Reunification of Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China is the culmination of the drive to undo the imperialist dismembering of China. This drive goes back to the May 4 Movement in 1919 (above) which brought together students and workers in anti-imperialist struggle leading to the 1921 founding of the Communist Party of China. (Photo: Alpha History)
Reunification of Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China is not just a currently hot issue, it is the culmination of the drive to undo the imperialist dismembering of China going back to the mid-1800s. It was this national oppression that gave rise to the May 4 Movement in 1919, particularly against Japanese colonial inroads including Taiwan (and their endorsement by the “democratic” imperialist victors of World War I in the Versailles Treaty), but more generally against imperialist domination of the most populous country on earth. This movement quickly went beyond patriotic nationalism to embrace revolutionary anti-imperialist workers struggle with the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921.
A century later, the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have repeatedly called to defeat the imperialist drive for war against China whose aim is to foment capitalist counterrevolution, just as Leon Trotsky fought to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism, despite the betrayals of Stalinism. At the same time, we warn that the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy undermines and is an obstacle to that defense with its policies of conciliating capitalism and imperialism. Regarding Taiwan, the Communist Party of China and its leader, Chinese president Xi Jinping, call to reunite China on the nationalist, explicitly non-socialist basis of “one country, two systems.” Concretely, what this means was made explicit in the White Paper issued by the Taiwan Affairs Office and Information Office of China’s State Council in 2000:
“After reunification, the policy of ‘one country, two systems’ will be practiced, with the main body of China (Chinese mainland) continuing with its socialist system, and Taiwan maintaining its capitalist system for a long period of time to come.”
The White Paper noted that this policy on Taiwan was first put forward by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. This was precisely when the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy was further deepening its treacherous alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union that had been established by Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. It was also when Deng was elaborating his policy of “reform and opening up” the Chinese economy to privately owned enterprises and foreign capitalist investment. While (contrary to what most bourgeois economists and reformist pseudo-socialists claim) the state sector is still dominant in China, these policies have fostered a large capitalist sector that ultimately endangers the very foundations of the workers state.
On Taiwan, Xi elaborated his position in a 1 January 2019 “Speech at the 40th Anniversary Commemoration of the ‘Message to Compatriots in Taiwan’.” There, the Chinese president and CPC general secretary stated that, “Taiwan compatriots have made significant contributions to the reform and opening up of the mainland, and have also shared the development opportunities of the mainland.” He promised to “provide the same treatment to Taiwan compatriots and Taiwanese enterprises” as to mainland companies, and while vowing to give no quarter to Taiwanese separatists, and not renouncing the use of force, Xi declared that “after peaceful reunification, the social system and way of life of the Taiwan compatriots will be fully respected, and the private property, religious beliefs, and legitimate rights and interests of the Taiwan compatriots will be fully guaranteed.”
The wager of the Stalinist bureaucracy, from Deng to Xi, is that by enabling a lot of Taiwan capitalists to make a lot of money off exploiting the labor of Chinese workers, they would create a sector of Taiwan’s bourgeois ruling class favorable to reunification with China. The Beijing bureaucrats have succeeded in fostering such a sector, but whether the owners of the key semiconductor industry, in which Taiwan is the world leader, would stand up to a credible threat of being cut off from the rest of the world capitalist market is open to question. Already, many Taiwan-owned companies are moving operations to Vietnam, India, or Mexico and the U.S. But what about the rest of the Taiwan population, including those induced to vote for the Taiwanese separatist Democratic Progressive Party (which since 2016 has held the presidency and a majority in the island’s legislature)?
“It is foreseeable that in the absence of sufficient political guidance and institutional guarantees, it will be difficult for Taiwan compatriots who have long received the Taiwan authorities’ ‘anti-Communist’ education and have been affected by the ‘de-sinicization’ policy to realize their identity transformation spontaneously after the reunification of state power.”
So then how is that to be accomplished? The Wuhan law professors call for “an institutional system with a coherent and unified narrative structure to realize the transformation of the historical, collective and individual identities of Taiwan compatriots,” that will “promote the transformation of the identities of Taiwan compatriots,” to “guide the Taiwan compatriots to form a correct collective identity” and to “form a correct individual identity.” This is a call for a giant Mao-Stalinist-style bureaucratic reeducation campaign, after reunification.
