@Comprehensive49
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(Also known as the June Fourth Incident)
In Western media, the well-known story of the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" goes like this: the Chinese government declared martial law in 1989 and mobilized the military to suppress students who were protesting for democracy and freedom. According to western sources, on June 4th of that year, troops and tanks entered Tiananmen Square and fired on unarmed protesters, killing and injuring hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The more hyperbolic tellings of this story include claims of tanks running over students, machine guns being fired into the crowd, blood running in the streets like a river, etc.
Anti-Communists and Sinophobes commonly point to this incident as a classic example of authoritarianism and political repression under Communist regimes. The problem, of course, is that the actual events in Beijing on June 4th, 1989 unfolded quite differently than how they were depicted in the Western media at the time. Despite many more contemporary articles coming out that actually contradict some of the original claims and characterizations of the June Fourth Incident, the narrative of a "Tiananmen Square Massacre" persists.
After Mao's death in 1976, a power struggle ensued and the Gang of Four were purged, paving the way for Deng Xiaoping's rise to power. Deng initiated economic reforms known as the "Four Modernizations," which aimed to modernize and open up China's economy to the world. These reforms led to significant economic growth and lifted millions of people out of poverty, but they also created significant inequality, corruption, and social unrest. This pivotal point in the PRC's history is extremely controversial among Marxists today and a subject of much debate.
One of the key factors that contributed to the Tiananmen Square protests was the sense of social and economic inequality that many Chinese people felt as a result of Deng's economic reforms. Many believed that the benefits of the country's economic growth were not being distributed fairly, and that the government was not doing enough to address poverty, corruption, and other social issues.
Some saw the Four Modernizations as a betrayal of Maoist principles and a capitulation to Western capitalist interests. Others saw the reforms as essential for China's economic development and modernization. Others still wanted even more liberalization and thought the reforms didn't go far enough.
The protestors in Tiananmen were mostly students who did not represent the great mass of Chinese citizens, but instead represented a layer of the intelligentsia who wanted to be elevated and given more privileges such as more political power and higher wages.
Jay Mathews, the first Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post in 1979 and who returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations, wrote:
Over the last decade, many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night. They repeated it often before and during Clinton’s trip. On the day the president arrived in Beijing, a Baltimore Sun headline (June 27, page 1A) referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” A USA Today article (June 26, page 7A) called Tiananmen the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down.” The Wall Street Journal (June 26, page A10) described “the Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops ordered to clear demonstrators from the square killed “hundreds or more.” The New York Post (June 25, page 22) said the square was “the site of the student slaughter.”
The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
— Jay Matthews. (1998). The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press. Columbia Journalism Review.
Reporters from the BBC, CBS News, and the New York Times who were in Beijing on June 4, 1989, all agree there was no massacre.
Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside the square:
Cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and released exclusively by The Daily Telegraph, partly confirm the Chinese government's account of the early hours of June 4, 1989, which has always insisted that soldiers did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square
— Malcolm Moore. (2011). Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim
Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, and Chinese-speaking correspondent of the International Business Times, wrote:
The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time — among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night.
Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed. All that has happened is that the location has been changed – from the Square itself to the streets leading to the Square.
— Gregory Clark. (2014). Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We're 'Remembering' are British Lies
Thomas Hon Wing Polin, writing for CounterPunch, wrote:
The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.
More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed. And the demands of the protesters focused on corruption, not democracy.
All these facts were known to the US and other governments shortly after the crackdown. Few if any were reported by Western mainstream media, even today.
— Thomas Hon Wing Palin. (2017). Tiananmen: the Empire’s Big Lie
(Emphasis mine)
And it was, indeed, bloodshed that the student leaders wanted. In this interview, you can hear one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, ghoulishly explaining how she tried to bait the Chinese government into actually committing a massacre. (She herself made sure to stay out of the square.): Excerpts of interviews with Tiananmen Square protest leaders
This Twitter thread contains many pictures and videos showing protestors killing soldiers, commandeering military vehicles, torching military transports, etc.
Following the crackdown, through Operation Yellowbird, many of the student leaders escaped to the United States with the help of the CIA, where they almost all gained privileged positions.
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Anti-Communists and Sinophobes claim that there is an ongoing genocide-- a modern-day holocaust, even-- happening right now in China. They say that Uyghur Muslims are being mass incarcerated; they are indoctrinated with propaganda in concentration camps; their organs are being harvested; they are being force-sterilized. These comically villainous allegations have little basis in reality and omit key context.
Xinjiang, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a province located in the northwest of China. It is the largest province in China, covering an area of over 1.6 million square kilometers, and shares borders with eight other countries including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, India, and Pakistan.
