Capitalism’s Dogged Defenders and Propagandists Try To Defend Capitalism From Criticism – by Richard D. Wolff – 22 Jan 2021

The more victims and critics of capitalism coalesce and thereby strengthen one another, the more that economic system is questioned and challenged. That in turn provokes capitalism’s defenders. They increasingly resort to attaching qualifying adjectives to capitalism and deflecting criticisms onto them. They say that the capitalism they support is a particular kind of capitalism. Their support depends on whether or not certain adjectives are attached to capitalism. For example, is it “free market” capitalism (minimum or no government intervention)? Similarly, is it perfectly competitive, conscious, compassionate, socially responsible, progressive, or still other qualifying adjectives? Defenders of capitalism criticize kinds of capitalism that lack the particular adjectives that matter most to them. Many defenders go a step further: kinds of capitalism lacking those adjectives are not “really” capitalism at all.

The placing of qualifying adjectives to differentiate among kinds of capitalism allows defenders to accept some of the rising chorus of criticisms of capitalism. Those criticisms, defenders say, apply only to certain kinds of capitalism that defenders also reject in favor of some other, preferred kind of capitalism. The flaws cited by capitalism’s critics become flaws not of capitalism per se but rather of its (unfortunately) currently existing kind. Such defenders can then focus our attention on changing from one kind of capitalism to another. By changing to a different kind of capitalism—one designated by a different adjective—the criticized flaws will vanish.

With such reasoning, for example, “free market” capitalism’s devotees can accept all sorts of criticisms of actually existing capitalism. They too can denounce its inequalities, instabilities, and injustices. But, they explain, that actually existing kind lacks a fully “free” market. They urge policies that change the economy from a government-regulated kind of capitalism to their preferred “free market” kind. Similarly, champions of a “competitive” kind of capitalism can join critics of the monopoly kind. They attribute monopoly capitalism’s social ills to the adjective—monopoly—not to the noun, capitalism, itself. The solution follows: take anti-trust steps to establish a competitive capitalism, their preferred kind. Progressive or “social responsibility” advocates are also included among capitalism’s defenders using adjectives. They find narrowly profit-driven capitalism to be a kind that causes all sorts of social ills. A different kind of capitalism could rectify those ills by adding social responsibility to the goals and standards of success for capitalists. Such a “compassionate” kind of capitalism represents the better world they seek.

For defenders, placing adjectives before the word “capitalism” removes its core “relations of production” from criticism. The focus of analytical attention becomes the adjective, not the noun. That noun, capitalism, is the employer-employee relationship that structures the enterprises producing the goods and services sustaining the economy and thus the society. Capitalism, per se, is defined by how it organizes production. The employer-employee relationship is what differentiates it from the master-slave relationship in slave systems of production, the lord-serf relationship in feudal economies, the economic structure of individual self-employment, and so on.

Qualifying adjectives for capitalism can be combined, a la Donald Trump, with a reversion to economic nationalism around the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Trump could and did criticize kinds of capitalism (e.g., as “globalized” or “unpatriotic”) that outsourced production beyond U.S. borders or that promoted immigration. He advocated, instead, a kind of capitalism that positioned “America First” as its qualifying adjective. Criticizing capitalism per se never entered his mind.

Qualifying adjectives can alternatively be combined with libertarianism. Then, criticism of a currently existing kind of capitalism (e.g., as “welfare or nanny statist”) blames its faults or flaws on the government’s intrusions (taxes, regulations, mandates, etc.). Libertarians’ policy proposals focus on reducing or, better, eliminating government intrusion into a capitalist economy. Their goal is the aforementioned “free market” kind of capitalism.

Opposite the libertarians, Keynesians and certain kinds of “socialists” also focus on capitalism’s alternative adjectives. Their critiques of currently existing kinds of capitalism often attribute their income and wealth inequalities, cyclical instabilities, and so on to inadequate governmental management of the economic system: too few and too constrained governmental intrusions. Keynesians therefore promote a more intrusive system of governmental monetary and fiscal policies, a state-macro-managed kind of capitalism. That, they believe, will overcome its central, cyclical problems (Keynes’ key work was published in the depths of the 1930s depression).

Further-left Keynesians want government intrusions to also reduce income and wealth inequalities. They often call themselves socialists. But in fact they put the adjectives “welfare state” or “social democratic” or “Scandinavian style” in front of the word capitalist. Many do not question or oppose the employer-employee organization of the workplace that defines capitalism. Neither do many “communists” who want the state to own and operate enterprises internally organized around the employer-employee division. If an economy’s enterprises, public and private, retain the basic capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee split described above—then that economy is a kind of capitalism even if and when its advocates call it “socialism” or “communism.”

