruling class, the United States’ North Korea policy must have one overarching objective: the DPRK’s demise. Asked by The New York Times to explain the aim of US policy on North Korea, then US under secretary of state for arms control John Bolton “strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called ‘The End of North Korea.’” “‘That,’ he said, ‘is our policy.’” [2]

On top of profit-making goals, and crippling North Korea economically, politically and socially to prevent its emergence as an inspiring example to other countries, Washington seeks to maintain access to its strategic position on a peninsula whose proximity to China and Russia provides a forward operating base from which to pressure these two significant obstacles to the United States’ complete domination of the globe.

Threats of nuclear war

According to declassified and other US government documents, some released on the 60th-anniversary of the Korean War, from “the 1950s’ Pentagon to today’s Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea.” [3] These documents, along with the public statements of senior US officials, point to an ongoing pattern of US nuclear intimidation of the DPRK.

• The United States introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula as early as 1950. [4]

• During the Korean War, US president Harry Truman announced that the use of nuclear weapons was under active consideration; US Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over Pyongyang; and US commander General Douglas MacArthur planned to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs across the northern neck of the Korean peninsula to block Chinese intervention. [5]

• In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed US warplanes were maintained on 15-minute alert to strike North Korea. [6]

• In 1975, US defense secretary James Schlesinger acknowledged for the first time that US nuclear weapons were deployed in South Korea. Addressing the North Koreans, he warned, “I do not think it would be wise to test (US) reactions.” [7]

• In February 1993, Lee Butler, head of the US Strategic Command, announced the United States was retargeting hydrogen bombs aimed at the old USSR on North Korea (and other targets.) One month later, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. [8]

• On July 22, 1993, US president Bill Clinton said if North Korea developed and used nuclear weapons “we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate. It would mean the end of their country as we know it.” [9]

• In 1995, Colin Powell, who had served as chairman of the US joints chiefs of staff and would later serve as US secretary of state, warned the North Koreans that the United States had the means to turn their country into “a charcoal briquette.” [10]

• Following North Korea’s first nuclear test on October 9, 2006, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice reminded North Korea that “the United States has the will and the capability to meet the full range—and I underscore full range of its deterrent and security commitments to Japan [emphasis added].” [11]

• In April 2010, US defense secretary Leon Panetta refused to rule out a US nuclear attack on North Korea, saying, “all options are on the table.” [12]

• On February 13, 2013, Panetta described North Korea as “a threat to the United States, to regional stability, and to global security.” He added: “Make no mistake. The US military will take all necessary steps to meet our security commitments to the Republic of Korea and to our regional allies [emphasis added].” [13]

As the North Koreans put it, “no nation in the world has been exposed to the nuclear threat so directly and for so long as the Koreans.”[14]

“For over half a century since early in the 1950s, the US has turned South Korea into the biggest nuclear arsenal in the Far East, gravely threatening the DPRK through ceaseless manoeuvres for a nuclear war. It has worked hard to deprive the DPRK of its sovereignty and its right to exist and develop….thereby doing tremendous damage to its socialist economic construction and the improvement of the standard of people’s living.” [15]

Economic warfare

The breadth and depth of US economic warfare against North Korea can be summed up in two sentences:

• North Korea is “the most sanctioned nation in the world” — George W. Bush. [16]

• …”there are few sanctions left to apply.” – The New York Times [17]

From the moment it imposed a total embargo on exports to North Korea three days after the Korean War began in June 1950, the United States has maintained an uninterrupted regimen of economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions against North Korea. These include:

o Limits on the export of goods and services.
o Prohibition of most foreign aid and agricultural sales.
o A ban on Export-Import Bank funding.
o Denial of favourable trade terms.
o Prohibition of imports from North Korea.
o Blocking of any loan or funding through international financial institutions.
o Limits on export licensing of food and medicine for export to North Korea.
o A ban on government financing of food and medicine exports to North Korea.
o Prohibition on import and export transactions related to transportation.
o A ban on dual-use exports (i.e., civilian goods that could be adapted to military purposes.)
o Prohibition on certain commercial banking transactions. [18]

In recent years, US sanctions have been complemented by “efforts to freeze assets and cut off financial flows” [19] by blocking banks that deal with North Korean companies from access to the US banking system. The intended effect is to make North Korea a banking pariah that no bank in the world will touch. Former US president George W. Bush was “determined to squeeze North Korea with every financial sanction possible” until its economy collapsed. [20] The Obama administration has not departed from the Bush policies.

Washington has also acted to sharpen the bite of sanctions, pressing other countries to join its campaign of economic warfare against a country it faults for maintaining a Marxist-Leninist system and non-market economy. [21] This has included the sponsoring of a United Nations Security Council resolution compelling all nations to refrain for exporting dual-use items to North Korea (a repeat of the sanctions regime that led to the crumbling of Iraq’s healthcare system in the 1990s.) Washington has even gone so far as to pressure China (unsuccessfully) to cut off North Korea’s supply of oil. [22]

Drawing the appropriate lesson

On the day Baghdad fell to invading US forces, John Bolton warned Iran, Syria and North Korea to “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.” [23] There can be no doubt that Pyongyang drew a lesson, though not the one Bolton intended. The North Koreans did not conclude, as Bolton hoped, that peace and security could be achieved by relinquishing WMDs. Instead, the North Koreans couldn’t fail to grasp the real lesson of the US assault on Iraq. The United States had invaded Iraq only after Saddam Hussein had cleared the way by complying with US demands to destroy his weapons of mass destruction. Had he actually retained the weapons he was falsely accused of hiding and holding in reserve, the Americans would likely have never attacked.

Subsequent events in Libya have only reinforced the lesson. Muammar Gaddafi had developed his own WMD program to protect Libya from Western military intervention. But Gaddafi also faced an internal threat—Islamists, including jihadists linked to Al Qaeda, who sought to overthrow him to create an Islamist society in Libya. After 9/11, with the United States setting out to crush Al Qaeda, Gaddafi sought a rapprochement with the West, becoming an ally in the international battle against Al Qaeda, to more effectively deal with his own Islamist enemies at home. The price of being invited into the fold was to abandon his weapons of mass destruction. When Gaddafi agreed to this condition he made a fatal strategic blunder. An economic nationalist, Gaddafi irritated Western oil companies and investors by insisting on serving Libyan interests ahead of the oil companies’ profits and investors’ returns. Fed up with his nationalist obstructions, NATO teamed up with Gaddafi’s Islamist enemies to oust and kill the Libyan leader. Had he not surrendered his WMDs, Gaddafi would likely still be playing a lead role in Libya. “Who would have dared deal with Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein if they had a nuclear capability?” asks Major General Amir Eshel, chief of the Israeli army’s planning division. “No way.” [24]

Having unilaterally disarmed, Gaddafi was hailed in Western capitals, and world leaders hastened to Tripoli to sign commercial agreements with him. Among Gaddafi’s visitors was the South Korean minister of foreign affairs, and Ban Ki-moon, later to become the UN secretary general. Both men urged the “rehabilitated” Libyan leader to persuade the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons. [25] Whether Gaddafi acceded to the Koreans’ request is unclear, but if he did, his advice was wisely ignored. In the North Korean view, Gaddafi fell prey to a “bait and switch.” The lesson the DPRK drew from Libya was that the only guarantee of peace on the Korean peninsula is a powerful military, backed by nuclear weapons. [26]

This is neither an irrational view, nor one the West, for all its pieties about nuclear non-proliferation (for others), rejects for itself. Britain, for example, justifies its own nuclear weapons program with reference to the need “to deter and prevent nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression against our vital interests that cannot be countered by other means.” [27] If the UK requires nuclear weapons to deter and prevent nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression, then surely the North Koreans—long on the receiving end of these minatory pressures—do as well. Indeed, the case can be made that the North Koreans have a greater need for nuclear arms than the British do, for whom nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression are only hypotheticals.

General Kevin P. Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command from 2007 to 2011, told Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus in 2010 that, “Throughout the 65-year history of nuclear weapons, no nuclear power has been conquered or even put at risk of conquest.” [28] On the other hand, countries that comply with demands to abandon their WMDs soon find themselves conquered, by countries with nuclear weapons aplenty and no intention of giving them up. Pincus used Chilton’s words to advocate a pre-emptive strike on North Korea to prevent the country from developing a large enough nuclear arsenal to make itself invulnerable to conquest. That no nuclear power has been conquered or put at risk of conquest is “a thought others in government ought to ponder as they watch Iran and North Korea seek to develop nuclear capability,” Pincus wrote. [29]

Conclusion

Nuclear arms have political utility. For countries with formidable nuclear arsenals and the means of delivering warheads, nuclear weapons can be used to extort political concessions from non-nuclear-armed states through terror and intimidation. No country exploits the political utility of nuclear weapons as vigorously as the United States does. In pursuing its foreign policy goals, Washington threatened other countries with nuclear attack on 25 separate occasions between 1970 and 2010, and 14 occasions between 1990 and 2010. On six of these occasions, the United States threatened the DPRK. [30] There have been more US threats against North Korea since. (The United States’ record of issuing threats of nuclear attack against other countries over this period is: Iraq, 7; China, 4; the USSR, 4; Libya, 2; Iran, 1; Syria, 1. Significantly, all these countries, like the DPRK, were under communist or economically nationalist governance when the threats were made.)

Nuclear weapons also have political utility for countries menaced by nuclear and other military threats. They raise the stakes for countries seeking to use their militaries for conquest, and therefore reduce the chances of military intervention. There is little doubt that the US military intervention in Iraq and NATO intervention in Libya would not have been carried out had the targets not disarmed and cleared the way for outside forces to intervene with impunity.

A North Korean nuclear arsenal does not increase the chances of war—it reduces the likelihood that the United States and its South Korean marionette will attempt to bring down the communist government in Pyongyang by force. This is to be welcomed by anyone who opposes imperialist military interventions; supports the right of a people to organize its affairs free from foreign domination; and has an interest in the survival of one of the few top-to-bottom, actually-existing, alternatives to the global capitalist system of oppression, exploitation, and foreign domination.

1. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, Merlin Press, 2009, p. 62.

2. “Absent from the Korea Talks: Bush’s Hard-Liner,” The New York Times, September 2, 2003.

3. Charles J. Hanley and Randy Hershaft, “U.S. often weighed N. Korea nuke option”, The Associated Press, October 11, 2010.

4. Hanley and Hershaft.

5. Hanley and Hershaft.

6. Hanley and Hershaft.

7. Hanley and Hershaft.

8. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. p. 488-489.

9. William E. Berry Jr., “North Korea’s nuclear program: The Clinton administration’s response,” INSS Occasional Paper 3, March 1995.

10. Bruce Cumings, “Latest North Korean provocations stem from missed US opportunities for demilitarization,” Democracy Now!, May 29, 2009.

11. Lou Dobbs Tonight, October 18, 2006.

12. Hanley and Hershaft.

13. Choe Sang-hun, “New leader in South criticizes North Korea,” The New York Times, February 13, 2013.

14. “Foreign ministry issues memorandum on N-issue,” Korean Central News Agency, April 21, 2010.

15. Korean Central News Agency, February 13, 2013.

16. U.S. News & World Report, June 26, 2008; The New York Times, July 6, 2008.

17. Neil MacFarquhar and Jane Perlez, “China looms over response to nuclear test by North Korea,” The New York Times, February 12, 2013.

18. Dianne E. Rennack, “North Korea: Economic sanctions”, Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2006.http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl31696.pdf

19. Mark Landler, “Envoy to coordinate North Korea sanctions”, The New York Times, June 27, 2009.

20. The New York Times, September 13, 2006.

21. According to Rennack, the following US sanctions have been imposed on North Korea for reasons listed as either “communism”, “non-market economy” or “communism and market disruption”: prohibition on foreign aid; prohibition on Export-Import Bank funding; limits on the exports or goods and services; denial of favorable trade terms.

22. The Washington Post, June 24, 2005.

23. “U.S. Tells Iran, Syria, N. Korea ‘Learn from Iraq,” Reuters, April 9, 2003.

24. Ethan Bronner, “Israel sense bluffing in Iran’s threats of retaliation”, The New York Times, January 26, 2012.

25. Chosun Ilbo, February 14, 2005.

26. Mark McDonald, “North Korea suggests Libya should have kept nuclear program”, The New York Times, March 24, 2011.

A February 21, 2013 comment by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (“Nuclear test part of DPRK’s substantial countermeasures to defend its sovereignty”) noted that,

“The tragic consequences in those countries which abandoned halfway their nuclear programs, yielding to the high-handed practices and pressure of the U.S. in recent years, clearly prove that the DPRK was very far-sighted and just when it made the option. They also teach the truth that the U.S. nuclear blackmail should be countered with substantial countermeasures, not with compromise or retreat.”

An article in the February 22, 2013 issue of Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of North Korea’s ruling Workers Party (“Gone are the days of US nuclear blackmail”) observed that “Had it not been the nuclear deterrence of our own, the U.S. would have already launched a war on the peninsula as it had done in Iraq and Libya and plunged it into a sorry plight as the Balkan at the end of last century and Afghanistan early in this century.”

27. http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/AC00DD79-76D6-4FE3-91A1-6A56B03C092F/0/DefenceWhitePaper2006_Cm6994.pdf

28. Quoted in Walter Pincus, “As missions are added, Stratcom commander keeps focus on deterrence,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.

29. Pincus.

30. Samuel Black, “The changing political utility of nuclear weapons: Nuclear threats from 1970 to 2010,” The Stimson Center, August 2010, http://www.stimson.org/images/uploads/research-pdfs/Nuclear_Final.pdf

Why Socialism?

16 Apr

by J. Bialek

The spectre which once haunted Europe long ago in 1848, materialized in corporeal form in 1917 and was seemingly exorcized in 1991 has returned in force. This time the “spectre of communism” is haunting the entire world. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party, also called The Communist Manifesto, in order to explain to the population at large the general beliefs of communists, and to differentiate communists from liberals and other social movements which existed during that revolutionary era.

Today it cannot be denied that we are once again living in a revolutionary era. As capitalism continues to degenerate, demonstrating with each passing day that it has outlived its usefulness to the vast majority of humankind, we see violent explosions of popular rage, ranging from peaceful demonstrations to chaotic riots. The ruling class and its “free” press would have us believe that even in these dark times progress is being made. We have the Arab Spring, a series of revolutions supposedly made possible thanks to the help of the Western-developed Twitter and Facebook. The Occupy protests, which complained of a media blackout during its infancy, soon managed to capture the attention of the world and to make its mark on the year 2011. As the media would have it, all that is necessary to solve the ills of the world are “democratic” revolutions in certain countries such as Egypt, but not in others such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or Yemen, and of course maybe a little more participation for “the little guy” in American politics. While the press has in recent years admitted that there are some flaws in the global economic system, those who have been paying attention since the start of this crisis might have noticed an explosion of increasingly shrill anti-communist propaganda.

The renewed interest in Marx and his theories, along with a rising tide of dissatisfaction and nostalgia for pre-1989 life within the former Eastern Bloc nations and the ex-U.S.S.R., has clearly sent chills down the spines of Europe’s elite. Their message could not be more clear. On one hand the media concedes that something is broken with the capitalist system, but on the other hand it warns the working class not to consider alternatives to capitalism. They are once again trying to exorcize this spectre that is haunting them, and indeed terrifying them; they insist that the working class limit their protests against the system so as to fit within the boundaries established by the ruling class. For them the greatest tragedy would be the rejection of the slogan that there is no alternative to capitalism and the assumption that mankind has reached its peak of societal evolution in the system of free markets and commodity trading. So here we are again, so far from 1848, and communists are again compelled to disclose their ideas and distinguish themselves from all other factions who claim to have a solution to our present crisis.

