Comrades and friends:

On behalf of the Central Committee, and indeed the entire membership of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, we thank the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and its member organizations for organizing this important conference. We salute all of you who are gathered here. Having a developed understanding of imperialism and national oppression, as well as the fights for national liberation, is vital for understanding the world as it is and what one needs to do to change it. This conference will no doubt further this end.

Trump and the decline of U.S. imperialism

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the U.S. is symptomatic of a monopoly capitalist power in decline. His return to power reflects a failure of the other party of monopoly capitalism (the Democratic Party of Biden/Harris) and its inability to address the needs and aspirations of the working class. Drawing from a toxic brew of national chauvinism and reactionary currents of all kinds, Trump’s return to the White House will signal the sharpening of a host of contradictions domestically and internationally.

Trump has referred to himself as “Tariff Man,” promising to slap 20% tariffs on all imports and substantially more – 100 or 200% – on things like electric vehicles from China. The people around him, like some of the Biden crowd, look towards “delinking” the U.S. economy from the People’s Republic of China.

In his outstanding work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin made the point that one of the features of imperialism, of decaying monopoly capitalism, was that big capital finds it increasingly difficult to utilize science and holds back advances in the productive forces. This phenomenon is on full display in the U.S., where someone like “vaccine skeptic” RFK Jr will be put in charge of public health, and where industrial policy is turning against technologies that cause less harm to the environment, such as electric vehicles.

The role of the U.S. in the world economy is shrinking. In 1960 the U.S. had about 40% of the world GDP. Today it is about half that. There was a day when U.S. imperialism championed free trade. For the past decade-plus, Washington DC has moved away from the neoliberal trade model, erecting a growing tariff blockade. The abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and paralysis of the World Trade Organization are signs of things to come.

After World War II, the United States constructed a web of economic intuitions where Wall Street and Washington DC occupied center place. That world is gone, and it has been replaced by a fragmenting world economy, where the decline of U.S. imperialism is picking up speed. Trump will accelerate the process.

One of the symptoms will be a sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions, which will have political and military dimensions. For example, Trump’s view of the Ukraine is that it is mainly a concern of Europe and that too much U.S. time and treasure has been wasted on it. If implemented as policy, this shift on the Ukraine will force the European imperialist powers, especially Germany, to carry out a military buildup while putting new stress on NATO.

What we are seeing is clearer definition in the developing spheres of influence and domination – where the U.S. has a smaller role to play. Also worth noting is that the two other monopoly centers of monopoly capitalism, i.e. Japan and the European Union, are also producing a smaller share of the world GDP.

People vs. imperialism

The principal contradiction in the world today is between the peoples, nations and countries of the developing world versus imperialism. The U.S. is presently the principal imperialist power, and as such, it is the main danger to the world’s peoples. From Puerto Rico to the Philippines and Palestine, people are rising up and fighting for liberation.

The battle taking place in the Middle East is vital to the world revolutionary process in the current period. On one side you have Western imperialism, Zionism and Arab reaction. On the other, we have the heroic resistance of Palestine and Lebanon, and a whole axis of resistance, which encompasses Yemen, Syria and the popular forces of Iraq and Iran. This is a battle of world historic importance.

The U.S. cannot continue to exist as a world empire without dominance of the Middle East, and this fact explains why the bond between imperialism and Zionism is so strong. The broad masses of people throughout the Middle East hate foreign domination and want it to end. Israel is the cop on the beat for Western imperialism, a reliable nightstick that can be used against those who want freedom and independence. This means that Trump will double down on the Gaza genocide facilitated by Biden/Harris.

It is also worth noting that things can turn into their opposite, that Israel can move from being an asset to a liability: if the genocide and carnage in Palestine and Lebanon provoke uprisings in the Arab world, the position of imperialism will be impacted.

The fact that many of the forces fighting imperialism and Zionism are not led by the working class does not change the revolutionary, anti-imperialist nature of the struggle that is taking place. Stalin, an outstanding Marxist-Leninist and pathbreaking theorist on national question, wrote in the great work, The Foundations of Leninism:

“The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’ democrats and ‘Socialists,’ ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism.”

That said, the struggle for working class leadership in the movements for national liberation is important, and as communists we have the responsibility to support other communists who are contending for leadership in the national movements – be it in Palestine or anywhere else.

Marxism-Leninism and the fight for national liberation

In an environment of declining imperialism, there are some important things to keep in mind.

First, there needs to be a strategic alliance, a “union” as Lenin put it, between the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, and the broad masses of the oppressed in the developing countries. There are hundreds of millions of people in rural areas locked in semi-feudal property relations, which in part provides the material conditions for people’s war.

Second, while there has been a resurgence of the communist and national liberation movements, party building and the construction of revolutionary, communist organizations is a vital task in the present period. Ending, or breaking free of imperialism is not easy, and to successfully do so over the long run requires organizations that embody the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism. Building a new communist party should be the central task of revolutionaries in the U.S., and great progress is being made on this front.

Third, national liberation movements which weaken imperialism are objectively progressive and will hasten imperialism’s end. Self-determination of oppressed nations is a democratic demand, and, to the extent and degree that the fight for self-determination weakens imperialism, those fights should be supported. This has an application in multinational states, including the U.S.

Fourth, monopoly capitalism is a law-governed system where the drive to seek the highest rate of profit is basic. While capitalism is always incapable of genuine long-range planning, imperialism in decline is animated by the shortest of short-term gain and contingency. One of the things that makes the Trump administration dangerous is precisely a reactionary pragmatism that is reshaping the U.S. empire. It is a recipe for more wars and intervention, particularly in Latin America and the Pacific.

Finally, we need to be proletarian internationalists who are serious about uniting the working and oppressed people of the world. Looking around this room, that is exactly who we are. Mao made the point that imperialism is strategically a paper tiger. He was right – in the short term imperialism is an “iron tiger,” it is dangerous. In the long run it will certainly be defeated.

Long live proletarian internationalism!

Long live the unity of the people of the world!

Long live the unity of working and oppressed people – we have nothing to lose but our chains!

#RevolutionaryTheory #FRSO #Statement #Imperialism #Trump #NDFP #OppressedNationalities

Washington, DC – On July 7, hundreds of activists from over 60 organizations mobilized to protest the 75th anniversary NATO Summit occurring July 9 -11 in the city. The protest, organized the Resist NATO coalition started at McPherson Square and marched to the White House, demanding an end to U.S.- NATO aggression and to defend peoples’ struggles.  

The Resist NATO coalition is made up of various groups including the International League of Peoples’ Struggle – US (ILPS-US), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Bayan USA, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), International Action Center, and the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). 

A member of NAARPR spoke at the rally stating, “From the war-torn streets of Afghanistan to the devastated cities of Libya, we raise our voices in support of those who have been killed by U.S. military aggression. Instead of money going towards our military, why is money not going towards our community? Why is money not going towards education? Or mental health?” The U.S. is by far the largest contributor to NATO’s budget. In 2023, the U.S. represented 68% of the total expenditure of NATO, spending $860 billion.

An organizer in Palestinian Youth Movement stated, “It is not only important, but necessary, to resist NATO through a broad united front, in order to protect people’s just struggle for freedom in Palestine, in the Philippines, in Puerto Rico, in Washington DC, and everywhere in the world. The peoples’ resistance in Palestine threatens the interests of Western imperialism and for the first time in recent history, the tides are turning. The myth of Israeli invincibility, of U.S. supremacy, of the futility of resistance, and of capitulation being the only solution has shattered. People around the world are joining the fight for total liberation.”

The Resist NATO coalition had a successful weekend of actions to protest the NATO summit, and they plan to continue building out the united front against US-NATO military escalation and aggression.

#WashingtonDC #ResistNATO #ResistNATOCoalition #FreePalestine #Philippines #PuertoRico #Imperialism #ILPS #FRSO #NAARPR #IAC #BAP #NATO #NATOSummit #USOutOfThePhilippines

The World Federation of Trade Unions, representing more than 105 million workers who work live, and struggle in 133 countries all over the world, strongly condemns the continuation of military interventions and wars, the accelerated militarization of international relations and confrontational rhetoric, the soaring of the military expenditures, as well as the NATO plans amid the escalating intra-imperialist confrontation. The 2024 ΝΑΤΟ summit which will take place in Washington D.C. on 9-10-11 July 2024, constitutes one more step toward the intensification of NATO’s aggressive imperialist plans, interventions, and wars.

NATO has already announced an increase of its military budget for 2024 by 12% to 2.03 billion euros and its civil budget by 18.2% to 438.1 million euros increasing even more the operating capacity of NATO Command Structure headquarters, missions, and operations around the world. This year’s figures confirm the continuation of an at least 10 years-long course of moving towards a “war economy” for the member states of NATO, with NATO’s Secretary General emphasizing that “burden sharing is improving within NATO” while military spending is up 18 percent across European Allies and Canada in 2024, and 23 member states will spend at least 2% of GDP in military spending this year.

The International class-oriented trade union movement unequivocally condemns the war plans of the imperialists and strongly opposes the uninterrupted increase of the NATO budget which sharpens even more the confrontation and deepens the preparations and the risk for a generalized imperialist conflict with disastrous consequences for the popular strata and the ordinary people who always pay the cost of the imperialist antagonism.

NATO’s history demonstrates nothing but interventions, wars, juntas, refugees, starvation, destruction, and death. In addition, the continued soaring in military spending constitutes a provocation for the people who constantly see their living standards affected due to generalized price rises, inflation, and long-term austerity policies.

The militant class-oriented trade union movement intensifies the struggle against imperialist wars and the system that creates them. The WFTU fights for the dissolution of NATO which constitutes an aggressive war machine in service of the imperialist interests of its member states, aiming to maintain, and expand if possible, the existing favorable correlation of forces for the NATO countries in order to safeguard the profits of their monopolies.

Simultaneously we reiterate our firm demand for the immediate dissolution of all military coalitions, the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, an immediate end to all imperialist armed conflicts, and full respect for the sovereignty, independence, and right of every people to freely choose their present and future. We denounce the exclusions, discriminations, embargoes, and sanctions imposed by the US, NATO, and the EU against various countries, negatively impacting the standard of living of low-income families, workers, poor small farmers, and popular strata in general.

The WFTU calls upon workers all over the globe, the militant trade unions to join the ranks and the struggles of the international class-oriented trade union movement for lasting peace, for a world free of imperialist interventions and man-by-man exploitation.

#WFTU #NATO #EU #Militarization #Imperialism #Exploitation #Peace #Labor #TradeUnion

When the first World War broke out in 1914, it threw the socialist movement into disarray. Within the Second International, socialist leaders from all over the world disagreed on how to analyze the causes of the war and the way forward. According to Vladimir I. Lenin: A Political Biography by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, “On the very outbreak of the war he set to work to make a profound and detailed study of the world literature on the economics, methods of production, history, geography, politics, diplomacy, the working class movement, the colonial question, and other spheres of social life in the different countries in the epoch of imperialism.” These Notebooks on Imperialism, over 600 pages of copious research, make up Volume 39 of his Collected Works. The Institute notes, “The fruit of this vast work of research was Lenin’s famous book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Completed in June 1916, this book is one of the greatest works in Marxist-Leninist literature.”

Lenin’s analysis of imperialism

Let’s begin with Lenin’s definition of imperialism: 

“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the domination of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the partition of all the territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”

Lenin notes that this process is a dialectical one. In other words, it is driven by the contradictions inherent in capitalism, as the aspects of those contradictions transform into their opposites. In economic terms, this means free competition is transformed into monopoly. Lenin puts it like this:

“Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.”

We can trace where this happens historically. Imperialism arose as a result of the laws of motion of capitalism beginning in the late 19th century. Lenin writes,

“Thus, the principal stages in the history of monopolies are the following: (1) 1860-70, the highest stage, the apex of development of free competition; monopoly is in the barely discernible, embryonic stage. (2) After the crisis of 1873, a lengthy period of development of cartels; but they are still the exception. They are not yet durable. They are still a transitory phenomenon. (3) The boom at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-03. Cartels become one of the foundations of the whole of economic life. Capitalism has been transformed into imperialism.”

In the section “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”, Lenin further explained, “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism in America and Europe, and later in Asia, took final shape in the period 1898–1914. The Spanish-American War (1898), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 are the chief historical landmarks in the new era of world history.” Indeed, the origin of imperialism was accompanied early on by war, in order to divide and re-divide the world. This trend has persisted, erupting in World War I and World War II, both of which began as imperialist wars for the redivision of the world among themselves. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. rose as the dominant imperialist power.

In the first section of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin addresses the how and why capitalism transitioned from its earlier stage of competitive capitalism to its new, higher stage, of monopoly capitalism. Lenin notes “Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialization of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialized.” 