It is important to note that the socialists and communists mentioned above, like the libertarians, Keynesians, and so on, all generally accept—often implicitly without comment or criticism—that workplaces must be organized around the distinctively capitalist division between employers and employees. When they advocate for more state-regulated or state-owned-and-operated enterprises as better economic systems than capitalism, they rarely question the internal organization of those enterprises. It is as if nature or technology or history mandates no other possible modern workplace organization than the employer-employee division and relationship. Their socialisms and communisms are then less nouns differentiated from capitalism and more adjectives distinguishing different kinds of capitalism. Such is the ideological power of the long tradition of defending capitalism with adjectives. Ironically, that tradition also captured many of capitalism’s critics.

As traditions, socialism and communism also include advocates who define those terms as entailing radically different organizations of enterprises. Instead of the capitalist division into employers and employees, such socialists and communists seek the democratization of enterprises’ internal organization. That means all participants in the enterprise’s work have equal votes in deciding what, how, and where production occurs and what is done with the output. Interestingly, the practical “going beyond” capitalism already exists in enterprises and has for a long time and around the globe. Sometimes socialists and communists helped establish such worker cooperatives, but often individuals outside those traditions did so as well.

Our current debates about our society’s problems and prospects need to refocus beyond the different adjectives for a common noun they qualify. It is time to expose and challenge capitalism’s core: that employer-employee organization of enterprises, private and state. We need to drop the taboo on debating how we ought to organize the workplaces where most adults spend most of their lives. Workplace organization shapes society in many ways. Different workplace organizations have always existed. Changing from the prevalence of one to the prevalence of another can help solve social problems. To that end, we need to challenge capitalism’s workplace organization, not presume its inevitability as the unacknowledged prison of our politics.

Parallel debates over “free markets” versus “state-regulated markets” in slavery were finally resolved by abolishing slavery. So too were debates over harsh versus compassionate slavery. Masters tried to save slavery by focusing people on choosing among its different kinds. However, people eventually grasped that the problem was not what kind of slavery existed; the problem was slavery itself. It had to end. Likewise, debates over monarchy contrasted those with parliamentary advisers and those without them, harsh versus popular kings and queens. Monarchs tried to hold on by offering alternative kinds of monarchy. But eventually, people decided that what was needed was not this or that kind of monarchy but rather monarchy’s abolition. Capitalism now faces that same historic resolution.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A Bright Star of Victory

Fellow Traveler

I created this graphic by adding the communist star to someone else’s image of the man on the horse. I posted to Reddit and Gab and Pinterest. I got a couple of dozen upvotes on Reddit’s subreddit r/AsianSocialists and r/CommunistChapo. But, on my personal Reddit feed I saw a blank on r/CommuismMemes. I looked on that subreddit where I had posted a dozen different videos and images and gotten hundreds of upvotes. I was ‘ghosted’ out. I post, but no one sees it. I am banned. I posted on telephone poles in the physical world; there are many telephone poles. There are many places on the internet to post material. While radical liberal censors and deplatformers are everywhere, “we are many, they are few.” Let’s play whack-a-mole.

Wall Street and the Russian Revolution of 1917 – Separating Truth From Right Wing Myth – by Max Parry – 12 January 2021

There is a deceitful and ahistorical myth that frequently resurfaces in right-wing circles seeking to discredit socialism with lies about the Russian Revolution. No matter how many times it has been invalidated as fabrication, the reactionary mythos endures. As might be expected, the author is referring to the preposterous claim that American capitalists — or “Wall Street bankers” — secretly financed one of the most epochal political revolutions in world history which overthrew the Romanov dynasty and ended the Russian Empire, leading to the establishment of the Soviet Union. One would be hard pressed to find anyone on the political left who has not encountered this mendacious propaganda which has a few variations depending on how far to the right its adherent lands on the political spectrum, but it usually shares the same core set of evidence-free claims.

Leaving aside whether or not the absurd premise makes any sense politically, what can be acknowledged is that at the heart of these false assertions are tiny elements of truth that have been distorted and overstated to the point of deception. Any research into this allegation inevitably leads one to its most popularly cited source, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by British-American conservative academic, Antony C. Sutton. The primary argument deduced by Sutton is that “Wall Street” indirectly funded the Bolsheviks via the Swedish financier Olof Aschberg, a prominent banker and communist sympathizer who supported a variety of left-wing causes throughout his life, including later the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War. During WWI, Aschberg was a banker in neutral Sweden before expanding his business into Germany where he then transferred sums to aid the Bolsheviks in Russia. However, the links that Sutton makes between Aschberg and “Wall Street” are contradictory and tenuous at best.