In these times of crisis it comes as no surprise that working people find themselves faced by a large number of proselytizers from a wide spectrum of ideological backgrounds preaching the superiority and explanatory power of their ideas. Each has an explanation as to why we are in this crisis today and a set of proposals which can supposedly solve the problem. In this marketplace of ideas, Marxists cannot pretend as though we sit above the fray, treating our theory as some kind of esoteric revealed knowledge in a manner similar to many of those aforementioned ideologues. We have an explanation, a theory, but what sets us apart is not simply our assertion that these are true, but rather that what we are truly offering is not so much a set of pre-packaged answers which constitute some kind of universal truth, but rather a methodology of analysis which allows people to find what can reasonably be judged as true.  This is not to state that we do not believe in the correctness of our theories, but that Marxism is a living theory to which we add our observations and experiences year after year, rejecting that which has been found to be no longer accurate and adopting that which is relevant and observable.

Other ideologies will claim that our problems stem from lack of regulation, too much regulation, the Federal Reserve, hierarchical authority, the Illuminati, the breakdown of the family, “multiculturalism” and a whole host of other scapegoats either real or imagined. By contrast, while Marxist analysis has identified certain laws or truth about the history of human society and the capitalist system, it is up to us in modern times to apply this analysis to our changing world, and to come up with answers based on our analysis rather than simply accepting some alleged axioms and then setting about to envision our ideal world. In this sense, Marxism does not reject all ideas outside of itself; in fact it does acknowledge the validity of many other ideas or concepts. However, Marxists see in many of these other ideological strains the neglect, either by accident or design, of certain factors which, without being accounted for, cause these other ideological analyses to be lacking and one-sided.

If we consider as an example neo-classical or “mainstream” economics, we cannot fault its proponents for ignoring class struggle, denying the existence of exploitation, and not dealing with the question of creating a more egalitarian, just society. Neo-classical economics was never intended to deal with these matters, and indeed, a common answer to questions about inequality and social injustice under capitalism is that these problems are outside the realm of economics, which of course means neo-classical economics, and that these are issues for sociologists to discuss. Marxism, on the other hand, sees all things in the world as being interrelated; any effect can have potentially infinite causes and any cause can have potentially infinite effects. This is important to keep in mind when one encounters a common straw man argument against Marxism, such as the claim that Marxism is “economic determinism,” or that Marxism sees class struggle as the main focal point of all human history. Marxism sees many factors influencing human society. On the other hand, class has been, via observation of history, a crucial factor in understanding inequality within society, and thus if one wants to change society in order to eliminate inequality and exploitation, Marxist theory says we must take this into account as a crucial factor. Of course, if one is not interested in changing society in such a way that deals with these problems, then class isn’t so important. Every individual who professes a political ideology insists that they want a more just society, but justice to the worker differs greatly from the justice of the owners of capital.

For the sake of argument, let us assume a position that declares the world as it is to be unjust, and in need of a significant change. From this starting point, let us now deal with the questions, “Why socialism? Why do we need revolution and why can’t we do something else?” For practical purposes this text will deal primarily with “left-wing” objections to socialism under the assumption that bearers of such arguments are at least sympathetic to ideals such as social justice and equality. However, while they really deserve to be dealt with in separate articles, we will have a look at some objections coming from the right and even the far-right. Right-wing reactionaries have a history of clothing their arguments in populist language so as to propagate their message among otherwise unsuspecting people who would never give them the time of day if they knew exactly who they were dealing with.

A word of caution – the reader should not assume that what follows is a false dichotomy insisting that Marxism is the only path out of the current crisis. Crisis is both inherent and cyclical in capitalism, and thus we can assume that the current crisis will eventually work itself out. This process may be violent, and in the end yesterday’s winners may be tomorrow’s losers, but the system will go on. It is important to understand that a system’s ability to perpetuate itself isn’t necessarily a merit; it only means that humans simply do not give up and resign control over their society. What this text argues is not simply “socialism or else,” but rather that while other solutions may have progressive and positive outcomes, so long as capitalism and its core contradictions are not dealt with these same painful effects will only return a few years down the road. Furthermore, these ad hoc solutions will not resolve some of capitalism’s cruelest effects such as starvation, war, imperialism, death due to preventable diseases, and the like. The second thing this text will not attempt to do is try to play a logical game so as to lead the reader to the idea that Marxism is “right” based on formal reason alone. If one does not see inequality or exploitation as morally wrong or at worst a necessary evil, no amount of logical arguments can convince them that socialist revolution is necessary. Logic dictates that those who stand to benefit from the system as it is are likely to defend it.

Why do we need revolution? Why can’t we fix the problem through the electoral system? You have to work within the system to make changes otherwise you’re just a dreamer who’s wasting everyone’s time.

Here we have typical arguments from lifelong supporters of the Democratic Party. They acknowledge that they too are disappointed in their hero Obama, but they warn us that things will be much worse under a Republican president. When we express our disapproval of Obama, they accuse us of being dreamers and spoiled children who are now throwing a fit because we didn’t get everything we wanted from the president. Communists find this argument somewhat amusing, seeing as how we never expected anything from Barack Obama. Communists do not see Obama in a vacuum, but rather as part of a clear and obvious rightward trend within the Democratic Party. The truth about “what Obama has done so far” is not a matter for this article. Media outlets such as the outstanding Black Agenda Report have easily cut through the excuses and lies of Obama and his party lackeys. For those pressed for time, sites like obamatheconservative.com catalogue nearly every hard right turn this supposedly “progressive” president has made, complete with sources for each item. Mainstream leftists often label Obama’s compromises with the radical right as “disappointments” at best and “betrayals” at worst. To communists on the other hand, everything is going as intended, not because these actions are part of some secret plan, but because the state is merely carrying out the very function it was designed to do. In other words, our opposition to supporting Obama has nothing to do with Obama himself; it is in fact opposition to voting for anybody. The state is designed to provide a foundation for a capitalist society, and however much “freedom” it may permit in its best moments, it will never permit the freedom to abolish capitalism and its relations of production. The system is meant to self-perpetuate, and the system inevitably favors the wealthy.

To some this might sound like political cynicism, but this is a readily observable fact throughout history. Let us first consider the remedies that liberals have offered us thus far in the endeavor to limit the influence of wealth in American society. Some demands will simply never be fulfilled. Congressmen are not going to consciously eliminate their own perks, including those which they gain from courting lobbyists both when they are in office and after they leave or retire from public service. The idea that politicians can be convinced to give up the vast privileges they gain from their relations with corporations and lobbyists simply based on an appeal to their conscience about “fairness” is simply laughable, and even more so when it comes from the mouth of an Obama supporter who chides leftists for not being realistic.

What of regulation, which will supposedly keep banks and corporations in line? Any attempt to pass such regulation through Congress will inevitably be met with a massive blitzkrieg by lobbyists, but for the sake of argument let’s say they somehow pass. What comes next? The advocates of regulation are fond of referring back to some earlier period in American history when various regulations of industry and banking still existed. The massive trend of deregulation since the 1980s is responsible for our problems, these people say. In this case we are forced to ask, if regulations can solve our economic problems, how did this deregulation take place to begin with? Perhaps more importantly, what will ensure that the new regulations won’t be overturned ten, twenty, or thirty years down the road? How can we be sure the exact same thing won’t happen again? As to why the regulations failed, we are again faced with the reality that the republican system we live under in the United States of America favors those with money, which inevitably means corporations and wealthy individuals. It cannot do otherwise. Some have suggested measures such as ending corporate personhood, but this is about as realistic as limiting or abolishing access for lobbyists. The politicians are not going to cut their own throats.

There are some on the so-called “left” who accuse us of being unrealistic, overly-cynical, and counter-productive by not working within the system. We are accused of wanting our way or no way, and that if we were really serious about change we would participate in the political process and then perhaps we would get the change we wanted, if only incrementally. First, the change we seek is radical; it is revolutionary and not a matter of reforms. Does this mean that we totally reject any participation in the political system as it is, or that we reject any reform in favor of total revolution? Absolutely not; every reform that the working class can squeeze out of the state for their benefit is a small victory. On the other hand, we will not cede massive ground to the right in exchange for a few crumbs from the table, nor will we line up to support candidates that do not represent our interests. To those who say we should stop complaining and vote “our people” into office, we may respond thusly: we would happily cast our vote for “our people,” that is candidates who represent our working class interests, but we will not vote your people into office. Moreover, if we somehow manage to find “our people” to vote for, we will reject all your attempts to blame us for the failure of your people if they should fail. You cannot accuse us of being unrealistic contrarians for not using the choices we supposedly have, and then condemn us when our choice differs from yours.

Getting to the bottom line, we must acknowledge that if we dare to say our problems stem from capitalism, as an increasingly larger segment of mainstream liberals and “leftists” are, we must set about finding a way to abolish capitalism, the root of the problem. By extension, we cannot expect to abolish capitalism via the very same state structure which serves as its foundation and defense. On this point we must agree with the anarchists who say “smash the state.” Politics can be likened to a sort of game, wherein players are permitted to make various decisions and perform actions so long as they do not violate the rules of the game. You can make many moves in chess but you cannot substitute its rules for those of another game, and you must make your moves on the chessboard. If for any reason we can achieve meaningful goals within the rules of the game, we will happily use these opportunities so long as they do not compromise our end goals. What we will not do, is accept the assumption that the game cannot be changed entirely and that we must forever struggle to achieve our gains within the confines of a system which is stacked against us.

Why can’t we fix capitalism? Can we not eliminate the negative effects of capitalism while keeping its benefits?

This is a relatively easy question, which has been somewhat answered in the previous section.  However, it is worth taking a closer look at this argument because one can propose a radical change in government without necessarily eliminating capitalism and its trappings, or as we call them, its relations of production. Here we won’t bother debunking the efficacy of reforms or regulations, but rather we will pose a question ourselves, along with a novel answer. People have been working against the ills of capitalism ever since its emergence in human society, yet to this day we still experience the same problems, oftentimes on a worse scale than before. Awareness of poverty, super-exploitation of workers in developing countries, and even modern-day slavery is higher today than it was in previous decades, but has any of this actually solved these problems? It is simply untrue that the resources necessary to solve these ills do not exist; rather it is one of capitalism’s hallmarks that resources necessary for life can be created in abundance, yet those who are in charge of their creation will not do so unless it proves profitable to them. In fact “relief” is often itself a very profitable industry, to the point that experienced relief workers often warn donors to carefully evaluate charity organizations before handing over their money. In any case, the solution to these problems lies not in increasing charity, but rather eliminating the conditions which make charity necessary.

Finally on this point, when we speak of eliminating the ills of capitalism while preserving its benefits, we would assert that this does describe socialism to an extent. We seek to create a society in which the great productive power brought into being by capitalism is put to use by the masses, for the benefit of the masses, as opposed to a minority of owners and investors. So long as these means of production are owned by a minority of individuals driven by the quest for profits, this cannot happen. Socialism is a synthesis which arises from the struggle to eliminate the contradictions inherent to capitalism, and when it triumphs, we will ultimately be left with capitalism’s benefits without its disadvantages. This may be a long, arduous process, but we have no reason to assume that it cannot be done. And if our struggle for a better, more just world never achieves our highest ideals, what does it matter so long as we strove to achieve all that we could?

The problem isn’t capitalism! We don’t live in a capitalist society! Our society is corporatist, or even socialist!

This kind of objection is as absurd as it is common in today’s discourse. It has often been propagated by Libertarians (typically followers of the Ron Paul cult), fellow admirers of the Austrian school of economics, and all manner of right-wing populists. We might ignore such absurd claims were they only espoused by such reactionaries, but because of their propensity for attempting to inject their ideas into left-wing movements, and the mainstream left’s susceptibility toward superficially radical attacks on everything “corporate,” we cannot avoid addressing such claims. Granted, this is a subject which demands its own article, and in fact many on this subject already exist. Here we will deal with it for the benefit of an audience which sees itself as left-wing or progressive, and we will do so in an abbreviated manner.

If capitalism is not the system under which we live now, then we must ask not only what capitalism is, but also when it has existed. If one asserts that it has never existed, as a few fanatical libertarians will occasionally admit under pressure, this is in itself an indictment of capitalism. Who can fault the U.S.S.R. for not achieving communism in seventy years if people have been championing the idea of capitalism for several centuries without ever having established it anywhere? But we need not concern ourselves with this rarer, ludicrous argument. Instead we will deal with the assertion that our modern system has transformed from some kind of “good” capitalism into something more grotesque. This assertion is especially troubling for those progressives and even more “radical” leftists who assert this argument, as it logically implies that there was some better time in the past, which is remarkably similar to the claims of right-wing ideologues.

The corporation, which earns so much hatred from the mainstream left, did not fall out of the sky one morning. It came into being through a natural process of capitalism’s evolution. The claim that our system is different than it was thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, regardless of who is making the argument, is based on a wholly metaphysical view of the world and in particular of capitalism. It presents capitalism as defined by a particular ideal, and then asserts that if reality should differ from this ideal, then reality must then be something other than capitalism. This way of thinking does not allow one to see capitalism as a system which went through changes from its inception to the present day. It is essential to deal with capitalism as it exists today, and as it has existed hitherto, as opposed to some abstract ideal.

In limiting our objections to this argument only as it is asserted by “leftists” as opposed to reactionary free market fanatics, then we find that we have come full circle back to the idea of “fixing capitalism.” To attack corporations and champion small and local business amounts to attacking the weeds without pulling up the roots. Again, these corporations did not fall from the sky one day, fully formed. To deny the connection between small businesses and multi-national corporations is akin to an economic Intelligent Design theory, as though the latter were once called into existence as they appear today. Even small local businesses will put their money into banks which will loan it out all over the country, if not the world. Communists seek not to cut the weeds of capitalism, but rather to uproot it entirely.

Can’t we subvert capitalism by changing our lifestyle and choices as consumers?

From the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s emerged an idea which began as a bastardization of Marxist thought, one that has recently gained popularity again, stripped of any hint of Marxism whatsoever. The gist of this idea goes like this: capitalists and by extension the capitalist system itself are compelled to sell their products in the market, and thus must ensure that consumers will continue to spend money on an ever-increasing array of products. Many of these products are not necessary to human life, and some wholly unnecessary, making it essential to somehow convince people they need such products. The conclusion of these observations is that capitalism requires conformity in order to survive. Via aggressive and seemingly omnipresent advertising, people are encouraged to follow trends and buy what other people are buying. This leads to the rise of what is generally termed “consumerism,” a lust for ever more material goods that always seems to afflict other people, as opposed to the person decrying it.

From this argument it follows that this system can be subverted via a revolt against consumerism, and in particular, the “jamming” of cultural messages which promote this lifestyle, namely advertisements. We allege that these theories are nothing but idealistic nonsense, wholly divorced from even a superficial analysis of how capitalism works. Capitalism does not require that people act alike and have the same tastes; on the contrary, it thrives when people seek to express their individuality via their lifestyle and purchases. There will always be a capitalist willing to fulfill some desire so long as there is profit to be had. Decades of counter-cultural rebellion have failed to put a dent in the capitalist machine, and there is no reason to believe that “fair trade” products, defaced advertisements, and the occasional street rave will succeed at overthrowing capitalism in the future. Moreover, making the struggle against capitalism a matter of purchases is little more than funneling money from big capitalists to small or medium-sized capitalists.

Aren’t you reducing everything down to economics? What about feminism, the struggle for people of color, and so on?

Marxists fight for an egalitarian society which means we fight against racism, xenophobia, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and all other social ills which create division and conflict within the working class. Despite this, we are still continually accused of reducing all matters to economics or class struggle, which is a woefully bad interpretation of Marxist theory. This accusation comes from a variety of directions but occasionally it is voiced by some die-hard followers of certain identity politics movements. Some, but by no means all or even a majority, put the struggle of their particular group above all others. History has shown identity politics to be largely a failure when it comes to achieving equality, much less overthrowing capitalism and its systematic division and oppression of people based on ethnicity, gender, sex, and so on. While many recognize the role of class in the oppression of their particular group, there are those who prefer to spend their time bickering over redefinitions of what it means to be a part of this or that group, who is more oppressed and how, and tit-for-tat arguments about who is “co-opting” their movement.