To win the masses of working people in Taiwan to reunification, it is indeed necessary to combat the poisonous anti-communist Taiwanese nationalist/separatist ideology promoted by the imperialists and their flunkeys in the U.S. neocolonial government of Taiwan. But the bureaucracy’s policy is to force-feed Chinese nationalism. Nowhere in the Wuhan paper, or in Xi’s 2019 speech, is there any mention of socialism or building class consciousness. And the only mention of autonomy for a reunified Taiwan is in terms of maintaining its capitalist social relations and “way of life.” Yet there is a real basis for building internationalist communist consciousness among Taiwanese and mainland Chinese workers in the course of waging class struggle against the capitalists and ousting their defenders whose policies endanger the foundations and gains of the Chinese Revolution. This internationalist orientation is, of course, diametrically opposed to Stalinism’s nationalist outlook and program, going back to the anti-Marxist dogma of “socialism in one country” put forward by Stalin and embraced by Mao and his successors.
Rather than nationalism or patriotism, what needs to be raised is the revolutionary consciousness that workers in Taiwan together with their comrades in mainland China have the power to expropriate capitalism, to take over all the factories and industries on the island and incorporate them into China’s centralized planned economy. In many cases, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese workers face the same capitalist bosses. As of 2019, according to one survey, Taiwanese-owned businesses employed more than 3.2 million workers in mainland China.28 Meanwhile, there are roughly 4 million industrial workers in Taiwan (35% of an overall workforce of 11.5 million).29 Moreover, Taiwan has over 700,000 immigrant workers, mostly from the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, who “account for 8 per cent of the country’s workforce and more than 60 per cent [of whom] work in the industrial sector, including in the microchip industry.”30 These workers are held in virtual bondage by a labor brokerage system. Southeast Asian workers do the jobs locals are unwilling to do, like being forced to handle dangerous chemicals without proper safety measures and to live in on-site factory dorms adjacent to combustible chemicals, which, unsurprisingly, has been known to cause deadly fires.
A genuinely communist leadership would take up the cause of these workers, and link them to the struggles of workers in mainland China against their brutal Taiwanese bosses. In 2018 workers in Taichung, Taiwan protested the deaths of three Vietnamese migrants living in a dormitory dangerously located above a circuit board factory of the Chin Poon Industrial Company where a fire broke out. Chin Poon also has a plant in Jiangsu, China. The 2010 suicides of workers protesting low pay and forced overtime in the giant Foxconn plant in Longhua, Shenzhen, where iPhones and Apple computers are made, drew worldwide attention. China responded by ordering sharply increased wages. Hon Hai Precision Manufacturing, Foxconn’s Taiwanese parent company, also has plants in Taiwan, as well as in Brazil, India, Mexico and a host of other countries. The imperialists seek to divert struggles against Taiwanese-owned and imperialist companies for anti-communist purposes using tools like the NED-funded China Labour Bulletin and China Labor Watch. To unite these workers in class struggle against their capitalist bosses requires a revolutionaryinternationalist program.
Authentic Trotskyists stand for the revolutionary reunification of China, which would be a significant blow against imperialist world domination. That means fighting for socialist revolution in Taiwan, to expropriate the capitalists on the island and throughout China, and for proletarian political revolution to replace the bureaucracy governing the People’s Republic of China with the soviet democracy of workers councils under authentic communist leadership while extending the revolution internationally. The reintegration of Taiwan could include a degree of autonomy so long as that is not a cover for maintaining capitalism or any suggestion of Taiwan “independence,” which can only mean subordination to imperialism. To defeat once and for all the threats and aggression of the imperialists, to defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution and open the way for socialist development throughout Asia and beyond, what’s needed is international socialist revolution. ■
1. According to the official line of succession, upon the death, resignation, removal from office or incapacity of an elected U.S. president, the office of president would pass to the vice president, and next in line is the speaker of the House of Representatives.