While it is evident that Aschberg visited New York in 1916 to convince a group of private American businessmen that the wartime financial opportunities in Russia would continue to flourish after its conclusion, by Sutton’s own admission he was in the United States on behalf of the Tsarist government to negotiate a $50 million loan for the imperial Russian Ministry of Finance. Sutton then debunks his own claim by alleging that Aschberg simultaneously siphoned money “from the German government” to the Russian revolutionaries just as he was acting as an agent in place of Nicholas II’s finance minister, Pyotr Bark. If that is the case, then the socialist Aschberg likely defrauded a partnership of American private bankers into inadvertently lending financial support to the Bolsheviks, at the very time he was employed as a representative for the Russian monarchy. It should be noted that this deal occurred during America’s neutrality in the war at the time, as the U.S. would not enter the conflict until the following year and Aschberg is known to have gotten into trouble with the Allies. Apparently, Sutton could not discern that these Yankee capitalists were being duped by the “Bolshevik Banker” and instead assigned conscious intent to their money passing through the Swede financier to the communist revolution.

Even if true, the conduit of funds from Aschberg’s Nya Banken would have constituted a minuscule portion compared with the primary subsidies for the Bolsheviks which came via the fortunes they seized from wealthy merchants, landed nobility, and senior members of the Russian Orthodox Church, not to mention the ruling class of the Tsar and his family who amassed incalculable riches going back hundreds of years. After the Russian Civil War, Aschberg founded the USSR’s first foreign trade bank, Roskombank, as one of the inaugural decrees of the Soviet government was the nationalization of the financial industry where the assets of private bankers were confiscated by the state. Thereafter, banking in the USSR functioned solely for the purpose of sponsoring foreign trade and the rapid industrialization of the agrarian country into a modern global superpower. If any American bankers were fooled by Aschberg into funding a Marxist revolution, they sealed their own fate.

Sutton’s accusation that the German state sponsored the Bolsheviks first came from the Alexander Kerensky-led Provisional Government which took power following the abdication of Nicholas II in the February Revolution. The short-lived interim government based its claims on telegraphic cables which purportedly showed payments between Berlin and the revolutionaries which was then used as evidence to smear Vladimir Lenin as a “German agent.” Historians have since debated the authenticity of the telegrams, but if Germany did divert funds toward the Bolsheviks, it was only because the revolutionary opposition to Russian participation in the imperialist war was an opening to undermine its enemy. For this reason in April 1917, German intelligence permitted Lenin’s return to Russia from exile in Switzerland via train through Germany, Sweden and Finland in an arrangement made by the Social Democrat Alexander Parvus. However, this meddling was no different than similar interference by the British and French governments who also attempted to influence Russia’s affairs. In fact, it was reportedly the French who intercepted the dispatches given to the Provisional Government showing the supposed transactions between Germany and the Bolsheviks.

If any Bolshevik was truly an agent of a foreign government, that distinction would belong to Leon Trotsky who was not admitted to the majority faction of the Russian socialist movement until September 1917 after previously siding with the Menshevik wing during the initial party split before straddling the fence for years as a self-described “non-factional social democrat.” If the truth should be told, Trotsky was never a dedicated Bolshevik and his opportunism proved useful to the interests of Western imperialism, namely the British who suspiciously ordered Canadian authorities to release him from internment in Nova Scotia that April. Why the British would free a revolutionary to return to Russia and presumably withdraw another Allied nation from the war might seem puzzling, except Trotsky’s advocation of “neither war nor peace” was an opportunity to obstruct Lenin’s efforts to make a separate cease-fire with Germany and accept the Central Powers terms. This would have consequences five months after the October Revolution during the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where Trotsky led the negotiations as Foreign Minister and nearly sabotaged the peace talks by disrupting them with his unauthorized tactics.

Of the original incumbents in the first Soviet cabinet, Trotsky was the only minister of Jewish descent. However, this did not prevent the Tsarist White movement from spreading propaganda during the Russian Civil War about the predominance of “Jews” within the Bolsheviks. Apart from the racism of such conjecture, it also turns out to be factually incorrect as shown in statistics published by the Moscow-based Vedomosti newspaper:

“If we discard the speculations of pseudoscientists who know how to find the Jewish origin of every revolutionary, it turns out that in the first composition of the Council of People’s Commissars of Jews there were 8%: of its 16 members, only Leon Trotsky was a Jew. In the government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic of 1917–1922 Jews were 12% (six out of 50 people). Apart from the government, the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) on the eve of October 1917 had 20% Jews (6 out of 30), and in the first composition of the political bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) — 40% (3 out of 7)”.

This sensationalist big lie of “Jewish Bolshevism” was really an extension of the infamous hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which itself had been forged in 1903 by Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, who disseminated the fabricated text to deflect growing discontent under the Tsarist regime against a scapegoat. After the Romanovs were ousted in 1917, the White movement turned the propaganda against its opponents in the Russian Civil War while this sentiment was promoted by its backers in the West such as Winston Churchill and Henry Ford. At some point, the “Judeo-Bolshevism” hoax became “Jewish bankers” or “Wall Street” funding the Bolsheviks.