Marxists on the other hand recognize a historically observable fact that oppression of women, ideas of race, caste systems, and other forms of systematic oppression are very much rooted in class society. They all serve the purpose of maintaining, in one form or another, a system whereby one class exploits another. We may liken class society to a disease, and things like sexism, racism, and so on represent symptoms of that disease. History has shown that struggles for civil rights and the liberation of women have often failed because they focused on symptoms without having any kind of historical material analysis of that which they were struggling against. In many cases, this often led dedicated fighters into alliances with their class enemies, all in the name of liberation for a particular repressed group. The promised liberation has yet to come. Marxists do not reduce every issue down to class struggle, but if we are analyzing two particular subjects, specifically the history of human society and formulating a way to build a better one, we see that class plays a major role in relation to both.

Of course this should not be taken to mean that problems like racism or patriarchy will simply disappear once the capitalist class is overthrown. Some forms of oppression are quite old; patriarchy, in particular, dates back to the dawn of class-based society.  And while a struggle must be waged during and after the revolution to right these wrongs, one thing is clear- we simply cannot ultimately triumph over these social ills until we overthrow that system and its ruling class which has a vested interest in maintaining a complex society of privileges designed to divide the exploited class and incite them against one another.  This having been said, Marxists have an obligation to set the standard for the kind of society they wish to live in by waging the day-to-day struggle against forms of oppression such as racism and patriarchy both inside and outside of their organizations and parties.  Those who feel that this question can be put off till  “after the revolution” are shirking their responsibility and not setting a good example of what could be possible once the system of class-based organization is overthrown.

Death of a Ruling Class Warrior: Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

9 Apr

lady_thatcher_diesBy Tom Mills

Thatcher is dead. But for years she was a shadow of her former self. After her fall from power in 1990 she slowly faded away from public life and when she did wander back onto the public stage the contrast between her frailty and the formidable figure of collective memory made these occasional spectacles almost surreal.

How we should respond when this elderly, diminished woman finally went to meet her maker has for some time been a minor talking point on the left. It is often said that we should not celebrate her passing. Not just because to do so would be distasteful, but because it is Thatcherism the idea not Thatcher the person that is the real enemy. This is of course true. Thatcher was no intellectual and did not invent what became known as Thatcherism. But neither was Thatcherism just some objectionable set of ideas to which the woman who lent it her name regrettably subscribed. Neoliberalism was, and is, a political project requiring political agency to achieve its hegemony; and in Britain it was Margaret Thatcher more than anyone who was responsible for transforming the neoliberal dreams of men like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman into a waking political nightmare.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born in the Midlands town of Grantham in Lincolnshire on 13 October 1925, the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her father, whom she greatly admired, even idealised, was a local politician and lay preacher who owned and ran a grocery store in the town. The young Margaret Roberts was not close to her mother and once when asked about her only remarked, ‘Mother was marvellous – she helped Father.’

Her upbringing, though relatively privileged, was hardly the classic stuff of the British ruling class, and this fact doubtless strengthened her populist instincts and credentials. Both admirers and critics have attributed Thatcher’s politics to her small town, petty bourgeois roots. In 1983 the journalist Peter Riddell wrote that:

Thatcherism is essentially an instinct, a sense of moral values and an approach to leadership rather than ideology. It is an expression of Mrs Thatcher’s upbringing in Grantham, her background of hard work and family responsibility, ambition and postponed satisfaction, duty and patriotism.[1]

This rather romantic view of Thatcher’s politics was no doubt one that she herself shared. In The Path To Power, she wrote: ‘There is no better course for understanding free-market economics than life in a corner shop.’ That the ‘free market’ policies associated with Thatcher in fact led to the domination of small town life by supermarkets and other powerful corporations, is just one of the many ways that the rhetoric and reality of her politics were cruelly out of sync.

In the Grantham of the real world, as opposed to the conservative utopia of Thatcher’s imagination, she will not be affectionately remembered. During her premiership several of the town’s manufacturing companies were forced to shut down and the nearby Nottinghamshire coal mines were closed. As Tim Adams has reported, several years ago 85% of the readers of the town’s local paper voted against the erection of a bronze statue of Thatcher in favour of bringing back a fondly remembered disused steamroller, once a feature of the town’s largest public park.

Thatcher left Grantham in 1943 having won a scholarship at Somerville College, Oxford and seldom returned. She studied chemistry and was appointed president of the university’s Conservative Association. After graduating in 1947 she worked for several years as a research chemist, first at British Xylonite (BX) Plastics, where she joined a trade union, the Association for Scientific Workers. She then joined the food company J. Lyons and Co., where it is often said that she was involved in the development of soft scoop ice cream. According to Jon Agar though, there is no firm evidence of this.[2]

In the general elections of 1950 and 1951, when she was still in her mid-20s, Margaret Roberts, as she was then, stood as the Conservative Party candidate in the Labour Party stronghold of Dartford. 1951 was also the year she met, and soon afterwards married, the millionaire businessman Denis Thatcher. Her husband’s financial patronage proved invaluable, allowing her to train as a barrister and eventually to secure a seat in the constituency of Finchley in North London. Yet as Peter Clarke noted in reviewing herPath To Power, the importance of her husband’s considerable wealth was barely acknowledged by Thatcher. She preferred to dwell on her humble roots as a grocer’s daughter and to imagine that her achievements were attributable to drudgery and self-discipline.

Thatcher was first elected to the House of Commons in October 1959. She subsequently held junior posts in the Harold Macmillan government before becoming shadow spokesperson for education and in 1970 she entered the cabinet as education secretary in Edward Heath’s ill-fated Tory government. It was in this period that in response to demands for departmental spending cuts she cancelled free school milk, only to be forever taunted with the rhyme ‘Thatcher, Thatcher milk snatcher’.

Heath and Thatcher and were not personally well disposed to each other and along with other members of the Tory hard right she would later come to bitterly resent his supposedly conciliatory politics. As far as the Tory radicals were concerned, Heath had started out on the right track. At a January 1970 meeting at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Surrey, his shadow cabinet and policy team developed a set of reactionary policies designed to curtail the waves of radicalism and popular mobilisations that unnerved the British establishment in the 1960s. They proposed a new law on trespass (designed to combat the direct action protests of the student anti-racist movements) as well as new industrial regulations intended to curtail an increasingly intransigent working class. Meanwhile business and finance was to be deregulated and taxes cut. In words that could have been describing Thatcherism, the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson condemned the Selsdon policies as ‘an atavistic desire to reverse the course of 25 years of social revolution’ and ‘a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality’.

If the policies were indeed intended to break with the post-war consensus (and it is not at all clear that they were), then Heath failed where Thatcher later succeeded. Attempts to limit the power of the trade unions ended in humiliating defeat at the hands of the National Union of Mineworkers and Heath’s free -market policies were abandoned after Britain’s capitalists in fact showed little interest in investing in British industry. Other economic policies proved equally lamentable. The lifting of administrative controls over bank credit in 1971 (which had been lobbied for by the City of London) engineered a short-lived economic boom concentrated largely in property, which collapsed dramatically with the worldwide economic slump and the subsequent hike in oil prices.[3] In 1974 Heath was essentially forced from office by a newly assertive labour movement after he challenged the unions with the campaigning slogan ‘Who governs Britain?’ – and lost.

Heath stayed on as Conservative leader after suffering yet another general election defeat to his long term rival Harold Wilson. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher and other reactionaries in the Conservative Party, who longed for a spirited counter attack on the labour movement, began to coalesce around the figure of Keith Joseph – Heath’s former secretary of state for social services who shortly after the first 1974 election defeat was apparently converted to the newly ascendant dogma of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism and the hard right

Neoliberalism had been developed for several decades by a group of intellectuals belonging to an elite organisation called the Mount Pelerin Society. Probably the most influential of their number was the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in The Road to Serfdom that any government intervention in the economy would ultimately lead to authoritarianism. Thatcher first readThe Road to Serfdom at university and after his Damascus moment Keith Joseph encouraged her to explore Hayek’s other writings. (After being elected leader Thatcher is said to have brandished a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, pronouncing, ‘This is what we believe!’)

In the UK Hayek’s ideas had been championed by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think-tank funded by a millionaire businessman and run by two committed pamphleteers, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Keith Joseph had been in contact with them both, as well as with other key neoliberal thinkers such as Alan Walters, an economist and a member of the Mount Pelerin Society, and Bill and Shirley Letwin (the parents of the Conservative minister Oliver Letwin). With the support of these right-wing trailblazers, Thatcher and Joseph together founded a new think-tank called the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which set out to win over the Conservative Party to neoliberalism. Along with the Institute of Economic Affairs, the CPS became a hub for the New Right, which was now able to operate independently from the official Conservative Party policy machine, which was still aligned to the s- called ‘One Nation Conservatism’ associated with Edward Heath and other influential Tories like Chris Patten and James Prior.

Thatcher came to lead the hard-right faction of the Conservative Party as a result of a remarkably ill-judged speech given by Keith Joseph in October 1974 on the subject of the family and ‘civilised values’. Joseph spoke of a ‘degeneration’ and ‘moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline’. The poor, he said, should be helped of course, but – and we hear echoes of this today in the speeches of Iain Duncan Smith – ‘to create more dependence is to destroy them morally’. Keith Joseph’s ultimate undoing was a section of the speech in which he said that the ‘balance of our population, our human stock is threatened’ since ‘a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers… who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5.’

Though often portrayed as what political journalists like to call a ‘gaffe’, Joseph had in fact long harboured such class prejudice and been inclined towards eugenics. A former Home Office official later recalled that while he was in government, civil servants had ‘been aware that he had inclinations in that direction but had steered him off.’[4]

Joseph was widely condemned for the speech and was discredited as a challenger for the Tory leadership. Thatcher, his closest political ally, stepped forward in his place with his full backing. She later recalled telling Joseph: ‘Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.’[5]

Heath had lost two general elections in one year, so Thatcher’s initial success was no great surprise. What was more unexpected was that the momentum of her success in the first ballot led her to an outright victory in the second after Heath dropped out. Thus, through some considerable good fortune, Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975.

Her media advisor in her leadership campaign was Gordon Reece, a former television producer who had set up a company producing corporate videos and providing media advice to business executives. Thatcher, the supposed ‘conviction politician’, was thoroughly rebranded by Reece, who persuaded her to change her dress sense, posture and even to take elocution lessons. As Germaine Greer has noted, ‘Reece began the long process by which the millionaire’s decorative wife with the fake, cut-glass accent was made over into the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter’. Thatcher herself later recalled: ‘Gordon was terrific. He said my hair and my clothes had to be changed and we would have to do something about my voice. It was quite an education because I had not thought about these things before.’[6]

Reece hired the advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi, whose chairperson Tim Bell became another key advisor. Together Reece and Bell carefully orchestrated Thatcher’s media appearances and, in a break with the classic Tory strategy, courted the tabloid press, meeting regularly with Larry Lamb of The Sun and David English of the Daily Mail.[7]

The Sun, which had been owned by Rupert Murdoch since 1969, had for a period maintained a broadly left-wing stance, but by that point had switched its support to the Conservatives and despite having previously been highly critical of Thatcher during her time as education minister, had lent her its full support. As James Curran and Colin Leys note, this rightward shift reflected changes to the political economy of the media, which from the 1960s onwards became dominated by large corporations, reversing the trend toward journalist autonomy.[8]

Even with innovative campaigning strategies and the support of the majority of the press however, the Tories still lagged behind the Labour Party in the polls as it approached the end of its troubled five year term and Thatcher personally was considerably less popular than the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. It was the wave of strikes during the winter of 1978/9 – the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ – which would hand Thatcher her election victory. Her allies in the reactionary press seized the moment, attacking Callaghan as a complacent leader whose government was ‘held to ransom’ by militant trade unions. By February 1979 the Conservatives enjoyed an 18% lead and they went on to win a strong majority of 43 seats in the May 1979 election.

Thatcher’s constituency

What was the nature of Thatcher’s electoral constituency? Though there was a notable rightward shift in the electorate in 1979, this trend has been hugely exaggerated by Thatcher’s supporters (who like to imagine her reactionary revolution as a popular uprising against the strictures of the social democratic state, rather than a top-down reassertion of class power). Like all political leaders she certainly enjoyed some cross-class support, but in the long run, working-class support for the Conservatives continued its long-term decline during her leadership.

The core Thatcherite voters, who were mobilised by the economic crisis and the rise of the ‘New Left’, were the most reactionary sections of the middle classes – the far-right UKIP voters of today – whose antipathy towards trade unions and the left, and anxiety over a perceived moral and economic decline, meant they were receptive to Thatcher’s nationalist, authoritarian and petit bourgeois political rhetoric. Perhaps most importantly, though Thatcher was able to mobilise a significant section of the electorate, her support in no way represented a political mandate for neoliberalism. Indeed Thatcher and her advisors were always careful not to present their political agenda during election campaigns. During the 1979 campaign they chose to portray Thatcher as a rather homely figure and focused on attacking the Labour Party over its lack of ‘economic credibility’. This strategy was to prove as ironic as Thatcher’s infamous promise as she entered 10 Downing Street that she would bring harmony and hope in the place of discord and despair.

The Thatcherite myth, which gradually became political common sense in Britain, is that the Conservatives introduced economic reforms which though painful and unpopular in the short term restored Britain to prosperity after years of Labour mismanagement of the economy. In fact Labour had been fairly successful in stabilising the economy. It brought down the high levels of inflation it had inherited from the Heath government through a combination of spending cuts and wage restraints – attempting effectively to resolve the economic crisis by driving down the living standards of its own supporters. This policy had relied on the Labour Party’s relationship with the trade unions, which was obviously not an option for Thatcher. Instead her government turned to the newly fashionable theory of monetarism, according to which the ‘money supply’ was the key to controlling economic growth and inflation. The Labour leadership had already shifted somewhat towards ‘monetarist’ thinking in 1976, coerced by the IMF and influenced by James Callaghan’s son-in-law Peter Jay, but the Thatcherites now embraced a rather crude version – later referred to by Thatcher’s second Chancellor Nigel Lawson as ‘unreconstructed parochial monetarism’ – with characteristic zeal.

Thatcher, to be fair, was never able to put into practice the pure monetarism championed by her most dogmatic advisors who (beholden to neoclassical economics and thus misunderstanding the nature of money and credit) favoured controlling the monetary base as a counter-inflationary measure. Such an approach was effectively blocked by the political representatives of the City of London, who favoured instead an increase in interest rates.[9] And under Thatcher, what the City wanted, the City got. This included, most significantly, an end to exchange controls, which were abolished almost immediately, fatally undermining the political capacity for democratic management of the economy.

While the City boomed, British manufacturing suffered severely and unemployment doubled. Neither would recover. Meanwhile growth declined, inflation rose once again and, in the midst of a severe recession, Geoffrey Howe introduced public spending cuts. From a national perspective these policies were as disastrous as they were unpopular. Thatcher, having described Labour as ‘the natural party of unemployment’, and campaigned using the famous Saatchi & Saatchi poster showing a seemingly endless dole queue, now pushed unemployment up to 3 million. The ‘One Nation’ Tory Ian Gilmour, a member of Thatcher’s first cabinet, noted that Thatcher and her neoliberal comrades were ‘largely cushioned by a surprising insensitivity to the human cost of their policy and by strong, if diminishing, feelings of dogmatic certainty’.[10] Nevertheless Thatcher (at this stage at least) knew when to back down. Having famously declared in October 1980 that, ‘The lady’s not for turning’, she quietly did just that in 1981.