2. “With Missiles, China Sends Warning on Taiwan,” New York Times, 5 August.
3. “Henry Kissinger Is Worried About ‘Disequilibrium’,” Wall Street Journal, 12 July.
5. “China protests another ‘routine’ US Navy transit through Taiwan Strait,” Stars and Stripes, 27 April.
6. The Han people, native to China, are the world’s largest ethnic group
7. The GMD, in the Pinyin phonetic transcription of Chinese, is known as the KMT (for Kuomintang) on Taiwan, which uses the older, Wade-Giles transliteration, under which, for example, the Chinese capital of Beijing was rendered as Peking.
10.https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality. For an account of how China mobilized centrally planned resources to effectively protect its population from the deadly plague, in stark contrast to the profit-driven capitalist rulers who have allowed COVID to ravage much of the rest of the world, see our article, “A Tale Of Two Cities: Wuhan – New York,” The Internationalist No. 59, March-April 2020.
12. Wikipedia, “List of US arms sales to Taiwan.” Since abrogating the U.S.-Taiwan defense pact in 1979, the U.S. has sent over $90 billion in arms to the island.
13. CNBC, 20 August 2021; CNN, 22 October 2021; Washington Post, 23 May.
14. Naval War College Review, Vol. 61, No. 3, Summer 2008.
22. “2004 Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Population Society Seminar – Comparative Analysis of Taiwan’s Current Ethnic Identity Situation [in Chinese] (2004)
27. The latest demand of the Campaign for Uyghurs is that “Chinese Regime Must End Extreme Covid Lockdowns in East Turkistan” (9 September). So these supposed champions of “human rights” are calling for Uighurs to die, for that is what ending the “zero-COVID” measures would mean!
28. “The Time is Up: Taiwanese Businessmen in China Facing the Centennial of the Chinese Communist Party,” Taiwan Gazette, 21 January 2022.
29. “Share of Taiwanese workforce employed in the industrial sector from 2011 to 2021,” Statista.com.
Target: China. U.S., Japanese and Australian warships heading for Rim of the Pacific 2022 war games on June 29. Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on August 2-3. The military exercise ended on August 4. Despite the timing, there was almost no mention in the media of RIMPAC, the world’s largest live-fire naval maneuvers. Yet, “Everything this exercise does has China in its sights,” reported the liberal warmongers at Defense One. (Photo: Mil3010 video)
Defend China Against Imperialist Drive for Counterrevolution! For Revolutionary Reunification of China – Expropriate the Capitalists
Late in the night of August 2, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her Congressional entourage flew on U.S. military aircraft into the Chinese territory of Taiwan, explicitly flouting numerous warnings by the Chinese government against this provocative stunt. Despite decades of Washington formally upholding a “one China policy,” affirming that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is “the sole legal Government of China” and “acknowledging” that “Taiwan is part of China,” the official visit by the third highest official of the U.S. government1 was a blatant provocation. During her stay, Pelosi all but advocated Taiwanese independence, referring to the island as a “country.”
The U.S. government is fully aware that such talk points to war with China, which has insisted for 70 years that reunification with Taiwan is imperative. The fact that the island is a separate entity from the mainland is the result of the dismemberment of China by imperialism going back to the mid-19th century, and the imperialists’ continued use of Taiwan as a spearhead to restore capitalist rule in China. That is the only reason Taiwan isn’t already part of the PRC.
In the face of this outrageous provocation, China’s foreign ministry responded with justified fury, releasing a statement saying that Pelosi’s visit is a “violation of the one-China principle” and “seriously infringes upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” It added that, “these moves, like playing with fire, are extremely dangerous. Those who play with fire will perish by it.” Three days later, to underline the gravity of the matter, on August 5, China’s foreign ministry announced a series of countermeasures, including cancelling all China-U.S. military talks, suspending China-U.S. talks on climate change and suspending cooperation on immigration, counternarcotics and criminal matters. But Beijing did not limit itself to diplomatic measures.