Lenin makes two important points here. First, the transformation from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism happens according to the laws of capitalism itself, not because a few particularly bad capitalists decided to steer it in that direction. Second, he points out that the imperialist stage of capitalism represents an important stage in the dialectical process driving capitalism towards revolution and socialism. Therefore, he writes, “Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization.” 

Lenin also notes that, in the contradiction between free competition and monopoly, both continue to exist side by side, but that monopoly has become the dominant, determining aspect of the contradiction. “The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains,” Lenin writes, “and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.” 

The result of this is that different strata among the capitalists are operating in very different ways. The petit bourgeoisie are, by and large, being crushed by the monopoly capitalist class. Simultaneously, non-monopoly capitalists continue to exist, but precariously, under immense pressure from the monopoly capitalists. The result is that these non-monopoly capitalists and petit bourgeoisie are buried unless they can achieve an extraordinarily high rate of exploitation. 

But the petit bourgeoisie cannot compete effectively with the superprofits of the monopoly capitalists. By exporting capital (namely factories) to the developing world, the imperialists are able to achieve a higher rate of exploitation than is possible with domestic labor. In other words, they can produce cheaper, and then sell for more. In this way, the imperialists use superprofits as life-support for a dying system. They are able to relieve some of the effects of the economic crises that plague capitalism by exporting capital to where labor is cheaper. 

All the while, they reinforce their superprofits with unequal trade agreements, predatory loans and other neocolonial policies meant to keep the peoples of these countries dependent and weak, and they back this up with military power. 

Meanwhile, the nature of the imperialist system drives forward and intensifies the crises within the capitalist countries. It pushes the class struggle towards its extreme limits, as the working class and oppressed nationalities are further exploited and oppressed in order to fatten the pockets of the capitalists. This cannot but lead inevitably towards a revolutionary struggle within the heart of the imperialist countries themselves.

Further, imperialism drives towards a revolutionary crisis in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. This inevitably leads towards the struggles for national liberation against imperialism on the part of the oppressed nations and peoples of the world.

And, finally, under imperialism wars cannot be averted. War is an essential and fundamental feature of the imperialist system. Because imperialism develops unevenly, the imperialist powers will seek again and again to redivide the world among themselves. Furthermore, the imperialists will inevitably resort to war to protect their interests, and the working and oppressed people of the entire world will fight to resist imperialism oppression by any means necessary. 

Imperialism today

“Leninism,” writes Stalin in The Foundations of Leninism, “is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.” The rise of monopoly capitalism has pushed to the forefront four fundamental contradictions on a world scale: the contradiction between the imperialist powers themselves, the contradiction between the imperialist powers and the oppressed nations and peoples, the contradiction between the monopoly capitalists and the proletariat in the imperialist countries, and the contradiction between the imperialist and socialist systems. 

Of these four, the principal contradiction on a world scale is the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations struggling for national liberation, while, within the imperialist counties the principal contradiction is generally reflected in the class struggle between the monopoly capitalists and the proletariat. 

This means that Lenin’s analysis of imperialism is essential to guiding our understanding of the terrain of struggle, as we work to build a united front against monopoly capitalism, based on the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities. 

Indeed, within the U.S. itself, the monopoly capitalist class holds whole peoples under the yoke of national oppression, in order to extract super profits. Therefore, the core of the united front against monopoly capitalism in the United States is that between the multinational working class, and the oppressed nations. Namely, these are the African American nation, which has a national territory in the Black Belt South, the Chicano Nation in the Southwest, and the Hawaiian Nation. These struggles for national liberation and self-determination are essential for the development of a revolutionary movement in the U.S.

It also means that, on an international scale, the working class here in the U.S. must ally with the national liberation struggles all over the world, from Palestine to the Philippines. The U.S. monopoly capitalist class is our mutual oppressor and enemy, and every blow struck against this class weakens them and aids our respective struggles. Solidarity is essential. 

In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution struck a major blow against imperialism, breaking the Soviet Union away from the imperialist world system and creating a counterbalance to imperialist hegemony. World War II saw further shifts in the balance. After the invasion of the USSR by Nazi Germany, the character of the war fundamentally changed from an inter-imperialist war to a war between socialism and imperialism. Blows were struck for liberation and against fascism all over the world. China and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe broke free of the imperialist system and joined the socialist bloc. And despite the turn towards revisionism in 1956, leading to the eventual restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991, the socialist countries, namely China, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos, continue to be a force against imperialism hegemony throughout the world. And since the historic defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1970s, U.S. imperialism has been in a state of prolonged decline, scrambling to hold on to its ebbing power and influence. 

Today the U.S. monopoly capitalist class struggles to cling to the remnants of a fading empire. It still dominates the UN, though that domination too seems to be slipping. Likewise, it controls international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF, which it uses to leverage neocolonial policies in the developing world. Further, it intervenes militarily, both directly and indirectly, all over the world to protect its interest. Currently it is pursing two simultaneous proxy wars, propping up Ukraine in an attempt to weaken Russia, and supporting the Israeli genocide against Palestine. It is pushing with all its might to pursue a cold war policy against an ascendent socialist China. Indeed, the U.S. is stretched very thin, and is everywhere on the ropes. 

The working class here in the U.S., together with its allies, needs to make every effort to support these struggles in whatever way it can. Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, is essential reading to understand the way forward. 

#RevolutionaryTheory #RedReviews #Lenin #MarxismLeninism #Imperialism

Comrades and friends,

On behalf of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, I extend our warmest greetings to all who are assembled here at the International Theoretical Conference on Economic Crises under Imperialism, and thank our hosts, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, for organizing this important gathering.

In his great work Anti-During, Fredrick Engels made the point that freedom is the recognition of necessity. In other words, historical development is a law-governed process, and by understanding these laws, revolutionaries can be more effective in our efforts to change the world. Therein lies the great importance of a conference such as this. We have the opportunity to learn from one another and discuss some of the key features of monopoly capitalism and how it impacts the world. We do this from the perspective of bringing this system of exploitation and oppression to an end as soon as we possibly can.

The contributions to this conference address three big topics and, while this paper will address all of them, the principal focus of this paper will be the sharpening contradictions in the international financial architecture and challenges to the neoliberal model.

But before doing so, let me note the following. Many of us were here for the October 2023 Theoretical Conference on Imperialism and War, and, shortly before that conference got underway, the Palestinian resistance launched the historic Operation Al Aqsa Flood. Since that time, the Israeli occupiers and their U.S. backers have launched a genocide in Gaza. For its part, the Palestinian resistance has been resolute and steadfast, and it continues to land heavy blows. It is a movement of heroes that deserves the support and solidarity of all progressive people.

Economic crisis and the decline of U.S. imperialism

The history of capitalism is the history of periodic crises of overproduction, and these crises are rooted in the contradiction between a process of production that is social and the individual appropriation of the wealth that is created in that process by the capitalist class. Anarchy reigns in unplanned capitalist economies, where the guiding law is the hunt for the maximum rate of profits.

As Stalin said the work Economic Problems of the USSR that the most basic law of capitalism is

“…the securing of the maximum capitalist profit through the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the population of the given country, through the enslavement and systematic robbery of the peoples of other countries, especially backward countries, and, lastly, through wars and militarization of the national economy, which are utilized for the obtaining of the highest profits.”

U.S imperialism has been in a state of decline since the early 1970s. The periodic economic crises which have occurred in the context of that decline have altered the landscape of the productive forces in a dramatic way. One of the functions of crisis is to destroy the forces of production that are least profitable. Marx and Engels referenced this is The Communist Manifesto, stating, “In these crises a great part not only of the existing products but also of the previously created productive forces are periodically destroyed.”

The fall of the U.S steel industry illustrates this. The plurality of steel was once produced in the U.S. and in 1955 it dominated about 40% of the world market. In 1973 steel production reached its peak, but it was a colossus with feet of clay. The industry had failed to create new capacity with up-to-date technology such as basic oxygen furnaces. Japan and Europe, which had their industrial capacity destroyed during World War II, employed more advanced technologies. The economic crisis that unfolded in the 1973–75 period delivered huge blows to the U.S. centers of steel production like Gary, Indiana; Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio. The following economic crisis of 1980 continued the collapse of the industry. By 2019 the U.S. was one of the largest steel importers, only producing about 5% of the world’s steel.

A look at the numbers compiled by the U.S, Bureau of Labor Statistics show similar trends for manufacturing as a whole. Since the 1970s, every crisis or contraction of the economy has resulted in a decline in manufacturing jobs. In 1979, manufacturing employment was 22% of total nonfarm jobs. It was 9% in 2019.

Some general observations can be made. U.S. imperialism has entered a period of accelerated decline and repeated periodic crises have rocked the economic base. Capitalism is not capable of real, long-term planning and it is fixated on short term gains. As a result, the composition of the economic base has been altered with manufacturing’s relative decline. The U.S. has less ability to deal with disruptions of global supply chains and would face tough going in the event of another major war.

The neoliberal model in a changing world

Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been the dominant economic model of the capitalist world. In his important statement Neoliberalism: A Scourge on Humankind, the brilliant communist Jose Maria Sison states:

Reagan and Thatcher undertook signal actions and pushed legislation to press down the wage level, suppress the trade union and democratic rights of the working class and cut back on social spending by government. They reduced taxes on the corporations and individual members of the monopoly bourgeoisie and provided them with all the opportunities to make super profits and accumulate capital.

These opportunities were made available through the flexibilization of labor, trade and finance liberalization, privatization of public assets, anti-social deregulation, the denationalization of the economies of the underdeveloped countries, the increase of overpriced contracts in war production and guarantees and subsidies for overseas investments.

U.S.-led imperialist globalization took place in this context. Not every center of monopoly capitalism fully adopted the neoliberal model – for example in Japan, liberalization was mainly limited to the financial sector, but that was an exception.

U.S. industrial policy

The decline of U.S. imperialism and sharpening rivalry between the respective centers of monopoly capitalism present a set of genuine challenges to neoliberal, free market fundamentalism.

While it could be said that the U.S. has always had an industrial policy, that of spending vast amounts of money on arms production, the recently adopted Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) along with the CHIPS Act have a real significance. U.S. government spending on developing the semiconductor industry will top $53 billion and create the ability to produce the most advanced computer chips. Government subsidies will also underwrite energy projects and the transition to electric vehicles. A huge boom in new factory construction is now underway.

A major target of this U.S. industrial policy is the People’s Republic of China. Currently about 90% of the world’s advanced computer chips are produced in Twain, and China’s leadership has made clear that the issue of reunification can not be put off forever. Additionally, China is the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles.

Using the measure Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which allows one to compare which commodities and services can be purchased with a given currency, the World Bank concluded that the Chinese economy was 23% larger than that of the U.S. in 2022. Looking at the sum of these statistics it’s not hard see why the U.S. has moved towards a policy of massive subsidies for key industries: it is a declining, moribund power and its domination of the world economy is coming to an end.

Trade, tariffs and the rise of protectionism

The U.S. spent a huge amount of political capital to establish the World Trade Organization in the mid-1990s. It was the continuation of the post-World War II, U.S. designed General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which set the rules of trade in the capitalist world. At lease some of us can remember the massive 1999 protest against corporate globalization that coincided with the WTO meeting in Seattle, Washington. The U.S. is now the one stopping the dispute mechanism of the WTO from functioning.

In 2017, the Trump administration stopped appointing judges for the WTO appeal process. The Biden administration has continued that policy. So as things stand, countries that do not like WTO decisions can appeal the decisions, but there is no quorum of judges to hear the case, so nothing happens.

Likewise, the Biden administration has continued many of the Trump-era tariffs, particularly those aimed at China, and it is looking at imposing new ones. Currently the U.S. has an ongoing discussion with the European Union on limiting imports of Chinese steel. Trump, who is ahead in the election polls, is promising to put 10% tariffs on all goods entering the U.S., including those for Europe and Japan.

The U.S. also has ongoing trade disputes with Europe on a host of issues ranging from aluminum exports to American subsidies for “green” industrial production.

There are three major centers of monopoly capitalism today: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. As the decline of the U.S. picks up speed, it has less ability to occupy the center of the capitalist world’s financial architecture. A weakening U.S. has become increasingly preoccupied with the defense of its own markets at the expense of an international system of free trade, where the U.S. was the supreme rule maker.

There is a military element to all of this as well. The U.S. is preparing for a war with China, and that’s at the core of the talk about “delinking” the U.S. and Chinese economies. The U.S. proxy war in the Ukraine is going poorly. U.S. influence in the Middle East is waning as the movement for national liberation is continuing to advance. The U.S. is determined to maintain its domination of the Pacific region, plundering the regions land, labor and natural resources. It is also attempting to block China’s development, and hinder reunification with Taiwan.

The environment

All of us understand that the state of the environment is an existential question that is of vital interest to communists and revolutionaries.

