Police moved in to disperse protesters who are against the U.S. infrastructure grant. AP
Nepal’s Parliament on February 27 ratified an aid package provided through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an “independent agency” located in the United States. The $500 million to be dispensed, plus $130 million from Nepal, will pay for roadway improvements and transmission lines conveying hydro-generated electricity to India and to domestic users.
Nepal’s acceptance process was long and tortuous due to the country’s layered, fractured, and unwieldy political system. China’s government opposed the MMC funding.
Massive protests unfolded outside the parliament building in Kathmandu prior to parliamentary approval. Joining the demonstrators were those representing student and peasant groups and sections of Nepal’s two Communist Parties. They were protesting the government’s alleged disrespect for Nepal’s sovereignty.
The U.S. Congress passed legislation creating the MCC in January 2004. The intention was that of providing economic aid to low and middle-income countries via “threshold programs” and “compacts” lasting five years. The MMC website highlights “cost-effective projects, a lean staff, an evidence-based approach …[and] a good investment for the American people.”
The aid is tailored to reducing investment risk and promoting “growth …[and] economic freedom.” MMC officials look for “good economic policies in recipient countries, such as free markets and low corruption.”
After first awarding a threshold grant, the MMC in 2014 offered Nepal a compact. The agreement signed in 2017 represented the largest foreign assistance grant ever received by Nepal, and the first MMC compact with a South Asia nation.
The MMC has offered 83 compacts and threshold programs to 51 countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. Some MMC agreements have ended abruptly – with Madagascar in 2009, Tanzania in 2016, and Sri Lanka in 2020. The MMC complained of election irregularities in the first two situations, while Sri Lanka objected to violations of sovereignty.
The almost six-year hiatus between the agreement being signed and Nepal’s ratification of the compact stems from governance problems in Nepal. Two factors contribute. One is institutional immaturity, the result of decades of political turmoil prior to 2015 when Nepal’s present Constitution took effect. The other is parliamentary dysfunction associated with wrangling over disparate caste, ethnic, and regional interests.
A constitutional monarchy, in place between 1990 and 2006, had succeeded decades of absolutist minority rule. A 10-year-old armed Maoist insurgency ended in 2006, coincident with the king’s departure. From then until 2015, strife over the dissolution of the Maoists’ army, regional demands, and the shape of a new constitution weakened the Maoist political party as it tried to exercise political power. All the while, it was contending with internal schisms, another Communist party, and Nepal’s Congress Party.
Following the institution of the new Constitution in 2015 and the general elections two years later, the Communist Party of Nepal–Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) and the Communist Party of Nepal–Maoist Centre were positioned to jointly form a government. They did so, and, having united in May 2018, they established the Nepal Communist Party.
The Supreme Court nullified the unification. Afterwards, the CPN-UML headed a shaky government amid continuing factionalism. It exited in early 2021 after a no-confidence vote. The Supreme Court named Congress Party head Sher Bahadur Deuba as prime minister, and he remains.
The picture is of a government that is precarious and rudderless. In particular, according to The Statesman news service in New Delhi, “With the leadership of the executive practically non-functional … the onus of making the system work lay upon Parliament. Sadly, the legislature has become almost dysfunctional.” Adding to the chaos is the matter of corruption.
Reports the Kathmandu Post: “Nepal’s position on the latest Corruption Perception Index remained unchanged at 117th out of 180 countries … Nepal’s score also remained unchanged at 33 …[and a] score below 50 is considered as having a relatively higher level of corruption.”
Once more The Statesman: “The biggest “achievement” of Parliament is that it had succeeded in ratifying the Millennium Challenge Corporation … Compact in the face of considerable resistance from the constituent political parties in government itself.”
It would be miraculous, so it seems, if mechanisms of accountability are in place as to where and to whom the money goes, and if the 28% of rural Nepalese who were poor in 2019 find that, with the money, their lives improve. Only through wishful thinking might one expect China to rest easy with Nepal’s half-billion-dollar bonanza. Perhaps that’s the U.S. purpose: to provoke and to intrude.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit Nepal on March 25 to deal with Nepal’s ratification of the MMC compact. According to a Chinese official quoted by India’s ANI news: “Implementation of the BRI projects in Nepal is important for Beijing … But this time Beijing is more worried about the security challenges emanating from the compact’s approval.”
Nepal’s government in 2017 had signed an agreement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for a railway project linking Kathmandu to Central Asia.
“We tried hard to stop the MCC compact’s parliamentary approval,” declared another Chinese official, who remarked also that, “[Nepalese] leaders who had earlier assured us of the compact’s failure started shaking under US pressure.”
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.
War in Ukraine is turning people’s lives and affairs upside down. Governmental functioning is confounded. Unsurprisingly, dirty laundry, previously hidden, is on display. A Russian communication March 6 mentions “evidence of an emergency clean-up performed by the Kiev regime was found – aimed at eradicating traces of the military-biological program in Ukraine, financed by @DeptofDefense.”
A Chinese Foreign ministry spokesperson two days later spoke of “26 [U.S.] bio-labs and other related facilities in Ukraine.”
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 08: Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland testifies before a Senate Foreign Relation Committee hearing on Ukraine on March 08, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded, saying that that the United States “does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere.” Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland indicated “Ukraine has biological research facilities …[and] so we are working with the Ukrainians [to] prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.”
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported that, as of February 25, “a network of US-linked labs [existed] in Ukraine that work with dangerous pathogens.” Those 26 such facilities are “public and animal health labs.”
The gist of the Chinese and Russian communications is their claim that the U.S. Government is doing biowarfare. In that regard, the large “Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research” in Tbilisi, Georgia, comes into view. The U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) paid for the Center’s construction and for its operation, between 2011 and 2018.
Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva produced a report in 2018 alleging the Center had bioweapons capabilities. She claimed that most of the Center’s staff were U.S. citizens enjoying diplomatic immunity and that at least three U.S. companies were doing bio-weapons research there. She indicates elsewhere that biologic specimens arrive by diplomatic pouch.
Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research
Gaytandzhieva’s extraordinarily detailed report displays dozens of official U.S. documents and graphics. She points out that DTRA-funded private companies carry out bio-weapons research and testing in laboratories and facilities located in Georgia, Ukraine, in the Middle East, South East Asia, Africa, and at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. U.S. government apologists have dismissed the report as Russian-inspired propaganda.
The distinction between offense and defensive preparations has been clear as regards Fort Detrick. A “biological weapons program” existed there until 1969, when, as ordered by President Richard Nixon, it became a “biological defense program.” U.S. research installations elsewhere in the world lack clear demarcation between offensive and defensive purposes.
One of the U.S. bio-laboratories abroad is Battelle Corporation, “a $59 million subcontractor at Lugar Center,” that, according to Gaytandzhieva, operates laboratories in eight countries across the globe and, as of 2018 “has been awarded some $2 billion [in] federal contracts” and ranks 23rd among US government contractors.
As of that year, the Southern Research Institute, Black & Veatch, and Metabiota company were operating one or more of the 11 Defense Department-funded bio-laboratories in Ukraine. In a report published in January, 2022, Gaytandzhieva mentions the “US Federal contracts registry” as documenting that “DTRA allocated $80 million [to Black & Veatch company] for biological research in Ukraine as of 30 July 2020.”
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva
She charges that the contractor did more than merely fund the labs – as suggested by Victoria Nuland – but instead has been responsible for their day-to-day operation. Cited as evidence are “internal documents” showing that “independent experts were denied even a visit” to the laboratories.
Ominously, scientists funded by the Defense Department have developed a new way of transmitting viruses to plants. According to a Science magazine article in 2018, the Defense Department initiated a program named “Insect Allies” in 2017 and would continue it for four years. Biting insects are being studied at the Luger Center in Georgia and presumably in other laboratories included in the multi-national U.S. bio-weapons network, such as those in Ukraine.
The scientists have arranged for genetically-modified viruses to infect insects that then go on to transmit the fixed-up viruses to plants where they alter the plants’ properties. Critics, mainly in Europe, doubt the peaceful purposes of the new methodology. They fear that the technique of “lab-modified self-spreading viruses” will soon be applied to humans and animals.
Commentary from the Max-Planck Institute interprets the Science magazine article as arguing “that the findings of the Insect Allies Program could be more easily used for biological warfare than for routine agricultural use.” It cites a legal opinion saying that, “The Insect Allies Program could be seen to violate the Biological Weapons Convention” (BWC),” which took effect in 1975.
This photo shows corn leaf aphids used in a study to modify crop plants through engineered viruses. | Meena Haribal – Boyce Thompson Institute via AP
Information presented here suggests it’s at least possible that the United States really has been developing bio-weapons for offensive use at facilities throughout the world and particularly in countries along Russia’s western periphery.
But questions crop up of mission overlap. Bio-medical and bio-industrial products are developed for both peaceful and war-making uses. In the latter case, a given product may be used for offensive or defensive purposes. A representative statement from officials in The Netherlands in 2013 testifies to a merging of purposes:
“On the one hand, many pathogenic organisms are very important to research and development in the fields of medicine, biology and agriculture. However, some of these organisms can also be used to develop biological weapons that may pose a threat to public health and the environment. The term ‘dual-use research’ can be extended … ‘Dual-use research of concern’ is the type of research that could be misused directly and whereby such misuse would have major consequences.”
Ambiguity cries out. That ambiguity demands that, in regard to Ukraine, and elsewhere, we view the likelihood of the United States preparing for biowarfare as probable, not as possible.
One more set of circumstances now boosts that likelihood up to near certainty. In furtherance of its goals, the U.S. government easily accepts the reality that masses of humans are going to suffer and die. We recall:
The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the conventional bombing of Dresden that sickened and killed hundreds of thousands.