China During August 4-7, in response to Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, China’s People’s Liberation Army carried out missile drills in six areas bracketing the island (shaded blocks), and live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait. (Sources: Xinhua News Agency, Google maps)
In the following days, China carried out a series of military exercises around Taiwan, demonstrating that the PRC is prepared to defend itself against anything the imperialists can throw at it. The maneuvers included firing 11 missiles into areas bracketing the island, landing to the north, northeast, east, southeast and southwest, including two directly overflying Taiwan. On the west, ten warships and 100 fighter planes of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) held maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait between the island and mainland China, while 22 PLA aircraft flew past the median line in the strait.2 China showed that it could encircle the island, while the combined maneuvers simulated and amounted to a trial run of a blockade.
China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, is fully justified in responding forcefully to the aggressive war threats by the U.S., including Pelosi’s highly publicized visit, escalating arms sales to Taiwan, official U.S. declarations calling China a “threat,” and bipartisan legislation budgeting over a trillion dollars to gearing up for a military showdown with China. While for two decades (1972-92) U.S. rulers formed an alliance with Beijing against the Soviet Union, later seeking to pursue the restoration of capitalism by including China in the World Trade Organization, the Chinese Revolution has always represented a threat to the U.S.-dominated world order, no matter how much Beijing bureaucrats pursued the illusion of peacefully coexisting with imperialism.
Today, as the U.S. and its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies are escalating their war drive against Russia, instigating the reactionary nationalist Russia-Ukraine war, the imperialists have ostentatiously and explicitly targeted China as well. (This crucial point, deliberately ignored by most of the “left,” has been underlined by the League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group.) The NATO summit in June issued a first-ever “Strategic Concept” which labeled the PRC a “strategic challenge,” “competitor” and “potential adversary” which seeks to “subvert the rules-based international order” – i.e., the unipolar, U.S.-dominated “New World Order” that plays by Washington rules. The conclave also declared “the Indo-Pacific” important to NATO, and for the first time invited the heads of state and government from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea to the summit.
Demonstrator rips U.S. flag during protest in Taipei, Taiwan, against provocation visit by U.S. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Photo: Reuters)
In the lead-up to Pelosi’s Taiwan adventure, much was made of supposed differences within the Democratic administration of Joe Biden, who remarked that the Pentagon thought the trip was “not a good idea.” This is eyewash, part of the U.S.’ “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan that the Cold Warriors in Washington are using as a cover for their build-up to war. The recklessness of Biden, Pelosi & Co. has alarmed even prominent mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie. Notorious mass murderer Henry Kissinger noted that “we [the U.S.] are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”3 And New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman termed Pelosi’s trip “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible,”4 even as he called to arm Taiwan to the hilt.
Underlining that Pelosi’s trip is part of a “escalation cycle” to provoke China, three more groups of U.S. officials visited the island in August, including a Congressional delegation on August 14 led by Massachusetts Democratic senator Ed Markey, as well as a bevy of Japanese lawmakers of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. At the end of the month, the U.S. sent two guided missile cruisers to violate China’s territorial waters in what it called “a routine Taiwan Strait transit.” After a similar exercise in “gunboat diplomacy” in April, it was reported that the Navy has been sending ships on such “routine transits” about once a month for the last two years.5 And on September 3, the Biden administration approved a billion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan, including air-to-air and anti-ship missiles like those recently provided to Ukraine.
Defeat U.S./NATO war drive – Defend China against imperialism and counterrevolution! Internationalist contingent in New York City 2022 May Day march. (Internationalist photo)
Ever since the 1949 Chinese Revolution established the PRC, it has been seen as a major obstacle to U.S. domination for having escaped the stranglehold of capitalist rule. Following the counterrevolutionary wave of 1989-92 that destroyed the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states, China has been the No. 1 target on the U.S. imperialists’ hit list. In the event of war with the U.S. – over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, the South China Sea or whatever – the League for the Fourth International stands squarely on the side of China. While most of the left lines up with the imperialist warmongers in China-bashing, we call on all class-conscious workers to defend China against imperialist provocations, exposing the lies and slanders aimed at promoting capitalist counterrevolution in the world’s largest remaining workers state.