The FRSO program states, “Monopoly capitalism is killing our planet. The boundless drive for profit is a threat to our continued existence. Climate change is causing more extreme weather disasters around the globe, with the most severe falling on the peoples of Asia, Latin America, and Africa.”

The existence of imperialism gives class and national dimensions to environmental crisis. Droughts, for example, do not impact everyone equally. Those who make the homes around Wall Street don’t worry about them, they don’t have to. The same can not be said for poor farmers in the Philippines or what few farmers that are left in the U.S.

Given that the monopoly capitalists are responsible for creating the environmental crisis, they are incapable of solving it. Instead, they hypocritically point at the countries that are, or have been, oppressed by imperialism and that are trying to make progress in national development.

In the U.S., investment in “green” technologies has become a mechanism to transfer wealth to the largest corporations.

In the U.S. our organization has been active in building the fight for climate justice and it is our view that the environmental movement can play an important role in opposing monopoly capitalism.

Polarization

The decline of U.S. imperialism has been accompanied by political polarization and sharpening contradictions in the camp of the enemy. The great uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd helped reshape the political landscape. The standard of living for the people of the U.S. is falling. The U.S.-backed genocide Gaza has brought millions of people into the streets.

Monopoly capitalism is a failed and dying system. Nothing – not industrial policy, increased contention with other centers of capital, or new wars are going to save it. Crises are a built-in feature of capitalism that express, in a way that words cannot, the overall weakness of an irrational system.

It is the task of communists to lead the fight that will bring this system to an end. To do this we need to start where people are at and recognize their felt need. By doing so we can continue to build mass movements and expand the strength of the mass organizations. And most importantly, we can win the advanced, the most active, to Marxism-Leninism and build a new communist party.

The outstanding revolutionary Mao Zedong once stated, “Historically, all reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the revolutionary forces, and some revolutionaries are apt to be deluded for a time by this phenomenon of outward strength but inner weakness failing to grasp the essential fact that the enemy is nearing extinction while they themselves are approaching victory.”

It is like the great revolutionary Mao Zedong wrote, “U.S. imperialism is paper tiger.” It is dangerous. It should not be underestimated. But at the end of day, it can and will be defeated.

Long live the unity of the world’s peoples!

Long live proletarian internationalism!

In the words of Marx, “We have a world to win.”

#RevolutionaryTheory #FRSO #Statement #CapitalismAndEconomy #EconomicCrisis #Imperialism

San Jose, CA – On February 18, over 300 people gathered in San Jose to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the directive that facilitated the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

The Nihonmachi Outreach Committee has been holding annual Day of Remembrance events in San Jose since 1981.

The program began with an aspiration by Reverend John Oda from Wesley United Methodist Church. Reverend Oda recounted his father’s and uncles’ experiences in the concentration camps, describing how they resisted their unjust incarceration by refusing to enlist in the U.S. military.

The next speaker was Dr. Yvonne Kwan, associate professor of Asian American Studies at San Jose State University. Dr. Kwan spoke about the importance of ethnic studies programs and their inherently political nature, especially in the face of attacks by reactionary far-right politicians like Governor DeSantis in Florida. Thanks to ethnic studies programs, Dr. Kwan extolled, “our youth are learning to develop a new critical consciousness about the world.”

Recently, students at San Jose State University (SJSU) achieved several victories in their fight for recognition and redress for SJSU’s role as a processing facility during the implementation of Executive Order 9066.

Nina Chuang, former SJSU Associated Students president, explained that around 2500 Japanese Americans were processed at SJSU campus facilities after being forced to leave their homes. Chuang and other students led the push to institutionalize a permanent annual Day of Remembrance at SJSU, and to install a mural on campus to recognize the university’s role in the incarcerations.

For the Remembrance section of the program, organizers showed a video interview with Susumu “Sus” Ikeda, a survivor of the Poston concentration camp in Arizona. Ikeda’s father was specially targeted and arrested by the FBI earlier than most because of his status as an active leader within the Japanese community. The arrest left his wife to provide for their children alone for several months. Ikeda’s father was finally reunited with his wife and children when he was relocated to Poston a year after his initial arrest. “As an American citizen, that should have never, never occurred,” Ikeda stated, “We should have never, never been uprooted from our homes and put into camps as American citizens.”

The event’s attendees then gathered for a candlelight procession through San Jose’s historic Japantown district. The procession was led by banners reading, “In honor of those interned: Day of Remembrance, Feb. 19.” People held battery-operated tea candles and walked in a loop along Jackson Street before returning to the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin where the event was being held.

Upon returning from the procession, Athar Siddiqee from South Bay Islamic Association spoke about the longstanding relationship between the Japanese American and Muslim American communities in San Jose. “After 9/11, members of the [Japanese American community] came to our mosque to stand with the South Bay Muslim community,” he stated, continuing, “The Japanese American community said, ‘We know what it’s like to have an entire population suspiciously viewed, stereotyped and vilified based on the actions of a few and we want to do whatever we can to support you.’”

The featured guest speaker of the night was Samir Laymoun, a prominent Palestinian American community member in the South Bay who was instrumental in establishing the annual Santa Clara County Palestinian Cultural Day in 2001. He spoke about the ongoing genocide that Israel is committing against Palestinians in Gaza, backed by funding, weapons and political support by the U.S. government. He spoke about the shared experiences of discrimination and racism between the Japanese American and Palestinian American communities, saying, “There is a special kind of pain associated with discrimination that is inflicted not on the basis of your deeds or even your character but instead on your skin color or even the name you inherited from your family.”

The program concluded with a cultural performance of taiko drumming by San Jose Taiko, meditation led by Rinban Gerald Sakamoto from San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin, and closing remarks by Sayoko Yoshimuru of Nihonmachi Outreach Committee. The event was a strong showing of solidarity between oppressed nationality movements in the U.S., as attendees united to say, “Never again, for anyone!”

#SanJoseCA #OppressedNationalities #AsianAmerican #InJusticeSystem #Imperialism #International #Palestine #JapaneseAmerican #Nihonmachi #Feature

Despite Bukele’s declaration of victory, two days after the election almost all of the ballots cast for the Legislative Assembly still remained uncounted and a significant number of presidential ballots also remained uncounted. On election night, poll workers across the country started reporting in live videos on social media that the computer system for reporting results kept trying to double or triple the number of votes for Nayib Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas, as they tried to transmit the results. Then the system crashed entirely, grinding ballot counting to a halt.

After the vote counting was stopped late Sunday night, the ballots from the country’s capital San Salvador were then “lost”’ for over a day, leaving open the possibility that they had been tampered with before they were “found” the next day.

On February 5, the day after the election, the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Block (BRP), a block of left-wing and progressive organizations in El Salvador, released a statement saying that they condemn:

“… the unconstitutional reelection of Nayib Bukele, imposed with the complicity of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). As an expression of the organized Salvadoran popular movement, the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Block DOES NOT recognize the illegal election results or the de facto regime surging from this electoral farce. We denounce the fact that to guarantee this fraud in favor of the governing party, the regime also illegally modified the electoral system and violated many legal dispositions during the electoral campaign. We positively appreciate the courage of hundreds of thousands of people who voted for the opposition in a context of illegalities, political persecution and the continuing State of Exception, which suppresses constitutional guarantees and which the government utilizes as a mechanism of social containment. In this context of rupture with the constitutional order, of repression and regression in the political, social and economic order, we reiterate our call to build a broad front of left, democratic, and progressive forces to impede the consolidation of the dictatorial regime that seeks to perpetuate itself in power. We call on the people to get organized and deepen the struggle against the Bukele clan’s dictatorship, which sustains itself with illegalities and which has the backing of the oligarchy and imperialism.”

In a press conference after the election, a spokesperson for the group of accredited international election observers from the Center for Interchange and Solidarity, which has observed every Salvadoran election since the 1992 Peace Accords, said, “We suspect that there was an attempt to modify the results by the system that completely failed in the final counting. There wasn’t a ‘Plan B’ and they haven’t given any explanation for why the internet went out, for why the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s electoral reporting system failed, why the printers stopped working. Some reported that the boxes containing the technology arrived without being properly sealed. This has never happened before. So we don’t know if something happened with bad intentions, but the Attorney General must investigate. There were many irregularities and these were the most chaotic elections since 1994.”

Despite these flagrant and widely-reported problems observed by international election monitors, on the day after the election U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken hastily recognized Bukele as the winner, saying, that the U.S. “looks forward to working with President-elect Bukele and Vice President-elect Felix Ulloa following their inauguration in June.”

Prominent right-wing political figures in the U.S. also quickly recognized Bukele as the election winner, including Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Bukele is popular with Republicans in the U.S., including Donald Trump. On the other hand, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and several of the more progressive members of Congress sent a public letter to the Biden administration the week before the Salvadoran election raising alarms over President Bukele's state of emergency, unlawful arrests and detention, harassment of political opponents, restrictions on press freedoms, and other actions.

Bukele’s self-declared victory in this election, for which he was ineligible to run, which took place under a militarized State of Exception, brings to an end El Salvador’s period of political opening that began in 1992 with the end of the Salvadoran Civil War. The Peace Accords signed that year put in place reforms forced by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) during its period as a left-wing guerrilla movement, which allowed the left to openly participate in elections for the first time in the country’s history. The left in El Salvador was outlawed and excluded from elections through the 1980s; the elections that the left tried to participate in under the umbrella of broad coalitions in the 1970s were stolen from them through fraud and brutal repression, leading to the rise of the armed left-wing revolutionary movement of the 1980s.

The Salvadoran constitution’s prohibition against a president serving two consecutive terms was put in place because of repeated experiences of military dictatorship in the 20th century, to prevent the same thing from recurring. But after winning the presidency in 2019, President Bukele illegally sacked and replaced the country’s Supreme Court justices with his own supporters, who then “reinterpreted” the constitution to allow him to run again.

Throughout this year’s electoral campaign Bukele changed the rules and tilted the playing field to his party’s advantage while threatening and repressing opposition parties to assure he and his Nuevas Ideas party would win. Bukele’s maneuvers included reducing the number of seats in the Legislative Assembly and redrawing the map of the country, and combining cities where opposition parties like the left-wing FMLN have support with areas where he had more support in order to reduce opposition parties’ representation.

Bukele and his supporters’ had an explicit goal in this year’s election of forcing the left wing FMLN’s disappearance as a recognized political party, by keeping their vote totals under the limit that would allow them to continue as a legal electoral party. While the results are still unclear, the partial and provisional results that were reported before the system crashed seem to indicate that Bukele failed in his attempt to erase the FMLN out of existence. In the numbers released so far, the FMLN has the second highest vote totals, higher than all other opposition parties.

This election took place under restricted democratic rights, with the militarized State of Exception that has dragged on for two years now with no end in sight. The mass arrests of more than 76,000 people under the State of Exception has rocketed El Salvador to have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

While the mass arrests are said to be aimed at combating street gangs, the government itself has admitted that at least 10% of the people they’ve arrested and held without charges are innocent, with the actual number likely higher.

While Bukele’s targeting of violent street gangs has been popular, he has also used the “war on gangs” and the State of Exception as cover to attack his political enemies, principally the left-wing FMLN party. Both of the former presidents from the FMLN, Salvador Sanchez Ceren and Mauricio Funes, have been forced to flee the country to avoid political persecution, receiving political asylum from neighboring Nicaragua’s progressive government. Several other FMLN leaders have been jailed and dragged through trumped-up trials accusing them of corruption, and Bukele frequently accuses the FMLN of being terrorists.

Bukele’s government has also attacked progressive activists like the environmental movement leaders in the town of Santa Marta who helped win a ban on exploitative foreign mining operations in El Salvador, jailing five key leaders for over a year on bogus charges before being forced to release them after widespread international protests.

Bukele’s government also tried to jail Ruben Zamora on bogus charges. Zamora is an important figure in modern Salvadoran history, as a founder of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) in 1980 who survived capture and torture, and whose brother was assassinated by the U.S.-backed military during the Salvadoran Civil War. Zamora was also the FMLN’s presidential candidate in the first election after the civil war in 1994, an ambassador to the U.S. and the UN under FMLN presidents. In recent years he has been an outspoken critic of President Bukele, reminding Salvadorans that their constitution allows insurrection against an illegitimate government. International outcry forced the government to rescind their order of capture against Zamora.

While Bukele currently has a base of support in El Salvador – and even more so among Salvadorans living abroad, due to his highly-orchestrated self-promoting propaganda campaign and the perception that he has ended violence in the country – he seemingly wasn’t content to gamble that his personal popularity would transfer to his party’s candidates for the Legislative Assembly enough to keep their supermajority – a supermajority that allows him to push through whatever policies he wants without debate.