Xinjiang is a diverse region with a population of over 25 million people, made up of various ethnic groups including the Uyghur, Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and many others. The largest ethnic group in Xinjiang is the Uyghur who are predominantly Muslim and speak a Turkic language. It is also home to the ancient Silk Road cities of Kashgar and Turpan.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, several factors contributed to a resurgence of separatist sentiment among Uyghur nationalists in Xinjiang. Since the early 2000s, there have been a number of violent incidents attributed to extremist Uyghur groups in Xinjiang including bombings, shootings, and knife attacks. Some high-profile examples include:
In 2014-2016, the Chinese government launched a "Strike Hard" campaign to crack down on terrorism in Xinjiang, implementing strict security measures and detaining thousands of Uyghurs. In 2017, reports of human rights abuses in Xinjiang including mass detentions and forced labor, began to emerge.
As materialists, we understand that terrorists don't magically appear out of thin air. There are material reasons for people resorting to such extreme measures. In order to combat the threat of rising extremism, these reasons must be indentified and resolved. One of the main causes is economic marginalization. When people are economically disadvantaged or excluded from mainstream economic activity, they may be more likely to turn to extremism as a way to address their grievances and gain a sense of purpose. Generally speaking, people who feel like they have a bright future do not resort to terrorism. It is only when people feel hopeless or trapped that they resort to such measures.
If the issue is that the Uyghurs were disenfranchised, and that is the reason they were susceptible to religious fundamentalism and resorting to terrorism, then surely the solution is to enfranchise them to remove that material condition. This is what the Strike Hard campaign ultimately sought to accomplish.
There is only flimsy evidence for the most egregious of the allegations being made about what China is doing in Xinjiang, it should be an easy matter to dismiss. Normally, the burden of evidence lies with the party making the claims. However, Western media is happy to spread rumours and present the allegations as having merit because it serves America's imperialist interests. Additionally, given the severity of the allegations and the gravity of the crimes China is being accused of, this issue has been taken very seriously by the international community, especially the international Muslim community.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the second largest organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The OIC released Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the non-OIC Member States in 2019 which:
- Welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat's delegation upon invitation from the People's Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People's Republic of China.
In this same document, the OIC expressed much greater concern about the Rohingya Muslim Community in Myanmar, which the West was relatively silent on.
Over 50+ UN member states (mostly Muslim-majority nations) signed a letter (A/HRC/41/G/17) to the UN Human Rights Commission approving of the de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang:
...separatism and religious extremism has caused enormous damage to people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, which has seriously infringed upon human rights, including right to life, health and development. Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers. Now safety and security has returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded. The past three consecutive years has seen not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang and people there enjoy a stronger sense of happiness, fulfillment and security. We note with appreciation that human rights are respected and protected in China in the process of counter-terrorism and deradicalization.
We appreciate China’s commitment to openness and transparency. China has invited a number of diplomats, international organizations officials and journalist to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counter-terrorism and deradicalization there. What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the media. We call on relevant countries to refrain from employing unfounded charges against China based on unconfirmed information before they visit Xinjiang.
The World Bank sent a team to investigate in 2019 and found that, "The review did not substantiate the allegations." (See: World Bank Statement on Review of Project in Xinjiang, China)
Even if you believe the deradicalization efforts are wholly unjustified, and that the mass detention of Uyghur's amounts to a crime against humanity, it's still not genocide. Even the U.S. State Department's legal experts admit as much:
The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials.
State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China | Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy. (2021)
China is not the only country to have faced faced a challenge of this nature. The United States, in the wake of "9/11", saw the threat of terrorism and violent extremism due to religious fundamentalism as a matter of national security. They invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks, with the goal of ousting the Taliban government that was harbouring Al-Qaeda. The US also launched the Iraq War in March 2003, which was justified by the Bush administration as a response to Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism. However, these claims turned out to be unfounded.
A former commander of NATO’s forces in Europe, [retired General Wesley] Clark claims he met a senior military officer in Washington in November 2001 who told him the Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq first before taking action against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan...
Clark says after the 11 September 2001 attacks, many Bush administration officials seemed determined to move against Iraq, invoking the idea of state sponsorship of terrorism, “even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever”...
He also condemns George Bush’s notorious Axis of Evil speech made during his 2002 State of the Union address. “There were no obvious connections between Iraq, Iran, and North Korea,” says Clark...
Instead, Clark points the finger at what he calls “the real sources of terrorists – US allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia”.
Clark blames Egypt’s “repressive policies”, Pakistan’s “corruption and poverty, as well as Saudi Arabia’s “radical ideology and direct funding” for creating a pool of angry young men who became “terrorists”.
US ‘plans to attack seven Muslim states’ | Al Jazeera (2003)
According to a report by Brown University's Costs of War project, at least 897,000 people, including civilians, militants, and security forces, have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and other countries. Other estimates place the total number of deaths at over one million. The report estimated that many more may have died from indirect effects of war such as water loss and disease. The war has also resulted in the displacement of tens of millions of people, with estimates ranging from 37 million to over 59 million.