Taiwan Used as a Launchpad for Imperialist Anti-China Operations
Taiwan has been part of China since the late 1600s under the Qing dynasty, and today its population is 97% Han Chinese.6 Beginning with the Opium Wars by Britain in 1839-42 and 1856-60, the imperialists sought to carve up China into spheres of influence. In 1884, France invaded Taiwan, but was forced to withdraw, and in 1895 Japan seized Taiwan in the First Sino-Japanese War, turning it into a colony. Ever since, the island has been a platform for imperialist attacks on China. This has included Japan’s 1931 takeover of Manchuria and its murderous invasion of eastern China in the Second Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937, including the infamous Nanjing massacre in which an estimated 200,000 people were slaughtered.
Crowds in Beijing greet the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army marking the victory of the Chinese Revolution, 1 October 1949. (Photo: public domain)
In 1949, the Communist Party of China led by Mao Zedong, at the head of a peasant army, defeated the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD, for Guomindang)7 of the U.S.-backed dictator Chiang Kai-shek, signaling the victory of the Chinese Revolution. The remnants of Chiang’s army fled to Taiwan, where its “Republic of China” (ROC) acted as a U.S. neo-colony against the victorious People’s Republic. On the mainland, capitalism would be replaced by a collectivized planned economy, which despite Stalinist bureaucratic mismanagement brought enormous gains for workers, peasants, women and ethnic minorities. On Taiwan reactionary anti-communist forces maintained a brutal and repressive capitalist system falsely hailed as “democratic” by its U.S. sponsors.
Bemedalled tinpot dictator Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Guomindang (Chinese Natioinalist Party) and butcher of the 1927 Shanghai workers uprising, fled to Taiwan in 1949. (Photo: public domain)
Washington has long sought to use Taiwan as a linchpin for imperialist military encirclement of the PRC and a launchpad for U.S. counterrevolutionary designs to “take back” China – that is, to re-enslave the Chinese masses under the boot of imperialism and “free” capitalist exploitation. In the Korean War (1950-53), the U.S. commander, General Douglas MacArthur, referred to Taiwan as his “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” But despite U.S. imperialism’s technological superiority, its systematic firebombing of North Korean cities and its massive use of chemical (napalm) and biological weapons, China’s entry into the war in November 1950 drove the U.S./U.N. forces halfway down the Korean peninsula. This secured the existence of the North Korean deformed workers state and dealt U.S. imperialism a defeat from which it has been smarting ever since.
In 1954, the U.S. signed a mutual defense pact with the “ROC,” establishing a United States Taiwan Defense Command and stationing up to 30,000 U.S. troops in Taiwan until 1979. In 1958 when China sought to take the ROC-occupied islets of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu, located in the harbor of Xiamen, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff held that “the use of nuclear weapons would ultimately be necessary” to defend them.8 But in 1972, U.S. president Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Kissinger switched gears to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and enlist the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy in an anti-Soviet alliance. And as a quid pro quo, the U.S. formally declared that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China,” and the U.S. “does not challenge that position.”9
Mao Zedong and U.S. president Richard Nixon sealed treacherous anti-Soviet alliance in 1972. (Photo: AP)
Mao’s treacherous alliance with U.S. imperialism was very real, and contributed to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. In 1979, China (backed by the U.S.) invaded Soviet ally Vietnam, and from 1980 on, Beijing colluded with the CIA’s Operation Cyclone against Soviet intervention backing a reform government in Afghanistan. China supplied arms to anti-Soviet mujahedin (holy warriors) and financed (together with Saudi Arabia) their training in camps run by Pakistan. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was a major factor setting the stage for the collapse of the Soviet bloc deformed workers states and the destruction of the USSR that began soon after. Authentic Trotskyists defended Vietnam and hailed Soviet intervention in Afghanistan against the U.S.-sponsored reactionaries, who were backed by China’s Stalinist rulers as part of their treacherous alliance with Washington.