Sutton alleges the German-born Jewish-American banker, Jacob Schiff, was a clandestine financier of the Bolsheviks. This too is demonstrably false, as Schiff was a supporter of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, a transatlantic organization which was as vehemently anti-Bolshevik as it was anti-tsar. Today, reactionary historical revisionists would like us to forget that the treacherous Provisional Government, which was to some extent financed and backed by foreign bankers, ever existed in the months between the February and October Revolutions. Schiff had previously backed the failed 1905 Revolution because of the numerous anti-semitic pogroms that occurred under the Russian Empire but immediately withdrew his support from the 1917 Revolution once the Bolsheviks removed the pro-war Provisional Government, as explained by Kenneth Ackerman in Trotsky in New York, 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution:

“Schiff’s gripe against Russia had been its anti-Semitism. At home Schiff had never shown any sympathy for socialism, not even the milder Morris Hillquit variety. Schiff had declared victory for his purposes in Russia after the tsar was toppled in March 1917 and Alexander Kerensky, representing the new provisional government, had declared Jews to be equal citizens. In addition to repeated public statements of support, he used both his personal wealth and the resources of Kuhn Loeb to float large loans to Kerensky’s regime. When Lenin and Trotsky seized power for themselves in November 1917, Schiff immediately rejected them, cut off further loans, started funding anti-Bolshevist groups, and even demanded that the Bolsheviks pay back some of the money he’d loaned Kerensky. Schiff also joined a British-backed effort to appeal to fellow Jews in Russia to continue the fight against Germany.”

Another member of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was the American explorer George Kennan, second cousin of future U.S. diplomat and influential strategist during the Cold War, George F. Kennan. Kennan is quoted in a March 1917 New York Times article explaining how Schiff and the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom funded the February Revolution. However, the elder Kennan was also adamantly against the October Revolution and when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson approved American participation in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, it was after being persuaded by his report in 1918 criticizing the Bolsheviks. If Wall Street bankers funded the Bolsheviks, why did the Anglo-Americans send their army to join the Allied nations to invade Russia and fight the Reds? Kennan’s final denunciation of the Soviets was written in 1923:

“The Russian leopard has not changed its spots…. The new Bolshevik constitution… leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years — in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.”

Years later, part of the inspiration as an envoy for George F. Kennan to found anti-communist Soviet émigrégroups like the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (ACLPR, AMCOMLIB) stemmed from his knowledge of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom begun by his great uncle during the Russian Empire. Also going by the name of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, AMCOMLIB was set up in 1950 as part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Project QKACTIVE in which U.S. intelligence also established Radio Liberation, later known as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, to broadcast behind the Iron Curtain. So not only was the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom anti-Bolshevik, it’s activities became the impetus for part of Kennan’s influential Cold War containment strategy.

Oddly enough, it was George F. Kennan who later proved the infamous ‘Sisson Documents’ purporting that Lenin and his associates were “German agents” to be forgeries in a 1956 article for the Journal of Modern History. The 1918 documents published by Edgar Sisson of the U.S. government’s Committee on Public Information ministry were part of a propaganda operation to discredit the Bolsheviks which reinforced the theory of a German-Bolshevik plot and gave further grounds for the Allied invasion of Russia. With eerie parallels to U.S. media coverage of the Iraq War, apart from war correspondent John Reed, most of the yellow press at the time accepted the Sisson Documents uncritically. While it is now generally acknowledged that the German Foreign Office funded the Bolsheviks to some degree, Kennan’s scholarly work showed the danger of believing deceptive information when it affirms preconceived notions and provides justification for desired actions, especially war.

Edgar Sisson

In recent years, such fiction about the Russian Revolution has not been relegated to the margins but even found its way into the pages of The New York Times when it allowed pseudo-historian Sean McMeekin to take out an op-ed on the 100th anniversary resurrecting the hoax that Lenin was a “German agent.” The ratcheting up of tensions between the U.S. and Russia in the new Cold War and the bogus allegations of interference by Moscow in American elections has normalized disinformation and fake narratives made up of anecdotes and distortion. Now, it is not just the right-wing which is a gullible audience for such psychological warfare regarding Soviet history but credulous Western liberals. In his defense, at least paleolibertarians like Sutton are willing to question the ‘official’ narrative of the Russian Revolution but unfortunately, because of the Red Scare begun by Sisson’s forgeries, like a matryoshka doll there is only more propaganda within the propaganda regarding communism which runs deeper than any right-wing canard. If those seeking the truth about history are sincere, they will keep searching even when it reveals truths that call their whole political views into question. Keep searching.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com

After Decades of Preparation For US Capitalist Collapse – Spartacists Disappear (Workers Vanguard) 14 January 2021

I posted one article that talks about the Spartacist disappearance from a Canadian who was with the Bolshevik Tendency socialist group.

https://shauntrain.blogspot.com/2021/01/whatever-happened-to-spartacist-league.html

Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ? (Notes From Underground) 26 January 2021

Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ?