The War on Terror also popularized such novel concepts as the "Military-Aged Male" which allowed the US military to exclude civilians killed by drone strikes from collateral damage statistics. (See: ‘Military Age Males’ in US Drone Strikes)
In summary:
Which one of those responses sounds genocidal?
Side note: It is practically impossible to actually charge the U.S. with war crimes, because of the Hague Invasion Act.
Let's review some of the people and organizations involved in strongly promoting this narrative.
One of the main proponents of these narratives is Adrian Zenz, a German far-right fundamentalist Christian and Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who believes he is "led by God" on a "mission" against China has driven much of the narrative. His anti-Communist and anti-China stances influence his work and makes him selective in his use of data. He relies heavily on limited and questionable data sources, particularly from anonymous and unverified Uyghur sources, coming up with estimates based on assumptions which are not supported by concrete evidence. He also ignores the broader historical and political context of the situation in Xinjiang, such as the history of separatist movements and terrorism in the region.
The World Uyghur Congress, headquartered in Germany, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, using funding to support organizations that promote American interests rather than the interests of the local communities they claim to represent.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) is part of a larger project of U.S. imperialism in Asia, one that seeks to control the flow of information, undermine independent media, and advance American geopolitical interests in the region. Rather than providing an objective and impartial news source, RFA is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, one that seeks to shape the narrative in Asia in ways that serve the interests of the U.S. government and its allies.
The first country to call the treatment of Uyghurs a genocide was the United States of America. In 2021, the Secretary of State declared that China's treatment of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang constitutes "genocide" and "crimes against humanity." Both the Trump and Biden administrations upheld this line.
As materialists, we should always look first to the economic base for insight into issues occurring in the superstructure. In this case, there is a compelling material reason for the US the promote a narrative of a genocide occurring in Xinjiang.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese infrastructure development project that aims to build economic corridors, ports, highways, railways, and other infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The project has been described as a new Silk Road, connecting China with its neighboring countries and expanding trade and economic ties with the rest of the world.
The BRI includes plans for major infrastructure projects in Xinjiang. These projects aim to improve connectivity and facilitate trade between China and countries in Central Asia and beyond. The Xinjiang region is critical part of the Belt.
For the United States, the BRI is a threat to its economic and political dominance. For one, the BRI could undermine US efforts to promote "free trade" agreements, which have often been used to lock in economic reforms and policies that benefit American corporations. The BRI also threatens to undermine US influence in key regions of the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, by providing countries with an alternative source of financing and investment that is not tied to US-led institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Moreover, the BRI could help to shift the global balance of power away from the United States and towards China. By expanding its economic influence and deepening its ties with other countries, China could emerge as a more formidable competitor to the United States in the global arena.
Promoting the Uyghur genocide narrative harms China and benefits the US in several ways. It portrays China as a human rights violator which could damage China's reputation in the international community and which could lead to economic sanctions against China; this would harm China's economy and give American an economic advantage in competing with China. It could also lead to more protests and violence in Xinjiang, which could further destabilize the region and threaten the longterm success of the BRI.
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Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
— Socialist Musings. (2017). Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, not just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a deliberate famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, Poor harvest and national suffering, characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
— Mark Tauger. (1992). The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry, Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words:
In 1941: Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’
— David Irving. (2001) Hitler's War and the War Path
In 1942: All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
— Werner Jochmann. (1980). Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
— Anna Louise Strong. (1956). The Stalin Era
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
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Anti-Communists and horseshoe-theorists love to tell anyone who will listen that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) was a military alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. They frame it as a cynical and opportunistic agreement between two totalitarian powers that paved the way for the outbreak of World War II in order to equate Communism with Fascism. They are, of course, missing key context.
The loss of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles had a profound effect on the German economy. Signed in 1919, the treaty imposed harsh reparations on the newly formed Weimar Republic (1919-1933), forcing the country to pay billions of dollars in damages to the Allied powers. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, required Germany to cede all of its colonial possessions to the Allied powers. This included territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, including German East Africa, German Southwest Africa, Togoland, Cameroon, and German New Guinea.
With an understanding of Historical Materialism and the role that Imperialism plays in maintaining a liberal democracy, it is clear that the National Bourgeoisie would embrace Fascism under these conditions. (Ask: "What is Imperialism?" and "What is Fascism?" for details)
Judeo-Bolshevism (a conspiracy theory which claimed that Jews were responsible for the Russian Revolution of 1917, and that they have used Communism as a cover to further their own interests) gained significant traction in Nazi Germany, where it became a central part of Nazi propaganda and ideology. Adolf Hitler and other leading members of the Nazi Party frequently used the term to vilify Jews and justify their persecution.