Bash the workers

Controlling the money supply proved far more difficult in practice than ideologues like Milton Friedman had imagined and the early commitments of the Thatcher Government were quietly abandoned. To consider this as a failure for Thatcherism though is to misunderstand the woman and the movement she headed. The Thatcherite interest in monetarism was not academic, but political. Peter Jay once remarked that explaining monetarism to Thatcher was ‘like showing Genghis Khan a map of the world’. Similarly Alan Budd, a founding member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, suggested that ‘the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers.’[11]

What monetarism provided was an intellectual and technocratic rationale for cutting public spending and undermining the labour movement, not to mention providing more favourable conditions for financial capital, which in reality was the power behind Thatcher’s throne. Once the Thatcherites’ early approach to the economy threatened to undermine these strategic goals it was abandoned, or at least revised.

Thatcher’s early macro-economic policies were a significant departure from previous practices, but in many other respects her first few years in office were relatively cautious. This was partly because her cabinet still included a number of influential, traditionally minded Conservatives (men she dubbed ‘wets’ for their failure to agree with her), but it was also because, despite her belligerent rhetoric, Thatcher was an adept strategist who understood that if she provoked a head on struggle with a united labour movement she would most likely lose. As one of her closest advisors, Charles Powell, remarked: ‘Mrs Thatcher was a radical, but she was a pragmatic radical.’[12]

So it was that when the National Coal Board announced pit closures in February 1981, the plans were quickly abandoned once the National Union of Mineworkers threatened to strike. As Nigel Lawson later commented: ‘Thatcher had very, very quickly backpedalled and she was quite right at that time because no preparation of any kind had been put in place for weathering a strike.’ [13] Indeed Lawson claims that on being appointed Energy Secretary in 1981, Thatcher told him, ‘Nigel, we mustn’t have a coal strike.’

Though Thatcher initially shied away from conflict with the miners, secretly she prepared for war. When it came three years later, she was not only well prepared, but was emboldened by her victories in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict and the 1983 general election. Her success in the latter, despite her risible record in office, is often attributed to the former and no doubt the Falklands/Malvinas conflict did have a significant impact on her confidence and status as a leader. But the truth is that in 1983 she was handed Britain on a plate by a divided opposition. In March 1981, a number of leading figures in the Labour Party broke off to form the Social Democratic Party, which then formed an electoral pact with the Liberals. In the 1983 election the SDP-Liberal Alliance secured 25% of the vote, but due to the first-past-the-post system received little in the way of seats. Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ share of the vote declined slightly, yet they secured the largest majority in the House of Commons since Atlee’s landslide of 1945. Just as the post-war Labour government had fundamentally changed the governing consensus in Britain, so Thatcher would now do the same.

As Thatcher’s former advisor John Redwood later admitted, the Conservatives had once again been very vague about what policies they would introduce once they came to office.[14] But this did not matter. For Mrs Thatcher sought no mandate on policy, only a mandate to lead. Her Churchillian posturing during the Falklands conflict had given her a taste for war which was to define her. As John Campbell, one of her many biographers, notes:

One of Margaret Thatcher’s defining characteristics as a politician was a need for enemies. To fuel the aggression that drove her career she had to find new antagonists all the time to be successively demonised, confronted and defeated.[15]

National Union of Mineworkers

At the top of Thatcher’s hit-list was the National Union of Mineworkers. Dubbed ‘the enemy within’, the miners’ crushing defeat after months of bitter struggle was probably Thatcher’s greatest single political achievement. It was not a popularity contest, and won her no new friends, but the battle fundamentally changed the political landscape of Britain. As Seumas Milne has suggested, the NUM represented an alternative vision for British society, one based on community, solidarity and collective action, rather than individualism and greed.[16] Its defeat therefore was not only a significant strategic victory, but it had an historic symbolic resonance. Thatcher’s equally truculent henchman, Norman Tebbit, later wrote that Thatcher had broken ‘not just a strike, but a spell’.

Having harnessed the full coercive powers of the state to defeat Britain’s most potent and politicised trade union, Thatcher moved to consolidate her victory. She passed legislative restrictions on picketing, strike actions and the closed shop. The trade union ‘reforms’ she instituted strengthened the hand of business and severely undermined the power and confidence of the labour movement. The left’s organisational base was further eroded by other policy innovations, now grimly familiar, such as restrictions on local government and the proliferation of quangos, the contracting out of local services and the privatisation of public utilities. In late 1984 Thatcher sold off British Telecom and she went on to sell off huge swathes of the Britain’s public infrastructure, including British Gas in December 1986, British Airways in February 1987, Rolls-Royce in May 1987, BAA in July 1987, British Steel in December 1988 and the regional water companies in December 1989.

These privatisations proved to be hugely profitable for the City of London and represented a massive transfer of wealth from public to private hands. They were carried out with a contempt for public opinion that came increasingly to characterise Thatcher’s reign. She famously described herself as a ‘conviction politician’, which in practice meant that in cabinet she was utterly intolerant of disagreement, and in government was contemptuous of all dissent. This autocratic style was not just a personal idiosyncrasy; it also reflected her underlying political philosophy – or perhaps the former attracted her to the latter. Precisely because of their peculiar notion of freedom, neoliberals have always harboured a deep suspicion of democracy. Looking back on Thatcher’s political legacy, Nigel Lawson remarked that as far as he was concerned democracy is ‘clearly less important than freedom’ and that to preserve the latter ‘strong government’ was necessary.

This is precisely what Thatcher provided: a sustained, violent assault on British society launched on behalf of big business in the name of ‘strong government’ and cloaked in the rhetoric of national renewal. Her pugnacious political style would eventually prove her undoing, but there was method in her madness. Her aggression meant she was able to secure some decisive victories which could be consolidated and entrenched. She understood that the British political system afforded enough time to pursue an unpopular vanguardist strategy and betted (correctly) that social democrats would adapt to rather than challenge the profound changes she forced through.

Much has been made of the ideological power of Thatcher’s political vision, but in reality she did not seek to persuade people that ‘there is no alternative’. Rather she forced people to accept as much by attacking the social bases of collective action and ideas, emasculating those institutional forms that could make building any alternative possible or even imaginable. Like the Marxists she despised, Thatcher believed that ultimately it is the material conditions of life that determine political consciousness, and she sought therefore to bring about institutional changes which would carry with them an ideological reorientation. Hence why in an interview for the Sunday Times in May 1981 she made the chilling remark that, ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’ As Kean Birch has noted, the policy innovations in the Thatcher years represented a profound shift towards a political economy based on rising asset values rather than income. This, it was hoped, would tie people materially and ideologically to the capitalist system and create what Thatcherites, echoing Harold Macmillan, liked to call a ‘property-owning democracy’.

If Thatcher’s true goal was to change the heart and soul of the British public then she failed. It is clear from public opinion data that neoliberal policies remained remarkably unpopular under Thatcher and that the public remained stubbornly committed to the old social democratic consensus. In 1990, the sociologist Stephen Hill noted that the ‘evidence of the 1980s is that subordinate groups still subscribe widely to a radical-egalitarian and oppositional ideology.’[17] Indeed, Ivor Crewe long ago demolished the notion that Thatcher instituted any significant shift in public attitudes,[18] whilst the former Conservative minister Ian Gilmour concedes that, ‘During the Thatcher years, public opinion remained centrist or, if anything, moved to the left.’

Be that as it may, the failure to win over people’s ‘hearts and souls’ did not derail Thatcher’s political project. Hegemony need not be built on popular consent and whatever Thatcher’s ambitions, it was never necessary to win us over to neoliberal ideas – only to neutralise any effective resistance. As Colin Leys has noted, ‘for an ideology to be hegemonic, it is not necessary that it be loved. It is merely necessary that it have no serious rival.’[19]

Thatcher succeeded in defeating all her serious rivals, but she was never loved, and she knew as much. In March 1990, drained of the confidence to fight another election and facing a national revolt against the poll tax, she told her confidant Woodrow Wyatt, ‘It’s me they don’t like. It always has been.’[20] By that time she had a reputation as being impossibly obdurate and was increasingly seen as a political liability by her allies. Edwina Currie later commented: ‘If we wanted the revolution to be consolidated, she had become its main obstacle.’[21]

Decline and fall

There is something pitiful about Thatcher’s eventual decline and fall; that fearsome and formidable woman finally brought down by her pathetic, cowed comrades. And though she was never moved by the suffering of her many victims, she was nevertheless brought to tears as she contemplated her own misfortune. Her diehard supporters were also heartbroken. Andrew Marr remembers seeing a member of the Tory ‘No Turning Back’ group (which included Liam Fox, Francis Maude, Michael Portillo and Iain Duncan Smith) break down in tears at the news of her resignation. Beneath the pathos however lay a hidden truth about Thatcher and Thatcherism. For behind the revolt against her leadership was a contradiction that had always threatened to undermine the potent political alliance she led.

John Campbell writes that: ‘Although in theory she rejected the concept of class… she was in truth an unabashed warrior on behalf of her own class.’ Campbell identifies hers as the ‘lower and middling middle class’, referred to by Thatcher as ‘the sort of people I grew up with.’ [22] In reality though it was not small business owners but multinational corporations, and the financial sector in particular, which benefited most from her reactionary revolution – and it was their interests that she most consistently served.

Thatcher had been able to appeal to a range of reactionary impulses which had developed during the slow burning crisis of the 1970s and had successfully fused them into a vaguely coherent political ideology. It is well understood that (like Rupert Murdoch) she sought to create mass support for big business by championing markets as an empowering, democratising force. More than that though, she also sought to portray markets as a moral force. Following Keith Joseph, she argued that state intervention had not only hampered Britain’s economic effectiveness, it had corrupted its moral character. As a leader of the New Right, she fused neoliberalism with the moralistic, reactionary politics of ‘Middle England’; tying the cold interests of capital to the bigoted preoccupations of the Tory base, who like Thatcher resented the complacent liberalism of the post-war establishment, its softness, permissiveness and acquiescence to the demands of society’s lower orders.

Economic elites and the lower middle-class base shared an interest in undermining the power of trade unions, rolling back the welfare state and cutting taxes. But on certain questions their interests diverged and the key issue was Europe. Whilst a majority in the world of big business favoured greater European integration, this was virulently opposed by smaller businesses and the xenophobic Tory base. Thatcher herself, it should be said, was no Powellite nationalist. She had voted in favour of entry to the European Economic Community in 1970 and as leader of the opposition supported the ‘Yes Campaign’ in the 1975 referendum. In 1986 she gave her full support to the Single European Act, which opened up European markets to British corporations.[23] However, she strongly opposed the notion of supranational European institutions, perhaps out of authentically nationalist sentiment, or perhaps because she feared that her political victories might be diluted by European states which still retained their social democratic character.

Thatcher’s outspoken opposition to Europe towards the end of her premiership set her against influential members of her cabinet like Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe – the more authentic representatives of the social forces which, having been unleashed by Thatcher, had come to dominate British society under her leadership. Lawson resigned from the cabinet in 1989 and Geoffrey Howe followed a year later. The latter delivered an infamous speech to the House of Commons in which, with Lawson sitting alongside him, he condemned Thatcher’s position on Europe saying, ‘What kind of vision is that for our business people, who trade there each day, for our financiers, who seek to make London the money capital of Europe…?’ As Robin Ramsey has detailed, Thatcher personally had no great love for financiers, but she had learned during her early ‘monetarist experiment’ that the City of London was one ‘interest group’ that she could not take on.[24] Years later then, when its political representatives demanded that she make what Nigel Lawson later called ‘the ultimate sacrifice’,[25] she displayed none of the defiance that had defined her time in office.

It is sometimes implied that during her many years in power Thatcher became ‘out of touch’ or drunk with power. But her authorised biographer Charles Moore, who interviewed her shortly before her final downfall, says he found her mood then to one of ‘unhappy fatalism’. Having failed to secure a decisive victory in a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine, Thatcher lost the backing of her cabinet and grudgingly agreed to resign. The Conservative Party chair Kenneth Baker told the media: ‘Once again Margaret Thatcher has put her country’s and party’s interests before personal considerations.’

Baker’s histrionics notwithstanding, Thatcher showed no grace in defeat. She resented her forced retirement and often criticised the new Tory leadership, particularly over Europe, which she came to believe represented some sort of ‘socialist’ threat. She gathered around her a team of writers to work on her memoirs in which she bitterly attacked her former comrades – Geoffrey Howe most of all, whom she accused of ‘bile and treachery’. Like Tony Blair years later, she embarked on a vanity tour and spent a period travelling around the world delivering highly paid speeches and socialising with the rich and powerful. She also took up a lucrative role working as a lobbyist for the US tobacco giant Philip Morris Inc, which hosted her $1 million 70th birthday party.

Gradually though, as her proximity to power decreased, so did her health and her mental capacity. As Charles Moore writes:

The passage of time, and possibly the delayed effect of so many years of relentless work, blunted the edge of Lady Thatcher’s mind. By the late 1990s it became gradually apparent that her short-term memory was failing. … By the time the century turned, she had lost her – until then – passionate and detailed interest in current events.

By this point Thatcher’s brand of hard-right politics looked as parochial and antiquated as the woman herself. A poignant moment came in 1997 when British Airways unveiled new logos for their aircraft tail fins, replacing the national colours of the Union Jack. In full sight of the television cameras, Thatcher covered a model of the new design with her handkerchief saying: ‘We fly the British flag, not these awful things you are putting on tails.’

Maybe the designs were awful. They were later abandoned by BA. But the spectacle powerfully illustrated how out of step Thatcher had become with the imperatives of a corporate elite whose power and privilege she had worked so tirelessly to defend and to bolster. Capital is a fickle thing and big business had by then already defected en masse to New Labour which looked like a far more viable prospect for consolidating the victories of Thatcher’s cruel war than the fractious party she left in her wake. Her belligerent, divisive politics had long since served its usefulness and so had the woman herself. One of her last political acts was to take a public stand in defence of Augusto Pinochet, the decrepit Chilean dictator thought to have imprisoned and tortured over 40,000 political opponents during his 17 years in power.

In 2002, having suffered a series of minor strokes, Thatcher was ordered by doctors to refrain from any public speaking and in the years that followed her health further deteriorated. Her loss of physical and mental capacity was made the focus of the curiously apolitical biopic The Iron Lady. The film was criticised by the Tory right, who preferred to remember Thatcher at her most potent and combative. In a sense they are right. That too, I think, is how we should remember her. Not for what she became once her faculties failed her, but for what she was at the height of her power: an advocate of inequality, a friend to dictators and arms dealers, a champion of power and privilege and a scourge of the poor and vulnerable. A true blue class warrior.

[Tom Mills is a researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Bath and a co-editor of New Left Project.

Notes

[1] Cited in Bob Jessop et al, Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Polity Press, 1988) p.4.

[2] Jon Agar, ‘Thatcher, Scientist’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Vol.65, No.3, 20 September 2011, 215-232. http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/65/3/215.full

[3] ‘Back to the future: the 1970s reconsidered’, Lobster, Winter 1998, Issue 34.

[4] Cited in John Welshman, From transmitted deprivation to social exclusion: policy, poverty and parenting (The Policy Press, 2007) p.62.

[5] Cited in John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.72.

[6] Thatcher: The Path to Power—and Beyond, BBC1, 12 June 1995.

[7] Mark Hollingsworth, The Ultimate Spin Doctor: the Life and Fast Times of Tim Bell (1997) p.70

[8] James Curran and Colin Leys, ‘Media and the Decline of Liberal Corporatism in Britain’, in James Curran and Myung-Jin Park (eds.), De-Westernizing Media Studies (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 221-36.

[9] Robin Ramsay, ‘Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City’, Lobster, Issue 27: 1994.

[10] Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma (Simon & Schuster, 1992) p.60.

[11] Quoted in David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism p.59.