January 26, 2021 at 4:46 pm

Years ago when I was a member of the Toronto branch of the Bolshevik Tendency, the assignment I hated most was having to go to [Spartacist League]  Trotskyist League forums. We were banned from meetings of the Internationalist Socialists and whatever the Mandelites were calling themselves, but we were allowed into TL meetings. Unfortunately…

We were required to sit at the back of the meeting in designated seats. After the presentation, we got to make one intervention (3 minutes although the time limit only seemed to apply to us), following that numerous TL members and supporters would shriek abuse at us (we were supposedly racists, anglo-chauvinists, cop-lovers, dubious elements, quitters, etc. etc.). Then at the end, we were herded out to prevent us from talking to anyone who was actually crazy enough to have come to this meeting in the first place (I suppose that included us too).

And they were always on a Saturday night.

Sustained by coffee and cigarettes, very energetic were the TL…and the rest of their international tendency. Among the first to arrive at an event, the last to leave. Always the most annoying: New issues of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist Canada, Spartacist, Women and Revolution, Black History and the Class Struggle, a pamphlet or two, and always always on sub-drives or so it seemed.

Workers Vanguard came out every two weeks for as long as I remember, until last year. In April, the ICL posted on its web site that the frequency of WV would be …irregular. That has turned out to be a bit of an understatement; it has been over seven months since an issue of WV has appeared.

On October 30, a new SL item appeared on the site: A perfunctory “Don’t Vote for the Democrats” leaflet which could easily have been written by a new member of the Spartacus Youth League (does that still exist?), but nothing since then to indicate to regular readers that Biden won the election and has since been sworn in as president, or that a motley crew of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6th. Odder too is that the SL does not appear to have written a single word on the uprising that took place after the police murder of George Floyd (or even the murder itself – if I’m wrong, please let me know)

A quick scan through the International Communist League web site and the pattern is the same. Some sections have not had a new item on their pages for almost a year. The Canadian section’s most recent post dates to October, but is a reprint of a leaflet from August about a ten-day strike. It too is of a generic variety of Spart cliches. You can’t help but think, something is going on.

In 2017, the ICL-FI published a long document, “The Chauvinist Hydra” which seemed to consist mostly of a lot of trashing of various sections on the national question. Spartacist leader James Robertson died in 2019. His passing was marking by a brief notice and then months went by before a more substantial obit was published. It’s temping to believe that there’s a power struggle taking place in the group which has paralyzed the organization, but that it would have prevented them from publishing across their international tendency to this degree is difficult to accept. The Internationalist Group, led by former Workers Vanguard editor Jan Norden speculates the group is on the verge of collapse, but they wrote that in May of 2020. I suppose it’ll all come out in the wash.

But seriously, whatever happened to the Spartacist League?

Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ?

Comment:

The ‘Underground’ person went to more than one Spartacist meeting with the Bolshevik Tendency bringing their newspaper and leaflets where they were allowed to address the audience for three minutes under a modified Roberts Rules for meetings. The Spartacists allowed more freedom of expression than the International Socialists Organization radical liberals, or the Stalinists and other self proclaimed ‘leftists’ and ‘socialist revolutionaries’ admits.

I was at a street rally opposing David Duke and his right wing supporters that was organized by Spartacists and Workers Vanguard in front of the church hosting the right wing organizer. The Spartacist had a permit and a platform and anyone who opposed Duke and the Rightists could speak for three minutes. Anyone. The rally began at 5:30pm and lasted more than two hours. We ran out of people to speak. People got up and spoke again. One local black minister showed up with a four young women as a choir and asked to ‘share’ the microphone. He did not want three minutes like everyone else. He was special. He had a show to put on an a narrative to convey to the audience with a drama that would take more than three minutes to present. Perhaps one and a half thousand people had shown up on the street in Boston in front of the Old South Church after weeks of organizing on the streets with Workers Vanguard in hand. This ‘reverend’ came with four people and wanted the audience others had assembled.

Offered a firm three minutes to speak, just like everyone else, the minister refused. There is no democracy in the Christian canon.

So, I’ve seen the Spartacists offer a political opponent an opportunity to speak to the audience they had assembled, but, the Spartacists did not allow the opponent to put on the performance they wanted to.

The ‘Underground’ writer did not like going to Spartacist public forums again and again on a Saturday night. The implication is almost that the Spartacists were deliberately making him go to their meetings and wanted to ruin his Saturday night fun. He was a voluntary member of the Bolshevik Tendency who was going to Spartacist meetings to speak with people and hand out printed material to convince people that the Spartacists where wrong. He chose to go to the meetings.