Pursuit of wars, in Korea and Vietnam, in which millions died, plus wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan that took the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Complicity in massacres in Indonesia and Latin America.
Institution of economic sanctions that killed or incapacitated hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Cuba and Venezuela.
Support for repressive regimes like apartheid South Africa and Saudi Arabia that killed and maimed.
W.T. WhitneyJr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell | The Boston Globe via Getty Images
“[O]ur obligation as scientists [is] to make sure we fight the good fight and ensure the fruits of science are not monopolized by the powerful and the elite.” — Richard Levins
Three scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are discouraged. New Zealanders Bruce C. Glavovic and Timothy F. Smith and Australian Iain Whitecriticize governments for not doing enough about climate change. They are calling upon fellow IPCC scientists to no longer conduct research on climate change. “More scientific reports, another set of charts,” Glavovic exclaims; “I mean, seriously, what difference is that going to make?”
Hundreds of IPCC scientists provide the United Nations periodically with reports on adverse impacts of climate change. The most recent report, issued in February, details rising seas, terrible droughts, atypical weather events, thawing permafrost, dying forests, and massive displacement of populations.
Once atmospheric warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius over 19th century levels, changes will be irreversible. The increase so far is 1.1 degrees Celsius. Surveyed, 60 percent of scientists working on an earlier IPCC report agreed that temperatures would rise almost three percent by the end of the present century.
Dr. Richard Levins (1930-2016) | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Climate scientists have contributed to people’s general awareness of the issues. Lots of people understand that fossil fuels, when burned, generate gaseous emissions which, in excess, cause atmospheric warming. Many people are more or less aware that as consumption and industrial production increase, emissions rise too. In their appeal, the three protesting scientists are, in effect, be reaching out to the public and politicians, as if to spark a resistance movement within society.
There is a side story that hasn’t resonated yet. Capital requires new wealth to be created in order to survive. That only happens as long as production and consumption are increasing. Therefore, with capitalism in charge, rising emissions are a secondary matter.
That’s why those three scientists seeking to renegotiate a science-society contract are spoiling for a fight that, in essence, is anti-capitalist. Unsurprisingly, the prospect is slim of allies flocking to their cause from either the scientific community or the public sector. But of the two, the scientists may be more receptive. What follows here is a look at the potential for collaboration among scientists.
Normally scientists don’t need a supporting cast. They often generate information that is applauded – for example, research findings that contribute to high technology consumer items. Even the science behind weapons manufacture gets a pass.
The public praises most scientific investigation involving natural and biologic processes, notably vaccine research, novel therapies for cancer or inherited illnesses, and the development of antibiotics. For instance, advances leading to antibiotic treatment of streptococcal infection led directly to the eradication of terrible afflictions of heart values, joints, and/or the brain. Everyone benefited.
But something went wrong in other healthcare situations. Scientific findings were not implemented, or only partially so. Population groups were excluded, as per decision-making at the highest levels of government and society. As regards the climate crisis, everyone is excluded.
Scientists found that ingested lead interferes with enzyme activities and thereby injures the brains of children, and causes other disastrous ailments. In 2014, the majority Black population of Flint, Michigan learned that their drinking water contained high levels of lead. Eight years later, lead levels are down, but still potentially toxic. Epidemiologists say there is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood.
Ariana Hawk, with her sons Aiden Hawk, left, and Sincere Smith. Thousands of children required to eat additional nutritional foods to help limit the effects of lead exposure from Flint’s poisoned water | Ryan Garza – Detroit Free Press via AP
The high death rates of African-American infants are an abomination. Specialists of many disciplines long ago showed how babies stay healthy. Their mothers have to be healthy, well-educated and well-nourished. Ready access to competent healthcare for mothers and babies is essential. But African American babies have long died at rates two to three times higher than those of white babies.
Maybe scientists investigating natural and biologic processes – our climate scientists, for example – and scientists concerned with how society works can join forces. Both sets of scientists study realities involving either matter, natural and biological processes, or collective human aspirations and actions. They study the interaction of real things, and how things change.
Similarities in methodological approach are one basis for scientists to collaborate in developing joint projects, enabling the general population to understand the role of science in society, and firming up implementation of research findings.
“Sheehan’s book remains the single best secondary analysis of the debates over Marxist philosophy of science from its creation in the late nineteenth century … until the close of World War II.”– Marx & Philosophy
Scientists within the Marxist tradition look for linkages and commonalities. According to historian Helena Sheehan, “The history of marxism in relation to science is extraordinarily dense and dramatic. From the beginning, marxism took science extremely seriously, not only for its economic promise in building a socialist society, but for its revelatory power in understanding the world. Marxism has made the strongest claims of any intellectual tradition before or since about the socio-historical character of science.”
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels incorporated findings from the physical and biological sciences into their political analyses. Here is Marx:
“Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil”.
Here Marx is discussing political power, changing modes of production, human migration from country to city, and the lack of organic waste material formerly produced by animals and people – which accounts for reduced soil fertility. His reference point is the enclosure movement in 19th century England. Wealthy bourgeoisie bought land, created large parcels, and surrounded them with walls to allow for grazing. Villagers and country people, now deprived of animals and land and unable to feed themselves, moved to cities and became factory workers.
This sequence of developments Marx characterized as a “metabolic rift.” In developing his analysis, Marx gained an assist from scientist Justus von Liebig who studied agricultural chemistry and plant growth.
The Discovery and Rediscovery of Metabolic Rift | Climate & Capitalism
Marx declared that, “Humans live from nature, i.e.: nature is our body, and we must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if we are not to die. And “man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature … man is a part of nature.”
Frederick Engels was a kindred spirit. He asks:
“What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, care that the tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock? In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, tangible success …Thus at every step we are reminded that … [we], belong to nature, and exist in its midst.”
We propose that scientists studying natural phenomena and processes are ripe for collaborative relations with social scientists, including Marxist investigators. As noted, they share similar methodologies and most of them a dedication to human well-being. Growing numbers of scientists, both kinds, are very likely primed to accept that a linkage runs from wealth accumulation, to perennially increasing production, to rising emissions, to atmospheric warming.
Together with the public, scientists need to realize that capital is bound to make its peace with planetary warming, no matter the disaster ahead. Aware that their research impinges on human lives, a few scientists, maybe, will turn to political activism.
Influenced by the worsening climate crisis, those social scientists receptive to Marxist analysis would increasingly familiarize themselves with issues involving the biologic and natural sciences. One envisions collaboration among the different kinds of scientists and even common struggle in the political arena. Anticipating the new society, revolutionaries within the ranks of scientists, acting together now, would gain a head start in building scientific institutions that serve the people.
Discussion here touching upon social transformation is incomplete without defining the political role of working people. They are the protagonists of the change to come and of rescue during the climate crisis. The desperate situation now has an urgency and sweep extending far beyond burdens falling specifically upon the working class, like economic exploitation and plunder. Now, the world’s entire population may be heading to ruin.
Yet in times past, the working class has shown itself capable of carrying out social revolutions amid other circumstances of generalized disaster. This time the working class, organized and motivated, could take the lead in the climate crisis while brandishing, as before, some sort of an all-encompassing demand. In the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, the working class called for national liberation; in the Russian revolutions of 1917, for “peace, land, and bread.”
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Public employees march to demand better salaries, adequate pensions, and better employment conditions, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Feb. 18, 2022. | Carlos Giusti – AP
In Puerto Rico on Feb. 18, thousands of publicly-employed union workers, retired workers, and university students took part in a national strike and march that spread throughout the island. The largest contingent filled streets in San Juan. Demonstrators made noise and marched behind a long banner saying, “People before Debt – Salary Justice – Dignified Retirement – Collective Bargaining – No Privatization.”
Their demands grew out of actions of the U.S. government’s Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), which was created under the authority of the U.S. Congress’s PROMESA Act of 2016. The island’s government was bankrupt at the time, and the FOMB was charged with negotiating with creditors and implementing austerity in Puerto Rico.
Labor unions participating in this most recent national strike included the Puerto Rican Workers’ Union, the Central Workers’ Federation, the United Auto Workers (for Treasury Department workers), the Electrical Workers’ Union, several teachers’ unions, the University Professors’ Union, and health workers’ unions. Unionized employees of the Highways and Transportation Authority also took part.
Students and teachers have sparked the recent protests. They’ve had no pay raises for 12 years. School closures have skyrocketed as the FOMB has denied funding to public schools while approving them for charter schools. Says one observer: “They are paying investors who are gaining profits from the country’s bankruptcy, and that is immoral.”
The FOMB recently approved public-employee salary hikes. But they were minimal and would only take effect in 2023. Beginning on Feb. 4, 70% of teachers stayed away from classes for six days, as thousands were demonstrating in San Juan and elsewhere on the island. Firefighters and police joined them. Those protests ended with Gov. Pedro Pierluisi promising the teachers an extra $1,000 per month, and firefighters a $500 raise. Funding sources are uncertain.
Puerto Ricans are in distress; 52% of them live below the poverty line, as do almost 60% of their children. Electricity and water bills are almost 60% higher than they are in the United States; food costs are 18% higher. The median family income is $20,500. The salary base for teachers—most are women—is $21,000 annually.
Privatization of the island’s electrical distribution system is emblematic of the FOMB’s brand of austerity. Since June 2021, Luma company has been in charge. It’s a subsidiary of the ATCO and Quanta Corporations, that together provide electrical services in more than 100 countries. Luma’s record is one of frequent blackouts and scant attention paid to damage left-over from Hurricane Maria in 2016 and earthquakes in 2020.