Bukele’s use of extralegal means to attack the left and to tighten his grip on power has politically catapulted El Salvador back 50 years, to the time when right-wing leaders aligned with the military and with U.S. imperialism ruled through open repression and tried to silence any left-wing or popular movement.

#International #LatinAmerica #CentralAmerica #ElSalvador #FMLN #Elections #Imperialism #RightWing #Feature

The following text was presented by Michela Martinazzi, a member of the Central Committee of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization at the International Assembly Against Imperialism in Solidarity with Palestine organized by Workers World Party.

Comrades and friends,

On behalf of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, let’s start by thanking the organizers of this important event – Workers World Party – for bringing us together at a truly critical juncture in world history. By sharing views and analyses of the world as it actually is, we can learn from each other, and, from those insights, make plans to challenge the existing order of things.

We are certain this International Assembly against Imperialism in Solidarity with Palestine will be a great success. The old world is exploding, something new is coming into being.

The great revolution that is underway in Palestine is nothing short of amazing. In the face of genocide, the Palestinian people are waging a fight that has the potential to end the Zionist project and limit the influence of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Israel has always existed on stolen land and borrowed time. The clock is ticking.

Holding this Assembly on the 100th anniversary of the passing of the outstanding revolutionary V.I. Lenin was a good choice. This U.S. working class has a proud history that we sometimes lose sight of. For many years following Lenin’s death, revolutionaries held huge memorial meetings right here in New York City to mourn his passing and recommit to the revolutionary cause. For example, on January 21, 1937, more than 20,000 communists assembled in Madison Square Garden for that very purpose.

Lenin and imperialism

Lenin above all else was a revolutionary, who applied Marxism to the world around him and saw that competitive capitalism was giving way to monopoly capitalism. And this monopoly capitalism is what is referred to as imperialism. The two things are synonymous.

For today’s purposes, there isn’t time to recap Lenin’s great work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. If there is anyone in hearing range who has not read it, get yourself a copy and do so. You won’t regret it. If you have done so, there is no harm in going over it again – odds are you will get something out of it.

Lenin drew a number of extremely important conclusions from the reality that capitalism had entered its imperialist stage, and I am going to focus on a few of them.

First, noting the world had been divided up amongst a handful of great powers, Lenin pointed out that wars to redivide the world were inevitable. He stressed that the only way to end imperialist wars was by ending imperialism and replacing it with socialism.

Lenin also appreciated the vital role that the majority of humanity in the colonies and semi-colonies would exercise, and that the contradiction between imperialism and oppressed peoples of the world would occupy a vital place in the era of monopoly capitalism.

In his important 1913 article Backward Europe and Advanced Asia, Lenin contrasts the broad progressive national democratic movement in China with the monopoly capitalist rulers of Europe. Of China, he said “Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light and freedom”, and of Europe’s rulers Lenin stated, “Advanced Europe is commanded by a bourgeoisie which supports everything that is backward.”

Lenin knew what all socialists and communists needed to realize as well, and, quite honestly, it is pretty likely everyone here today gets this – any movement of the oppressed that weakens imperialism is a good thing. It deserves our support and solidarity. It is like the question posed in the old labor song, “Which Side Are You On?”

Every setback for Wall Street is an advance for Main Street. Working and oppressed people in the U.S. have a common cause with all who are oppressed by imperialism. Every ship turned around by Yemen helps those of us who are fighting to end exploitation here in the U.S. – we have the same enemy. Do we want strong enemies? No, we want weak and defeated ones. By the same token, every blow that we are able to inflict on the class enemy aids those suffering under imperialism’s yoke.

Palestine and the decline of U.S. imperialism

The decline of U.S. imperialism is accelerating. The people of Palestine are showing the way. All of us need to learn from their will to sacrifice and determination to win.

Lenin stressed that imperialism was capitalism that is moribund; it is dying. And we can see the symptoms all around them, including their political representatives. I invite you to join us at the Republican National Convention, July 15 in Milwaukee, and at the Democratic National Convention, August 19, in Chicago to confront them.

Marx talked about the vampire-like nature of capitalism. Let’s build unity. The many against the few. The people of the world can and will unite. Together we will put a stake in the heart of imperialism.

#FRSO #RevolutionaryTheory #International #Palestine #Imperialism #Lenin #MarxismLeninism

Since the writing of The Communist Manifesto and the founding of the First International, proletarian internationalism has been a cornerstone of scientific socialism, and is a pillar of Marxism-Leninism. Today, in the era of imperialism, putting genuine proletarian internationalism into practice demands that we be consistent anti-imperialists.

Beyond any moral questions, there are two obvious, material reasons for this proletarian internationalist, anti-imperialist unity. On the one hand every dollar that goes to imperialist war is a dollar that could have been spent on people’s needs at home. But even more importantly, every blow struck against imperialism weakens the monopoly capitalist class here.

What imperialism is and what it is not

First, let’s be clear on what imperialism means. Understanding the link between imperialism and monopoly capitalism is essential. Indeed, imperialism and monopoly capitalism aren't just linked, they’re synonymous. Failing to understand this, some people think any kind of big country is an empire and that any empire is imperialist, from ancient Rome to socialist China. But this is an idealist and metaphysical view. In other words, this view fails to look at how imperialism develops historically, according to definite material processes. It should be obvious that the Roman Empire and the U.S. empire are qualitatively different.

If we look at imperialism historically, we have to understand its relationship to the dominant socio-economic system. V.I. Lenin developed the scientific analysis of imperialism in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, to help the working-class movement understand the demands that this new historical stage of capitalism placed on the socialist movement. In “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Lenin writes, “Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism.”

Lenin goes on to explain that imperialism, as monopoly capitalism, has five principal characteristics:

“Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts—the concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these monopolistic associations of capitalists; (2) the monopolistic position of the big banks—three, four or five giant banks manipulate the whole economic life of America, France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of raw material by the trusts and the financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international cartels has begun. There are already over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market and divide it “amicably” among themselves—until war redivides it. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial-political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world (colonies) is completed.”

This is the historical materialist view of imperialism as it exists today. Thus, Lenin points out that “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism in America and Europe, and later in Asia, took final shape in the period 1898–1914. The Spanish-American War (1898), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 are the chief historical landmarks in the new era of world history.” The rise of imperialism in the U.S. led to the colonization of foreign territories and contributed to the development of oppressed nations within the borders of the U.S., such as the Chicano Nation in the Southwest, the African American Nation in the Black Belt South, and the Hawaiian Nation.

Dialectically, the era of imperialism has led to the development of four fundamental contradictions operating on a world-scale: the contradiction between labor and capital, the contradictions between the imperialists among themselves, the contradiction between the imperialists and the movements for national liberation, and, following the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the contradiction between the imperialist and socialist systems.

It is important to note that some people choose to ignore the historical connection between the development of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. They argue that countries like China are imperialist, because they engage in foreign trade. Looking at the difference between the foreign policy of China and the imperialist countries will help us understand what imperialism is in practice, and what it isn’t. Basically, what these people fail to understand is that imperialism is fundamentally exploitative, extractive and violent.

Imperialism relies upon predatory loans, structural adjustment programs, unequal trade agreements, privatization and liberalization, to ensure that it can extract as much profit from its colonies and neocolonies as possible. Capital is exported to the underdeveloped countries in order to exploit cheap labor. By locking these oppressed nations and peoples into a permanent state of underdevelopment it is able to achieve a higher rate of exploitation than it can otherwise. This super-exploitation allows the imperialist powers to prop themselves up with these super-profits, using them as a kind of life-support, to prolong the existence of the capitalist system far beyond its natural lifespan.

This inevitably leads to the sharpening of the contradictions between the imperialists themselves and the contradiction between the imperialists and the movements for national liberation. For this reason, the imperialists must back all of this up with military force. For the U.S., this includes a network of military bases, spanning the world, and its military alliances, like NATO, which it dominates. It will not hesitate to intervene militarily, or to arm and fund its proxies, such as Ukraine and Israel. It will stage coups and assassinate leaders. There is no price in human bloodshed and suffering that is too high to protect U.S. hegemony and imperialist super-profits.

China’s foreign policy in the developing world is nothing like this. It is neither exploitative nor extractive and is based on equal and mutually beneficial trade agreements. It is also fundamentally peaceful. The countries that benefit from trade and development from China are not locked into underdevelopment by China. Nor are they targeted for Chinese military intervention, or coups. On the contrary, China provides an alternative to imperialist underdevelopment that many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are glad to take.

China doesn’t do this because the Chinese are nice and the imperialists aren’t. The imperialists are violent, exploitative and extractive because they must be. The imperialist system is governed by laws, laws inherent to capitalism. China behaves differently because these are laws from which the working class has freed itself in the socialist countries. Socialism, and China in particular, is thus a counterbalance to imperialism in the world. This counterbalance causes the contradiction between the imperialist and socialist systems to sharpen, leading to a constant barrage of anti-China propaganda and increasing aggression from the U.S. towards China.

Imperialism and war

Beyond this question of what imperialism is and what it isn’t, there is further confusion about what it means to be consistently anti-imperialist in relation to the question of war. Because monopoly capitalism relies upon military intervention, that is, upon war, to further its aims, progressive people everywhere rightly oppose imperialist war. But it is possible to make a very dangerous error here.

There is a pacifist trend in the anti-war movement that originates in the ideology of the petite bourgeoisie. These people oppose all war, regardless of who is fighting and for what. They see the violence of the imperialists and the violence of the oppressed as equally bad. These are the kind of people who, in the face of Zionist apartheid in Palestine and the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, demand first and foremost the movement’s condemnation of Hamas. They demand peace, condemning both the reactionary violence of the oppressor and the revolutionary violence of the oppressed. There is a material basis for this kind of thinking. The petite bourgeoisie is a class stuck between a rock and a hard place. They are driven down by the monopoly capitalist class, but they also benefit from the exploitation of labor and support the capitalist system. By taking this pacifist approach, they wash their hands of the whole conflict, and try to cling to the status quo.

On the other hand, there are also social-democrats who turn a blind eye towards imperialism. These people believe that “socialism” can be built within the framework of monopoly capitalism, despite the super-exploitation of the oppressed peoples of the rest of the world. This is why the representatives of this ideology tend to lend their support to the U.S. wars for empire, while they clamor for “socialism” at home. They see “socialism” as social programs under capitalism, like Medicare, public works projects, the postal service, and fire departments. Their “socialism” doesn’t challenge the power of the monopoly capitalists but would merely regulate it. Based on the so-called “Nordic model,” this kind of “socialism” is really just imperialism dressed in red—they advocate socialism in words, but imperialist in deeds. This is what Lenin called “social-imperialism.” These reformists argue for class collaboration, denying that the contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class is fundamentally antagonistic. And so, these “socialists” don’t understand that the starting point of socialism is the seizure of political power by the working class.

Some of these social democrats are the “progressive except for Palestine” variety. They support progressive reforms that would help working and oppressed people, but when it comes to foreign policy, especially in regard to support for Israel, they hold social-chauvinist and downight reactionary positions. Right now, as Israel continues to wage a genocidal war against the Palestinian people, these so called “socialists” have nothing but praise for Zionism and the Israeli apartheid state, and nothing but scorn and condemnation for principled anti-imperialists who stand in solidarity for the unified Palestinian Resistance.

We must be absolutely clear: victory for the resistance in Palestine is a victory for working and oppressed people everywhere, and that victory is coming closer every day. History will remember the Israeli state together with apartheid South Africa, as a stain on history and a mark of shame to everyone who ever supported it. As PFLP leader Leila Khaled once put it, “The supreme objective of the Palestinian liberation movement is the total liberation of Palestine, the dismantlement of the Zionist state apparatus, and the construction of a socialist society in which both Arabs and Jews can live in peace and harmony.” When that day comes, not only will the Palestinian people be liberated from oppression, but a mighty blow will be struck against the monopoly capitalist class in the U.S. that relies on the Zionist state to maintain its hegemony in the Middle East.

Social-chauvinist thinking isn’t a new problem, but it must be addressed again. Indeed, Lenin fought these tendencies in the Second International. Lenin argued that true proletarian internationalism means that socialists should support the defeat of their own imperialist governments in their wars of domination and plunder. Lenin put it simply, saying, “During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.” During World War I, Lenin fought against those in the socialist movement who called for a “class truce” during the inter-imperialist war.

Some “socialists” even supported “defense of the fatherland” wrongly identifying the interests of the working class with the national interests of the capitalist ruling class. In his 1915 essay “The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War” Lenin takes to task those “socialists” like Karl Kautsky in Germany and Leon Trotsky in Russia who opposed the slogan of revolutionary defeatism, that is, the call for the defeat of one’s own imperialist government and the demand to transform the reactionary inter-imperialist war into a revolutionary, civil war. In his 1916 article, “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International,” Lenin further attacks these social-chauvinists, saying, “War is often useful in exposing what is rotten…”

But imperialist war is only one side of the equation. The reality is that some wars are unjust and others are just. Mao Zedong put it this way in his book, On Protracted War.