The Spartacists are also very annoying because they energetically try to sell their ideas in a number of publications. Since the Bolshevik Tendency the ‘Underground’ writer was with put out about one article every two months this variety of articles must seem baffling.

The ‘Underground’ writer notes that Workers Vanguard stopped regular publication and posting and no reason has been given. The only new article that has come out since June 2020 is really only a 30 October 2020 US election leaflet.

The Underground writer says that the Spartacists call to ‘Break with the Democrats’ could have been written by one of the youth. Okay. What’s wrong with that? Lenin’s slogan in 1917 was ‘Bread, Land, Peace!’ which was then written by many young socialist militants.

The ‘Undergound’ writer then speculates on Workers Vanguard readers waiting to find out who won the November 2020 US election. Really? No one was turning to Workers Vanguard to find the daily news. The twice monthly paper was essentially a Leninist editorial page.

US media is filled with stories about the Deplorable Trump supporters Seven Hours In The Capitol events, but the Underground writer worries that Workers Vanguard subscribers are waiting by their mailbox to read what Workers Vanguard has to echo about what the rest of the Radical Liberal Left are saying.

As to what is happening with the “Chauvinist Hydra” or the Spartacist League, or Workers Vanguard, I don’t know. Years ago I said to someone, “a machine doesn’t keep coming out with the right political answers if it’s broken.”

But, lately, the Spartacist League, and Workers Vanguard are not coming out with any answers.

Who won the election in November, anyway?

China – Communist Central Planning Forces Chinese Into Mass Transit For Group Think – The Nightmare of Socialism

I made this video thinking of what the subways look like in New York City. I also thought of the 1970’s version in the movie Joker. One of the features of Stalinism during the Great Depression of the 1930’s was the construction of the Moscow Subway system. The ideas of socialist planning from Lenin and Trotsky survived in some form. Stalin did not create a capitalist owner and give the publicly built system to that favorite.

.

Trotsky pointed out the significance of the methods of Stalin and the Stalinists when Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 while Germany invaded from the West. Stalin did not hand out properties in the newly conquered Polish lands to individuals. Factories were transformed on the existing soviet socialist model. Farms were collectivized. This indicated to Trotsky that the Soviet Union was not yet a capitalist country, or on the verge of becoming capitalist in 1940.

Another telling sign during the invasion of Poland: Polish capitalists and right wingers ran toward the German lines; labor union leaders, socialists and left wingers and Jewish people ran towards the Red Army Soviet lines. Simply noting ‘totalitarian’ aspects of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany does not explain the difference people who were running for their lives understood. Stalinists are not fascists although they are frequently totalitarian. Fascists are often the last ditch shock troops of capitalists who reluctantly turn to illogical and often self defeating violence to save their lucrative illogical system.

So… that’s my thinking behind the video above of the utilitarian side of Stalinist/Maoists in China. They seem to think they have found a successful ‘third way’ between militant impoverished communism with slogans for everything and chaotic capitalism that seems to live in an island of anarchy. Perhaps… we shall see.

About a hundred years ago the Chinese Communist Party was started by six men in a row boat at a public park who wanted to talk with out police spies hearing them plan for a workers led new China. Today the Chinese Communist Party is the largest membership organization in the world. They could not all fit on a boat. I wonder if there are any communists left in the Chinese Communist Party. I watched a Chinese Communist Party five year conference meeting on CCTV on my cable channel with a Chinese friend who had a sister back home who was a communist party cadre.

I think there were 5,000 ‘communists’ in the enormous hall decked with communist flags and red and gold everywhere.

I turned to my friend, “Is there one real communist in that whole room?”

To be fair when I found the Chinese Communist Party singing of the unofficial anthem of the party I was moved. Below is a rendition of ‘The Internationale’ leftist anthem for over a hundred years. The song was popular during the Paris Commune of 1871, and became the USSR anthem from 1920 – 1944. Stalin brought in a more nationalist Hymn of the Soviet Union that praised him by name. The melody has been brought back as the Russian Federation anthem by Putin with different words.

https://videopress.com/v/TbOlUNth?preloadContent=metadata

The Stalinist/Maoist misrulers where rewarded by US Imperialism for turning on the Soviet Union. China was given access to capitalist world markets in a way that Soviet Russia or East Germany never where. In 1980 China had 80% of the population living in poverty. Today only 8% of China’s population lives in impoverished conditions. Perhaps China can now keep up the momentum they have built up over the last forty years and simply turn to their vast internal market to sell goods and services. Why not buy Treasury Bonds from North Korea and help out an ally instead of literally paying for the missiles aimed at China by purchasing billions and billions and billions of US Treasury Bonds.