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was repressed by the Nazi regime soon after they came to power in 1933. In the weeks following the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis arrested and imprisoned thousands of Communists and other political dissidents. This played a significant role in the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933, which granted Hitler and the Nazi Party dictatorial powers and effectively dismantled the Weimar Republic.
Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Great Britain and other Western powers placed strict trade restrictions on the Soviet Union. These restrictions were aimed at isolating the Soviet Union and weakening its economy in an attempt to force the new Communist government to collapse.
In the 1920s, the Soviet Union under Lenin's leadership was sympathetic towards Germany because the two countries shared a common enemy in the form of the Western capitalist powers, particularly France and Great Britain. The Soviet Union and Germany established diplomatic relations and engaged in economic cooperation with each other. The Soviet Union provided technical and economic assistance to Germany and in return, it received access to German industrial and technological expertise, as well as trade opportunities.
However, this cooperation was short-lived, and by the late 1920s, relations between the two countries had deteriorated. The Soviet Union's efforts to export its socialist ideology to Germany were met with resistance from the German government and the rising Nazi Party, which viewed Communism as a threat to its own ideology and ambitions.
The appointment of Hitler as Germany's chancellor general, as well as the rising threat from Japan, led to important changes in Soviet foreign policy. Oriented toward Germany since the treaty of Locarno (1925) and the treaty of Special Relations with Berlin (1926), the Kremlin now moved in the opposite direction by trying to establish closer ties with France and Britain to isolate the growing Nazi threat. This policy became known as "collective security" and was associated with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister at the time. The pursuit of collective security lasted approximately as long as he held that position. Japan's war with China took some pressure off of Russia by allowing it to focus its diplomatic efforts on relations with Europe.
— Andrei P. Tsygankov, (2012). Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin.
However, the memories of the Russian Revolution and the fear of Communism were still fresh in the minds of many Western leaders, and there was a reluctance to enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union. They believed that Hitler was a bulwark against Communism and that a strong Germany could act as a buffer against Soviet expansion.
Instead of joining the USSR in a collective security alliance against Nazi Germany, the Western leaders decided to try appeasing Nazi Germany. As part of the policy of appeasement, several territories were ceded to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s:
However, instead of appeasing Nazi Germany by giving in to their territorial demands, these concessions only emboldened them and ultimately led to the outbreak of World War II.
Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.
Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history...
The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.
The new documents... show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.
But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer...
— Nick Holdsworth. (2008). Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'
After trying and failing to get the Western capitalist powers to join the Soviet Union in a collective security alliance against Nazi Germany, and witnessing country after country being ceded, it became clear to Soviet leadership that war was inevitable-- and Poland was next.
Unfortunately, there was a widespread belief in Poland that Jews were overrepresented in the Soviet government and that the Soviet Union was being controlled by Jewish Communists. This conspiracy theory (Judeo-Bolshevism) was fueled by anti-Semitic propaganda that was prevalent in Poland at the time. The Polish government was strongly anti-Communist and had been actively involved in suppressing Communist movements in Poland and other parts of Europe. Furthermore, the Polish government believed that it could rely on the support of Britain and France in the event of a conflict with Nazi Germany. The Polish government had signed a mutual defense pact with Britain in March 1939, and believed that this would deter Germany from attacking Poland.
Seeing the writing on the wall, the Soviet Union made the difficult decision to do what it felt it needed to do to survive the coming conflict. At the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's signing (August 1939), the Soviet Union was facing significant military pressure from the West, particularly from Britain and France, which were seeking to isolate the Soviet Union and undermine its influence in Europe. The Soviet Union saw the Pact as a way to counterbalance this pressure and to gain more time to build up its military strength and prepare for the inevitable conflict with Nazi Germany, which began less than two years later in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).
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According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
— Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelag" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. Read more
Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
- Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
- From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
- For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
- Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
- Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
- A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
- In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
— Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
— Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
— Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
— L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG
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“Freedom of the press” in bourgeois society means freedom for the rich systematically, unremittingly, daily, in millions of copies, to deceive, corrupt and fool the exploited and oppressed mass of the people, the poor.
— V. I. Lenin. (1917). How to Guarantee the Success of the Constituent Assembly
Anti-Communists criticize a lack of "freedom of the press" in societies run by Communist governments. They claim that the government suppresses dissenting voices and controls the media in order to maintain its power, and that this leads to a lack of transparency and accountability, as well as the suppression of free speech and the ability of individuals to express their opinions and hold those in power accountable. They also argue that state control of the media leads to censorship which prevents citizens from accessing unbiased information and making informed decisions. This critique is often used to argue against Communism and in favor of Capitalism. In this light, Capitalist societies are believed to offer greater freedom of the press and personal expression.
These are all important concerns which ought to be taken seriously. The problem is that these concerns are not specific to Communism; Capitalist societies, as a result of the profit-motive and the accumulation of wealth, suffer from all these same issues.