The workings of PROMESA and the FOMB had aroused Puerto Ricans to the point in July 2019 of forcing Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s resignation, a process made easier through the corruption of some of his appointees. In recent weeks, protesting unionists called upon current Gov. Pedro Pierluisi to resign.
But the island’s government may lack tools for putting the people’s will into effect. Law professor and author José Nicolás Medina Fuentes, for example, regards the current prohibition on political parties forming electoral coalitions as undemocratic. He wants an “alternative to elites holding on to power through a two-party system that bypasses governance by a majority of the people.”
Medina Fuentes points out that in the elections of 2012, the Popular Democratic Party (supporting commonwealth status) and the New Progressive Party (supporting statehood) together gained 96% of the vote, leaving only 4% for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and the Working People’s Party.
In 2020, the two major parties accounted for 64.5% of the vote, and the “emerging parties” now attracted 35.5% of the vote. These included the Citizens Victory Movement with 14.3%, the PIP with 13.7%, and Project Dignity with 6.9%. Effectively, he says, 67% of Puerto Ricans “do not govern.” He calls for either of the two major parties to be able to form coalitions with minor parties. A coalition with the PIP, for example, would give visibility to the independence vote.
A major sign of popular rejection of both government and major political parties is Puerto Rico’s increasingly high rate of voter abstention, really of electoral boycott. Voter turn-out for the general elections in 2020 was 50.02%.
Nevertheless, the island’s government by no means bears the main responsibility for difficulties confronting Puerto Ricans in the wake of PROMESA. The underlying, but not always explicit, theme of the recent protests is a call for the island’s association with the United States to be radically altered.
Reporter Monica Cruz cites Jocelyn Velazquez Rodriguez, who is an organizer of the ongoing campaign of demonstrations and strikes. Cruz refers to that campaign as “Jornada Se Acabaron Las Promesas,” which means “On this day we are done with promises!”
Velazquez Rodriguez emphasizes “the impact PROMESA has had on the political consciousness of the Puerto Rican people …[The] PROMESA [law] has been a mechanism that has revealed the true face of US imperialism. It is a law created for a colony, to serve of the imperial interests of the United States. [And for] many Puerto Ricans there has never been a contract, nor an agreement, nor a convention on this.”
She sees “the popular demonstrations…[as] a sample of an awakening of a people that are tired of imperialism, the colonialism, the persecution and the suffering that it has caused us for so many years.”
The existence of colonial rule is not imaginary. The U.S Army invaded and occupied Puerto Rico in 1898. An “Organic Charter” two years later put the U.S. Congress in charge of the island. In 1950, Congress declared Puerto Rico to be a “Free Associated State,” authorized a constitution, and subjected the resulting document to U.S. laws and regulations. Also, there would be no protection from bankruptcy.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service ruled in 1976 that U.S. companies operating in Puerto Rico would not pay taxes on income or capital gains. U.S. investors would pay no taxes on dividends paid by those companies. Nor were taxes due on U.S. investments deposited in Puerto Rican banks.
Previously, exploiters had counted on low-wage textile jobs and agricultural work for their profits. U.S. chemical and electronic manufacturers rushed to a Puerto Rico converted into a tax-free haven. A tax attorney quoted by The New York Times referred to the IRS tax leniency as “nothing but a welfare program for the Fortune 500.”
Meanwhile, Puerto Rico’s government had to rely on “multi-million” dollar loans to compensate for reduced tax collections. After 1990, U.S. authorities gradually restored taxation, and the manufacturers departed. To cover expenses, Puerto Rico’s government issued bonds held by U.S. banks, hedge funds, and corporations. Indebtedness mounted. Bankruptcy required rescue, of sorts—and thus came the PROMESA law of 2016.
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Painting by Eyre Crowe, A Slave Sale in Charleston, South Carolina, 1854
A recent BBC report attributes climate-change damage in Africa to “racialized capitalism.” That confusing term reflects a new understanding of U.S. slavery on the part of many historians. Here the term signifies the commanding role of capitalism in the oppression of Africans and of African-descended peoples in the United States. Racial hatred, by implication, takes on a secondary role as a tool useful for enforcing oppression.
What follows is an attempt to highlight the contribution of capitalism to racial oppression in the United States.
W.E.B. DuBois describes Europeans “scurrying down the hot, mysterious coasts of Africa to the Good Hope of Gain until for the first time a real commerce was born […] That sinister traffic, on which the British Empire and the American Republic were largely built cost black Africa no less than 100,000,000 souls, the wreckage of its political and social life, and left the continent in precisely that state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation.” (“The African Roots of War,” 1915).
Basic Books, 2021 9781541616592
In his recently published bookThe Ledger and the Chain, historian Joshua Rothman studies three wealthy U.S. slave traders. He points out that, “By 1860, four million enslaved people in the United States were a pillar of American prosperity, cumulatively worth more than the whole country had invested in manufacturing, railroads, and banks put together.” Slave traders “helped define the financial, political, legal, cultural, and demographic contours of a growing nation.”
Profit rules
Reflecting on Rothman’s observations, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie suggests that, “we should not think of the slave system or the slave trade as somehow about racism and hatred. It was about profit. That’s why — and how — it lasted so long.” He regards “chattel slavery … as part of a larger class system.” That characteristic, claims Bouie, accounts for “the ideas, ideologies and institutions” produced by slavery.
The northern side in the Civil War freed enslaved workers in the South. Reconstruction followed; it shocked the southern political establishment. Formerly enslaved people proved to be adept at organizing, articulating demands, and making politics work. Even the new National Labor Union briefly extended its organizing into the South. As described by Communist author James S. Allen in his 1937 book Reconstruction, “A strong tendency for solidarity with Negro workers and for alliance with the Negro people made itself felt early.”
International Publishers, 1937 978-0717801695
The old order took charge again after congressional shenanigans over the presidential elections of 1876 finished off Reconstruction. The freedmen were fodder for the profitable convict-leasing system. As tenant farmers, they provided a lifeline for the survival of plantations. Although some of them slowly and tenaciously gained land ownership, over time local oligarchs and lending agencies cut back on their acreage; the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be complicit.
Oppression continued through institutional means. That’s significant in that public institutions in the United States by and large reflect capitalist priorities.
Local and state governments and the courts sharply restricted voting rights and managed police, judicial, and prison affairs in oppressive ways. Local authorities provided low-quality and scanty education for the descendants of enslaved people. Poor schooling confined already marginalized workers to a future of diminished hopes and low wages.
The U.S. Supreme Court legitimized exclusionary legislation and administrative actions, especially in regard to higher education. African-Americans missed out on important benefits provided under the New Deal. Until the mid-twentieth century, their military service was debasing and discriminatory.
Variations
Oppression came from directions other than governmental action, or inaction. In the post-Civil War period, a trade-off arranged by higher-ups saw northerners tolerating continued abuse of African-descended workers in the South in return for the appearance of North-South harmony, viewed as essential for growing the nation’s capitalist economy.
Theirs was a bargain similar to the one struck by European workers in the early 20th century. As recounted by DuBois, “the laborer at home is demanding and beginning to receive a part of his share” on condition that the labor movement and other progressive forces go along with the imperialists’ plundering of “the darker nations of the world.”
Racial oppression rested on the same social and political attitudes that allowed U.S. capitalism to flourish. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, explains that the frontier experience itself instilled “anti-social” attitudes in the European settler, who manifested “antipathy to control.” Indeed, “democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs.”
Since then, capitalist enforcers have taken advantage of the precariousness of workers’ lives. They’ve used poverty-stricken African-Americans as strike breakers to weaken labor unity. And very poor European-descended workers, mainly in the South and resentful of their own desperate economic conditions, have colluded in oppressing African-Americans. Intent upon preserving a modicum of status, they curry favor with the upper echelons
Some miscellaneous observations: first, the Thirteenth Amendment in 1965 abolished slavery, but it also legalized “involuntary servitude” as punishment for crime. It led to the convict leasing system that would continue for the next half century. It contributed to the profitable prison-industrial system of today.
Some miscellaneous observations: first, the Thirteenth Amendment in 1965 abolished slavery, but it also legalized “involuntary servitude” as punishment for crime. It led to the convict leasing system that would continue for the next half century. It contributed to the profitable prison-industrial system of today.
Secondly, the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 was to assure “due process of law [and] equal protection of the laws” for formerly enslaved people. Instead, according to historian Eric Foner, it became “a vehicle for protecting corporate rights rather than those of the former slaves.”
Thirdly, members of one’s own family in the U.S. South, no stranger to social-class distinctions, formerly employed that stock regional term “uppity.” They were referring to African-descended neighbors deemed to be rising above their “station in life.”
A clear message
In pursuing their own economic interests, the upper orders of society arranged for the enslavement of Africans in the United States and, later on, for the oppression of their descendants. That’s clear, as is the fact that race-based hatred persists because it’s useful as an enforcement mechanism and can be readily applied to victims identifiable through their physical appearance.
Hatred has many applications. Inciting fear, it theoretically inhibits open rebellion among the oppressed. Hatred in the form of organized terror – the lynchings, massacres, and police violence – maybe assures quiescence, or maybe not. Hatred frequently leads to divisions within racially-diverse political coalitions, and to their demise.
Protest mobilizations against hatred and its manifestations are necessary. But unless they are directed against the class-based origins of the oppression, they won’t do much to end it. Jamelle Bouie, the New Times columnist, agrees.
Citing the 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, authored by Trinidadian historian and political leader Eric Williams, Bouie describes the settlers’ reliance first on Native Americans to provide forced labor and then on indentured white servants. The former did not survive long, and the latter were in short supply, independent-minded, and desirous of land once they were free. Plantation owners turned to enslaved Africans.