Note the US Federal Bank, a private capitalist institution, created a trillion an a half dollars out of thin air with a computer program in March of 2020 to bail out Wall Street. The Capitalist Paradise couldn’t create face masks by the millions. That takes labor and machines and material. But US dollars? They wish them into existence. So… China’s US Treasury Bonds became worth less as the dollar is devalued to bail out Wall Street et al. What backs the US dollar? Saudi oil. Russia has oil. Iran has oil. Venezuela has oil. China – buy North Korean Treasury Bonds and maybe the deformed workers state can explore and find oil.

Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.

Getting Censored and Deleted And Blocked On Parler And Gab And Reddit – Like It Or Not – This Story Is Going To Be Told – 11 January 2021

I joined ‘Parler’ social media posting site on 23 November 2020.  I felt like I was posting to no one.  I was re-posting articles and words and pictures that I had posted on Reddit, or my own numerous blogs.  

I had been kicked off Twitter during the Spring 2020 Democratic primaries when I made fun of Senator E. Warren.  “He undressed me with his eyes.” I wrote with a neutral line drawing of Warren.  

I was restricted and had to give an email and new password or something, I did it all, but was still shut out.  I had been getting about 15,000 views a month for a while on Twitter.  But I started posting more after some kind of restriction on Reddit.  My views went up to 50,000 for the month.  So, people started to notice me, I guess.  Radical Liberal authoritarians saw my words and images.  I must have been reported.  

I posted all kinds of Left Wing material on Parler, and also Gab.  I had zero problems.  I had low views.  At first I thought I’d get virtually no views.  I gave links to one blog and saw the traffic was half a dozen views.  But, as the weeks went by and I posted lots and lots and lots of posts on many subjects my views went up.  

I made a video of my Gab photo gallery when I glanced over at the sidebar display and noted how interesting and varied the images were.  Whatever the creators problems are, he does not have a one track mind.  

I am lucky to have had an adequate varied education and work history along with wide access to books and periodicals and the breadth of the internet.   

When I posted pro-labor union messages on Parler and Gab I got no negative reaction.  Perhaps no one saw them.  Perhaps conservative populists are not opposed to labor unions.  I copied the post on Parler and posted on Reddit’s r/ParlorWatch.  Someone wrote that I would get ‘death threats’ from people on Parler because I was pro-labor union.  Simply not true.  If I pointed that out to the writer of the comment I expect to get a non-response that labels Parler as ‘racist’ and probably me as ‘racist’ as well.  They never, ever, answer point by point.  As if enforcing a religious dogma, not a rational political position that seeks to win others over.  

Perhaps ‘Parler’ is gone with the wind.  I posted on Gab today, and Reddit, and Blogger.  I think I’ll put this on WordPress, too.  I have put leaflets on telephone poles to advertise political meetings or demonstrations or labor union strikes.  There were lots of telephone poles.  I always expected to have some leaflets torn down.  

The situation is the same with social media as a way to spread ideas.  One should put material on many places.  If one has strong ideas, expect a strong reaction.  

I expect to be erased as soon as I draw something, or write something, or think something.  Reality is a harsh mistress.  Last summer I made a sidewalk chalk drawing of Vincent Van Gough’s Starry Night on the black tarmac of the street.  Almost as soon as I had finished a street sweeper truck came along and erased my drawing.  I was delighted.  Confirmation bias.  “See, the whole world’s against me, including the city’s public works department who were obviously waiting for me to draw something on the spur of the moment just to erase my work,” I thought, I think.  

My only regret was that their was still a faint outline of my imitation of Van Gogh’s.  

The same thing happened last year with my copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.  

But I think it was the rain and a drunk’s vomit that washed that masterpiece away.  

The good news is I can draw the works again.  And again, and again, and again.

Repetitio mater studorium est! 

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7yg4zd

Shadow of the Pitchfork

America’s fantasy that China will soon collapse like the Soviet Union did is based on arrogance and ideology, not facts and reason – by Tom Fowdy – 4 January 2021

Audio of Article – Mp3

2020 was a year to forget, but it was also immensely geopolitically significant. The outbreak of Covid-19 was a world-changing event which will profoundly alter the globe. Not least because the political shockwaves it created have brought relations between the United States and China to their lowest ebb in modern times. 

In what many describe as a “new cold war,” the Trump administration has used its remaining time in office to escalate confrontation with Beijing and forcefully set a legacy for Joe Biden to follow. In setting out this scenario, some in the United States have framed the situation and its risks in very “short termist” thinking. It assumes China only has a short space of time to achieve its goals before, apparently, it becomes economically and socially depleted. 

An article published in Foreign Policy, titled “China Is Both Weak and Dangerous” and covering the book The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State, by American Enterprise Institute’s Dan Blumenthal, argues that China’s political system is weak and lacking in legitimacy. It then proceeds to argue that it is therefore, apparently, ideologically incapable of generating sustained growth or the innovation required to truly become a superpower and “displace” the US. As a result, the piece argues, Beijing only has a short period of time to “accomplish its goals,” thus making it dangerous.