But three decades on, in the decaying post-Soviet, U.S.-dominated “New World Order,” the Beijing Stalinists’ illusions of building “socialism (with Chinese characteristics) in one country” through “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism have reached a dead end. Particularly since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, all wings of the U.S. bourgeoisie have joined in vilifying China. Washington has now switched from backing the GMD/KMT to fomenting Taiwanese separatism through the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). During her visit, Pelosi effusively embraced Taiwan’s DPP president, Tsai Ing-wen, and declared that Taiwan had the “lowest number of deaths from COVID. A real model for the world.” In reality, the island’s COVID death rate is 3748% higher than that in mainland China (39.35 vs. 1.05 per 100,000).10
On the occasion of her war-mongering visit, Nancy Pelosi was awarded the “Order of Propitious Clouds with special Grand Cordon” by Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen (right). (Photo: Taiwan Presidential Office)
In the spirit of Democratic Party imperialist feminism, Pelosi suggested that China was only upset at her visit because she is a woman. Actually, the House speaker is famous for her rabid anti-communism and backing of every CIA-sponsored counterrevolutionary “movement” against China, from decades of enthusing over “His Holiness,” the CIA-funded, Nazi-educated Dalai Lama, to shepherding leaders of the fascist-infested, imperialist flag-waving Hong Kong “democracy” riots through Washington in 2019, to promoting the CIA conduit-funded “World Uyghur Congress” (WUC). In 2020, Pelosi appointed an advisor to the separatist WUC to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. During Pelosi’s visit, Taiwan president Tsai awarded her the “Order of Propitious Clouds with special Grand Cordon” as a “devoted friend” of Taiwan.
Pelosi’s virulent hatred of China is by no means at odds with U.S. president Biden, who campaigned as a bigger China-hater than Trump, who had feted Chinese president Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago luxury resort. The House speaker traveled to Taiwan aboard a U.S. military plane, making this a deliberate official U.S. provocation. Left out of U.S. media reports is the fact that immediately leading up to and during Pelosi’s Taiwan adventure, from June 29 to August 4, the U.S. Indo-Pacific command held a giant military exercise, RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific), involving 26 nations, 38 surface ships, four submarines, nine land forces, about 170 aircraft, more than 30 unmanned systems, and 25,000 people. “Everything this exercise does has China in its sights, whether or not military leaders are free to say so,” reported one military site.11
RIMPAC 2022, timed to coincide with Pelosi visit to Taiwan, was all about practicing for war on China. Clockwise from top: sailing in formation to open exercise; Philippine navy frigate testing weapons systems; U.S., Canadian, Australian and Malaysian forces sink decommissioned U.S. warship; South Korean assault forces head towards beach; Mexican naval infantry storm beach during amphibious raid in multinational littoral operations. Click on photo to enlarge.
(Photos: U.S. Naval Institute; Philippine Navy; U.S. Navy; Royal New Zeland Navy; Royal New Zealand Air Force)
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, with aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, guided-missile destroyers, nuclear submarines and other U.S. warships and aircraft was moved into position for Pelosi’s visit. And while Republican China hawks are pushing an “Arm Taiwan Act,” in his year and two-thirds in office Biden has already approved six arms sales to Taiwan, totaling $2.3 billion.12 On three different occasions, Biden has said that the U.S. would “defend” Taiwan by military force in case of an “invasion” by China.13 And the U.S.’ “2022 National Defense Strategy” states that China is the U.S.’ “most consequential strategic competitor” and that the U.S.’ No. 1 priority is “defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC.”
Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy 2022 (declassified fact sheet released on March 28) repeatedly lists the People’s Republic of China as the No. 1 “challenge,” “strategic competitor” and “threat” to – and hence target of – U.S. imperialism. Click on image to enlarge.
At the same time, as Washington is more and more explicit in preparing for imperialist war against China, there has been an important shift in U.S. strategy for Taiwan. Even as Chinese president Xi continues to emphasize the PRC’s longstanding policy of peaceful reunification with Taiwan, the Trump and Biden administrations have stepped up efforts to block this, and thus make military action the only option. Rather than arming Taiwan with sophisticated (and expensive) hardware like F-16 fighter jets, at $33 million each, which have no chance of withstanding a frontal assault, the Pentagon has been emphasizing a “porcupine defense,” to arm Taiwan with large quantities of high-tech, lower-cost arms (antiaircraft and antitank weapons, drones) to wear down a Chinese “invading” force and make a takeover as costly as possible.