There can be no such thing as freedom of the press, except for the owners and editors of newspapers, while capitalism lasts.
— Arthur Cowell
Do you own a news station? A newspaper? Then what "freedom of the press" do you really have?
A deep analysis of America’s top 100 news sites reveals key shareholders, parent companies, and commonalities.
About 15 billionaires and six corporations own most of the U.S. media outlets. The biggest media conglomerates in America are AT&T, Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, National Amusements (which includes Viacom Inc. and CBS), News Corp and Fox Corporation (which are both owned in part by the Murdochs), Sony, and Hearst Communications.
— Who Owns Your News? The Top 100 Digital News Outlets and Their Ownership
With this kind of concentration, the select few who actually own these media outlets have an unparalleled ability to set the narrative and promote their own interests. Sinclair Broadcast Group, for example, owns hundreds of local TV news stations. The most infamous example of them using this network to spread an agenda was this unsettling video: Sinclair's Soldiers in Trump's War on Media.
This issue affects movies and television producers as well: Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today
All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.
— V. I. Lenin. (1921). A Letter To G. Myasnikov
In Capitalist societies, the concept of "freedom of the press" is a misleading and deceptive notion. While the ruling class promotes the idea of a free press as a fundamental right, the reality is that the press is owned and controlled by a small group of billionaires who use it to advance their own interests.
Under Capitalism, the media is a profit-driven industry that is dependent on advertising revenue to survive. As a result, the media serves the interests of the capitalist class by promoting their ideology and suppressing dissenting voices. This is evident in the way that news stories are framed and presented, with an emphasis on sensationalism, celebrity gossip, and consumerism, rather than on issues that affect working-class people.
The Capitalist media is not a neutral observer of society, but an active participant in the class struggle by hyper-focusing on culture war non-issues such as the endless debate about manufactured controversies such as trans women in sports, an issue which does not affect the vast majority of people. This ragebait distracts from real issues that affect the working class. The media is constantly scapegoating some minority group with sensationalized ragebait narratives such as the "Welfare Queen" or "illegal immigrants".
The owners and editors of media outlets use their power to set the narrative, which shapes public opinion and influences government policy, to serve their own interests. This is why it is essential for the working class to build its own media institutions that are independent of Capitalist influence.
The general deal is that Marvel gets to use real military hardware, film on military bases, and hire real soldiers as extras, while the Department of Defense gets to approve the final script of the film. In other words, Marvel gets tons of stuff to make production easier and cheaper, while the military gets to edit out anything that doesn't make them look good.
Even the movies that don't have a direct marketing connection to the US military have a noticeable bias towards it. Consider Black Panther, a movie about the monarch of an advanced African nation. The one prominent white character in that film is Everett K. Ross, a CIA agent who aids T'Challa in overthrowing Killmonger. The CIA has a long history of overthrowing regimes, but, in this film, an agent of the organization that put Pinochet in charge of Chile aids in a coup for good. This may not be the intention of the film, but the CIA sure appreciated it. The agency promoted the film heavily on social media, allowing it to glom onto a project that was seen as a great leap forward for representation and a masterful blockbuster film.
— The Marvel Military Propaganda Criticism, Explained | GameRant (2022)
The bottom line is that there is nothing "free" about the press in Capitalist society. For those who have the means, being able to control the media is an incredibly powerful tool for shaping public opinion. We need a truly free and democratic press, but that will never be possible under Capitalism.
The corporate media in the US practices self-censorship by limiting the range of acceptable opinions and perspectives that can be expressed in their reporting. This is done to maintain a narrow range of political debate that is acceptable to the ruling class and to ensure that the interests of the Capitalist class are not threatened.
During red scare period of the 1950s, the government was cracking down on leftist and progressive organizations, accusing them of being communist sympathizers or agents. Many journalists and media outlets were investigated and harassed for their supposed left-wing leanings by the the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which led to a climate of fear and self-censorship in the media.
As a result, many media outlets and journalists began to avoid covering or promoting progressive or leftist ideas in their reporting. This trend has continued to the present day, with mainstream media outlets often avoiding critical coverage of US foreign policy, imperialism, and corporate power, and instead promoting a narrow range of views that are acceptable to the ruling class.
Similarly, Operation Mockingbird began in the early years of the Cold War to recruit journalists to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. The US government also operates a few explicit propaganda networks such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and more in order to export America's ideology internationally, particularly in regions where Communism is popular. In particular, RFE/RL was meant to counter the USSR and RFA was meant to counter the PRC. Organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) fund activities which promote America's interests.
First, we could ensure that the media is owned and controlled by the working class. This would allow the media to operate in the interests of the people rather than in the interests of profit and of promoting bourgeois ideology. We could also ensure that the media is run democratically, with workers having a say in the editorial and managerial decisions.