[12] Tory! Tory! Tory! The Exercise of Power, Broadcast on BBC 4 on 11 August 2007, 01:40.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.351.

[16] Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 1994) p.ix.

[17] Stephen Hill, ‘Britain: The Dominant Ideology Thesis after a decade’, In Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner (eds.), Dominant Ideologies (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990) p.6.

[18] Ivor Crewe, ‘Values: The Crusade that Failed’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Thatcher Effect (Oxford University Press, 1989) pp. 239-50.

[19] Colin Leys, ‘Still a question of hegemony’, New Left Review, 181, p.127.

[20] John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.674.

[21] Tory! Tory! Tory! The Exercise of Power, Broadcast on BBC 4 on 11 August 2007, 01:40.

[22] John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.352.

[23] Andrew Gamble, ‘Europe and America’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.219.

[24] Robin Ramsay, ‘Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City’, Lobster, Issue 27: 1994.

[25] Tory! Tory! Tory! The Exercise of Power, Broadcast on BBC 4 on 11 August 2007, 01:40.

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Fidel Castro: The Duty to Avoid War in Korea

5 Apr

fidel_.si

A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years ago.

A virtually infinite number of life forms exist. In the sophisticated work of the world’s most eminent scientists the idea has already been conceived of reproducing the sounds which followed the Big Bang, the great explosion which took place more than 13.7 billion years ago.

This introduction would be too extensive if it was not to explain the gravity of an event as unbelievable and absurd as the situation created in the Korean Peninsula, within a geographic area containing close to five billion of the seven billion persons currently inhabiting the planet.

This is about one of the most serious dangers of nuclear war since the October Crisis around Cuba in 1962, 50 years ago.

In 1950, a war was unleashed there [the Korean Peninsula] which cost millions of lives. It came barely five years after two atomic bombs were exploded over the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, in a matter of seconds, killed and irradiated hundreds of thousands of people.

General Douglas MacArthur wanted to utilize atomic weapons against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Not even Harry Truman allowed that.

It has been affirmed that the People’s Republic of China lost one million valiant soldiers in order to prevent the installation of an enemy army on that country’s border with its homeland. For its part, the Soviet army provided weapons, air support, technological and economic aid.

I had the honor of meeting Kim Il Sung, a historic figure, notably courageous and revolutionary.

If war breaks out there, the peoples of both parts of the Peninsula will be terribly sacrificed, without benefit to all or either of them. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba, as Cuba has always been and will continue to be with her.

Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific achievements, we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her great friends, and it would be unjust to forget that such a war would particularly affect more than 70% of the population of the planet.

If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.

Fidel Castro Ruz

April 4, 2013

11:12 p.m.

The American Party of Labor Celebrates International Women’s Day

8 Mar

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Comrades around the world!

Today we celebrate March 8th, International Women’s Day. We reaffirm that the link between women’s liberation and total human emancipation from exploitation is unbreakable, and that we cannot have one without the other. To speak about revolution and the creation of a new society while ignoring the oppression of women is to march into battle at less than half strength.

Why is it so important that we make this affirmation on this day? In recent years many women have been justifiably put off by what shall hereby be referred to as the “left,” including some self-proclaimed socialist or communist organizations, due to numerous failures to demonstrate a proper attitude towards women’s liberation and proper behavior towards female comrades. In some cases, female activists have reported being marginalized and objectified, while in the more severe cases reports of sexual assaults have been inexcusably suppressed and victims intimidated, all for the sake of maintaining the integrity of the organization, as if an organization which ignores sexual harassment and even assault in its ranks could ever truly have the integrity that a revolution would inevitably require.

In this shameful series of failures on the part of self-proclaimed progressive forces, many groups and organizations have taken up a line on prostitution which only serves to justify and perpetuate patriarchy, as well as enrich the worst among capitalists. No matter how many reasoned arguments are made to refute their claims that prostitution is not “work like any other form of work,” and no matter how much evidence is mustered to show that legalized prostitution has failed to improve the lives of prostituted women while encouraging men to use women as they see fit, these “leftists” continue to insist that legalization of prostitution is the only possible road.

One of the major causes of these problems stems from what is an unfortunately very popular and vulgar belief, namely the idea that issues like women’s liberation must be put on hold until after the revolution, after the overthrow of capitalism. While it is true that the full liberation of women cannot be achieved so long as society is divided into hostile classes, this does not mean that revolutionaries, and in particular male revolutionaries, have no responsibility to wage a daily struggle against the oppression of women. If nowhere else, any woman should be able to find respite from a hostile world within the ranks of the workers’ movement. Once again, the primary burden of responsibility must inevitably fall on the shoulders of men in this regard. When we speak of women being oppressed, we must ask by whom are they oppressed, and the answer is men. This is not to be taken as a “divisive” statement accusing men but rather an objective fact. And it is for this reason that male revolutionaries must constantly be mindful of their behavior and call out sexism and misogynistic behavior or ideas whenever they might appear, and more importantly resolutely sweep them out of our organizations and coalitions.

On this day, International Women’s Day, the American Party of Labor publicly proclaims its support for the following:

  • Zero tolerance for sexual harassment and especially sexual assault within leftist organizations, coalitions, and events. Members should remain vigilant toward their own behavior and the behavior and attitudes of others.
  • Full rejection of any idea that claims women’s liberation and sexism in general are ideas which can “wait until after the revolution,” or that these things will be solved simply by the overthrow of capitalism. Oppression of women pre-dates capitalism, going back all the way till the beginning of class-based society. This being the case, how can anyone seriously claim that the overthrow of capitalism alone would end women’s oppression? The struggle against sexism, like racism and other social ills, must be waged within revolutionary organizations before, during, and after any hypothetical revolution. The regression of women’s rights in formerly socialist countries clearly demonstrates how difficult this struggle can be, how the overthrow of capitalism alone is insufficient, and how in the future any successful revolutionary party or organization must be ever vigilant on this front.
  • An abolitionist position on prostitution. The APL does not support the criminalization of prostituted women, and does not oppose the desire of any group of prostituted women to organize so as to acquire whatever rights and dignities they can attain by doing so, but the Party will not support any measures which legitimize pimps, traffickers, and buyers of sex. The only bourgeois legislation the APL can support on this issue would be any laws resembling the so-called Nordic Model, which criminalizes pimps, buyers, and landlords rather than prostituted women. This model properly puts the blame where it belongs, on the men who exploit women by selling or renting their bodies. In spite of the arguments by the prostitution industry, study after study show that this is the only bourgeois legal measure which reduces trafficking and risks toward women while providing prostituted women a path to exit from this vile trade. The legalization of prostitution means legitimization, making it “normal” for men to buy sex. Such a situation cannot help but to preserve and perpetuate patriarchy, as it would, and in fact already does, overwhelmingly benefit men at the expense of women.

So let us remember on this, International Women’s Day, that putting the struggle against women’s oppression on an equal plane with the struggle against capitalism does not detract from the latter, nor does it “divide” workers or set them against one another. The people who are guilty of such division are those who act as though female activists exist only to provide girlfriends and partners for male activists, those who turn a blind eye to sexual harassment, and those who masquerade as feminists seeking to empower women by giving them the “choice” to be prostitutes while arguing against any kind of consequences for the men who abuse them.

Waging a struggle against sexism and misogyny is what strengthens the movement and binds it together. Let us wage that struggle, comrades!

Editorial: Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela

5 Mar

hastaBy OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA

He wrote, he read, and mostly he spoke. Hugo Chávez, whose death has been announced, was devoted to the word. He spoke publicly an average of 40 hours per week. As president, he didn’t hold regular cabinet meetings; he’d bring the many to a weekly meeting, broadcast live on radio and television. Aló, Presidente, the programme in which policies were outlined and discussed, had no time limits, no script and no teleprompter. One session included an open discussion of healthcare in the slums of Caracas, rap, a self-critical examination of Venezuelans being accustomed to the politics of oil money and expecting the president to be a magician, a friendly exchange with a delegation from Nicaragua and a less friendly one with a foreign journalist.

Nicaragua is one of Venezuela’s allies in Alba, the organisation constituted at Chávez’s initiative to counter neoliberalism in the region, alongside Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia. It has now acquired a life of its own having invited a number of Caribbean countries and Mexico to join, with Vietnam as an observer. It will be a most enduring legacy, a concrete embodiment of Chávez’s words and historical vision. The Bolívarian revolution has been crucial to the wider philosophy shared and applied by many Latin American governments. Its aim is to overcome global problems through local and regional interventions by engaging with democracy and the state in order to transform the relation between these and the people, rather than withdrawing from the state or trying to destroy it.

Because of this shared view Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentinians perceived Chávez as an ally, not an anomaly, and supported the inclusion of Venezuela in their Mercosur alliance. Chávez’s Social Missions, providing healthcare and literacy to formerly excluded people while changing their life and political outlook, have proven the extent of such a transformative view. It could be compared to the levelling spirit of a kind of new New Deal combined with a model of social change based on popular and communal organisation.

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Chávez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Chávez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d’état in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October. He was a rare thing, almost incomprehensible to those in the US and Europe who continue to see the world through the Manichean prism of the cold war: an avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat. To those who think the expression of the masses should have limited or no place in the serious business of politics all the talking and goings on in Chávez’s meetings were anathema, proof that he was both fake and a populist. But to the people who tuned in and participated en masse, it was politics and true democracy not only for the sophisticated, the propertied or the lettered.

All this talking and direct contact meant the constant reaffirmation of a promise between Chávez and the people of Venezuela. Chávez had discovered himself not by looking within, but by looking outside into the shameful conditions of Latin Americans and their past. He discovered himself in the promise of liberation made by Bolívar. “On August 1805,” wrote Chávez, Bolívar “climbed the Monte Sacro near Rome and made a solemn oath.” Like Bolívar, Chávez swore to break the chains binding Latin Americans to the will of the mighty. Within his lifetime, the ties of dependency and indirect empire have loosened. From the river Plate to the mouths of the Orinoco river, Latin America is no longer somebody else’s backyard. That project of liberation has involved thousands of men and women pitched into one dramatic battle after another, like the coup d’état in 2002 or the confrontation with the US-proposed Free Trade Zone of the Americas. These were won, others were lost.

The project remains incomplete. It may be eternal and thus the struggle will continue after Chávez is gone. But whatever the future may hold, the peoples of the Americas will fight to salvage the present in which they have regained a voice. In Venezuela, they put Chávez back into the presidency after the coup. This was the key event in Chávez’s political life, not the military rebellion or the first electoral victory. Something changed within him at that point: his discipline became ironclad, his patience invincible and his politics clearer. For all the attention paid to the relation between Chávez and Castro, the lesser known fact is that Chávez’s political education owes more to another Marxist president who was also an avowed democrat: Chile’s Salvador Allende. “Like Allende, we’re pacifists and democrats,” he once said. “Unlike Allende, we’re armed.”

The lesson drawn by Chávez from the defeat of Allende in 1973 is crucial. Some, like the far right and the state-linked paramilitary of Colombia would love to see Chavismo implode, and wouldn’t hesitate to sow chaos across borders. The support of the army and the masses of Venezuela will decide the fate of the Bolívarian revolution, and the solidarity of powerful and sympathetic neighbours like Brazil. Nobody wants instability now that Latin America is finally standing up for itself. In his final days Chávez emphasised the need to build communal power and promoted some of his former critics associated with the journal Comuna. The revolution will not be rolled back. Unlike his admired Bolívar, Chávez did not plough the seas.

Source

Venezuela begins seven days of mourning after death of Hugo Chávez

5 Mar

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 and  in Caracas

  • Vice president Nicolas Maduro takes up interim post
  • Wave of mourning breaks out in streets of Venezuela
  • Chávez to get state funeral in Caracas

Venezuelans began seven days of painful and public mourning on Tuesday night after the announcement that their president, Hugo Chávez, had died aged 58 after a long battle against cancer.

The country’s vice-president, Nicolás Maduro – tipped as a likely successor – broke the news on Tuesday night, prompting a wave of grief in the nation’s streets.

“We have just received the most tragic and awful information. At 4.25pm, President Hugo Chávez Frias died,” Maduro announced in a televised address, his voice choking. “It’s a moment of deep pain,” he said.

Chávez died at a military hospital in Caracas, the capital of the country he has ruled since 1999. As soon as the news was announced, supporters gathered at the city’s main square, Plaza Bolivar, and began chanting: “Chávez vive, la lucha sigue” – “Chávez lives, the battle continues.”

People wearing the red beret the president was known for sang a popular folk song with the words: “Those who die for life cannot be called dead.”

As messages of condolence came from many world leaders, perhaps the most significant was from Barack Obama. He said: “At this challenging time of President Hugo Chávez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the US remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”

Chávez, the symbol of Latin American socialism, succumbed to a respiratory infection on Tuesday evening, 21 months after he first revealed he had a tumour. He had not been seen in public for three months since emergency surgery in Cuba on 11 December.

He will be given a state funeral in Caracas on Friday, likely to be attended by millions of supporters and leftwing leaders from across the globe who have been inspired by Chávez’s doctrine of “Bolivarian 21st-century socialism”, grateful for the subsidised energy he provided or simply impressed by his charisma. His death will also trigger a presidential election, to be held within 30 days, to decide who controls the world’s greatest untapped reserves of oil.

His designated successor, Maduro, is likely to face Henrique Capriles, the losing opposition candidate in the presidential election held a few months ago in October 2012. Until then, according to the constitution, the interim president should be the head of the national assembly, Diosdado Cabello. However on Tuesday night the Venezuelan foreign minister, Elias Jaua, said Maduro was the interim president. It was not clear whether this would only apply until the official calling of the election and beginning of the campaign, or whether Maduro would remain in charge until the election result was determined.

Robert Menendez, chairman of the US Senate foreign relations committee, called for free and fair elections to replace Chávez. “Hugo Chavez ruled Venezuela with an iron hand and his passing has left a political void that we hope will be filled peacefully and through a constitutional and democratic process, grounded in the Venezuelan constitution and adhering to the Inter-American Democratic Charter.”

Replacing one of most colourful figures on the global political landscape will be an immense challenge. Born to a poor family on the plains, Chávez became a tank commander and a devotee of South America’s liberator, Simón Bolívar. A failed coup in 1992 propelled him into the limelight but it was his ballot box triumphs that made him an inspiration for the resurgent Latin American left and the most outspoken – and often humorous – critic of the US, the war in Iraq and George Bush, whom he described as a “donkey” and a “devil”. Formerly one of the most dynamic political leaders in the world with a globe-trotting schedule and a weekly, unscripted TV broadcast – often hours long – Chávez shocked his countrymen in June 2011 when he revealed that Cuban surgeons had removed a baseball-sized tumour from his pelvic region.

After that, he underwent several rounds of chemotherapy and two more operations in what he described as a “battle for health and for life”. His medical records were never made public, prompting widespread speculation about his imminent demise, but he and his supporters insisted he was recovering. Before the presidential election in October 2012, aides claimed he was well enough to complete a full term. During that campaign, Chávez was clearly affected by his illness. But although he made fewer and shorter appearances, he won more votes than in any of his earlier elections battles, prompting him to proclaim victory in a “perfect battle”.

Fears about his health escalated after he rushed to Cuba for hyperbaric oxygen treatment on 27 November. Less than a fortnight later, he made a televised address in which he said that doctors had discovered malignant cells that required surgery and urged Venezuelans to vote for Maduro if he was incapacitated.

Since his operation in December, Chávez has been visited by family members and several of his closest political allies, including Fidel and Raul Castro of Cuba, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

Beyond a set of four photographs released last month that showed a remarkably hearty looking Chávez smiling in a hospital bed and flanked by his daughters, the president has not been seen or heard for three months. This prompted frequent rumours that the president was dead or on life support. The government denied this and said he continued to run the country by writing down his orders.