Penguin Classics, 2022 3rd edition 9780241548165
Bouie quotes Williams: “The Negro, in a strange environment, conspicuous by his color and features, and ignorant of the white man’s language and ways, could be kept permanently divorced from the land.” Williams adds that, “Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery … to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection which alone make slave labor possible.
Moreover, “The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘subhuman’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best.”
Bouie concludes: “One thing I’d like you to consider […] is the extent to which racial distinctions and racial divisions are rooted in relationships of class, labor and property, even when they take on a life and logic of their own. And if that’s true, I would like you to think about what that means for unraveling those divisions and distinctions, and consigning the ideology of ‘race’ to the ash heap of history.”
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Anti-communist Cuban-Americans ask for U.S. military intervention in against Cuba, July 26, 2021, at Lafayette Park near the White House in Washington | J. Martin / AP
Remarkably, the U. S. economic blockade of Cuba is 60 years old. It began with President John Kennedy’s executive order signed on February 3, 1962 that broadened existing restrictions on U.S.-Cuba trade. When the blockade reached its35-year milestone, it was already “the longest embargo in modem history”, according to one observer.
Equally remarkable is the zeal with which the blockade is still being enforced. Two recent news reports, selected as coinciding with the blockade’s 60-year anniversary, testify to the U.S. government’s still-remaining commitment and serious purpose.
Argentinian Graciela Ramírez works in Cuba as a correspondent for resumenlationameriano.org, an important Buenos Aires news outlet. She directs both the Cuba branch of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity and its English language website. Ramírez is co-coordinator of the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity, based in Oakland, California. She is a public figure whose undoing would gratify U.S. reactionaries.
Ramírez also operates the cubaenresumen.org website. She reports that on “January 27, while we were preparing different notes on national and international affairs, our [website] was silenced. We could not upload any information.” Replying to her inquiry, the server, Linode LLC in Canada, indicated that that, “this account may be being used in connection with a country that is subject to the embargo laws of the U.S.”
Ramírez is outraged: “The absurd attempt to silence us lays bare the lies and hypocrisy about the much-manipulated freedom of press and information that we hear ad nauseum from the imperialists.”
The other report of interest concerns Cuba’s BioCubaFarma company, which exports Cuban-produced vaccines and other bio-medical products. Dr. Eduardo Martínez, the company’s president, told reporters on January 31 that foreign banks have yet to transfer funds owed to BioCubaFarma by purchasers abroad. The banks are motivated by fear of incurring U.S. fines for violating blockade regulations that prohibit them from handling payments denominated in U.S. dollars. Martínez laments the “accumulation of millions [of dollars] in receivables” and BioCubaFarma “lagging on its commitment to pay providers for raw materials.”
The two reports attest to the persisting dedication and diligence of blockade enforcers. After 60 years, they still harass a solitary anti-blockade activist like Graciela Ramírez who is little known to the U.S. public and hardly a threat to U.S. national security. Even now the U.S. government pursues its blockade with such determination as to reject norms of international humanitarian law: they interfere with BioCubaFarma’s distribution of lifesaving coronavirus vaccines.
Almost two years before it was launched, the U.S. State Department defined the blockade’s main purpose to be that of getting rid of Cuba’s revolutionary government. The year was 1962, and the blockade decisively took on an anti-communist mission. Apologists of the anti-communism of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who died in 1957, occupied positions of power. The Vietnam War, with its anti-communist mission, had hardly begun, leaving an anti-communist void to be filled.
No mental gymnastics are required to appreciate overlap in motivation between blockade aimed at Cuba’s government and blockade as war on communism. Blockade operatives leaning toward the latter, perhaps the very ones hitting at Graciela Ramírez and BioCubaFarma, very likely have a special view of their work.
The motivations of individual operatives are divided, qualitatively. On the one hand, there are strategies, priorities, isolated grievances, external pressures, and passing enthusiasms to be dealt with; they change over time. Responding to these factors becomes motivation according to circumstance.
A co-existing impulse, motivation as sense of mission, has to do with far-reaching principles and has an eye to a supposed greater good, for all time. It crystalizes as a set of ideas, particularly those that inspire anti-communism. Ideas fuel the blockade, bestowing upon its defenders a missionary-type zeal. They are steadfast in preserving the blockade in all of its rigidity.
In any case, high-level commitment to implementing the blockade does remain. It stems from the enforcers’ mission of fighting communism, a mission that is no stranger to historical experience in the United States.
U.S. governments and opinion shapers have long taken advantage of anti-communism; it’s useful. With anti-communist ideas and deeds having been mobilized against the Soviet Union, the way was clear for the United States to build a capitalist world order after World War II. Anti-communism became a battle-flag in U.S. interventionist ploys throughout the global South. It prompted formation of the anti-communist Organization of American States in 1948 and rationalized all kinds of skullduggery and regime-change projects.
Anti-communism has riled U.S. politics. Often, rightwing spokesperson freely, falsely, and even randomly label political opponents as “socialist,” or “communist.” Fear of communism has terrified far too many U.S. citizens, leaving them silent and accepting. Mainstream politicians regularly have manipulated that fear to weaken or block progressive political initiatives.
Over time, the U.S. government has experienced difficulties in extending its war on communism overseas. Communist-led nations ripe for harassment are in short supply.
Vietnam and China are U.S. trading partners. As for China and North Korea, power politics takes precedence over anti-communist needling Communist Laos, small and far away, attracts little notice. But close neighbor Cuba, long the object of acquisitive U.S. ambitions, comes to the rescue. It qualifies.
It’s as if the United States needs Cuba. Beating up on Cuba can be an advertising ploy. The word spreads: “Watch out for those leftist politics brewing in your country. You don’t want to mess with the United States.” The U.S., government is always game to manipulating public opinion to its advantage, at home and abroad. Regarding Cuba, the United Nations General Assembly helps out.
For almost 30 years, nations of the world annually vote on a Cuban resolution denouncing the blockade. They massively vote their approval; only the United States, Israel, and the rare straggler disapprove. The message goes out near and far: for reliable anti-communism, one can count on the U.S. government.
The anti-communism that is key to prolonging the blockade figures into what Fidel Castro called a battle of ideas. The implication for us is that fighting the blockade on the basis of contingencies and balance of forces is necessary and commendable. But what counts, ultimately, is attention to ideology, basic principles, and a sense of our own mission.
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine
Campaigning in Colombia began January 15 for congressional elections on March 13, and for first-round voting for a new president on May 29. Gustavo Petro, leader of the progressive Humane Colombia movement, will likely be the Historical Pact coalition’s presidential candidate.
A former urban guerrilla, congressional representative, mayor of Bogota, and now senator, Petro ran for president in 2010 and in 2018, when he lost to current president Iván Duque in second-round voting. Duque is not running for re-election.
Petro led the opposition against former president and extreme right-winger Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) who is accused of corruption, narcotrafficking, and ties with paramilitaries. Duque is Uribe’s protégé. As president, Uribe prioritized war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and later opposed the government’s peace agreement with the FARC.
The Historical Pact is a coalition of left-leaning and centrist parties and of “social movements, indigenous people, feminists, environmentalists,” according to Petro. Coalition partners include the Communist Party and the affiliated Patriotic Union on the left, the Alternative Democratic Pole and Humane Colombia representing social democracy, and centrist anti-Uribe groups. Joining these are politicians who backed Juan Manuel Santos, who succeeded Uribe as president and promoted the Agreement.
Observer Felipe Pineda Ruiz suggests that, “most of those voting for the Historical Pact … are more to the right than are the activists and candidates.” Also, “as traders and small business people, they gained real economic benefits from the commodities bonanza … that sustained economic growth when Santos and Uribe were in power.”
People attend a rally for Gustavo Petro in Cali, Colombia. He has developed a following not seen in generations for a leftist candidate. Photograph: Ernesto Guzmán Jr/EPA
Gustavo Petro registers 34% approval in a recent opinion poll, down from 40% in October. The favorability ratings of the other top-polling candidates range from 32% to 7%.
The Historical Pact’s election campaign follows more than two years of seesawing protests and repression. The associated turmoil has shaped the constituency Petro is appealing to and leaves an aftermath the next government will be dealing with. It has exacerbated Colombia’s longstanding rural-urban divide, a major impediment to a just society there.
On November 21, 2019 major demonstrations broke out in cities. For weeks afterwards, hundreds of thousands of students, unionists, environmentalists, pensioners, LGBT activists, workers of all sorts, and social movement activists filled streets throughout Colombia. They were demanding pension reforms, revised labor legislation, improved access to healthcare and education, income support, and no more police violence.
Along the way, 200,000 troops and riot police wounded and/or arrested, and killed, protesters. Demonstrations continued intermittently in cities well into 2020. The government’s inept handling of the Covid -19 pandemic was a new grievance.
The Bogota police, reacting to the burning of their facilities, killed taxi-driver and law student Javier Ordoñez on September 9, 2020. Huge crowds assembled the next day. The police killed 14 young people and wounded hundreds more. Demonstrations culminating September 21 in a “national strike” would continue intermittently for the rest of the year. A government tax increase was a further provocation.
The police and protesters clashed last week in Bogotá, Colombia, at a demonstration over a proposed tax reform / Credit…Federico Rios for The New York Times
National strikes erupted in May, July, and August, 2021. Now indigenous groups and even sports organizations were involved. International agencies and human rights organizations weighed in against the government. Polling in May, 2021 showed 75% of Colombians as supporting the national strikes.
Colombian historian Renán Vega Cantor notes that, “State terrorism in the Colombian style became visible to the world.” For him, the “extraordinary national strike was the most important social protest in Colombian history in terms of duration … and the diversity of social sectors that participated.”