Second, we could establish strict guidelines for media coverage, ensuring that the media covers events and issues of importance to the people. These guidelines would be developed through democratic participation, with workers, intellectuals, and activists contributing to the decision-making process. We could also establish mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating media coverage to ensure that it is accurate, objective, and free from bias.
Third, we could promote a culture of critical thinking and media literacy among the population. This would help the people to evaluate media coverage critically and to identify when propaganda is being spread. We could also promote independent media outlets and encourage the development of a vibrant and diverse media landscape.
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Anti-Communists of all stripes enjoy referring to successful socialist revolutions as "authoritarian regimes".
This pejorative label is simply meant to frighten people, to scare us back into the fold (Liberal Democracy).
There are three main reasons for the popularity of this label in Capitalist media:
Firstly, Marxists call for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (DotP), and many people are automatically put off by the term "dictatorship". Of course, we do not mean that we want an undemocratic or totalitarian dictatorship. What we mean is that we want to replace the current Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie (in which the Capitalist ruling class dictates policy).
Secondly, democracy in Communist-led countries works differently than in Liberal Democracies. However, anti-Communists confuse form (pluralism / having multiple parties) with function (representing the actual interests of the people).
[!NOTE] Side note: Check out Luna Oi's "Democratic Centralism Series" for more details on what that is, and how it works:
- DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM - how Socialists make decisions! | Luna Oi (2022)
- What did Karl Marx think about democracy? | Luna Oi (2023)
- What did LENIN say about DEMOCRACY? | Luna Oi (2023)
Finally, this framing of Communism as illegitimate and tyrannical serves to manufacture consent for an aggressive foreign policy in the form of interventions in the internal affairs of so-called "authoritarian regimes", which take the form of invasion (e.g., Vietnam, Korea, Libya, etc.), assassinating their leaders (e.g., Thomas Sankara, Fred Hampton, Patrice Lumumba, etc.), sponsoring coups and colour revolutions (e.g., Pinochet's coup against Allende, the Iran-Contra Affair, the United Fruit Company's war against Arbenz, etc.), and enacting sanctions (e.g., North Korea, Cuba, etc.).
Anarchists are practically comrades. Marxists and Anarchists have the same vision for a stateless, classless, moneyless society free from oppression and exploitation. However, Anarchists like to accuse Marxists of being "authoritarian". The problem here is that "anti-authoritarianism" is a self-defeating feature in a revolutionary ideology. Those who refuse in principle to engage in so-called "authoritarian" practices will never carry forward a successful revolution. Anarchists who practice self-criticism can recognize this:
The anarchist movement is filled with people who are less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive social order than with washing their hands of it. ...
The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is necessary to actually win freedom. Anti-capitalism doesn't do the victims of capitalism any good if you don't actually destroy capitalism. Anti-statism doesn't do the victims of the state any good if you don't actually smash the state. Anarchism has been very good at putting forth visions of a free society and that is for the good. But it is worthless if we don't develop an actual strategy for realizing those visions. It is not enough to be right, we must also win.
...anarchism has been a failure. Not only has anarchism failed to win lasting freedom for anybody on earth, many anarchists today seem only nominally committed to that basic project. Many more seem interested primarily in carving out for themselves, their friends, and their favorite bands a zone of personal freedom, "autonomous" of moral responsibility for the larger condition of humanity (but, incidentally, not of the electrical grid or the production of electronic components). Anarchism has quite simply refused to learn from its historic failures, preferring to rewrite them as successes. Finally the anarchist movement offers people who want to make revolution very little in the way of a coherent plan of action. ...
Anarchism is theoretically impoverished. For almost 80 years, with the exceptions of Ukraine and Spain, anarchism has played a marginal role in the revolutionary activity of oppressed humanity. Anarchism had almost nothing to do with the anti-colonial struggles that defined revolutionary politics in this century. This marginalization has become self-reproducing. Reduced by devastating defeats to critiquing the authoritarianism of Marxists, nationalists and others, anarchism has become defined by this gadfly role. Consequently anarchist thinking has not had to adapt in response to the results of serious efforts to put our ideas into practice. In the process anarchist theory has become ossified, sterile and anemic. ... This is a reflection of anarchism's effective removal from the revolutionary struggle.
— Chris Day. (1996). The Historical Failures of Anarchism
Engels pointed this out well over a century ago:
A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned.
...the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part ... and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule...
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.
— Friedrich Engels. (1872). On Authority
Parenti said it best:
The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
— Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
But the bottom line is this:
If you call yourself a socialist but you spend all your time arguing with communists, demonizing socialist states as authoritarian, and performing apologetics for US imperialism... I think some introspection is in order.