An article in the liberal Foreign Policy (8 November 2021) notes that Biden is continuing the “so-called porcupine strategy” of Trump’s national security advisors, “aimed at making Taiwan a pricklier target.” This goes back to a 2008 article by U.S. Naval War College professor William S. Murray, “Revisiting Taiwan’s Defense Strategy.”14 The “porcupine strategy,” he wrote, “would offer Taiwan a way to resist PRC military coercion for weeks or months without presuming immediate U.S. intervention.” This parallels the “war of attrition” policy of U.S. imperialism in Ukraine today, which has been summed up as “fight to the last Ukrainian.” In view of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian casualties resulting from this dead-end strategy, and with Taiwan’s population (23 million) half the size of Ukraine’s, sober-minded elements in Taipei – facing vastly larger People’s Liberation Army forces – may consider whether the Biden-Trump “fight to the last Taiwanese” strategy is the way they want to go.
Preparations for Economic War Against China
House speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. president Joe Biden sign CHIPS and Science Act, for economic war on China. A boondoggle for Intel Corp. and attempt to get Taiwan microprocesser chip manufacturers to cut off China. (Photo: AP)
In addition to the military threats against China, the U.S. continues its preparations for economic war against China. These days, about the only issue on which it is possible to get a bipartisan Democrat and Republican majority in Washington is in going after China. Last year, Congress passed “the most expansive industrial policy in U.S. history” to build up a U.S. manufacturing and technological edge.15 And in August 2022 Biden signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act, allocating billions of dollars for microprocessor chip manufacture in the United States, including by Taiwan-based firms. This makes Taiwan’s local capitalists more dependent on the U.S., particularly as the act provides subsidies for companies to manufacture chips on condition that they cut economic ties with the Chinese mainland.
As Wang Peng, a research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, explained:
“The U.S. is using the CHIPS Act to force companies in countries and regions of key status on the global chip supply and industrial chains to play by U.S. rules, as well as encircling and suppressing chip industries in emerging markets.”16
This may be a windfall for giant U.S. firms like Intel, but the days are long past when U.S. imperialism could easily bully the world with its economic might, and this and other such measures will ultimately prove futile. The problem for Washington is that the economic power of the Chinese deformed workers state has steadily increased, while that of the U.S. and other imperialist powers is on the decline. Meanwhile, Taiwan is becoming ever more economically connected to the mainland. Currently, 42% of the goods sent off the island go to the PRC, while only 15% of exports go to the U.S.17 Attempts to split Taiwan economically from the mainland would entail severe costs.
To U.S. imperialism, Taiwan is simply a chip to be played, to generate a crisis. It is seeking to run a script similar to what it has followed in Ukraine, where the U.S. and NATO instigated a war partly in order to force Europe to decouple from Russia. But China, with a GDP (gross domestic product) roughly ten times as large as Russia’s, is a very different matter. At the NATO summit in June, the U.S. was able to strong-arm its European allies into denouncing Chinese actions as “malicious” and declaring that the PRC’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.” But any practical application of NATO’s “strategic concept” will be hard for European imperialists to swallow. For example, in any given year half or more of Volkswagen’s net earnings come from China, its largest market.