But officials acknowledged that Chávez suffered multiple complications after his surgery including respiratory infections and bleeding. He had to undergo more chemotherapy and drug treatments and could only breathe through a tracheal tube. He returned from Cuba on 18 February at his own request, said officials. Since then he has been treated at Carlos Arvelo military hospital in Caracas.

Hopes for a recovery dimmed on Monday, when minister of communications, Ernesto Villegas, said the president’s condition had declined due to a “new and serious respiratory infection.”

Constitutional questions have been raised by his long hospitalisation and absence from public life, which he formerly dominated with dynamic and provocative appearances on his weekly television address, Hello Mr President.

When he failed to attend his scheduled inauguration on 10 January, the opposition asked who is running the country. The ruling party responded with a rally of more than 100,000 supporters, many carrying banners declaring “We are Chávez.”

Source

JFK secretly freed rapists, drug dealers and Mafia hitmen to kill Castro and curb threat of Communism, claims explosive new book

15 Feb
  • Revelations made by journalist Bill Deane in new book ‘Smooth Criminal’
  • It tells story of alleged CIA spy and ‘one-man crime wave’ Dave Riley
  • Claims criminals allowed on ‘crime sprees’ in US when not working for CIA
  • Deane: ‘Riley was typical recruit: Intelligent, ambitious and without morals’
  • While JFK did not order the programme, Deane says he was ‘aware’ of it

By MATT BLAKE

President John F. Kennedy secretly endorsed the release of hardened criminals to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro to curb the Communist threat, a new book has claimed.

At the height of tensions between America and neighbouring Communist Cuba in the early 1960s, JFK was implicit in the freeing of rapists, drug dealers, and Mafia hitmen through CIA in a bid to recruit ‘untraceable’ spies willing to risk their lives on dangerous missions rather than go back to jail, a new book sensationally claims.

Desperate to remove Castro from power, the president resorted to using dangerous criminals as operatives – rather than CIA agents – to ‘do America’s dirty work’ as they couldn’t be linked back to his administration, it is claimed.

In one failed plot, an ex con was smuggled into Cuba in 1962 to pose as a waiter in Castro’s favourite restaurant where he would drop poison tablets into the revolutionary leader’s soup.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy appearing on television talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
President Kennedy secretly endorsed the release of hardened criminals to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro to curb the Communist threat, experts have claimed.

Height of the Cold War: Desperate to remove Fidel Castro, right, from power, President John F. Kennedy, left, resorted to using dangerous criminals as operatives – rather than CIA agents – to ‘do America’s dirty work’

The explosive claims come in a new book by veteran American Journalist and author William Deane, who claims specially-recruited criminals became ‘untouchable’ and were allowed to embark on ‘crime sprees’ in the US without fear of prosecution.

Deane, former assignment editor at American news networks ABC and CBS, says he uncovered the programme – which he believes is still in operation today – after following the ‘trail of destruction’ left by one such operative.

Though JFK did not order the setting up of the top secret programme, Deane says that as president Kennedy would have ‘been aware’ of it.

‘For over 50 years, the CIA and American government has been systematically releasing dangerous criminals back into society to work for them on secret missions overseas,’ said Deane, whose new book Smooth Criminal details the life of alleged CIA operative and ‘one-man American crime wave’ Dave Riley.

‘The programme started during the Kennedy administration at the start of the 1960s as a clandestine means of dealing with the Communist threat of Castro, and was given the seal of approval by JFK – who was still smarting following the political embarrassment of the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961.

Journalist and author William Deane
President Kennedy secretly endorsed the release of hardened criminal to assassinate Cubas President Castro and curb the Communist threat

‘One man American crime wave’: The details of the plot were revealed by veteran journalist and author William Deane, whose new book Smooth Criminal, right, details the life of alleged CIA operative and ‘one-man American crime wave’ Dave Riley

‘Criminals were ideal operatives as they were ruthless and willing to risk their lives during missions rather than be sent back to prison. They also couldn’t be officially connected with the CIA so it didn’t matter if they were captured – there was no risk of America’s shady policies being exposed.

‘Riley was a typical recruit. Highly intelligent, ambitious and with no morals. The CIA sent him on many missions abroad, including to Cuba to assassinate Castro,’ added Deane.

‘Between missions he was allowed to do what he liked – which generally consisted of embezzlement, fraud, gunrunning and drug dealing – without fear of being arrested or prosecuted.’

Warning: Deane claims the CIA continues to recruit hardened criminals to 'do America's dirty work' with impunityWarning: Deane claims the CIA continues to recruit hardened criminals to ‘do America’s dirty work’ with impunity

Deane claims to have first encountered Riley back in 1961 while working as a DJ at a radio station in Miami, Florida.

Riley, then in his early 20s and with ambitions of being the ‘next Frank Sinatra’, had connections with the Mafia and used his connections to ‘persuade’ the radio station to play his records.

Though they lost touch, Deane next heard of Riley in April 1962 when working as a cub reporter for a Miami TV station – after hearing he had hijacked a plane to Cuba.

According to news reports, on Friday, April 13, 1962, Riley and an accomplice had forced pilot Reginald Doan at gunpoint to fly them to the communist island, where they planned to defect, only for the Cuban authorities to imprison them before sending them back to Miami.

Deane says he was contacted by Riley prior to the Black Friday Skyjacking trial and during that meeting revealed that he was working for the CIA and had been sent to infiltrate Cuba as a spy.

‘The skyjacking was just a smokescreen conjured up by the CIA after the mission went wrong.

‘Riley confessed that he’d been recruited by the intelligence agency while in prison for extortion of a public official back in 1960, and had been sent to Cuba to carry out a number of assignments – including one to assassinate Castro.

‘He had posed as a waiter at one of Castro’s favourite restaurants and been supplied with Botulinum tablets – an untraceable poison – by the CIA to drop into his soup, but Castro must have got wind of the plan as he suddenly stopped eating there.’

Deane admits that at first he thought that Riley was a ‘fantasist’ and, after the criminal was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the skyjacking by the U.S. Supreme Court in November 1964, largely forgot about him.

Kennedy with military leaders in 1962: The programme started during the Kennedy administration at the start of the 1960s as a clandestine means of dealing with the Communist threat of Castro.JFK with military leaders in 1962: The programme started during the Kennedy administration at the start of the 1960s as a clandestine means of dealing with the Communist threat of Castro. but Deane claims the practice is still in use today

It was only after his retirement from CBS in 2005, when he started writing Smooth Criminal, that Deane discovered that Riley might have been telling the truth about the criminal operatives programme all along.

Deane traced Riley’s whereabouts from the time of the skyjacking trial onwards and found that far from serving his time in jail, he had apparently been back on the streets committing crimes within a matter of months.

The journalist uncovered over 40 newspaper reports of Riley’s various crimes in archives and gained further corroboration of his seeming invulnerability to prosecution after tracking down several of his victims.

He added: ‘Riley was a one-man crime wave who was allowed by the CIA, and indirectly the president, to consistently get away with his crimes in return for his occasional assistance.

‘In the late 1960s and early ’70s he went on undercover missions to Vietnam, Cambodia and other troubled South Asian countries, and back at home got away with embezzlement, fraud, gunrunning, drug dealing and sexual assault among other crimes.

Smoking gun: Deane says Riley had posed as a waiter at one of Castro's (pictured) favourite restaurants and been supplied with Botulinum tabletsSmoking gun: Deane says Riley had posed as a waiter at one of Castro’s (pictured) favourite restaurants and been supplied with Botulinum tablets – an untraceable poison – by the CIA to drop into his soup, but Castro must have got wind of the plan as he suddenly stopped eating there

‘He has left a string of victims across the USA over the last 40 years, but the police and FBI have been powerless to act because he is protected by the CIA. The agency maintains a policy of complete secrecy and doesn’t want to risk compromising operations by having one of their operatives involved in a public trial.

‘One unfortunate woman who came across Riley was swindled out of $20,000 – her life savings – and the deeds to several properties, but the police and Feds weren’t allowed to warn her, and weren’t allowed to stop him.’

Deane says that he has evidence of Riley living in New York in 2005, but after that the scene goes cold.

He claims requests for information from the FBI, CIA, Treasury and other government agencies were ignored and suspects Riley, now in his 70s, is either dead or has been placed into a Federal Witness Protection scheme to put him out of reach.

Deane says he doesn’t disapprove of America’s criminal operatives programme per se, but has written Smooth Criminal to warn the American public about the programme in case they become victims of ‘untouchables’ such as Riley.

He added: ‘America has lots of enemies and security has to be maintained if we are to prevent another 9/11 so I am not against a programme that helps protect the nation.

‘What I do object to is the CIA’s insistence on complete secrecy. The rationale that a few Americans have to suffer for the sake of 315 million is not acceptable.

‘It’s sad and pathetic that totally innocent Americans have lost virtually everything, including their homes and businesses, while the Feds stood by and did nothing but protect their released criminals.

‘The CIA should be capable of controlling freed criminals without exposing their clandestine operations, and if they can’t, should discretely warn potential victims to keep away from these people.’

Source

APL Speech from 19th of January Anti-Fascist Protest against Golden Dawn in Chicago

22 Jan

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Greetings fellow anti-fascists and comrades. Welcome to this solidarity action with immigrant rights groups and anti-fascists in Athens, across Greece and around the world. We have a few speakers today who will talk about Greece’s critical struggle against the rising tide of fascism – and why we must take up this struggle in the United States today.

We know from history that in times of economic crisis and austerity, when the just rage of working people threatens the ruling class and its dictatorship of capital, those elites dispense with the pretense of democracy in favor of authoritarian rule designed to keep the working class in line and ensure steady profits. They try to convince us that we should turn our anger away from the failures of the system as a whole and direct it instead at scapegoats –  immigrants, leftists, people of different religions or sexual orientations.

In Greece today, Golden Dawn thugs who claim to be bearers of Greek culture are instead perpetrating a wave of racist, repressive violence rooted in ignorance, fear, hate, and blind obedience to charismatic, manipulative leaders. Their true inspiration comes not from Aristotle or Democritus, but from the virulent Balkan nationalism that has claimed millions of lives and produced centuries of atrocities.

True Greek patriots risked – and even sacrificed – their lives to defend and ultimately liberate Greece from the fascist thugs who occupied her from 1941-1944. They include Konstantinos Koukidis, an honor guard at the Acropolis on April 27, 1941, who when German soldiers ordered him to raise the Nazi war flag, wrapped his country’s flag around his body and threw himself off the cliff to his death instead. That occupation flag flew over the Acropolis for barely a month – until two young anti-fascists, Apostolos Santas and Manolis Glezos, risked their lives to tear it down, an act of defiance that inspired not only the Greek people but occupied peoples across Europe. Glezos was later arrested more than once, including by a Greek collaborator – a traitorous precursor to today’s Golden Dawn party.

We’re here to tell Golden Dawn and their allies in today’s Greek government that they’re not welcome in America – that Greek Americans and their allies will drive them from our shores just as Greek patriots drove out the Nazis and their collaborationist lackeys in 1944. We’re inspired by Greek heroes like Koukidis, Santas, and Glezos – and by today’s modern-day antifascists in Greece – and we will not allow Golden Dawn to pervert and distort the Greek people’s proud anti-fascist history on American soil. Golden Dawn has appeared on our shores because they’re welcome here by fellow fascists. We say to these stooges of the elites that in these desperate times we will not be fooled by dishonest appeals to people’s fear and uncertainty. Instead, we stand up as one and tell them all YOU SHALL NOT PASS!  NO PASARAN!

Speech & Photos from 19th of January Anti-Fascist Protest in Chicago against Golden Dawn

22 Jan

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The following statement was read aloud by the comrades of the No Golden Dawn in Chicago Working Group in front of the Greek consulate

NoGoldenDawnChicago@gmail.com | www.facebook.com/NoFascistGoldenDawnPartyInChicago | @NoGoldenDawnChi | 312-446-4939

January 19, 2013

The Honorable Ioanna Efthymiadou

Consul General in Chicago, The Hellenic Republic

650 North St.Clair St., Chicago Illinois 60611

 

Dear Madam Consul General:

We write as Greeks in Chicago, as the American-born children and grandchildren of Greeks, as workers, immigrants, artists, union members, human rights advocates and activists from a host of backgrounds. We write to condemn the Greek government’s use of police violence against virtually every protest on the streets of Greece — unless those protests are organized by fascists, who count police officers as members of their ranks.

We condemn your government’s sweeping use of chemical weapons against protesters, the wanton arrest of civilians who resist police violence, the torture of anti-fascist demonstrators, and your government’s naked abandonment of even the most fundamental principles of democracy.

Your government has used the police — including the fascists in their ranks — to squelch dissent and soften the ground for growing corruption and austerity, the evisceration of even the most basic economic safety net, and the ongoing transfer of wealth from ordinary Greeks to the elites your government serves. Your government has stood by idly while fascists maim and murder — including the murder in Athens on January 17 of Pakistani cyclist Shehzad Luqman, one more atrocity in a relentless series of attacks on immigrants, people of color, leftists, LGBT people and anyone who dares to speak out against fascism or the Greek government. Greek police routinely criminalize not the perpetrators of these crimes, but instead the people who speak out against these neo-Nazis — while your government sets those same Greek riot police upon the Greek people in a wave of violence that now rivals the worst practices of the dictatorship.

No people, no nation, no progressive impulse inspires us more than the example set by the people of Greece themselves — who are engaged in a daily, heroic struggle to resist not just Golden Dawn, fascism and right-wing extremism but the wider wave of state-sponsored repression that seeks to undermine their just struggle for jobs, education, housing and dignity. Greeks have withstood generations of repression. The Greek people endured WWII’s devastating Nazi occupation, which took the lives of tens of thousands of Greeks from starvation, assassination, Nazi death camps and extermination campaigns. Greeks have endured years of right wing dictatorship — a legacy of authoritarianism that your government increasingly parrots, particularly in your tacit embrace of the open neo-Nazi agenda that Golden Dawn and its fascist allies promote both within and outside of the government.

Chicago is a city of immigrants, including a large and well-established Greek American community — and the Golden Dawn party has declared its intentions to expand operations into this community. Your government’s tacit collusion with Golden Dawn and its murderous agenda opens the door for these fascists to not only continue to terrorize the people of Greece, but to expand that wave of terror to the United States, to the very city that hosts your consulate.

Golden Dawn members have a well-documented history of brutality, destruction and murder that targets Jews, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, gays and lesbians, progressives and any Greeks who oppose their racist, xenophobic worldview. No civilized government would stand for this. The group’s open violence has sparked a growing international push-back that is increasingly — and rightly — putting responsibility for the impunity of Golden Dawn squarely at the feet of Greece’s ruling party.

We embrace the aspirations of Greek protesters in the streets on January 19 in Athens — and their opposition to austerity, government repression and the growth of neo-Nazism in Greece. We reject your government’s policies — including your government’s raids on the squats in Athens and the police campaign to crush dissent in a wave of state-sponsored violence against immigrants, workers, autonomous social centers, unions, leftists, the poor and any Greeks who oppose your government’s catastrophic austerity and privatization policies.

We join those anti-fascists in holding your ruling party and your government responsible for these predations and the lethal effects of austerity — and in demanding that they end. Finally, we have one simple response to any Golden Dawn plans to extend its reach anywhere in our city or on this planet: No Pasaran.

Yours,

The members and supporters of the No Golden Dawn in Chicago Working Group

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MLK Day: the Lessons of Pacifism & the Civil Rights Movement

21 Jan

Today is the celebration of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the United States. While it is ostensibly celebrated to promote the Civil Rights Movement, one wonders why MLK, among all other more active and progressive civil rights leaders, was chosen to receive a federal holiday. The answer lies in history: Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been successful in his bid for civil rights for black people if groups like the Black Panthers and individuals such as Malcolm X did not remind America of the alternative of pacifism.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy has been one of two strong messages which are spread on this holiday: a message of anti-racism and the preaching of nonviolence. One famous quote says that nonviolence “is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.” Another says “Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.” In the hands of American historians, the story of MLK has become a warning against legitimate action against oppression, and thus for the American ruling class has become a useful tool to remind people to never rebel, even if they are oppressed.