— Second Thought. (2020). The Truth About The Cuba Protests
Even the CIA, in their internal communications (which have been declassified), acknowledge that Stalin wasn't an absolute dictator:
Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by a lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist's power structure.
— CIA. (1953, declassified in 2008). Comments on the Change in Soviet Leadership
The "authoritarian" nature of any given state depends entirely on the material conditions it faces and threats it must contend with. To get an idea of the kinds of threats nascent revolutions need to deal with, check out Killing Hope by William Blum and The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.
Failing to acknowledge that authoritative measures arise not through ideology, but through material conditions, is anti-Marxist, anti-dialectical, and idealist.
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Revisionism refers to the explicit or implicit attempt at revising the fundamental premises of Marxist theory. Often this is done in attempt to make alliances with the bourgeoisie or to render a working class movement impotent. Explicit revisionism clearly states that Marxism is wrong or outdated and needs to be changed. Implicit revisionism is harder to notice because it claims to still be Marxist, but in actuality puts forward positions that are counter to Marxist theory.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
— Karl Marx. (1845) Theses On Feuerbach
Although there is ongoing debate and discussion within Marxist circles about how these principles should be interpreted and applied in specific historical contexts, there are several key tenets that are generally considered to be central to Marxist theory and which are not subject to revision:
From these fundamental premises follow a series of conclusions, which informs our understanding of the world and teaches us how to affect change. Revisionism alters these fundamental premises or rejects the conclusions that follow from them, the most important of these being the need for revolution.
The events of the Paris Commune and the October Revolution demonstrated the role and necessity of revolution, and provided important lessons in establishing and defending a revolutionary movement. Revolution is not just a means of seizing political power, but of fundamentally transforming society and creating a new social order. Revolutions must be defended against counter-revolutionary forces both from within and without. The movement must be organized and disciplined, and must be able to defend itself against attacks from reactionary forces.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
Revisionism, or Right opportunism, is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the Right opportunists, pay lip-service to Marxism; they too attack ‘dogmatism’. But what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people’s democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party, and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. After the basic victory of the socialist revolution in our country, there are still a number of people who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and fight the working class on every front, including the ideological one. And their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists.
— Mao Zedong. (1957). On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Right opportunism is a political tendency that seeks to make concessions to the bourgeois ruling class in order to maintain or achieve political power. This tendency is often associated with a lack of commitment to revolutionary change and a willingness to compromise on fundamental principles in order to realize short-term gains. Right opportunists may advocate for policies that are not in the long-term interest of the working class, such as supporting capitalist reforms or forming alliances with capitalist parties. This can lead to a weakening of the revolutionary potential of the working class and a failure to achieve real social change. Right opportunism is seen as a deviation from the Marxist principle of class struggle and a betrayal of the interests of the working class.
Trade Unionism is an example of right opportunism as unions focus on limited concessions, rather than advocating for the long-term interests of the working class as a whole. They negotiate with employers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions for their members, but do not challenge the fundamental power relations between labour and capital. Union bosses make compromises or alliances with capitalist parties in order to achieve these concessions.
This creates a privileged layer of the working class who are more interested in defending their own privileges than in fighting for the liberation of the working class as a whole. This labour aristocracy is a barrier to the development of revolutionary consciousness among the working class because it prefers the status quo to radical political movements that seek to overthrow it.
One of the first revisionists was Eduard Bernstein, a leading theorist and prominent member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who argued that the gradual extension of social welfare programs and the reform of capitalist institutions could lead to a peaceful transition to socialism, without the need for a violent revolution. This was in sharp contrast to the German Communist Party (KPD). There are two historical events which underscore this fundamental divide:
Salvador Allende was a socialist politician who was elected president of Chile in 1970, becoming the first Marxist to be elected to the presidency in a liberal democracy. In power, he pursued a program of radical reform, including the nationalization of key industries, the redistribution of land, and the expansion of social welfare programs. His government was supported by a coalition of left-wing parties, including the Chilean Communist Party, and was seen as a model for peaceful democratic socialist transition. However, Allende's reforms faced opposition from powerful domestic and international forces, including right-wing politicians, the military, and the United States government. In 1973, Allende's government was overthrown in a US-backed military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, who established a brutal Fascist dictatorship that lasted for years.
In "The State and Revolution", Lenin explained why the capitalist state could not be reformed or co-opted for the purposes of Socialism, but had to be destroyed and replaced by a new proletarian state. Allende's failure to apprehend this lesson proved fatal. His reliance on the existing bourgeois state apparatus as well as his failure to implement more radical measures, such as the establishment of workers' councils or the arming of the proletariat, left him vulnerable to counterrevolutionary forces.
“If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.”
— George Carlin
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Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. It is a global system of economic, political, and military domination, with the imperialist powers using a variety of means, including economic sanctions, military interventions, and cultural influence to maintain their dominance over other nations.