Attitudes were changing. Before the protests, “the bombings, massacres, torturing, disappearances were of little interest for residents of middle-class districts. For the rich and powerful they simply did not exist and did not matter.” For “the urban middle classes, state and parastate violence” was faraway and “to some extent was justified to confront security threats or insurgent movements in the countryside.”
Now there was violence in the cities. Vega Cantor mentions “80 Colombians killed by agents of the state, hundreds wounded, dozens disappeared, and a score of women raped.” He describes armed civilians protected by the police showing up in districts of the wealthy and “acting as if to protect their interests from intruders, Indians, Blacks and the poor.”
Observer Fernando Dorado states that the Historical Pact campaign “has to maintain the people’s enthusiasm expressed in the social explosion … and in parallel fashion must attract sectors of the so-called ‘center’ in order to isolate and defeat recalcitrant right-wing forces.”
As the campaign looks for votes from urban population sectors, it shows no sign of attending to injustices, resistance, and longstanding repression in rural areas. That approach may end up reinforcing Colombia’s rural-urban divide.
For Petro, the politics of class struggle is for somebody else. He told an interviewer that, “I don’t divide politics between right and left … My divide is the politics of death and the politics of life. In Colombia a politics of death has governed for two centuries.”
Historical Pact officials have fixed it so that voters are not readily exposed to class-oriented political views. The coalition is using the “closed list” voting system for the congressional elections in March. There, each candidate of a partnering group appears on a list, with preferred candidates at the top. Voters need only select the coalition of their choice; they don’t get to choose a candidate.
The object ostensibly is to assure an equal number of female and male candidates and allow for indigenous and African-descended candidates. Voting arrangements for Historical Pact candidates de-emphasize ideological differences among their parties such as, for example, a center-left party pitted against socialist ones like the Communist Party or the Patriotic Union.
Colombian Communist Party joins the Historical Pact – Infobae
Electoral politics that doesn’t involve working-class power that would challenge plunder by oligarchs will likely be irrelevant to the realities of Colombia’s countryside. There, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people relate in one way or another to struggle between rich and poor over the use and control of land. Vast numbers were killed in the 1950s in the wake of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination in 1948, and again from the 1960s on as the Colombian state reacted to the founding of the FARC, an agrarian insurgency.
That phase ended with the government’s Peace Agreement with the FARC in 2016, following which a “Third Cycle of Violence” commenced. Writer Horacio Duque points to more than 1300 mainly rural community leaders and some 300 former FARC combatants killed between then and now.
Blame, he states, lies in part with the government’s failure to carry out agrarian reforms as specified in the Peace Agreement. The Historical Pact’s program mentions agrarian reform, but a Petro government’s likely priority given to cities anticipates neglect of the countryside.
Similarly, Colombia’s military will probably remain untouched, despite the coalition’s promise of “structural reform.” With much to protect, Colombia’s landowning elites, leery of agrarian revolt, have long sought military capacity. Now the country’s military consumes 12% of the government’s budget. With 295,000 troops, it’s the second largest military force in Latin America. With no working-class power at the center of governmental decision-making, military control over rural Colombia will likely continue.
The coalition’s statement on “New International Politics” rejects foreign intervention, but is silent on the U.S. role as the Colombian military’s senior partner. The brazen nature of current arrangements reflects the bullying power of U.S. interventionism nourished by global capitalism. An outmatched Petro government probably will acquiesce.
Current U.S. activities include: an annual monetary contribution ($461.4 million in 2021), air bases distributed throughout Colombia, U.S agents there charged with destabilizing Venezuela, and preparation of Colombian troops for special tasks. Some of these are: training the security forces of U.S.-allied nations, fighting their wars (in the Middle East, for example), and performing dirty work, such as assassinating Haiti’s president on July 7, 2021.
This note finishes on a note of tragedy. Much-needed restoration of rural life in Colombia is a distant dream. The rural poverty rate in 2019 was 34.5%, in the cities 12.3%. Learning levels between same-grade children in urban and rural areas differ by three years. Illiteracy in rural areas is more than twice that in cities. In rural areas in 2016, stunted growth in children (as a measure of chronic malnutrition) was almost twice the rate for urban zones. The 1% of persons individually controlling the largest landholdings in Colombia together own more than 80% of all land there. Colombian inequality in land ownership is the greatest in Latin America.
And a touch of ambiguity: We’ve been harshly critical of the Historical Pact. But the election of Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia would be good news, or at least as much as is possible now. He would be Colombia’s first progressive head of state. That’s no small matter.
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Viral propaganda: In the social media age, the U.S.’ anti-Cuba efforts have to keep up with the way people get their information (and disinformation). Here, protesters in Key West, Fla., use their phones to photograph and video a flag reading ‘SOS Cuba’ from atop the Southernmost Point buoy, July 13, 2021. | Rob O’Neal/The Key West Citizen via AP
The cruder U.S. methods for destroying Cuba’s revolutionary government—military attacks, bombings of hotels and a fully-loaded airplane, violent attacks on officials, biological warfare—did not work. Nor has economic blockade, which of course continues. A more subtle approach also exists. Like the blockade, its purpose is to cause despair and then dissent.
U.S. officials pay for the collection of bad news about Cuba’s revolutionary government and for its dissemination within Cuba and to news outlets abroad. U.S. paymasters provide money to agents for delivery to opponents of Cuba’s government, real or imagined, in Cuba and elsewhere. The recipients find or devise information unfavorable to Cuba’s image and spread it. Cubans’ well-founded complaints about shortages, bureaucracy, low wages, and living with the pandemic become news items.
The groups transferring the money from the United States to disgruntled elements in Cuba and elsewhere are key to the entire operation. One recalls the “bagman” who in certain U.S. cities deliver pay-offs from point to point within a criminal network. These groups transferring money—as authorized by the Helms Burton law of 1996—are bagmen for imperialism.
An odor of criminality is sensed. To interfere with Cuba’s conduct of its own affairs violates norms of international law relating to national sovereignty. And it turns out that, as of 2011, “Accusations of fraud, reckless distribution of funds, and diversion of monies to stateside anti-Cuban groups have prompted temporary stays in disbursement of funds.”
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of two big U.S. paymasters. Founded in 1983, it’s a non-governmental organization funded exclusively by the U.S. Congress. The projects funded by the NED are similar to those formerly undertaken by the CIA.
The Cuban Communist Party’s Granma newspaper on Jan. 18, 2022 presented a list published on the NED website on Feb. 23, 2021. Groups are named “which received funding to intervene in Cuba during the year 2020, with sums ranging from 20,000 to 650,000 dollars.”
The list includes 42 groups; the total amount dispensed was $5,077,788. Below appears a short list. It contains the names of groups receiving $146,360 or more, the amount of money each one did receive, its home base, and the supposed shortcoming in Cuba needing to be fixed.
The top recipients of NED funds were:
Cubalex: $150,000 – Memphis, Tenn. (human rights)
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI): $500,000 – Washington, D.C. (gender rights)
Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos: $150,000 – Madrid (human rights)
Asociacion Diario de Cuba: $215,000 – Madrid (access to information)
Instituto Cubano por la Libertad de Expresion y Prensa: $146,360 – Hialeah, Fla. (access to information)
Cuban Democratic Directorate: $650,000 – Miami (access to information)
Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE): $309,766 – Washington, D.C. (private sector needing support)
Clovek v tisni, o.p.s. (People in Need): $150,882 – Prague (access to information)
Grupo Internacional para la Responsabilidad Social Corporativa en Cuba: $230,000 – Miami (labor rights)
The State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is another paymaster. On Oct. 23, 2021, journalist Tracey Eaton’s “Cuba Money Project” website reported on disbursements USAID announced during the previous month. The total being delivered to 12 organizations was $6,669,000. The list, constructed like the list above, includes:
International Republican Institute: $1,006,895 – Washington, D.C. (human rights)
Pan American Development Foundation: $800,000 – Washington, D.C. (labor exploitation)
Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba: $717,000 – Miami (medical workers exploited)
Digital News Association: $604,920 (military abuse)
Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia: $625,000 – Miami (political prisoners)
International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights: $546,00 – Washington, D.C. (human rights and racism)
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: $545,573 – Washington, D.C. (democracy)
Cubans in many cities, predominantly young people, took to the streets on July 11, 2021. They were protesting shortages of medical supplies, food, and other goods; the failure of remittances from abroad to arrive; and, in some instances, racial discrimination. Arrests and detentions followed and, more recently, trials and prison sentences. Social media played a major role in mobilizing the protesters and subsequently in disseminating news of arrests, injuries, property damage, and reaction from abroad.
As with social media trial runs in earlier anti-Cuban propaganda campaigns, some of the U.S. government funds delivered by the intermediaries were undoubtedly earmarked for expanding the role of social media in recruiting protesters and in publicizing adverse fallout.
The U.S. has expanded its anti-Cuba information offensive, spreading the dollars around to groups that stretch well beyond the older means like Radio and TV Marti, whose studio is seen here in 2007. | Alan Diaz / AP
As bad news from Cuba makes its way to anti-Cuban politicians in the United States and Europe, it takes on added value. New pretexts crop up for administrative actions and legislation that, aimed at destabilization in Cuba, imposes sanctions and tightens blockade rules. These in turn generate reports of new grief in Cuba.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently responded to the trials of some of the July 11 protest leaders and the resulting prison terms by announcing visa restrictions against eight Cuban officials. A legislative proposal recently introduced by South Florida congresspersons calls upon President Joe Biden to urge the United Nations to issue sanctions against Cuba. The bill’s title is “Atrocities and Genocide in Cuba.”
The story here is about siege socialism. In his Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti shows Russian revolutionaries under Lenin cutting back on their aspirations due to pressures of civil war and invasion by capitalist nations: “[I]n May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled…to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party.”