“History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars; we actively participate in them. As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore, the Communists of the whole world firmly opposed that war. The way to oppose a war of this kind is to do everything possible to prevent it before it breaks out and, once it breaks out, to oppose war with war, to oppose unjust war with just war, whenever possible.”

The wars carried out by the imperialists for hegemony, to divide and redivide the world, and to protect their super-profits, are unjust. They sacrifice the lives of millions for the sake of profit, to make sure the lines on the graph go up, and that the vaults of the shareholders are filled to the brim. This is why the U.S. gives billions in military aid to its proxies, like Israel, to maintain its foothold in the Middle East. No matter the war crimes or atrocities, the U.S. is always ready with its checkbook. These wars impede progress.

On the other hand, wars that oppose imperialism, that fight for national liberation from foreign capital and their domestic lackeys, are progressive, just wars. From Palestine to the Philippines, people are fighting tooth and nail to throw off the yoke of imperialism and colonialism, to achieve national liberation, independence, and dignity. These wars are just and should be supported.

During World War II, in “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War,” Mao put it like this:

“The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and there is our patriotism. Communists must resolutely oppose the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The Communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To bring about the defeat of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler by every possible means is in the interests of the Japanese and the German people, and the more complete the defeat the better.... For the wars launched by the Japanese aggressors and Hitler are harming the people at home as well as the people of the world.”

Because the anti-imperialist struggle is the strategic ally of the working class movement, Mao explains, “in wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism.”

During World War II, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union transformed the nature of that war. The war began in 1939 as an inter-imperialist war for the redivision of the world between the imperialist powers, but once the Soviet Union came under attack in June of 1941, it was no longer correct to regard the war as a purely inter-imperialist war. The contradiction between the imperialist and socialist systems came to the forefront, leading communists to join in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany, the main danger to the USSR. Furthermore, communist-led resistance movements, particularly in China, Yugoslavia and Albania, were waging just wars for liberation against imperialist occupation.

Friends and enemies

At the core of all this lies an important point, that Mao summed up well: “We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” Who is the enemy? The imperialist, monopoly capitalist class. Who does the enemy oppose? Everyone fighting against oppression and for liberation, and everyone who challenges their hegemony. Who does the enemy support? Anyone who will serve their interests, who will help them in their drive for domination and exploitation.

Stalin makes this crystal clear in his 1924 book, The Foundations of Leninism, when he says, “The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement.”

Stalin gives the example of Amanullah Khan in Afghanistan: “The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism.”

To clarify this point, Stalin contrasts the nationalist movement in Egypt to the Labor Party in Britain. He writes “the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British ‘Labor’ Government is waging to preserve Egypt's dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are ‘for’ socialism.”

This may seem strange to some people, but the reason for this is simple. The monopoly capitalist class that is oppressing, in Stalin’s example, the Egyptian independence movement, is the very same monopoly capitalist class that is exploiting the British working class. Their defeat by the Egyptian independence movement weakens them, helping the British working class to overthrow them. There is a strategic alliance that is possible here, even among classes with different interests, because they share this common enemy.

U.S. imperialism is in a state of prolonged and inevitable decline. Since the historic defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the United States has grown more and more desperate. Like a cornered beast, it lashes out everywhere. For all of its snarling, biting and clawing, it accomplishes little at great cost. Its place of dominance in the imperialist system, established at the end of World War II, is slipping away. The labor movement is seeing an upsurge, the national liberation struggles are advancing, and the socialist countries are gaining strength. U.S imperialism fights on many fronts, and each defeat it faces is a victory for the working class here and around the world. Everyone who wants socialism should celebrate every blow struck against the imperialist, monopoly capitalist class.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

#RevolutionaryTheory #MarxismLeninism #Imperialism #AntiWar #Lenin #Stalin #Mao #Feature

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following paper by Mick Kelly, political secretary of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, that was presented in Amsterdam October 14 at International Theoretical Conference on Imperialism and War organized by the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

Comrades and friends,

On behalf of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, I would like to extend our thanks to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and its member organizations for organizing this timely and important theoretical conference on imperialism and war. And we salute all of you in attendance today. We have much to gain by exchanging our respective views, seeking points of agreement to build unity, and putting proletarian internationalism into practice.

Marx famously noted that the point of understanding the world is to change it. To put this another way, theory must be weaponized. As revolutionaries, we strive to find the ways and means to strengthen our common efforts to drive imperialism and its tools to their extinction.

Sharpening contradictions on a world scale

The outstanding revolutionary Mao Zedong made the point, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” This is an apt description of the situation we find ourselves in. The 4 fundamental contradictions – between labor and capital, between the oppressed nations and imperialism, between socialism and capitalism, and among the imperialist powers themselves – are intensifying. The factors for war and revolutionary struggle are on the rise.

The decline of U.S. monopoly capitalism is accelerating, a phenomenon that is a critical factor in shaping the development and motion of the other contradictions on a world scale. This decline is also shaping the contradictions within U.S. society, particularly the class struggle and the struggle against national oppression (the systematic inequality that is visited upon African Americans, Chicano/Latinos, Asian Americans, and the indigenous peoples) and is fueling a level of political polarization that is without parallel since the U.S. Civil War.

Features of a declining U.S. imperialism

The decline of American imperialism is not something new. It is a long-term process that has been underway since the early 1970s. In 1971, then-president Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system – where all currencies were fixed to the dollar (and countries that held dollars could demand payment for dollars in gold) – an important signal that the sun was setting on the American empire. Likewise, the rise of powerful movements for national liberation, and the U.S. defeats in Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea (Cambodia), demonstrated that the “American Century” was over.

The changing place of the U.S. in the world did not proceed along a straight line. The rise of revisionism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe following the death of Stalin ended in the final collapse of socialism in 1991. This allowed U.S. imperialism additional room to maneuver – not due to any internal development or strengthening, but because a constraining force had disappeared from the world stage.

While the monopoly capitalist rulers of the U.S. remain the main enemy of the world’s peoples, the place of the U.S. monopoly capitalists in the world is shrinking as their decline speeds up. The paralysis that pervades the appeals process of the World Trade Organization is one symptom. The stalling of large scale multilateral trade agreements since the Doha rounds and the abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership are others. Equally telling are some basic economic measurements. In 1960, the U.S. economy represented about 40% of the world economy. Today, it is about half that. The economy of the Peoples Republic of China is poised to surpass that of the U.S., and by some measures it has already done so.

In many respects former U.S. President Donald Trump was an ideal political representative of a declining empire, a practitioner of fraud and corruption who thinks in the short term and relies on contingency. Trump abandoned or undermined a large swath of the post-World War II economic and military topography that had Wall Street at its core and Washington DC as its capital. This meant weakening NATO and putting tariffs on allies and junior partners, accompanied by a bellicose go-it-alone approach.

Biden would like to revive and shore up the multilateral institutions of empire, but the U.S. lacks the muscle. It’s a colossus with clay feet that can no longer move the way it used to, and as a result Biden continues much of Trump’s protectionism and mimics Trump’s anti-China campaign.

Inter-imperialist rivalry

The declining fortunes of U.S. imperialism has led Washington to fear for capitalist supply chains, fueled in part by concerns about the ability of the economy to weather a major war. So, the Biden administration is fast-tracking new mining operations within the U.S. borders, subsidizing semiconductors, computer chips, and helping to underwrite the automakers’ transition to electric vehicles at the cost of autoworkers’ jobs. For his part, Trump who is the leading Republican contender for the presidency, says he will slap a 10% tariff on all imports, including those from Europe and Japan.

These practices, plans and polices are illustrative of increased inter-imperialist rivalry, and are contributing to rise of national chauvinism in the political superstructures of the major imperialist powers, along with war preparations.

Inter-imperialist rivalry can also be seen in Europe. The disintegration of the EU and moves such as the Brexit are good things, and they serve to weaken the respective European imperialist powers and provide a more favorable context for the working class of the Western European countries to advance their own interests.

At this juncture in time, the greatest inter-imperialist conflict is in Ukraine. The U.S provoked this war and in fact it is a proxy war against Russia. It is not a surprise that people in East Ukraine do not want to live under a bunch of reactionaries, and in fact they have waged a heroic struggle to avoid it. The Russian government correctly notes, with the passage of time, the war is increasingly a direct struggle with the U.S. and its accomplices in Western Europe, as the imperial powers pour in military aid such as advanced weapon systems, combat aircraft, tanks, moving troops closer to the war fronts, and providing intelligence and targeting information to the Ukrainian government.

We also need to be clear on the class nature of the war. It is an inter-imperialist conflict. Russia is an emerging imperialist power, where capitalist development has reached the stage of monopoly capitalism. It is a country that acts in its own “national interest.” In the early years following the fall of the USSR, Russia was dominated by compradors who sold the country to the West. This is no longer the case.

The U.S. and Western European powers speak of incorporating Ukraine into NATO and the European Union, while debating timetables and scenarios for this happening. This means that the war is likely to continue for an extended period, and that there is considerably more at stake than the fate of the Eastern Ukraine.

Working and oppressed people in the U.S. have nothing to gain from a U.S. victory – in fact a Washington/Wall Street win would strengthen the hand of our oppressor. Therefore, in our antiwar work we demand that the U.S. get out at once, and we will strive to utilize favorable conditions that result from any setback the U.S. ruling class is confronted with. It is like Lenn said, “During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.” A positive aspect of this conflict is that oppressed people can take advantage of this rivalry, as was recently illustrated by the meeting between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and Russia.

Countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people want revolution

There is a growing tide of anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

As we noted in the Main Political Report adopted at our 9th Congress:

“A great resurgence of the national liberation movement and the international communist movement is underway.

“In Asia, the socialist countries are on the rise. The national democratic struggle in the Philippines, led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, stands out in sharp relief and is an inspiration to people everywhere. The Philippines is a crucial base for the projection of U.S. power into the Pacific region. Millions of people are on the move in India, and revolutionary movements are growing in power throughout the region.

“In the Middle East, the center of gravity continues to be the heroic struggle of the people of Palestine to end the Zionist occupation and to liberate every inch of their land. A powerful camp of resistance has come into being that unites Iran, Syria, the Palestinian resistance, and the popular forces of Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — and it is fully capable of challenging imperialism, Zionism, and reaction of all kinds.

“In Latin America, a number of countries have broken out of the orbit of U.S. imperialism, including socialist Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Across the continent, great advances in the popular and revolutionary movements are underway…In Africa, there are sharp struggles against imperialism, particularly in the horn of Africa.”

Two additional points should be made. In Palestine the reactionary right-wing rulers of Israel have rejected the “two state solution” favored by the U.S. and have opted for the logic of complete displacement of the Palestine people from their land. It is the logic of genocide. The Palestinian fight for national liberation has now moved into a phase where armed struggle is now the principal form of struggle. Looking at the emerging balance of forces in the Middle East, we can see the waning influence of U.S. imperialism and the end of the Zionist project.

In the Pacific, the liberation of Taiwan province by People’s China remains the great unfinished task of the Chinese revolution. The end of U.S. dominance in the Pacific region will mark the end of the U.S. as the core of a world empire.

Prospects in the U.S.

The situation is excellent. The science of Marxism-Leninism lays bare the general laws that are at work in a dying imperialism. For example, the intensification of uneven development gives rise to more wars; also, a contraction of world markets open to imperialism limits effective demand and contributes to new and greater crises of overproduction.

It is also possible to draw some general conclusions from recent events and experience.

Polarization is intensifying. The attempt by Trump to cling to power, including the storming of the U.S. Capitol are indicators of this. Trump is now the Republican frontrunner. If the elections are close, many will not accept the outcome. A declining, polarized U.S. imperialism is an unstable U.S. imperialism. This degree of instability is something new, and something that can be worked with.

Sharpening contradictions and polarization are fueling the class struggle. There are a growing number of strikes and sharp battles on the part of the working class. The recent fight of a third of a million Teamsters in the logistics industry and the strike by auto workers are but two examples of this.

The powerful uprising that took place after the police murder of George Floyd graphicly demonstrates U.S imperialism is a paper tiger. More than 23 million people participated in the protests. Thousands of buildings, including one of the main police stations in Minneapolis, Minnesota (the city of Floyd’s murder), were burned. This uprising showed the power of the Black freedom movement. It is also a fact that on the left, our organization – Freedom Road Socialist Organization – was the only communist group that played a significant role in those events nationally.

Also of note are the fights around democratic demands such as the fight to defend women’s and reproductive rights. In many cities, our organizations have played a major role in these struggles.