Not surprisingly, I don’t buy into this argument. If anything, I would describe this kind of attitude, which I term “collapsism” as an ideological expression of overconfidence from some within the United States. It is a view which has become endemic since the end of the Cold War in 1991, which simply assumes China must be destined to fail at some point, while America marches on. 

This of course is to be expected from the American Enterprise Institute, which, it goes without saying, is a ridiculously neoconservative and pro-war institution, but it nevertheless represents a broader and more misleading set of assumptions in American politics. The idea, perhaps more famously put by Gordon Chang’s “The coming collapse of China” ( 2001), is simply that the Chinese system is doomed to implode because it doesn’t tick the right ideological boxes. If anything, this view risks America being overconfident.

“Collapsism” better known as the “end of history thesis” is a strand of Cold War thinking which assumes that liberal capitalism is the only way to create a successful and stable country. It holds that all other ideologies are fundamentally flawed and cannot truly replicate the success of the West, even if they represent a geopolitical threat. It is an expression of American triumphalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union, based on the premise that in the end the West became more prosperous than the USSR and had outmatched it on innovation. 

Liberalism, having evolved out of Christian thought, has embedded the idea that one’s own “divine destiny” is inevitable and, in the same way, believes western political thought is “the way, the truth, the life.” On top of this, it also holds that only liberalism allows creativity and critical thinking, and, thus, technological success.

You don’t have to read heavy books on international relations to find this view; attitudes towards China are riddled with it. Mike Pompeo once boasted, “The Communist Party knows it can’t match our innovation,” spreading the misleading trope that the only way China can obtain technology is by “stealing” it, and claiming all Chinese students in the US are “sent” to do that. Overall, this is an expression of overconfidence that clouds US foreign-policy making. The idea that if China can be contained quickly and harshly, it can be beaten as its political system is leaning on borrowed time. 

Not surprisingly, this view is also endemic in the mainstream media and commentary. When Covid-19 broke out in February, newspapers rushed to frame the outbreak in ideological terms and assumed naively such a catastrophe could never happen in a transparent and progressive society like in the West. This had to be a failure of China’s system. This is obviously a trait of this ideologically driven discourse outlined in ‘The China Nightmare’ and the events of 2020 proved it wrong before it was even published, which shows how short-sighted the analysis is. 

First of all, it talks about China’s growth slowing down and facing the “Middle Income Trap”– this is the idea that, like some countries in Latin America, nations reach a certain point then fail to grow further. However, where is the evidence for this happening? China is already passing the middle-income mark and is set to be designated a high income country by 2023. 

It is also projected to become the world’s largest economy by 2028. The reason why many countries failed to surpass the middle-income mark was because of US led capitalism, not in spite of it. Mexico for example, cannot innovate because its economy is completely hegemonized by the US, who dominates its key industries and extracts Mexican talent for itself.

China does not face these problems or pitfalls. It has an increasingly educated workforce, universities which are increasingly competitive globally, a number of “unicorn” startups to rival the US and record levels of foreign direct investment in 2020. Does this really seem like a society “on the brink” with no potential to innovate? The author might want to consider that China has published more scientific papers since 2018 than any other country in the world, and files more intellectual property patents than anyone else too. Not bad for a nation that apparently “steals” everything, right?

Given this, the idea that China is weak and does not have time on its side is one based exclusively on ideology, not facts. Whilst the book highlights upcoming challenges, such as demographic decline, these are treated in a fatalist manner as if China has no way to absolve them, such as encouraging inbound immigration in the way Western nations have done. If anything, last year should have been a stark warning that China’s political system is not easily overcome or contained and, contrary to US hysteria, is not rampaging on a zero-sum path to world domination or to displace the US. This is a neoconservative fantasy which simultaneously believes Beijing is coming for Washington, yet cannot understand why China has not collapsed already.

As a result, the real danger in US-China ties is the belief that a path of confrontation on Washington’s behalf, as we have seen with Trump, can upend Beijing quickly and affirm US supremacy. Realism is needed, rather than ideological and triumphalist thinking. China’s strategy has involved hedging against American pressure by consolidating more economic agreements and options with others, rather than barging headfirst into a bloodthirsty conflict, that suggests it is a country that is biding its time. 

It would be very happy to stabilize its ties with Washington. If anything, American complacency and the belief China can be stabilized, encapsulated by Pompeo’s legacy, is inherently dangerous. Beijing has been written off too quickly many times before, and history does not always repeat itself and run in straight lines, as the US has assumed since 1991.

https://archive.vn/mVWZ9

Time, time, time… I have thee not, but, I see thee still…I see you pass, you never pause, but, where are you…What are you?