Fidel Castro once offered a vivid characterization of a socialist society faltering under enemy attacks while being advertised, by those enemies, as the best that socialists can do—as if peaceful circumstances did prevail. He declared that, “For 40 years you try to strangle us. And then you criticize us for the way we breathe.”
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.
Education is central to Cuba’s brand of socialism. The revolutionary government’s dedication to scientific knowledge and healthcare for all shows up now as Cubans cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. The United States is not so lucky.
Cubans have wholeheartedly carried out masking, social-distancing, testing and quarantining. Cuba’ s bio-medical research and production facilities created five anti-Covid vaccines. As of December 3, 90.1 percent of Cubans had received their first dose; 82.3 percent of them were fully vaccinated. Only seven other countries have higher rates. (1) Trials showed that Cuba’s workhorse Abdala and Soberana 02 vaccines were protective for over 90 percent of vaccine recipients.
Cuba’s Covid vaccines don’t need extremely low-temperature refrigeration as is the case for major U.S. vaccines. In that regard they are particularly useful in poorly resourced countries. Cuba has sent, or is preparing to send, vaccines to Vietnam, Venezuela, Iran, and Nicaragua. Cuban scientists are elaborating a version of their Soberana Plus vaccine that will protect against the Omicron variant.
Cuba’s achievement in producing anti-Covid-19 vaccines is remarkable in the face of shortages of equipment, reagents, and supplies due to the U.S. economic blockade.
U.S. and Cuban assumptions regarding vaccination programs and other public health measures are different. Vaccine production in Cuba is a matter of the common good, pure and simple. In United States, government-subsidized manufacturers will be making huge profits – $18 billion for Moderna in 2021. U.S. government scientists and their pharmaceutical company counterparts collaborated in developing vaccines, but the companies now are claiming intellectual-property and patent rights for themselves.
Rejection of scientific facts and expert opinion is widespread in the United States. Myth-making leads to vaccine refusal. Political and cultural frictions frustrate consensus on mask-wearing and social distancing. The upshot is that the prevalence of Covid-19 infection in the United States is 14.9 per 100,000 persons; in Cuba it’s 8.5. The two countries’ Covid-19 mortality rates are, respectively, 240.18 and 73.31 per 100,000 persons
The message here is that a society coping with a major pandemic must draw upon reserves of unity and learning. Cuba’s recent experience shows that long attention paid to schooling and science is bearing fruit.
In the 19th century, according to one account, Felix Varela, a Catholic priest, “introduced Cuba to the principles of scientific thought, the first independence ideals, and the pursuit for national identity.” Jose Martí, Cuba’s national hero and independence leader, was teaching in Guatemala in 1878. There he wrote that, “Knowing how to read is knowing how to act. Knowing how to write is knowing how to ascend. Those first lowly school books put at man’s disposal feet, arms, and wings.” (2). He later suggested that, “to study the forces of nature and learn to control them is the most direct way of solving social problems,”
Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro attacked Santiago’s Moncada Barracks in 1953. In honor of Martí, born in 1853, they called themselves the centennial generation. Martí’s educational mission was in good hands.
Fidel Castro on December 16, 1960 told a meeting of spelunkers (explorers of caves) that, “We teach about accidents of nature but we don’t teach about tremendous accidents of humanity.” Calling for the study of nature, he declared that, “The future of our country must necessarily be a future of men of science, it must be a future of men of thought.” He noted that “many of our people had no access to culture or science” and “only 5% of farm-worker children have reached the 5th grade.”
A pre-revolutionary national census revealed almost 26 percent of Cubans to be illiterate. A major literacy campaign took place in 1961, the “Year of Education.” Some 100,000 young people, barely into their teens, and most of them raised in towns and cities, received instruction on teaching literacy. They went into rural areas and taught marginalized farm people how to read and write. The teenagers lived in their houses and did farm work.
Midway, goals were not being met. Taking up the slack were 20,000 volunteer factory workers and large numbers of regular teachers. Soon Cuba’s literacy rate was among the highest in the world.
Fidel Castro on December 22, 1961 spoke to literacy-campaign volunteers massed before him in Havana: “I will begin. [T]here are many jobs, jobs for all and we’re going to see if we can fill them … pay attention to these choices …”
He outlined scholarship opportunities for tens of thousands of the students to become teachers of those who would teach in primary schools, basic secondary schools, pre-university schools, schools for domestic workers, and art and music schools.
Castro also urged the literacy volunteers to serve as “technicians … language professors, engineers, physicians, economists, architects, educators, specialized technicians. “We are converting fortresses into schools” and “filling the island with teachers, so that in the future the homeland can count on a brilliant galaxy of men of thought, of researchers, of scientists.”
On being interviewed 60 years later, Dr. Agustin Lage spoke of “another literacy campaign.” He asks for “a massive penetration of the scientific method in our general culture.” Science would “be converted into a national culture for Cubans.”
Lage, head of Cuba’s Center of Molecular Immunology (CMI) since its founding in 1994, praises young scientists working in Cuba’s bio-medical institutes for their “moral values, social commitment, and a vision of what the world must be.” “Young people,” he explains, “led in confronting the challenge of Covid and making the vaccine[s].”
Lage surveys Cuba’s large biomedical research and production institutes, mentioning the National Center for Scientific Investigations (formed in 1965), the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986), the Finlay Vaccine Institute (1991), and his own CMI. Each of these centers, on its own premises, carries out research, development, production, and marketing of products. BioCubaFarma, created in 2013, serves 34 such entities by facilitating worldwide commercialization of vaccines, immunologic agents, chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, tests, medical equipment, and more.
Lage observes that in Cuba “science is a social process,” that “human societies, not individuals, make science.” He envisions “freely available and universally accessible healthcare, scientific and biotechnological development, and the pharmaceutical industry as a base of social cohesion.”
He suggests that economic development, “material well-being, and protection of our kind of social construction are possible only in a high-technology economy.” Without “internal demand or natural resources to drive our economy,” Cuba relies upon “science and technology.”
For Lage, social context matters. For example, when “an innovative laboratory of a multinational [corporation] sells its vaccine abroad, prices and the cost of healthcare go up, and inequalities are greater.” The process “helps to enrich those private companies.”
“Inequalities are now expanding in the world” he points out, “and we have to defend our achievements. We do that by connecting culture, scientific thought, and science with the economy so that social conquests can provide leverage for economic development.”
Lage had earlier stated on his blog that, “Cuba’s scientific culture always promotes analyzing with data, generating new hypotheses about reality, submitting hypotheses to criticism… and rejecting improvisation, superficiality, pseudoscience and superstition.” Ultimately, “we need science and technology to develop our economy, but also to preserve and solidify its socialist character.”
Concerned about vaccine rejection, a physician and sociologist writing recently in The New York Times point out that “governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services and people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them.” And “public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation.” They seek “policies that promote a basic, but increasingly forgotten, idea: that our individual flourishing is bound up in collective well-being.”
Neighboring Cuba has by no means forgotten this agreeable message.
Cuba, of course, is the model practitioner of what they are preaching.
Notes.
1. None of those seven countries – Chile, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Cayman Islands, Singapore, Brunei, and North Cyprus – produced their own Covid vaccines.
2. Philip S. Foner, ed., On Education by Jose Martí, (Monthly Review Press, NY, 1978), p.68
The author translated.
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.
Supporters of Chile’s President-elect Gabriel Boric celebrate his victory in the presidential run-off election, in Santiago, Sunday, Dec. 19, 2021. Above the crowd wave several flags belonging to the Communist Party of Chile, which supported Boric’s candidacy in the run-off. | Matias Delacroix / AP
Chileans on Dec. 19 were facing a defining moment as they voted for a president to replace right-wing billionaire Sebastián Piñera, whose second term is ending. Their choice of 35-year-old Gabriel Boric, social democratic candidate of the left-leaning Approve Dignity coalition, deflected the threat from devotees of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship. They were backing billionaire José Antonio Kast, candidate of the Christian Social Front.
At stake were prospects for overcoming leftovers from the Pinochet dictatorship that ended in 1990. Policies in place under Piñera had prompted massive protests in October 2019 and for weeks afterwards. Demonstrators demanded rights for youth, labor, pensioners, and Indigenous people. They called for a new constitution to replace the one imposed by the old dictatorship and still in force today. Under fire, the Piñera government prepared for a Constituent Assembly, which voters authorized in May 2021.
Delegates to that Assembly are at work now presumably removing constitutional protection for Pinochet-era laws and regulations, most of which are neoliberal in nature. With Kast as president, approval of a new constitution and then implementation would likely have been problematic.
Kast had secured 27.9% of the votes in the first round of presidential elections on Nov. 21. Second-place Boric had gained 25.8%. In the just-completed second round, however, Boric won 55.7% of the vote to Kast’s 44.3% of the total. Crucially, 55% of eligible Chileans voted; only 47% had done so in the first round. On that occasion, seven political parties presented candidates.
Voter participation was the highest since the authorization of voluntary voting in 2012. Since then, low attendance at the polls has been routine. Massive distrust of political parties is said to contribute to potential voters staying away. Political participation has overwhelmingly taken the form of involvement with social movements.
Social movements represented the main force behind both the watershed demonstrations that began in 2019 and the student-led mobilizations of 2008 and 2011. It’s likely that on Dec. 19 politically unaffiliated activists voted in large enough numbers to give the presidency to Boric.
Chile’s President-elect Gabriel Boric. | Luis Hidalgo / AP
The new president, who grew up in extreme southern Chile, drew attention in 2011 as one of the student leaders responsible for nationwide protests. He has served in the Chamber of Deputies in Chile’s Congress since 2014, having been the first to legislate there without party affiliation.