FRSO is working to build a new communist party. The current situation is excellent for doing exactly that, so we are experiencing an unprecedented wave of growth. Reality and modesty dictate we acknowledge we need to make substantially more progress in fusing Marxism-Leninism with the actually existing working class movement before such party is created. That said, the clock is ticking and if we continue to progress at our current rate, we will get there.

In 1956, Mao Zedong made the point, “Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.” The peoples of the world, along with the people of the U.S., will be the wind and the rain that U.S. imperialism is unable to withstand. There will be difficulties to be sure. But our future is bright!

Long live the unity of the peoples of the world!

Long live proletarian internationalism!

Victory is certain!

#FRSO #MarxismLeninism #Imperialism #NDFP #Philippines #Mao #Feature

Orlando, FL – On Saturday, September 16, around 45 community members gathered at Knowledge for Living in the Parramore district for an educational forum on U.S. and Western intervention in Haiti and West Africa. The event was hosted by the Revolutionary Education and Action League (REAL) and the Florida chapter of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

The presentation began by highlighting the connection between imperialism abroad and political repression and police violence domestically. For example, the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program allows state and local police forces to acquire surplus military equipment including weapons, tanks, drones, and more for next to no cost. These highly militarized police agencies then serve as occupying forces in working-class and oppressed nationality communities. The police also utilize that same military-grade equipment to suppress popular movements, as seen most recently with the George Floyd uprisings in 2020 and in the current efforts to build Cop City in Atlanta.

On the other hand, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) operates 46 military bases across the African continent, with tens of thousands of troops currently stationed on African soil. In many cases, the police and militaries in these African countries receive training from U.S. and NATO military forces, and are taught the same tactics of oppression used here in the U.S.

“We cannot understand our struggle for justice, our struggle against police brutality as isolated from what's happening in Nigeria, what’s happening in Burkina Faso, what’s happening in Haiti or what’s happening in any part of the world resisting imperialism. We have to understand that we have more in common with the poor and working-class masses, with those youth fighting back against police violence than we do with the people in power here,” said Onyesonwu Chatoyer of the A-APRP. 

Chatoyer then laid out the historical and political context through which imperialism and neocolonialism arose. This gave the audience the background necessary to understand the recent anti-colonial military take overs springing up throughout West Africa and the Western imperialist meddling in Haiti. 

The main goal of these military takeovers, spearheaded by military leaders like Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso and Abdourahamane Tchiani in Niger, is to secure their country’s natural resources and sever the extractive and exploitative relationship with Western imperial powers, namely France and the U.S. For example, one in three lightbulbs in France are powered using electricity generated by nuclear power using uranium ore extracted from Niger. At the same time however, 80% of Nigeriens do not have access to electricity in their own homes. Shutting down foreign military bases and kicking out foreign – namely French and U.S. – troops occupying the land is part and parcel with this goal.

One of the main ways we can support revolutionary movements – not just in Africa but around the world – is to staunchly oppose U.S. economic sanctions against these progressive governments, sanctions which only serve to crush and starve the everyday people of these countries. Chatoyer added, “The same that we show up for Cuba, that we show up for Nicaragua, that we show up for Venezuela, we have to show up for Niger, for Zimbabwe, for Azania, for Algeria.”

REAL and A-APRP hope to host more educational forums for the community, especially in the Pine Hills and Parramore district, one of Orlando’s historically Black neighborhoods. Their next event will be on Saturday, September 30 at the Hiawassee Branch Library. See @aaprpflorida on Instagram for more information.

#OrlandoFL #Africa #Haiti #Imperialism

Meredith Aby-Keirstead of the Anti-War Committee (AWC) introduced the event by describing how drone strikes in Somalia escalated under the Trump administration, and how President Joe Biden is continuing Trump’s devastating policies. “The fact is that Biden amping this up again has us very much concerned,” Aby-Keirstead stated. “We know from Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran and Syria, that U.S. airstrikes kill civilians, increase anti-U.S. resentment, and violate sovereignty on a daily basis.”

Jaylani Hussein, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations-Minnesota (CAIR-MN), who recently visited his home country of Somalia, provided the main presentation, covering the history of U.S. intervention in Somalia and the ensuing political instability. He described how the U.S. has been intervening politically, economically and militarily in Somalia since the Cold War, including troop deployments beginning during the Somali Civil War of the 1990s.

Hussein explained that in 2006, after a long period when Somalia had no functional government, a group of religious leaders known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) armed themselves and restored a functioning government in southern Somalia. The U.S. designated the ICU as a “terrorist” group and backed an Ethiopian military intervention that destabilized Somalia once again, which, according to Hussein, led to the growth of more armed groups like Al-Shabaab. He said that U.S. foreign policy “literally created terrorists,” adding, “In 2006, if the U.S. just listened to the Somalis, and just allowed us to move forward and not intervene, Somalia today would be projected in a totally different way.”

According to the New America think tank, the U.S. to date has carried out 269 known drone strikes in Somalia, estimated to have killed almost 2000 people in total, including many civilians, with the most recent strike taking place on July 17, 2022. Hussein described how many Somalis know or are related to someone who has been killed by an American drone strike.

Hussein criticized the U.S.’s efforts to ameliorate the ongoing famine in Somalia, noting, “In situations like right now, drone strikes could actually further exaggerate the famine.” Hussein highlighted the role of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in helping weaken the country’s agricultural industry, by flooding the local market with cheap food produced by U.S. farming monopolies instead of supporting Somali farmers. “The United States policy on food, whether it’s during war or in peacetime – both are wrong. USAID completely annihilates every farming community that exists in the Third World,” Hussein explained. “There is no intention of actually solving the food security issues in these communities.”

Hussein also called attention to state repression of the Somali diaspora community in the U.S. “The FBI continues to target the Somali community in Minnesota. They have a clear distaste for the Somali community,” he said. CAIR-MN helps represent Somalis in the Twin Cities who face FBI harassment and abuse.

“The United States has no interest in helping the people of Somalia, of Ethiopia, of Kenya, in any other way than to have their military have access to do what they want,” Hussein concluded. “We do not ship our American hospitality. We ship our cowboy racist white supremacy.”

#MinneapolisMN #AntiwarMovement #Imperialism #Somalia #Africa

So far in our series on theory, we’ve looked at the historical emergence of Marxism. But by the time Marx finished writing Capital, capitalism was still developing and changing. The fundamental characteristics of the capitalist mode of production haven’t changed. Commodity production and exploitation of workers’ surplus value by the capitalists remain the driving force of the capitalist system. And it remains a system plagued by regular cycles of crises of overproduction, pushing poor and working-class people further down while the rich get richer and richer. But by the beginning of the 20th century the internal motion of capitalism’s contradictions led to its advancement to a higher stage: monopoly capitalism, also known as imperialism.

As capitalism developed to this higher stage, Marxism needed to advance to come to grips with the demands that imperialism placed upon the international working class, theoretically and practically. By and large, the mainstream Marxists of the time had begun to treat Marxism as a dogma rather than a living science. They failed to understand this shift and proved inadequate to the demands that imperialism placed on the working class. The leader of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin, took up this task of understanding this new stage and on the basis of that understanding developed the strategy and tactics of proletarian revolution.

Huge strides were made in the Great October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, where the Bolsheviks established the first socialist state, the Soviet Union. Through the course of the October Revolution and socialist construction, the leaders of the Bolsheviks, especially Lenin and Stalin, further developed Leninism as the Marxism of the era imperialism and proletarian revolution.

Let’s break down the contributions of Leninism to Marxism here before we go into greater detail in forthcoming articles in our series.

First, Lenin clarified the terrain of struggle in developing his analysis of the current stage of capitalism, especially in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He said that imperialism had five basic characteristics:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

Based on this, Lenin understood that imperialism is capitalism in decay, that the imperialist powers could extract super-profits through the exportation of capital to the oppressed nations and the super-exploitation of the people there to hold off the system’s own inevitable demise. Lenin thus understood that capitalism developed unevenly. The monopoly capitalist states were able to grow very advanced at the expense of the rest of the world, which was held in a lower stage of development due to imperialist exploitation. Based on this analysis, Lenin recognized the tremendous revolutionary importance of the anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation in the oppressed nations, and gave central importance to the right of nations to self-determination as a cornerstone of proletarian internationalism.

Stalin, himself from one of the oppressed nations of the Russian empire, played a pivotal role in developing the Leninist understanding of the National Question. His essay Marxism and the National Question is the cornerstone to the Leninist understanding of the role of the oppressed nationalities and the demand for national self-determination.

This analysis of imperialism was epoch-defining. According to Stalin, the rise of imperialism brings forward three fundamental contradictions, or defining struggles of the current era: the contradiction between labor and capital, the contradiction between the imperialist countries amongst themselves, and between the imperialist countries and the oppressed nations. The socialist revolutions would create a fourth contradiction, between the socialist and the imperialist countries. Stalin explained in The Foundations of Leninism that because imperialism represents a new stage of capitalism the contributions of Lenin are universally applicable, and that Marxism-Leninism is the Marxism of the current era.

In organizing the revolution in Russia, this theory of uneven development also played an important role. Many Marxists once thought revolution would first happen in the most advanced capitalist countries. Lenin argued that the imperialist stage of capitalism meant that revolution should first develop in the “weak links” of the capitalist chain, and he believed that Russia was just such a weak link. History proved Lenin correct.

In his pamphlet, What is to be Done? Lenin also put forward the theory of the Party of the New Type, a Communist Party of professional revolutionaries in the vanguard of the working class – cadres organized according to the principles of democratic centralism, who would work shoulder to shoulder in the mass movements of working and oppressed people. In practice this meant fusing Marxism with the movements of workers and peasants in Russia through the class struggle, and building the Communist Party through that struggle.

Importantly, Lenin also developed the theory that the revolution in semi-feudal countries like Russia should develop in stages. The working class and their party could and should lead the revolutionary movement directly from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the proletarian-socialist revolution.

First, the overthrow of semi-feudal society requires a broad people’s democracy, led by the working-class in alliance with the peasantry. In Russia, this stage lasted from 1903 to February, 1917, and had as its objective the overthrow of Tsarism and the remnants of medievalism. The book Foundations of Leninism sums up this stage well. Stalin points out that the main force at this first stage was the proletariat relying on the entire peasantry as the reserve force, and that the revolution was directed at isolating the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie who sought compromise with Tsarism. The firm alliance between the proletariat and peasantry was crucial to prevent the peasantry (as a basically petty-bourgeois, or small-time capitalist, class) from being won over to this idea of compromise.

Then, after the overthrow of the Tsar, the revolution entered its second stage. This stage spanned from March to October, 1917, with the objective of overthrowing imperialism and withdrawing from the imperialist war. The core of this stage was the alliance of the proletariat with the poor peasants, to defeat the bourgeoisie and prevent the peasantry and other petty-bourgeois strata from going over to the side of the imperialists. The establishment of socialism depended on the success of this second stage, and during both stages the leadership of the working class was essential. After this it became possible to establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, consolidate socialism in one country and use that country as a base area from which the international communist movement could battle against imperialism more broadly.

Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, along with the 1938 History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) – Short Course, by summing up the process of the revolution in Russia and breaking down clearly the stages of its advance, serves as a master-class for the application of Leninism’s universal lessons for revolutionaries all over the world. This theoretical understanding of revolutionary stages has proved tremendously important for revolutionaries in countries as diverse as Cuba, Vietnam and China.

Lenin further understood that the old, bourgeois state machinery couldn’t be used to build socialism. Socialism couldn’t be achieved by reforming the bourgeois state, but rather it must be smashed and replaced by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. As the African American poet Audre Lorde later put it, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” On this basis Lenin led the struggle against opportunists and revisionists in Russia and in the international communist movement as a whole and led the Soviet people in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the establishment of working-class state power, in the largest country in the world.

Led by the only class with no material interest in the exploitation of others, the elimination of all exploitation becomes possible. On this basis, the Soviet Union gave the international working class a base for the first time in world history and was a beacon and an inspiration to people all over the world for more than 70 years. In his pamphlet The State and Revolution, Lenin argued that after the consolidation of socialism and the progressive elimination of the reasons for its existence, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would eventually wither away as it deliberately and methodically developed the forces of production, eliminated capitalist relations of production, and transitioned step-by-step to a classless, stateless society – Communism. Then the material conditions would be in place for Marx’s slogan of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” to be truly realized.

Up to this point our series has covered the historical emergence of Marxism and its development into its current stage, Marxism-Leninism. Next we will look more deeply at the philosophy at the center of Marxism-Leninism. In our next several articles we will look at the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge, which stands at the very core of the science of revolution.

See our full series on Marxist-Leninist theory here.