The American Party of Labor has already outlined its position on the flaws of the non-violent strategy of resistance in this previous article: Gandhi Was Wrong – Nonviolence Doesn’t Work. Pacifism is a useful tool to those who use violence, such as those in power. Peaceful protests in the Civil Rights Movement were only successful because of the other alternative. Pacifism against fascist and authoritarian regimes is suicide and does nothing in achieving liberation. Resistance, which eventually must take on violent forms, is the only way to fight imperialism. Despite popular myth, Gandhi’s resistance did not defeat the British—rioting Indians did. We have decided that, on this important holiday celebrated by so many, we will offer both a brief history of the significance of the entire Civil Rights Movement, and not just a single individual, as well as a more expansive analysis of the tactic of nonviolence.

Historical Context

The struggle for black civil rights was definitely an advance for humanity. The black population was being exploited economically as well as intimidated socially and physically by racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, assisted by lynching mobs and police. Racist terror grew from the southern states and became national in scope. At its peak, the KKK numbered in the tens of millions. Thousands were lynched, churches and houses were burned and innocents were arrested and murdered for protesting. In some states, hoards of ex-Confederate soldiers in white robes roamed the streets at will with guns and torches. Racist terrorism became widespread and institutionalized: Jim Crow laws were in full effect, segregating the black population under apartheid.

The Role of the State

Even after the supposed “end” of such outward racial oppression (these days they prefer an electric chair to a lynching rope and Death Row to the Old Oak Tree) after “equality” legislation was passed by the bourgeoisie, racism remained a powerful oppressive force in the United States. Social, economic and educational disadvantages reigned supreme. Poverty among African-Americans was widespread and education was hard to come by. Blacks were still not allowed to vote and until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were still not allowed to go into most public buildings, restaurants, schools, bathrooms or public facilities. Law enforcement continued to collaborate with groups such as the KKK. Federal enforcement such as the FBI was called upon to enforce the anti-segregation laws, but it was extremely rare that they actually did their jobs. The film Mississippi Burning for example, while giving an appropriate portrayal of such racist murder, also gives an optimistic picture of the willingness of the state to enforce its own supposed laws.

The FBI, at that point, was in fact too busy executing the infamous COINTELPRO project, which arranged the assassination of such civil rights leaders as Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Bobby Hutton and Bunchy Carter. Declassified FBI documents now show the true extent of the US government’s crimes during that time, which are freely admitted. Under the “Counterintelligence Program,” the documents say that the government should:

“Prevent the RISE OF A ‘MESSIAH’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah;’ he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism” (1).

The same document continues:

“This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence” (1).

The state also refused during this time to stop violent attacks on left-wing and progressive groups, such as the slaughter of leftists by the KKK in both the Greensboro Massacre and the racist and anti-Semitic riots in Peekskill during the concert of popular black singer Paul Robeson.

Rise of the Movement

After all this sordid and star-crossed history, from 1955-1968 the African-American Civil Rights Movement arose, a time of civil unrest and popular rebellion against oppression. Out of this came such popular figures and groups as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, W. E. B. Du Bois and many others. There was a popular ferment to support the immediate end of oppression and imperialism against non-white peoples at home and abroad. Even liberals such as MLK were soon labeled as “radicals and troublemakers.” Most of the Civil Rights leaders, including King, would up dead at the hands of racist murderers or, more often, the state itself acting on the bourgeoisie’s behalf. To this day however, the imperialists are unable to kill the living memory of the movement, and they live in terror of a similar movement in the future.

The Truth about Nonviolent Protests against Oppression

Even though racist oppression still continues to the United States to this day, committed by not only individual racists and supremacist group, but also by our own bourgeoisie, the Civil Rights Movement did manage to make the rulers panic and win social and political rights for black people. The time has come however, to smash some of the Myths regarding the legacy left behind by Martin Luther King, the same message that has been picked up by the same government who created the documents above. Nonviolent protests are only one means of resisting, and must only be a way to reach the higher goal of revolution. There is a time and a place for peaceful protest, but in the real world, nonviolence must not be a doctrine or an absolute policy.

Non-violent civil disobedience only works within extremely limited context, and not against an enemy such as the American state, which are absolutely committed to violence in service of its own ends. Living under imperialism, strict adherence to non-violence on the part of the oppressed is nothing more than suicide. The victims of genocide and fascism cannot and should not use only the pacifist route to end their suffering. Oppressed people should not have to justify their struggle to idealists.

“An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind” is a typical argument heard by those who advocate nonviolence as a dogma. On the one hand the oppressors are incorrect for doing wrong but you are also equally “wrong” for striking back and trying to stop them. All violence is most certainly not “equally bad.” This line of reasoning is simply ludicrous. Nonviolence has been popularized and upheld to a level so high that it is now nothing more than a weapon in the hands of an imperial power that has no qualms about cracking the heads of protestors for civil rights. As the APL has said before, the results of the Civil Rights Movement were not because of Martin Luther King’s avocation of nonviolence, but in spite of it. The true “successful results” of nonviolence can be seen in fascist or apartheid regimes, for example the amount of peaceful protestors murdered by the United States, the Israeli government or Nazi Germany.

It’s Right to Rebel

In order to bring about true revolutionary change, we cannot rely on those in power, that is, those who create the conditions of bigotry, violence, racism and colonialism to overnight change their minds and either side with us, or give up their power. That does not happen, never has and never will. American slavery didn’t end through peaceful protest—it took a Civil War. Foreign occupation never ends peacefully, either in Africa, Palestine, Vietnam, Korea or Iraq. Fascism did not end through peaceful protest either. The desires of oppressed people to fight back must be supported, and more than that, encouraged.

Sources

1) http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/COINTELPRO-FBI.docs.html

Eight Are Charged With Chilean Singer’s 1973 Murder After Military Coup

3 Jan
Víctor Jara, a folk singer, songwriter and theater director, was 40 when he died.

Víctor Jara, a folk singer, songwriter and theater director, was 40 when he died.

By PASCALE BONNEFOY

SANTIAGO, Chile — Eight retired army officers were charged on Friday with the murder of a popular songwriter and theater director, Víctor Jara, who was tortured and killed days after the 1973 military coup in a stadium that had been turned into a detention center.

Judge Miguel Vásquez charged two of the former officers, Pedro Barrientos and Hugo Sánchez, with committing the murder and six others as accomplices. Mr. Sánchez, a lieutenant colonel, was second in command at the stadium. Mr. Barrientos, a lieutenant from a Tejas Verdes army unit, currently lives in Deltona, a city southwest of Daytona Beach, Fla., and was interrogated by the F.B.I. earlier this year at the request of a Chilean court. Attempts to reach Mr. Barrientos for comment were unsuccessful; his two listed telephone numbers had been disconnected.

Judge Vásquez issued an international arrest warrant against Mr. Barrientos through Interpol Santiago and ordered the arrest of the other seven, who were in Chile. Those charged as accomplices are Roberto Souper, Raúl Jofré, Edwin Dimter, Nelson Hasse, Luis Bethke and Jorge Smith.

Víctor Jara, then 40, was a member of the Communist Party and a leading folk singer in the late 1960s and early ’70s. A day after the American-supported Sept. 11 coup that ousted the socialist president, Salvador Allende, Mr. Jara was arrested by the military at the Santiago Technical University, where he was a professor and researcher, along with hundreds of students, teachers and staff members.

The detainees were bused to Chile Stadium, since then renamed Víctor Jara Stadium, and held in the bleachers for days with thousands of other prisoners, in the custody of army units brought in from various parts of the country.

Judge Vásquez established that Mr. Jara was recognized by military officers, separated from the rest of the detainees and taken to the basement dressing rooms, which were being used to question prisoners. There, he was interrogated, beaten and tortured by several officers, according to the court.

On Sept. 16, 1973, when the stadium was evacuated and the prisoners transferred to the larger, open-air National Stadium in the capital, Víctor Jara and a former prison service director, Littré Quiroga, who was also detained there, were taken to the basement and killed. The bodies of both men and three other victims were later found dumped near a railroad track outside a cemetery; one of the victims remains unidentified. According to the autopsy report, Mr. Jara was badly beaten and was shot 44 times.

Mr. Jara’s widow, Joan Turner, a British dancer and a resident of Santiago, was unavailable for comment.

Source

The Rise and Fall of Third Worldism – Part 1

1 Jan

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PART ONE: “Two, Three, many Vietnams”: National Liberation and the Rise of the Third World (1945 – 1991)

Asia, Africa and Latin America in the Early Years of the Century

With the exception of Latin America, and several noteworthy cases in Africa and Asia, the pre-1945 history of what came to be known as the “Third World” is overwhelmed by the fact of imperialism. Native voices were silenced and native cultures nearly eradicated.

In Asia, Japan was the only country to industrialize, and thus the only country to emerge as a major player in world affairs. Although at first resistant to Western influences; by the middle of the 19th century Japan had embarked on a major modernization program. Building upon traditional values, Japan built an army and navy powerful enough to challenge Russia over Korea at the turn of the last century; and strong enough to join the British, French, Germans, and Americans in carving out a sphere of influence in China. A hybrid of feudal/warrior institutions and modern technology would characterize Japan throughout most of the 20th century. Some argue that this mixture would enable Japanese economic success.

China, the most populous nation on earth, with a culture going back some 5,000 years, was weak and felt herself victimized by the Great Powers. Unlike Japan, China had not modernized. Chinese institutions had frozen. The Manchu dynasty which had ruled China for some 300 years seemed more interested in maintaining itself in power than in bettering the lot of its people; the majority of whom lived in conditions of appalling poverty. Although there was a strong feeling against foreign domination, which periodically erupted into mass uprisings such as the Boxer Rebellion; China had been effectively divided up amongst the Great Powers, who controlled large areas known as ‘concessions’ where they enjoyed trade monopolies. The corrupt and infirm Manchu dynasty fell underneath its own weight in 1911. The collapse of Manchu rule created a power vacuum which was filled by ambitions local strongmen, the ‘warlords,’ who became a law unto themselves in China’s vast outlying regions and frustrated any attempt at national unification.

Only two nations in Africa escaped colonial rule: Liberia and Ethiopia. Liberia, created by American abolitionists in 1825 as place to which future freed slaves could be “repatriated,” existed as a small anomaly to the general imperialist trend. Ethiopia, the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia, continued as a feudal monarchy surrounded by European protectorates and outright colonies.

Latin America was the great exception. By 1821, most of the old Spanish and Portuguese colonies had become independent states. Most of the 19th Century, in Latin America was consumed by a fierce struggle between traditional elites who favored a continuation of the old colonial plantation system and modernizers who wished to institute capitalist economics and bring in contemporary technologies and ideas. This conflict was further complicated by the beginning of the 20th Century by the active involvement of the United States in the region. Going back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1825, the United States had seen Latin America as its “back yard”; and American investments and interests in Latin America grew exponentially.

In Central America and the Caribbean, the battle between Conservatives (traditionalists) and Liberals (modernizers) lasted, in some case up to the 1930s. The ever increasing US presence stunted indigenous development and encouraged the rise of military dictatorships which maintained a precarious balance between repressing domestic dissent and ensuring continued US support. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonial rule was replaced, in the first instance by an apparent independence masking the reality of outside control, and in the second case, by direct US annexation.

Different scenarios were played out north and south of Central America. To the north, Mexico, which had, shortly after independence, lost much of its territory to the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1842, developed a strong, albeit contradictory state. In 1911, the Mexican Revolution overthrew the 40-year military dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and inaugurated a period of titanic political/economic/social struggle. Populist radical leaders such as Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata vied with conservatives such as Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon as ad hoc revolutionary armies fought against whom ever happened to constitute the government at the time and each other. Eventually, the radicals were either marginalized or destroyed, and power settled into the hands of a conservative, modernizing elite composed of political strongmen and their followers. This elite held power through the mechanism of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI oversaw the secularization and modernization of Mexican society. By 1945, Mexico was a contradictory mixture of large cities with modern industries, and a poor, backward countryside; a strong national sense of self, and control by a coterie of politicians and businessmen; an independent foreign policy, and a sharp awareness of the presence of the United States. In one way or another, this pattern would come to characterize not only Mexico, but much of Latin America.

In the south, Brazil and Argentina were becoming industrial power houses – albeit conflicted ones. Brazil seemed to follow the pre-established Mexican pattern: large, sprawling urban areas surrounded by impoverished rural zones. Brazil’s industries were concentrated in the north and along the coast; the wealth of the interior was only sporadically exploited. Argentina, with its large immigrant population (mainly Italian and Eastern European) provided something of a contrast. Heavy industry had appeared at the dawn of the century; the immense volume of European immigrant coming to work in those industries. The immigrants brought with them European ideas and social relations; both of which conflicted with traditional values. By 1945 the dictatorship of Juan Peron which combined a fascist core with modernizing elements initiated a period of military rule which would, by and large, characterize Argentina until the 1980s.

Imperialism and Colonialism Revisited

The decisions of the Versailles Conference of 1919 dismantled the Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but kept the British and French Empires intact. Not only that, but the Portuguese continued to rule Angola and Mozambique in Africa; the Belgians continued to rule the Congo; and the Dutch continued to govern Indonesia. The Middle East was divided between British French spheres of influence and protectorates. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did become independent commonwealths – and Ireland did fight her way to a disunited independence – but, by and large, imperialism remained intact after World War I.

It wouldn’t be until after World War II that powerful drives towards independence and de-colonization would shatter the old European empires and create the modern states of Asia and Africa. The Second World War, with its anti-fascist and democratic aspirations, would impel the peoples of the colonial world to demand the same.

National Independence Struggles

In some cases, indigenous forces had played a major role in the defeat of the Axis powers. In Vietnam and Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno (respectively) emerged from the war as venerated national leaders. After the war, the French attempted to restore their rule in South East Asia. This misguided attempt came to an end in 1954 when, at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese forces under the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh which had previously defeated the Japanese; now prevented the French from returning. When the Americans tried to supplant the French, they too came to grief. A similar situation unfolded in Indonesia when the Dutch tried to restore the pre-war order. A similar outcome resulted: Sukarno, who had led resistance to the Japanese, now oversaw the independence of Indonesia.

The British came out of World War II in no condition to hold their empire together. In India, the Congress Party, under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah had been the focus of the independence movement there for decades. Their moment arrived in 1948 when the British pulled out and Indian independence was declared. But independence brought crisis. Perhaps with British encouragement, Jinnah led a faction which demanded that a separate Muslim state be created. In multi-religious, polyglot India, this demand led to massive disruption, forced resettlement of huge amounts of people, and a great amount of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed. In the end, India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Muslim) were created as two separate – and mutually hostile – states.

In Africa, decolonization quite often led to extended periods of instability. Independence leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Julius Nyere (Tanzania), and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) strove to modernize their countries by following a socialist model of development. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba failed to establish a fully independent state, at the cost of his life. In many parts of Africa, the pull out of the colonial powers created confusion, chaos, and ethnic strife. Often this was caused by old imperial states themselves, as they continued to try to exert influence in their former possessions by sponsoring ethnic and political rivalries. Portugal refused to divest itself of its colonies, with the result that it took nationalist guerrilla movements until the 1970s to establish the independent nations of Mozambique and Angola. In the former British colonies of Rhodesia and South Africa, the white settler population refused to yield to demands for civil equality for the native Africans. Fighting lasted until 1975 when Rhodesia became the majority-African governed Zimbabwe (under Robert Mugabe); and until 1989 when the racist apartheid system was destroyed in South Africa (under Nelson Mandela).