Imperialism is inevitable under Capitalism because Capitalism is based on the premise of infinite growth in a finite system. When capitalists first run into the limits of their own country, they will eventually be forced to expand their markets, resources, and influence into other countries and territories in order to continue increasing their profits.
Furthermore, the capitalists can exploit and oppress the workers of other nations much more easily than they can in their own. For example, by moving manufacturing jobs from the imperial core out to the periphery where wages are lower, and environmental protections and labour rights are much weaker-- if they exist at all-- they can reduce costs which increases profits.
When the capitalists run into limits again, and are unable to continue increasing their profits-- even by exploiting the periphery-- they will inevitably turn Imperialism inwards and further oppress and exploit workers domestically. This is the origin of Fascism.
Some key features of capitalist imperialism are:
So what does this look like in practice? The IMF, for example, provides loans to countries facing economic crises, but these loans come with strict conditions, known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). These conditions require recipient countries to adopt specific economic policies, such as reducing government spending, liberalizing trade, and privatizing state-owned enterprises. The SAPs also require austerity measures, such as the dismantling of labor and trade regulations or slashing of social programs and government spending, to attract and open up the country to foreign investment.
These policies prioritize the interests of multinational corporations and investors over those of the recipient countries and their citizens. For example, by requiring the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the IMF may enable multinational corporations to gain control of key industries and resources in recipient countries. Similarly, by promoting liberalized trade, the IMF may facilitate the export of capital from recipient countries to wealthier nations, exacerbating global inequalities.
Moreover, SAPs are often negotiated behind closed doors with the political elites of recipient countries (the comprador bureaucratic class), rather than through democratic processes. This can undermine the sovereignty of recipient countries and perpetuate the domination of wealthy nations and multinational corporations over the global economy.
The struggle against Imperialism is an essential part of the struggle for Socialism and the liberation of the working class and oppressed people worldwide. Anti-Imperialism is the political and economic resistance to Imperialism and Colonialism (or neo-Imperialism and neo-Colonialism). Anti-Imperialism requires a revolutionary struggle against the Capitalist state and the establishment of a Socialist society.
It is important to recognize that anti-Imperialism is not simply about supporting one state or another, but about supporting the liberation of oppressed peoples from the exploitation and domination of global Imperialism. Therefore, any course of action should be evaluated in terms of its potential impact on the broader struggle against Imperialism and the goal of establishing a Socialist society.
During WWI, Lenin called on Socialists to reject the idea of a "just" or "defensive" war, and instead to see the conflict as a class war between the ruling class and the working class. He argued that Socialists should oppose the war and work towards the overthrow of the Capitalist state. Seeing that the war was an Imperialist conflict between competing Capitalist powers, the workers of all countries had a common interest in opposing it. Socialists who supported their home countries during World War I had betrayed the principles of international Socialism and Proletarian solidarity.
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To understand Fascism, one must first understand Capitalism. There are three primary characteristics of Capitalism:
The essence of the Capitalist mode of production is that someone who owns means of production will hire a wage labourer to work in order to produce commodities to sell for profit. Marxists identify economic classes based on this division. Those who own and hire are the Bourgeoisie. Those who do not own and work are the Proletariat. There is far more nuance than just this, but these are the bare essentials. The principal contradiction of Capitalism is that the Bourgeoisie wants to pay the workers as little as possible for as much work as possible, whereas the Proletariat wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as possible.
Fascism is a form of Capitalist rule in which the Bourgeoisie use open, violent terror against the Proletariat. It is an ideology which emerges as a response to the inevitable crises of capitalism and the rise of socialist movements. It is characterized by all forms of chauvinism (especially racism, occasionally leading to genocide), nationalism, anti-Communism, and the suppression of democratic rights and freedoms. In a Capitalist society, Liberalism and Fascism essentially exist on a spectrum. The degree to which a given society if Fascist directly corresponds to the degree to which the proletariat must be openly oppressed in order to maintain profits for the Bourgeoisie. This why we have the sayings: "Fascism is Capitalism in decay" and "Scratch a Liberal, and a Fascist bleeds"
Capitalism requires infinite growth in a finite system. This inevitably leads to Capitalist Imperialism as well as Fascism, given that infinite growth is not actually possible. When the capitalist economy reaches its limits, the Bourgeoisie are forced to either expand their markets into other territories (Imperialism) or exploit the domestic proletariat to an even greater degree (Fascism). This is why we have the saying: "Fascism is imperialist repression turned inward"
The struggle against fascism is an essential part of the struggle for socialism and the liberation of the working class and oppressed people. However, it is critical to note that simply combatting Fascism alone without also combatting Liberalism is reactionary, because it ignores the fact that Fascism inevitably arises out of Capitalism, so Liberal Anti-Fascism is not really anti-Fascism at all.