Speaking after his victory, Boric promised to defend the Constituent Assembly, to protect Indigenous rights, support pension reform and public education, introduce universal healthcare, and work toward reducing wealth inequalities.
Primary elections in July 2021 established Boric as a front-runner presidential candidate. Running on behalf of a center-left coalition that included his new “Social Convergence Party,” he defeated Daniel Jadue, the Communist mayor of Recoleta and candidate of a leftist coalition led by the Communist Party. The two coalitions quickly merged to form the now victorious Approve Dignity formation.
Campaigning, candidate Kast based his appeal on anti-communism and condemnation of abortion. Family ties burnishing his ultra-right credentials came to the fore. His brother had served the Pinochet dictatorship as economist, labor minister, and Central Bank head; his immigrant father was a member of Germany’s Nazi Party.
The disaster in store for Chile, had Kast been elected, was clear in a pre-election survey of his proposals for governing. Promising to “restore order,” Kast wanted to “grant legal immunity to the armed forces and fund the legal defense of police officers accused of using excessive force; give the President sweeping powers to crack down on dissent; establish an International Anti-Radical Left Coalition; identify, arrest, and prosecute radicalized troublemakers…[and] exit the United Nations.”
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Yolanda Diaz, the popular Communist Minister of Labor in Spain, a nationally admired figure in the country | Press pool photo
Spanish Communist Yolanda Díaz presently serves as minister of labor and social economy in the coalition government headed by Pablo Sanchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE). It includes the United Podemos (UP) formation, with which Díaz’s own Communist Party of Spain (PCE) is associated. (Podemos is “Yes, we can!)
UP leader Pablo Iglesias in early 2021 resigned from his post as the government’s second deputy prime minister – also referred to as “second vice-president.” Díaz replaced him there and also as leader of the UP. Polling suggests that Díaz now is “Spain’s most highly regarded politician.”
Yolanda Díaz is in the news. She recently criticized the strong-arm tactics of government security forces in confronting an eventually successful strike in Cadiz involving 20,000 metalworkers. “The key role of the UP in the government in blocking repression and confronting liberal sectors of the PSOE” was clear, according to the PCE’s Mundo Obrero news service.
Díaz on November 13 joined four other political leaders, all women, before an audience in Valencia. They were exploring what they called “Other Politics.” She told listeners that, “We are you,” [and we] … “know that my country wants to move, advance and guarantee equality.” Her appearance prompted enthusiastic applause and, in reference to her political future, shouts of “President! President!”
As labor minister, Díaz has gained recognition for leading negotiations aimed at repealing or reforming anti-worker labor laws. She has worked with unions and business groups to secure furloughs and monetary support for workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
She resists Iglesias’s preference for early national elections, an idea opposed by Prime Minister Pablo Sanchez. She states that, rather than deal with elections, she wants “to govern, to govern, to govern.” She is angling for an electoral coalition, a broad front, that would eventually include the PSOE.
Díaz speaks out. Pablo Casado currently heads the rightwing People’s Party (PP), which has long served as the main conservative force opposing the PSOE in national elections. On November 20, Pablo Casado attended a mass celebrated at Granada’s Cathedral for dictator Francisco Franco, who died on that day 46 years ago.
Responding, Díaz told reporters that “Casado must immediately provide explanations and rectify what he has done,” adding that, “Catholics and believers in this country do not understand this type of performance.”
Conservatives have castigated Díaz since the publication in mid-September of a new edition of TheCommunist Manifesto that contains a prologue she authored. (It appears below in English translation). The PCE republished the Manifesto as part of its centennial celebrations.
The People’s Party bench in the Chamber of Delegates called upon the PSOE government to take responsibility for Díaz’s prologue. PP spokesperson Edurne Uriarte denounced Díaz’s portrayal of the Manifesto, pointing to her reference to a “magical and timeless book” and her praise for its “impassioned defense of democracy and freedom.”
Defending Díaz, former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias noted that “the PP was founded by seven ministers of the dictatorship.” He suggested that “the PCE and [the workers movement] have a lot more democratic credentials than does the Spanish right.” The socialist government of Pablo Sanchez has evaded the issue.
After her legal education, Díaz studied urban planning, labor relations, and human resources. She worked as a labor lawyer, was a municipal councilor, and served in Galicia’s parliament. Since 2016, voters have repeatedly returned her to Spain’s Chamber of Deputies. From 2005 to 2017, she coordinated the Galician federation of the United Left. She served as an advisor for Pablo Iglesias when he formed Podemos in 2012.
Díaz’s current role as tribune of Spain’s radical left is no accident. At age one, she was held in the arms of her imprisoned father Suso Díaz. As a Communist Party member necessarily working underground, he had resisted measures of the Franco dictatorship. Suso Díaz and his brother Xosé were prominent Galician labor leaders, and Suso has remained such. Suso Díaz remarked recently that people used to refer to Yolanda as “the daughter of Suso.” Now he is “the father of Yolanda.”
Yolanda Díaz’s prologue accompanying The Communist Manifesto:
Diego Rivera’s 1935 mural ‘Mexico: Today and Tomorrow’ features a depiction of Karl Marx and a quote from the Manifesto. (Credit: Palacio Nacional)
The thinking of Karl Marx appears to have been written, in indelible ink, on the wind of history. It always resurfaces in a context of social and economic crisis, with all of its clarity and its capacity for stimulating reflection. His look at the mechanisms of capitalist production still illuminates and helps us understand the major problems of our world and our time.
There are many Marxisms in Marx, many dissenting views, many rescues. There are post-colonialist viewpoints and orthodox views, condemnations of his patriarchal leanings, and celebrations of his affinity with nature and the environment. Whatever the case, as social theorist Marx disrupted the ideologic framework of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism. He pulled apart the seams and pitfalls of their language and, at the same time, their capability for dominating.
In Galicia, we use the expression “moving the boundaries” in referring to how we get angry, as if it were treason, at the practice of, in the dead of night, changing boundary lines and physical markers that enclose tracts of land or an agricultural section. Sometimes these markers no longer physically exist – the stone, the tree, the little stream bordering the property that dried up. But this ancestral knowledge of boundaries survives in memories of the spoken word, almost in our collective consciousness.
Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto have shifted the invisible boundaries of western thought, doing so in broad daylight, with the world watching. Together they began a new conversation that, with an optimistic and revolutionary spirit, shook up conventions and denounced prehistoric injustices.
Marx has been caricatured and over-simplified innumerable times. The very language he used for dismantling things played a big trick on him. The translations from the original German carried out over many years, for example, have introduced phrases and clichés – “dictatorship of the proletariat being one of them – that don’t correspond to the real core of his thesis. The metaphors of Marx and Engels also, on occasion, obscure the categories they are referring to.
The Communist Manifesto, we must not forget, is a political text, is propaganda. And yet its literary soul, clear and assertive, is surprising. It’s brilliant that way; the four hands of the two friends intertwine their judgments and their preferences. It’s a text for brotherhood, not only for its accessible style but also for its essence as an open letter to humanity, to people at the grassroots level.
Marx, who was a scholar speaking several languages, regularly read Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Dante also. He could recite entire passages of The Divine Comedy, a passion for which he shared with Engels, who paid homage to that poet in the prologue of the Italian edition of the Communist Manifesto in February 1893. There, Engels asks, “Are we offering Italy a new Dante who is announcing the birth of the proletarian era?” And Marx certainly admired Balzac’s capacity for exploring the depth of the human soul and the social transformations of his time.
Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, author of that visionary essay “The Right to Laziness,” once mentioned old Karl’s predilection for Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, a story where the philosopher of Trier miraculously finds reflections of himself. Lafargue says: “In this work, a brilliant painter is so tormented by his determination to reproduce things exactly as they appear in his mind that he continually works on his paintings and retouches them to the point that he ends up with a formless mass of colors. Nevertheless, with his blurred vision, it represents a most perfect rendition of reality.”
Perhaps from this same viewpoint, that of a work perpetually growing and being transformed, it may be quite appropriate today for us to approach our reading of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto this way: not as static, impassive, and monochromatic dogma, anchored in its own frame of reference, but as a key for interpretation, as sketchy as it is exact, allowing us over and over again to sharpen and tinker with our visions of the world and its affairs.
In this sense, The Communist Manifesto is one of those magical and limitless books, born to last, that succeeds in portraying reality and, at the same time, transfiguring it. I believe that Marx and Engels themselves were conscious of the transformational nature of their work, or at least of the unforeseeable variability of the equation presented there which, in the name of communism and of a revolutionary ideal, gets resolved through invalidating eternal truths and achieving true democracy. This process is also reflected in the different prologues of the international editions of the book. Taken together, they are like a set of Russian dolls that, inside, hide the sub-texts and the para-texts making up its content.
To approach this genealogy of different interpretations with my own prologue is both a responsibility and a source of pride stemming from my profound respect and admiration for the voices and contributions of those responsible for the edition and the translation: Marta Sanz, Wendy Lynne Lee, José Saramago, Santiago Alba Rico, Iván de la Nuez and José Ovejero.
In 1872, José Mesa y Leompart, editor of La Emancipación — a weekly magazine in Madrid with which Pablo Iglesias de Ferrol, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party founder, was involved— translated the first version of The Communist Manifesto to be published in Spain. This was a translation not from the original German but instead entered our language by way of the English and French versions of The Communist Manifesto.
The editorial offices of El Socialista on Calle Hernán Cortés in Madrid, #8, was where in 1886 another of the early editions of The Communist Manifesto was published. That building no longer exists. And nothing exists on this narrow street, perpendicular to Calle Fuencarral, that commemorates Marx and Engels’s declaration of worker solidarity. Reclaiming such memory is a political task, something apparently unthinkable in a capital troubled by amnesia. Its municipal authorities didn’t think twice about removing plaques in a public space honoring the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero [Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War].