In the Middle East, the Algerian Revolution of 1956 forced the French out of that country. In Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser came to power with a promise to encourage “Arab unity” and “Arab Socialism.” Nasser’s ideas spread to Syria and Iraq, where a movement claiming to champion Arab Socialism, but in fact more reminiscent of Italian Fascism took hold, Baathism. In many cases, interference by Western powers led to the displacement of radical, modernizing regimes with repressive conservative governments. The neutralization of the Left and the bankruptcy of the Right led many to see radical Islam as a viable political alternative.

The creation, by UN mandate, of the state of Israel in 1948 exacerbated the crises endemic to the area. The flow of immigrants to the new Jewish state led to the displacement of much of the native Palestinian population. The new Israel developed into a thoroughly militarized state, eventually going to war with the surrounding Arab states in 1967 and 1973.

The movement for de-colonization was strongly affected by the Cold War. Many independence movements had adopted one or another variety of socialism as its ideology, and many post-independence regimes sought Soviet aid. Other, more conservative post-independence governments became allies of the United States. Some changed sides. Thus, movements such as the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, Frelimo in Mozambique, and the MPLA in Angola saw themselves as Marxist; Israel, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia were in the US camp; while governments in Algeria, Egypt, and the Congo (Zaire) switched from Soviet to American sponsorship. The proxy conflict between the US and USSR was played out in the post-colonial world. Soon, two other forces, China and Cuba, would enter the fray.

The Chinese Revolution

China has seen a century of revolution – and some would say that it’s far from over. Revolution overthrew the decrepit Manchu dynasty in 1911. The newly created Chinese Republic, under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), wanted to create a united, modern, and democratic China. The first step in achieving this would be the cancellation of foreign concessions and the bringing to heel of the regional warlords. It was ‘simple’ enough to ask the British, French, etc. to leave; the second part of that equation was more difficult to achieve. The warlords were ensconced in remote areas, unseating them would require a trained, professional army. In order to raise an officer class capable of leading such an army, the Whampoa military academy was established in 1920. The Whampoa academy attracted many young, patriotic Chinese of all political persuasions. Many of China’s future leaders would come out of the Whampoa Academy. At the head of the academy, as director, was Sun yat-Sen’s protégé, Chiang Kai-Shek. By the end of the 1920s, the “Northern Expedition,” as the anti-warlord campaign was termed, was largely successful. By that time, however, a new conflict had developed.

The new China was alone in the world. The former imperial powers, who had just been asked to leave, weren’t about to render any aid. Desperate for support, China turned to another nation just then going through a revolution of their own, the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed to provide political and military aid to China, but at a price: that the Kuomintang bring into the government, as partners, the newly-created Communist Party of China. Sun Yat-Sen agreed, and the Communists were essential to victory in the Northern Expedition. However, Sun Yat-Sen’s lieutenant Chiang Kai-shek vehemently disagreed with any cooperation with the Communists. After Sun’s death in 1925, he was succeeded by Chiang who jettisoned any pretense of democracy, making himself military dictator. Chiang also wanted to get rid of the Communists at the first available opportunity.

In November of 1927, Chiang struck. Nationalist troops unexpectedly turned on their Communist fellows. In all of China’s major cities, Communists and their sympathizers were massacred in the streets. Overnight, the Chinese Communist Party was almost exterminated. In a state of confusion and disarray, the surviving Communists, made their way to the southern province of Jianxi where, a local Communist leader, an ex-librarian named Mao Tse-tung, had managed to hold the party together.

Organizing Communist guerrilla forces into a Red Army, Mao managed to hold off the Nationalists long enough to force an escape out of Jianxi. Known as the “Long March,” the Communists embarked on a 6,000 mile trek over rivers, mountains, and deserts, fighting Nationalists troops all the way. Finally, the Communists found sanctuary in the area of Yenan in China’s northern mountains. This, then, became their base. The Long March solidified Mao as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party. From Yenan, Mao’s Communists engaged Chiang’s Nationalists in guerrilla warfare, and extended the Communist-controlled zone.

The full-scale Japanese invasion of China brought a temporary truce between the Communists and Nationalists, as they agreed to join forces against the foreign occupiers. Overall, as American advisers during World War II pointed out, the Communists were the more effective fighters against the Japanese. Chiang seemed to be more afraid of the Chinese Communists than he was of the invading Japanese; and American aid sent to Chiang often ended up in the pockets of Nationalist politicians. The end of the war and the defeat of Japan signaled a resumption of hostilities between the Nationalists and Communists. After an intense four-year civil war, Communist forces gained the upper hand. Chiang’s Nationalists were forced to flee the mainland; establishing themselves, as the republic of China, on the island of Taiwan – where they have remained to this very day. On October 10, 1949, from Beijing, Mao proclaimed the creation of the new, communist, Peoples Republic of China.

Communist China became a new and powerful ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In fact, Chinese troops entered the Korean War against the United States. Domestically, the Communists embarked on numerous developmental and modernization campaigns. Campaigns to eliminate infectious disease and illiteracy, as well as campaigns to ensure the equality of women were, in great part, successful. Attempts to industrialize China’s economy were less so. The best known of these, the “Great Leap Forward” (1959), which tried to jump start China’s development through mass participation in the form of things such as encouraging the building of backyard blast furnaces to produce steel, was a failure.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union and his policy of Peaceful Coexistence with the West met with disapproval in Beijing. Mao felt that the new Soviet leaders were abandoning revolutionary principles and bowing to the US. Tensions within the Communist camp came to the breaking point in 1961 when, at a meeting of Communist parties in Moscow, the Chinese and Albanian delegations denounced the Soviets and their supporters and walked out. The Sino-Soviet split divided the world Communist movement and led to the creation of new, more militant Communist groups dedicated to the Chinese position. China felt itself to be the new center of the world revolutionary movement and, as such, supported and encouraged revolutionary parties and guerrilla groups in the Third World. The Cold War was developing into a three-cornered fight.

Within the Communist Party of China itself, Mao feared that elements similar to those represented by Khrushchev in the USSR would derail his revolutionary vision. Starting in 1964, Mao moved to isolate “conservative” and “pragmatic” elements in the Party. His attempt at a mass mobilization to reinvigorate revolutionary enthusiasm resulted in the upheaval known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution consumed China in chaos as radical and moderate forces, through the medium of youth organizations known as “Red Guards,” jostled each other for power and influence. Reaching a crescendo in 1966 – 1967, the Cultural Revolution involved pitched armed battles between rival Red Guard units. Mao called a halt to the anarchy in 1969, castigating some of the excesses of the more extreme radicals. However, tension and conflict between the more radical and the more pragmatic members of Mao’s inner circle remained.

The same year, 1969, that Mao rolled back the Cultural Revolution saw an intensification of the Sino-Soviet crisis as the Chinese and Soviets came to blows over a border dispute. This event seems to have convinced Mao that the Soviet Union was a greater threat to China than the United States. China offered the United States an opportunity to begin a normalization of relations; an opportunity the American President Richard Nixon took advantage of. In 1972, Nixon traveled to China, met with Mao and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, and the thaw in the Chinese- American Cold War began.

Chou En-lai’s, a protector of the moderates in Mao’s circle, death in 1976, followed by Mao’s own passing later that year renewed the conflict between radicals and moderates within ruling Party circles. After a brief and intense power struggle, the radicals were defeated. Deng Xiaoping, who had been exiled as a “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution emerged as China’s new leader. Deng’s policies not only reversed the Cultural Revolution, but effectively dismantle communism itself. Throughout the 1980s, China more and more embraced a pro-market orientation, encouraging foreign investment and development of key industries. By the 1990s, China had emerged as a major economic force, exporting goods across the globe. Although the People’s Republic of China is still ruled by the Communist Party, it has, in fact, become a modern capitalist power.

The Cuban Revolution

Although conducted on a much smaller scale than the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 would send even stronger shock waves throughout the Third World. On New Year’s Eve of 1959, guerrilla forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew the long-standing government of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista had been supported by the United States since 1933; and, under his leadership, the island had become a haven for US interests which virtually managed the Cuban economy.

Castro’s victory signaled major reform, including land redistribution, literacy and public health campaigns, and the nationalization of major utilities and industries. These latter reforms incurred the ire of American corporations which lost their investments in Cuba. The United States’ severing of diplomatic relations followed by the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and an economic embargo against Cuba caused the Castro government to fully enter the Soviet orbit. However, the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union was far from smooth. Having come to power in through a guerrilla movement in a peasant society, Cuba had much in common with China. Both China and the USSR courted Cuba to support them in their struggle with each other. Cuba was, for a time, caught between the feuding Communist powers. Instead, Cuba developed a unique image and presented itself as a model for Third World nations to follow. This pleased neither China nor the Soviet Union. Adding to the conflict with the Soviets was Cuba’s support for armed guerrilla movements, especially in Latin America, which threatened Soviet attempts at a rapprochement with the US.

In the wake of the Cuban Revolution guerrilla and national liberation movements emerged, aiming at spreading the Cuban example in Latin America. Castro’s right-hand-man, the Argentine born Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was central to this endeavor. Guevara personally led Cuban-trained guerrillas in Africa; and, in an attempt to foment revolution in South America, died while organizing a guerrilla force in Bolivia, becoming a revolutionary icon in the process. Although most of the guerrilla organizations spawned in the 1960s failed, they had the unexpected consequence of producing a severe reaction in the form of repressive military regimes devoted to their destruction. Thus, in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina, extremely violent military dictatorships characterized those nations in the 1970s. In Chile, the election and subsequent overthrow of a Socialist president, Salvador Allende, produced a similar phenomenon. Cuban advisers trained guerrillas in other parts of the world, as well, namely Angola and South Africa.

Cuban attempts at developing an independent, diversified, modern economy met with failure. By the 1970s, Cuba had abandoned overtly encouraging armed struggle and integrated itself into the Soviet system. This would continue until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

In the 1950s, Indian Prime Minister Nehru stated that the modern world was divided into “Three Worlds.” The “First World” consisted of the United States and the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe; the “Second World” was the Soviet Union and its Communist Bloc allies; the “Third World” was the poor, underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Fought over by both the First and Second Worlds, Nehru urged the Third World to develop an independent stance, find its own voice, and put forward its own demands and aspirations. Thus, the “Non-Aligned Movement” came into being.

Led by India’s Nehru, Yugoslavia’s Tito, and Egypt’s Nasser, Non-Alignment did not mean neutrality. India leaned to the West, Cuba (who later joined the Non-Aligned Movement), leaned towards the Soviets; instead, Non-Alignment meant that the Third World countries recognized that they shared a commonality of interests. Indeed, many of the Non-Aligned nations were bitter rivals; India and Pakistan readily come to mind. However, despite sometimes serious differences, the Non-Aligned nations managed to bring questions of development and industrialization, debt and poverty, national independence and self-determination to the world’s attention.

Although the Non-Aligned movement seems to have greatly dissipated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the appearance of a unipolar world dominated by the United States, non-alignment did shift world politics from the East vs. West emphasis of the Cold War to the North vs. South conflict that persists to this very day.

FORTHCOMING:

PART TWO: “The coming of the new international:” Third Worldist Theory in the 1950s – 1970s.

Privatization in Ex-Communist Countries Killed Over One Million People

30 Dec

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As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.

The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.

The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.

David Stuckler from Oxford, and colleagues Dr Lawrence King from Cambridge University and Professor Martin McKee, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, took death rates reported by the World Heath Organisation for men of working age (15-59 years) in 25 post-communist countries and compared them to the timing and extent of participation in mass privatisation and other transition policies.

The team took into account other factors that might affect rising death rates (such as economic depression, initial conditions and health infrastructure). They also examined other measures of privatisation from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a bank which gave loans in support of radical mass privatisation.

During the 1990s, former communist countries underwent the world’s worst peacetime mortality crisis in the past 50 years – with over three million avoidable deaths and 10 million ‘missing’ men, according to the United Nations.

However, while life expectancy plummeted in some countries, like Russia and Kazakhstan; the populations’ health steadily improved in other countries, such as Slovenia. Previous research shows that unemployment and levels of alcohol consumption are major factors behind these differences, but this study is thought to be the first to isolate aspects of the reforms process that might cause these variations. It finds that death rates are linked to the speed and type of privatisation and resulting unemployment – and also to the level of social support available. If at least 45 per cent of the country’s population were members of at least one social organisation, such as a church or trade union, they were better protected from the economic shocks, the authors found.

David Stuckler, from Oxford’s Department of Sociology, said: ‘Our study helps explain the striking differences in mortality in the post-communist world.  Countries which pursued rapid privatisation, or ‘shock therapy’, had much greater rises in deaths than countries which followed a more gradual path. Not only did rapid privatisation lead to mass unemployment but also wiped out the social safety nets, which were critical for helping people survive during this turbulent period.’

Professor Martin McKee said: ‘As variants of rapid reform policies are being debated in China, India, Egypt and other developing and middle-income countries, including Iraq, our study reminds us that radical economic reforms affect ordinary people and, in some cases, cost them their lives.’

Source

Condemned…again: ‘Genocidal’ US embargo on Cuba slammed by UN for 21st year

29 Nov
(Reuters / Enrique de la Osa)

(Reuters / Enrique de la Osa)

The UN has urged the US to lift the 52-year trade embargo with Cuba in an almost-unanimous vote. Cuba likened the blockade to “genocide” and said it was disappointed that Obama had not taken measures to lift the disputed embargo.

Of the 193 members of the UN assembly, 188 voted to abolish what is widely perceived as an illegal blockade. The only two nations that got behind the US were Israel and the Pacific nation of Palau, while two countries abstained from the vote.

This is the 21st year running that the UN has decried the American economic sanctions against the island nation.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez addressed the assembly, voicing Cuban disappointment that despite Obama’s pledge to open a new chapter in Cuban-American relations on assuming office four years ago, no steps had been taken the lift the crippling embargo.

“The reality is that the last four years have been characterized by the persistent tightening of …the embargo,” he said.

The Cuban government has calculated that since the blockade was enforced in 1960 the total financial damage to Cuba’s economy is around US$3 trillion.

Rodriguez qualified the maintenance of the embargo as tantamount to “genocide” and a “massive, flagrant and systematic violation of the human rights” of the people of Cuba.

He criticized America for what he called a “costly double standard” for wasting “hundreds of millions of dollars from the taxes that are paid by US citizens in the useless and illegal subversion against Cuba.”

US president Barack Obama has taken measures to facilitate US travel to the island nation, but has thus far refrained from taking any further steps to lift the embargo. The US justifies its stance by saying it is waiting for signs of changes in Cuba’s political regime and improvements in the island state’s human rights record.

The embargo was originally introduced with a view to crippling Cuba’s communist regime, which took power in the country following the 1959 revolution headed by Fidel Castro.

‘A loyal friend’?

In fact, US envoy at the UN assembly, Ronald D. Godard argued the embargo is “one of the tools in our overall efforts to encourage respect for the human rights and basic freedoms to which the United Nations itself is committed.”

Cuba’s resolution seeks to identify an external scapegoat for the island’s economic problems when they are principally caused by the economic policies that Cuban government has pursued for the past half century,” Godard said.

He stressed that the US was a “loyal friend” to Cuba and it is working to “empower Cubans who wish to determine their own future.”

Citing the case of Alan Gross, a US citizen who was arrested in Cuba and currently serving a 15-year sentence for setting up internet networks on the island, Godard said his imprisonment had halted diplomatic proceedings with Cuba.

Minister Rodriguez’s speech was greeted by thunderous applause, while Godard’s was met with comparative silence at the assembly vote.

Cuba has offered to work in tandem with the US in areas such as the fight against drug trafficking, terrorism and human trafficking. However, Washington has affirmed that its policy towards Cuba will remain intact for the time being.

Source

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