#UnitedStates #Imperialism #PeoplesStruggles #monopolyCapitalism #Socialism #Leninism #MLTheory

45 years ago, on April 30, 1975, the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people came to a successful conclusion: a small and determined country defeated the imperialist goliath, the United States. Ho Chi Minh, an outstanding Marxist-Leninist and the architect of Vietnam’s struggle for national liberation, famously stated, “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.” On that spring day, Saigon, the capital of the south, was no more. Ho Chi Minh City was born.

Several weeks earlier, on April 18, the liberation forces in Cambodia defeated the U.S. puppet regime of Lon Nol. Later that year, Laos would gain genuine independence. These combined victories, particularly the win in Vietnam, were events of historic proportions. One U.S. president after another – first Kennedy, then Johnson, and finally Nixon, systematically escalated the war so that by 1969 more than half a million U.S. troops were present. U.S. B-52s carried out ‘carpet bombings’ and by 1974 the U.S. had dropped more bombs that in the entirety of World War II. The entire history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam was nothing short of criminal.

In 1967, the great Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong anticipated Vietnam’s success, stating, “Your victory manifests once again that a nation, big or small, can defeat any enemy, however powerful provided only that it fully mobilizes its people, relies firmly on the people, and wages a people’s war. By their war against U.S. aggression and for national salvation under the wise and able leadership of the great leader President Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese people have set a brilliant example for the oppressed peoples and oppressed nations the world over in their struggle for liberation.” And that was exactly what happened.

There are other factors that contributed to Vietnam’s victory. The socialist countries provided real assistance. The weapons and personnel sent by People’s China, the Soviet Union, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and others helped. So did the solidarity expressed by people all over the world.

In the United States, the leading section of the anti-war movement was in fact in solidarity with Vietnam and the valiant National Liberation Front (NLF). Hundreds of thousands of students and youth supported the slogan, “Victory to the NLF,” and NLF flags were everywhere. There are some who want to sanitize history and forget the fact that one of the main chants at anti-war demonstrations was, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is sure to win.” Among U.S. troops in Vietnam, a wave of resistance grew. While it was not decisive, this mosaic of resistance and solidarity – worldwide – helped the Vietnamese achieve victory.

Revolutionaries in the U.S. owe the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos a debt of gratitude. Their struggle for national liberation helped to create a new communist movement in U.S. The example of Vietnam, the rising power of national liberation movements, and the example of socialist countries like People’s China had a profound effect on the student, anti-war, Black, Chicano, Asian American and other oppressed nationality movements. There was wave of activists who wanted to bring down U.S. imperialism and who decided to take up Marxism-Leninism. The result was the creation of serious revolutionary organizations like the League of Revolutionary Struggle, the Revolutionary Union, October League, Black Workers Congress and so many others. Today, Freedom Road Socialist Organization is carrying forward the best aspects of the new communist movement. Proudly, and without apologies.

Reflecting on the struggle of the Vietnamese people, there are real lessons for us today. We need to be working class internationalists. We live in a country ruled by a clique of monopoly capitalists that still command an empire. Whatever weakens that empire is good for all working and oppressed people, and that includes people right here at home. The Communist Party of the Philippines is waging a people’s war against the U.S.-backed regime of President Duterte. In the Middle East, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is helping to spearhead the fight to end the Israeli/U.S. occupation. From Syria to Venezuela, efforts are underway to break the chains of imperialism.

45 years ago, Vietnam showed the world what was possible and it is important to remember that today. Trump and his corporate backers are doomed. Capitalism is a failed system.

It is like Mao said about the U.S. in the 1960s, “However, all reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct desperate struggles. They are bound to resort to military adventure and political deception in all their forms in order to save themselves from extinction. And the revolutionary peoples are bound to meet with all kinds of difficulties before final victory. Nevertheless, all these difficulties can be surmounted, and no difficulty can ever obstruct the advance of the revolutionary people. Perseverance means victory.”

#Vietnam #AntiwarMovement #Imperialism #PeoplesStruggles #US #HoChiMinh #Asia

Why review a book that the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin began in 1901 and finished in 1902? The short answer is the book is just that good and it has endured the test of time, and the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth is a good occasion for it.

A more complete answer is as follows – we are in a period where monopoly capitalism has shown itself to be a failed system. Not only has it failed to deal with the challenges of a pandemic, capitalism is a people-destroying economic system that is making the pandemic worse. Add on the facts that we are in the onset of a large-scale economic crisis and millions of people, including a section of the working class are turning towards socialism. So, a book that laid the ideological basis for the political party that organized and led the first successful socialist revolution is timely to say the least. It helps us figure out what we need to do in the U.S. today.

Some might object by saying what relevance could a polemic have – whose target audience was an illegal, underground movement that did battle with Russia’s Czar, capitalists and landlords a century or more ago? The answer to that question can be found in looking at the overall lessons and conclusions Lenin makes in his trailblazing work. So, here’s some of the main points Lenin addresses.

Lenin starts out What is to be Done? by talking about the importance of the theoretical struggle, of the need for debate and clarity around fundamental questions of political and ideological line. Some people don’t like this and see it as disunity or ‘left infighting’ that needs to be overcome. Veterans of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), and other Marxist-Leninist organizations know better from our own experience.

In the case of FRSO, we had a struggle with right opportunists in our ranks 20 years ago. We faced a group of petty bourgeoisie radicals who claimed to be Marxists but rejected Marxism-Leninism, the need for a working class revolution, and the socialist countries. We debated with them until it became clear we did not really agree on anything, and they split from our organization. That struggle for Marxist clarity and the break with opportunism allowed us to build a U.S.-wide Marxist-Leninist organization that is multinational and growing rapidly.

In What is to be Done? Lenin uses a wonderful literary construction – “the marsh.” Lenin stated, “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighboring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there.”

To put this another way, Lenin was saying let’s not head into the swamp of right opportunism and do battle with all who say we should, concluding, “Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are ‘free’ to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!”

Theory matters. For example, let’s take the issue of fighting for reforms. We fight for reforms because it creates a favorable context for people to learn about society, what laws govern its development and what kind of change is needed. Reforms can improve people’s lives, but are limited. We live in the heart of a declining imperialist power where our way of life, our very mode of existence is going to get worse.

But one thing for sure is that we cannot reform our way to socialism, where the working class is in charge. For that you need a revolution – not a Bernie Sanders ‘political revolution', but a real one, where one class takes away the power of another. Examples include the French Revolution, where the aristocrats met the guillotine or more recently, the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions.

Revolution will be a practical question in the U.S. to be sure, but it also deals with questions of theory, such as what the nature of the capitalist state is. The capitalist state cannot be reformed into a socialist one; Lenin’s prescription is that it needs to be “smashed to atoms.” How one answers basic issues of theory like these are critical to what kind of organization we should build and what strategy we should employ.

In What is to be Done? Lenin does battle with a confused political tendency in the Russian socialist movement known as the Economists. As it was not a label they picked for themselves and the issue of ‘Economism’ still peppers debates around socialist strategy, it is helpful to be clear about who Lenin was talking about. He wasn’t talking about workers fighting for economic gains or a general trade union problem. He was talking about a trend, a group of people in the socialist movement made up of some workers and quite a few intellectuals. The Economists viewed themselves as socialists, but in practice they were not.

Trade unions are great, and we need more of them. The problem with the Economists was they made trade unionism – which is in essence getting a better deal for workers under capitalism – their everything. To them, politics was not overthrowing the Czar and his ruling-class backers, nor revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or socialism. Instead it was legal rights for unions or protective measures for labor. As a result, they saw no real need for a tight, centralized revolutionary political party, and they advocated for a form of political organization that was a hodgepodge mix of labor union and socialist organization that in fact was not socialist at all.

That a trend like this could get any traction might seem odd at first but it wasn't that strange at all. At the time, all forms of trade union activity could land you in jail, as could passing out a leaflet, or organizing study groups. So, all these activities were underground, and, when you combine inexperience with ‘socialists’ who made a fetish of their ignorance of what actual tasks of socialists are, you get forms of organization that are not good for trade unions and are not revolutionary either.

When the Economists thought about the international socialist movement, they tended to identify with the most conservative, non-revolutionary sections of it that said the “movement as everything, and the goal as nothing.”

In What is to be Done? Lenin points out that at the root the Economists’ right-opportunism was their worship of the spontaneous movement and the belittling the role of socialist consciousness. And Lenin forcefully made the point that a socialist understanding of the world, or Marxism, arose outside the working class and had to be taken to its proletarian home.

Here is how Lenin put it in What is to be Done?: “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals.”

Marxism is a science, a science of revolution that built itself on most advanced currents of thinking at the time it arose. Science is not something that spontaneously pops into people’s heads. It never has been and never will. We all live in the physical world; to understand it we need to study some physics. Likewise, if we want to change the society, we need to study some Marxism. Scientific socialism uncovered the principles by which human society developed and the inevitability of a society without classes: communism. It is a road map forward for the struggle of our class.

What is to be Done? Is a book that is filled with important insights about a range of topics including how to fight the forces of repression, and methods of work to raise the level of understanding of working people. But if you want to do a thumbnail sketch of what the book is all about here it is. Socialist theory, or scientific socialism, arose independently of the workers’ movement, the task is to fuse the two, to unite them, to bring them together. And this union of Marxism and the working-class movement shows itself organizationally in the creation of revolutionary socialist, or what we would now call a communist, organization. Lenin then lays out a plan to build that organization, the party that came to be known as Bolsheviks, who decisively shaped the course of world history.

For revolutionaries in the U.S., What is to be Done? is super relevant because we still have the task of fusing Marxism-Leninism and the workers’ movement. We are trying hard to build a new communist party that can lead a successful fight for socialism. This means helping the advanced of our class, the activists and leaders, take up Marxism-Leninism.

FRSO is working to do that day in and day out by carrying out three tasks. First, we are building the day-to-day struggle of the masses of people, be it on the job or in the communities. Second, we are trying to raise the general level of political understanding and organization. And finally, just like Lenin was talking about in What is to be Done? we are trying to build a serious organization of working and oppressed people that has the capacity to contend for power.

Given that many people are considering alternatives to the existing order of things and exploring the implications of what it means to be a socialist who really wants change, let’s talk (or better, let’s work) together to put our ideas into practice.

When Lenin wrote What is to be Done? the Economists could see nothing more than a growing trade union movement. Three years later, in 1905, workers were fighting in the streets to bring down the Czar. In less than a score of years proletarian political power would be established in what was the Russian empire. Lenin was right about what our class can do.

One thing about monopoly capitalism is that it is good at producing oppression and better at producing enemies. So, here is what needs to be done. We need to build a new communist party to get rid of this monster. We need to unite all who can be united to do so. The U.S. holds African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native peoples in the chains of inequality, so at the core of this united front against monopoly capitalism, we need a strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities.

Is all this easier said than done? For sure. But reading a book like What is to be Done? and putting Marxism-Leninism into practice makes it all possible.

Mick Kelly is an editor of Fight Back! and a leading member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO).

#MinneapolisMN #Imperialism #Socialism #BookReviews #frso #Lenin #WhatIsToBeDone

Agencia Bolivariana de Prensa originally published the following article by Ivan Marquez, of Colombia’s FARC. It was translated by Fight Back! staff.

By Ivan Marquez

The whole world is witnessing the decline of the most brutal empire in human history: that of the United States. The White House feels the tremor of losing control of the world, and that is why it is desperately trying to impose a global fascist dictatorship that will allow it to live beyond its sunset.

Tucked in the eye of the hurricane of its anguish, the United States believes it has carte blanche to act arbitrarily  against countries of the hemisphere, as it throws punches at Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and Iran – who know how to defend themselves. This impotent anger is based on the fact that these countries are neither subordinate nor anyone's satellites. Hence its aggressiveness.

Cuba and Venezuela are targets, and undoubtedly less materially powerful than the capitalists of the United States, but they are much, much, more powerful in decorum and in dignity. This is the force they have. They don't need anyone to spare their lives. They know how to resist. They are people of the lineage of Bolívar and Martí, of Chávez and Fidel, who do not bow down or humiliate themselves. And the Latin American peoples have never had an affection for the Monroe Doctrine of the terrible monster of the North.

It is time to unleash the world's solidarity towards Cuba, which has been blocked and attacked since 1959. Nothing justifies the destruction of that country's sovereignty or the socialist work of its revolution. Reason obliges us to condemn the application of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, the transgression of international law and the laws of commerce, which affect not only Cuba but also third countries.

Hands off Venezuela! Washington is punishing this brave people, with its dream of Bolivarian socialism that is erected as a retaining wall against the plundering of oil, gold, diamonds and minerals that generate new energies; that is why it conspires to overthrow the legitimate government of President Maduro, worsening the humanitarian crisis with its inhuman measures of sanctions, expropriation of companies like Citgo, and the freezing of funds that are needed for the purchase of food and medicines.