There’s poignance in thinking about those first copies: sheets of paper moving from hand to hand. They are there hidden in rows, like gold over cloth, under someone’s work clothes, or in the folds of a skirt. These are words imprinted for a lifetime in a student’s mind, and in the hearts of those men and women whose hopes we must respond to today. After all, their hopes are, first and foremost, our hopes too.
The “now-moment,” declared Walter Benjamin, is that specific moment in which the past collides with the present. It reappears there — like a great wave taking shape far from the shore, where we cannot see it, in the middle of the sea, and then breaking on the rocks under our feet. Now.
In this sense, the new installment of the Manifesto is an act of memory and redemption that, happily, joins the celebration this year of the centennial of the Communist Party of Spain. The PCE, founded in 1921, has suffered wars, repression, exile, and underground existence throughout its troubled life.
The programmatic character of the Communist Manifesto has continued to develop according to the rhythm of a century full of global economic crises and great revolutions. Capitalism has always been in charge in all of the century’s diverse and voracious mutations, ready to swallow up, corrupt, and disintegrate the very reality on which it was built. But it has never been able to escape the theories of Marx and the transforming power of this text. This is a book that speaks to us of utopias coded into our present existence, our being, in which pulses, today and yesterday, a vital and impassioned defense of democracy and freedom.
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
Protesters took to the streets of Glasgow near the COP26 conference to urge world leaders to take immediate action to combat the climate crisis. More than 100,000 marched in the city, organizers said. Credit: Kieran Dodds, The New York Times
Capitalism’s role in causing climate change now gains new visibility. Scientists advising world leaders present at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) on November 1-12 in Glasgow affirmed the association. To slow down climate change and mitigate its effects, they want action taken to reduce capitalism’s impact on the climate.
The climate crisis is worsening. For Monthly Review magazine, the COP26 gathering represents “a last-ditch effort to achieve a global solution on behalf of humanity as a whole.” The COP is the decision-making body of the 1995 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of 230 climate scientists from 66 countries, monitors climate-change trends and effects. Their observations, analyses, and recommendations appear in the IPCC’s Assessment Reports, which are issued periodically. IPCC scientists, who “have spent the last 3 years reviewing over 14000 studies,” are in the process now of releasing their Sixth Assessment Report, with 4000 pages.
On August 9, 2021 they released the Report’s Part I on the “physical science basis of climate change.” The IPCC will not release Part II, about impacts, and Part III, about mitigation, until early 2022, after all UN member states have reviewed the two sections. Key portions of the two have been leaked and, widely disseminated, they are the basis for this report.
Earlier Assessment Reports attributed climate change to human activity, unspecified. What with IPCC scientists linking expanded industrial production and consumerism with rising greenhouse gas emissions, capitalism enters the picture.
As summarized by the Monthly Review editors, Part II asserts that “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot… We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviors at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments. We must redefine our way of life and consumption.”
An important finding of Part III, according to the editors, is that, “technological improvements that allow for relative decarbonization are not enough. Rather, what is required … ‘is fundamental structural changes at the global level’ … in production and consumption systems. Accelerated climate-change transitions require a shift to entirely new systems of sustainable development. ‘Transformative change’ must replace incremental changes favored by the status quo.”
Monthly Review indicated also that “for the first time in the IPCC process,” Part III called for a “turn to demand-side strategies, exploring cutbacks in energy use and across all economic sectors, as well as aggressively pursuing conservation and low-energy paths.”
Part III, crucially, “indicates at one point, referring to the analysis of Malm and others that: ‘The character of social and economic development produced by the nature of capitalist society [is] …ultimately unsustainable.’”
This is not a new idea. Advocates for environmental sustainability – Marxists, academic socialists, eco-socialists, environmentalists – have long concerned themselves with capitalism’s impact on the environment. Visionary Marxist scholar Kenneth Neill Cameron called for action almost 30 years ago. Concluding his book Marxism, a Living Science (International Publishers, 1993), he discusses global warming.
“Most Marxists write as though … social advance will take place in a social bubble shut off from nature. The scientific evidence, however, points to an era of environmental stress. The evidence was already strong in 1984 when this book first went to press … [It’s] a perspective beyond anything Marx and Engels had to confront … Clearly then the struggle for socialism will take place in a world racked by natural disasters of social origin.”
Cameron explores the curbing of fossil-based fuel and reliance on alternative energy. He suggests that, “there is only one way known to slow down and then eliminate these disasters, namely by phasing out the gases that cause them.” He declares that:
“[T]o fully replace the fossil-fuel-based corporate structure is beyond the capacity of capitalism and requires a socialist planned economy … As this struggle progresses it will become apparent that human survival will depend not just on clean energy but on a socio-economic system run by the people in their own interest. In short, a new dimension has been added to the struggle for socialism, which no longer aims only at universal “social justice” but at assuring human survival.”
Marxists like Cameron, however, realize that words and theory are not enough. From Marx, they know that merely to interpret the world falls short; “The point … is tochange it.”
Marxists are able to frame climate-change action in a straightforward way. Inasmuch as their primary object is fighting capitalism, and capitalism causes climate change, and climate change endangers humanity, Marxists are duty-bound to involve themselves in the climate fight as learners, teachers and activists.
How would they do this, and what might the prospects be?
The opinions of the IPCC scientists, having circulated, constitute a kind of UN endorsement of fight-back against capitalism. To the extent that the UN position gains respect, capitalism becomes fair game for wider criticism within society as a whole. That’s helpful.
Marxists, self-described “scientific socialists” and prone to theorizing, analyzing problems, and strategizing, are prepared. As materialists, they embrace scientific inquiry and study of the natural world. The intersection of science and politics is familiar territory.
Marx himself modeled that approach. For example, he made the association between diminished productivity of soil in Britain and burgeoning industrialization. Having consulted with German scientists, he concluded that the movement of small farmers away from the land and into British factories, as industrial workers, had led to crops being under-fertilized. Because farmers had left the land, fertilizer in the form of animal and human excreta was in short supply.
Marxists are versatile. Having theorized, strategized, and acted in widely varying situations, they’ve shown that they probably would be able to confront the climate crisis. They’ve studied and defended waged labor laid low by the extraction of surplus value, small farmers displaced or oppressed by landlords, women (mostly) laboring in social reproduction for no pay, and those whose bodies, land, or subsoil resources have been plundered.
But capitalism won’t disappear quickly. After all, preparation for the way capitalism looked in the 1800s required a couple of centuries. As long as capitalism lasts, formation of a mass movement ready to defend environmental sustainability, and the climate, won’t happen soon, especially in the industrialized world.
For the sake of their jobs, wages and salaries, working people employed by entities dependent directly or indirectly on the market economy require economic stability and predictability. Under capitalism, that means an economy that produces and grows, always – one that, along the way, aggravates climate change. Working people, therefore, may find it more compelling to preserve the status quo than to pursue goals realizable only in the future, virtuous though they may be.
Relatedly, many wage workers, unemployed people, unionists, and seniors are leery of the environmental movement. They may resent the seemingly disproportionate involvement there of activists with comfortable life styles or object to the scarcity of black and brown people in such campaigns. It’s not yet clear how these twin projects, replacing capitalism and coping with climate change, are ultimately going to come together.
The possibility does emerge, however, that crisis-ridden capitalism, loaded with contradictions, will face some sort of a collapse. Waiting in the wings are disasters like pandemics, wars, massive default on debt, underproduction due to climate-caused catastrophes, oil shortage, and more. In chaotic situations like these, the building of a mass response to the climate crisis, one that is collective, anti-capitalist, and necessary, might come about.
The stimulus would derive from fears and perplexity. These, of course, could also lead to the authoritarian solutions of fascists and their like. Such a potential outcome adds to the urgency of preparing for the great mobilization of a socialist nature that we need.
Meanwhile, socialists and Marxists have promoted programs directed at protecting the environment and climate. These are the multifaceted programs often referred to as Green New Deals, as outlined in Mark Brodine’s book Green Strategy, in John Molyneux’s article in Climate & Capitalism, and by Sean Sweeney writing in New Economic Forum. As envisioned, they would accompany far-reaching proposals for progressive social and political change. Such undertakings are at risk of cooptation by corporations and other capitalist forces.
As the fight to ameliorate climate change proceeds, Marxists should take advantage of the teachability of their message. The idea that phenomena are connected – capitalism, expanding production, and rising emissions – is fact-based and logical. Lesser explanations blame the perversity of individuals. Exclusive focus on short-sightedness, disregard for the truth, ignorance, heartlessness, and/or immorality distracts from societal factors at work.
Class struggle will undoubtedly intensify in the years ahead. Faced with climate chaos, the upper classes, with their money, properties, and connections, will seek to wall themselves off from turmoil and victims, perhaps even hire enforcers to protect their remaining privileges.
Undone by climate change and its fallout – desertification, drought, floods, no homes, no livelihoods – people on the run worldwide become the rejects of resourced societies. Easily stigmatized, they serve as pawns for dividing and immobilizing the working class. And like nothing else, their plight calls for redistribution of wealth and resources, that is, if notions of the common good mean anything at all.
The object of this report has been to raise the consciousness of Marxists, socialists, and anyone else. Marxists ought to realize that they can contribute to and even lead collective efforts to head off climate change and to mitigate adverse effects. They have two major resources: the chain of causation from capitalism to climate change and anti-capitalism, which is their foundational tenet.
We are facing “the tragedy of our times;” and countries are “now so perilously close to the edge.” (Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley) Time is up; revolutionary socialists of all kinds need to set priorities. Let the discussion and work begin.
Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.
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COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 