If they don't give it what it wants, the United States takes it anyway. With blatant lies it creates media manipulation. It threatens wars of invasion. It releases its crazy hawks to justify the outrage. It doesn't care about UN resolutions. It doesn't care about destroying the planet, and it despises the efforts that seek to stop climate change.

We must make people aware – by reading from the pages of history – that empires are neither immortal nor eternal. That the answer to the outrages is the mobilization of the peoples into a world rebellion. An alliance of peoples and sister republics must be created on all continents superseding religious beliefs, skin tones and all social prejudice, if life and human dignity are to be preserved.

An alliance of sovereign states and peoples for dignity and respect. The construction of a better world demands today the mobilization of resistance against global tyranny. Inaction is of no use. Wonderment and paralysis are of no use. We must react, we must move on to a united response of the world against the outrage. We need unity to defeat centuries of injustice, with the certainty that we will have on our side the immense majority of the people of the Americas.

The strategy of domination that combines a powerful battery of firepower, technology, manipulation of the mind, cultural warfare, pedagogy of fear, applied science, diplomacy, destabilization, incitement of conflicts, will not deter the struggle for human dignity.

May 5, 2019

#Colombia #Venezuela #Imperialism #Chavez #Socialism #HandsOffVenezuela #BolivarianSocialism

Minneapolis, MN – On Sunday, December 23, 30 people gathered to demonstrate against U.S. wars, at an action titled “Send an Anti-War Message for the Holidays – Stop Endless Wars.” The protest took place in Uptown Minneapolis near a commercial node full of holiday shoppers, as well as the busy Uptown Transit Station where eight different bus routes converge.

Demonstrators demanded immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from all foreign wars and interventions, questioning whether President Trump’s recent announcement that he had ordered thousands of troops out of Syria and Afghanistan would truly end illegal U.S. interference in those countries.

“Now they’re going to privatize the war. And we’re going to pay for it with our taxes,” said Kristin Dooley of Women Against Military Madness (WAMM). “Rather than ending direct U.S. efforts to control the Middle East, bringing the troops home, while good – and we’re glad they’re home – is not going to end us messing with the Middle East. And that’s why when we do our chants, we don’t just say bring the troops home, we say stop sending the drones, stop sending the jets, stop killing people all over the world.”

The protesters also condemned the continuing U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen, waged largely by Saudi Arabia but supported by U.S. arms, intelligence, aerial refueling and warships.

“In American politics, the war on Yemen gets sidelined and ignored,” said Wyatt Miller of the Anti-War Committee. “It shows how things like Trump’s Muslim travel ban – which was designed to make specific countries the target of dehumanizing, anti-Muslim bigotry – helped to normalize mass death and trauma inflicted on ordinary people in Yemen.”

Sherilyn Young from MN Caravan Solidarity connected President Trump’s deployment of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to U.S. wars and imperialism, noting the history of U.S. interventions in Central American countries as a cause behind the mass exodus of refugees and asylum-seekers from Honduras and elsewhere in the region.

Young called attention to the Soto Cano air base in Honduras, where U.S. military personnel historically have been stationed for covert operations across Central America. “That base still exists,” she said. “Folks in Honduras have said that they want it changed into a commercial air base for cargo shipments, but it is not. It is still used for war.”

The action was called by the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition.

#MinneapolisMN #AntiwarMovement #Imperialism #PeoplesStruggles #Us #Minneasota

Typically, the gathering commemorates important events like the historic struggle that began back in the late 1920s with national hero Augusto Sandino’s army’s successful expulsion of U.S. Marines; the toppling of the vicious Somoza family dictatorship, and the inspiring accomplishments of the Sandinista era in the 1980s. Oftentimes, there are international guests, like in 2007, when the Sandinistas returned to power, attendees were then-Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. Ironically, at that gathering of an anti-imperialist political party like the FSLN, on stage with Daniel Ortega were a survivor a U.S.-coordinated coup d’etat in 2002, Hugo Chavez, and a future victim of a U.S.-supported coup, Mel Zelaya, in 2009. Since Zelaya’s forced removal, Honduras has had some of the highest levels of violence in the Americas that has driven many Hondurans to migrate to the U.S., only to face repression from ICE. And now, in 2018, it is Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega who is under threat from a U.S.-supported ‘soft coup.’

Like the rescue of Venezuela President Hugo Chavez from the hands of the golpistas in April 2002, it is the masses who are the primary actor in the maintenance of Nicaraguan sovereignty amid a U.S. -backed ‘regime change’ push. Since mid-April, the country has been embroiled in violence created and maintained by opposition forces seeking the removal of democratically-elected President Ortega. One of their tactics has been the use of tranques (roadblocks) in order to create chaos and disorder through economic and social destabilization and provoking the National Police into shootouts.

Amid this disorder is the opposition media that manipulates imagery and stories in order to make it appear that the National Police are responsible for heavy-handed, bloody repression. Then, they make the call for President Ortega to step down and for the U.S. to intervene if necessary. This resembles the U.S. intervention playbook from Venezuela 2002 and 2014, when the corporate-controlled media manipulated imagery and messaging to make it appear the leftist government is ‘authoritarian’ and ‘unpopular.’

Despite the claims that Ortega is ‘unpopular,’ although he was re-elected with 72% of the vote in 2016, it is clear the opposition and, specifically their violence, is unpopular. For example, the opposition has used gang members from not only Nicaragua, but also from El Salvador as foot soldiers to carry out their violent political mission, because they cannot find ordinary Nicaraguans willing to destroy their own country. Second, since the character of the violence by the opposition has had a very clear, very vicious political character, attacking regular, rank-and-file Sandinistas, there has been a massive demonstration of support for the FSLN and President Ortega in the last few weeks, culminating in the weekend’s festivities.

The FSLN, its many organizations, and rank-and-file members have started to combat the opposition’s two fronts of struggle: the tranques and social media. In town after town, city after city, Nicaraguans have demonstrated their resolve and commitment to a peaceful, sovereign country by running off the delincuentes, disassembling the tranques, and rebuilding the roads. The heightened political level of this ‘soft coup’ is not lost on proud, patriotic Sandinistas who call their reclaimed city or town ‘liberated territory.’ All of these stories are promoted through a counter-offensive on social media by popular, revolutionary forces because the corporate-controlled, pro-opposition media does not report them on the whole. That media instead manipulates images of two different people and yet shares the story that the person was abducted and tortured by the National Police and paramilitaries. False narratives like this dominate the landscape and its impact is disastrous.

It is clear that despite the level of coordination from the comprador bourgeoisie in Nicaragua and the U.S. government, the opposition and their wave of violence is unwanted and unpopular. Whatever political opportunism they attempted after students protested a Social Security proposal by Ortega, has been lost in their bid to undemocratically decide who rules Nicaragua. The tide has turned back in favor of La RojiNegra (FSLN colors red and black) because the call for “Nicaragua Libre!” wasn’t just an 80s thing, it’s here to stay.

#Tucson #AZ #Imperialism #Americas #Socialism #Nicaragua #Sandinista #FSLN

The Communist Party of the Philippines and the Filipino people condemn the entry and the docking in Manila of nuclear-powered super-aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, along with Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville last June 26 for a supposed four-day “regularly scheduled port visit.”

The CPP denounces the Duterte regime for conniving with the US military and allowing it to use the Philippines as a foothold in its push to defend its hegemonic power in the Asia-Pacific. The Duterte regime could not even ensure compliance with the 1987 constitutional ban against nuclear weapons in the country.

The USS Ronald Reagan arrived in the Philippines after sailing through the South China Sea. Prior to proceeding to Manila, warships belonging to the aircraft fleet sailed near the contentious waters this year provoking Chinese military forces in the area. Some of the other US port visits made this year include:

February 16 – Aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and guided-missile destroyer USS Michael Murphy arrived in Manila carrying more than 5,500 US sailors

March 1 – Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Bremerton arrived at the Subic Bay Freeport March 4 – Amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard, with embarked 3d Marine Division Marines, arrived in Manila, carrying more than 2,500 US sailors April 11 – Aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and its 65 supersonic F18 jets, spy planes and helicopters, along with embarked Carrier Air Wing 17, and guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill arrived in Manila

These port visits are in fact brazen power projection operations meant to assert US military might in this region. By bringing in warships, high-powered aircrafts and all types of war materiél in the Philippines, the US imperialists infringe on Philippine sovereignty and the policy of neutrality, and stoke military tensions in the region under the pretext of “freedom of navigation operations.”

Besides regular port visits, the US is strengthening its military foothold on the Philippines by constructing its own military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), including seaports, airports and hangars and warehouses for weapons stockpiling.

#ManilaPhilippines #AntiwarMovement #Philippines #Imperialism #CPP #EnhancedDefenseCooperationAgreementEDCA

The masses rise up against the Islamic State

The election is happening in the midst of victory against the Islamic State, which at one point controlled over a third of the country and subjected the people within that area to the most brutal reactionary regime. The Islamic State sought to build a Saudi-style state in Iraq and Syria, and it was backed to the hilt by the Turkish and Saudi governments to achieve this.

Within two weeks of their invasion in June 2014, the Islamic State had routed the U.S.-created Iraqi army and taken control of Mosul, a city of millions. Assyrians, Shi’a and Yazidis were massacred, women were pressed into slavery, and cultural sites not in line with their Saudi-style world outlook Islam were bulldozed. The world was stunned by their brutality. The Islamic State seemed unstoppable, and the national situation spiraled out of control. Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was forced to resign, handing power over to fellow Dawa Party member Haidar al-Abadi.

A call went out across the country for the people to take up arms and save Iraq. The numerous patriotic forces that fought the U.S. occupation were now mobilized against the Islamic State. Militias from every sector of Iraqi society marched westward under the leadership of the Popular Mobilization Committee, with full support from the Iranian military. They were the decisive force in driving out the Islamic State, village by village, street by street.

While the war against the Islamic State raged on, anger at the government’s absolute failure at defending the Iraqi people spurred a mass movement on a level not seen in years. The people demanded an end to sectarian practices that kept the same elites in power and created the conditions for an Islamic State to rise up. They also demanded action against the corrupt officials that kept the government inept, and guaranteed access to public services for all Iraqis.

This movement included students and intellectuals and included a section of the working class, guided by the Communist Party and the Sadrist Movement, a Shi’a anti-imperialist group led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Baghdad under their leadership, and on April 16 they stormed the infamous Green Zone and occupied the Iraqi parliament.

By the end of 2017, the Islamic State was driven from Mosul and Iraq was declared free. It was only because of the fierce resistance of the Iraqi people – who have not known peace in decades because of the cruelty of U.S. imperialism. Now there is hope for a better future independent of outside influence.

What to watch for the elections

The frontrunner in the May 12 polls is the Victory of Iraq coalition, led by incumbent Haidar al-Abadi. He enjoys widespread popular support because of the military victory and is the first leading political figure since the 2003 invasion to enjoy support across all religious groups. Nouri al-Maliki is trying to come back to power at the head of the State of Law coalition, and still enjoys support among sectors of the Shi’a elite, but his appeal ends there, and he is not expected to win.

Al-Abadi and al-Maliki are the only establishment politicians with any popular support. They seek closer relations with Iran and the Arab world and ignore the demands of the U.S. All the puppets of imperialism have been discredited and stand no chance of returning to government.

A decisive role in the election will be played by the communists and Sadrists. Their united front in practice has translated into a political alliance, the Marchers, and they hope to win the popular movement’s demands through the next government. Among their candidates is Muntader al-Zaidi, a journalist who is famous around the world for hurling his shoes at George W. Bush during a press conference in 2008, while shouting, “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog.”

The Popular Mobilization Committee is also fielding candidates as well – veterans of the wars against the U.S. and the Islamic State – and they are expected to win a number of seats.

No coalition has majority support, meaning that a coalition government will need to be made. Many political analysts expect the Marchers to play the role of kingmaker, meaning they will be the deciding factor in whatever coalition government comes out of May 12.

Iraq’s future

Iraq is a country ruined by imperialism. In the 1950s the Iraqi people threw off the British empire and their local pawns and established a republic dedicated to national self-determination. The revolutionary and progressive forces that led Iraq at the time had their eyes set on a modern and free nation. In the decades that followed, the U.S., Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia did everything they could to break this dream. But despite all the horrors inflicted upon them, the Iraqi people resisted and fought back.

All blame for the suffering in Iraq lies at the feet of the Bush family, the Clintons, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and ultimately the monopoly capitalists who the U.S. government dutifully serves. We should never forget their crimes, and when the time comes we must do what we can to ensure that these monsters face justice.

In the meantime, it is our duty to cheer for the Iraqi people every time they strike a blow against imperialism and as they make another step towards self-determination and freedom.

#MilwaukeeWI #AntiwarMovement #Iraq #Elections #Imperialism #US #MiddleEast #PeoplesStruggles #IslamicState