Workers at FAW/Volkswagen factory in Tianjin, China assembling Audi cars in December 2019. In any given year, half or more of Volkswagen’s net earnings come from China, its largest market. (Photo: Bloomberg)
Economic blackmail seeking to force companies and countries to break ties with China, as NATO and European Union (E.U.) sanctions have done with Russia, may not succeed. U.S. imperialism needs a sharper stick – a military one. Last year the U.S., Britain and Australia formed the AUKUS alliance to increase military pressure on China. Now they have lined up NATO to extend its war drive from Russia to China. But a war over Taiwan, which Biden & Co. seem hell-bent on preparing, would be a direct confrontation with China, raising the spectre of thermonuclear war. Meanwhile, China’s dramatic progress in developing its defensive capabilities make a U.S. “victory” in a conventional war increasingly doubtful. Since launching its third aircraft carrier in June, China now has the largest navy in the world.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. carries out its war provocations and economic sanctions, its propaganda machine is in high gear churning out lies about China. Perhaps the most egregious of these, echoed by every Democrat and Republican, as well as by many fake leftists, is that China is carrying out or has carried out “genocide” in Xinjiang. In fact, the 1949 revolution laid the basis for continuing enormous advances for the people of Xinjiang, and while Han chauvinism is inherent in the nationalist Stalinist ideology of the bureaucracy – and has had expressions in Chinese policy in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in northwestern China – there is not a shred of evidence of mass killings or any attempt to wipe out the Uyghur Muslim people, for the simple reason that there have been none. And among the things that this war-propaganda invention omits is that Chinese official measures were taken in response to a number of murderous attacks – including a wave in 2016 in which 183 people were killed – by Islamist forces associated with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which even the E.U., the U.N. and the U.S. have designated a terrorist organization.
The lie of “Uighur genocide” is a battle cry of the imperialist anti-China war drive. It is also a pretext for fomenting separatism in Xinjiang and inflicting economic harm to the region, for example by imposing sanctions on cotton grown there. The United States government, through the CIA conduit National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has funneled millions of dollars to the anti-communist World Uyghur Congress,18 which has also received millions in funding from the Australian version of the NED, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Now the NED is preparing to hold an “11th Global Assembly” of another of its projects, the “World Movement for Democracy” (which works out of NED headquarters in Washington), in late October. And in yet another deliberate provocation, that confab for counterrevolution is to be held on the Chinese territory of Taiwan.
Nancy Pelosi (center) and Carl Gershman (second from right), founder of the CIA conduit National Endowment for Democracy, present “democracy” award to NED-funded World Uyghur Congress, May 2019. (Photo: National Endowment for Democracy)
This “World Movement for Democracy” is the brainchild of Carl Gershman, former head of the NED from its founding by Ronald Reagan in 1984 until last year. (Before that he led the hardline Cold Warriors of Social Democrats, USA, followers of the anti-Trotskyist Max Shachtman.) Every year, the “WMD” confers “courage tributes” to Washington’s favorite U.S.-sponsored, pro-imperialist “movements.” In 2021, the list included the San Isidro Movement in Cuba, which sparked the anti-communist protests that July;19 Students for a Free Tibet, which was set up by the NED-funded International Campaign for Tibet and seeks to restore the theocratic rule of the Dalai Lama; and the Campaign for Uyghurs, whose executive director boasts on her bio of her “extensive experience working with U.S. government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Justice, and various U.S. intelligence agencies.” Etc.
Pseudo-Socialist “Running Dogs of U.S. Imperialism”
Anti-communist social democrats in action. Socialist Action (Hong Kong), part of the International Socialist Alternative tendency, campaigning with sign calling to “Defeat the Chinese Communist Party Dictatorship,” next to the Taiwan “Republic of China” flag. (Photo: Socialist Action)
Meanwhile, various left groups that falsely claim to represent Trotskyism repeat the imperialist lies. The International Socialist Alternative (ISA) current, which includes Socialist Alternative (SAlt) in the United States and Socialist Action in Hong Kong, grotesquely smears the Chinese workers state as “imperialist.” These anti-Trotskyists loudly backed the 2019 anti-communist riots in Hong Kong, including the call for “independence” for the capitalist enclave and former British colony. In the current crisis, the ISA/SAlt calls to “actively engage in the struggle” for Taiwan independence “[i]f the Taiwanese people want independence, which is clearly the case today.”20 Actually, the polls it cites show that 82% favor the status quo while only 5% want “independence as soon as possible,”21 and it admits that for Taiwan nationalists, “independence” means to support U.S. imperialism. The counterrevolutionary line of the ISA/SAlt on Hong Kong and Taiwan shows that the “socialist” pretensions of these imposters are only a cover for their real role as deckhands on the Pentagon’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
Another group abusing the name of Trotskyism in the region is the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), which recently published an article on “The Taiwan national question and the tasks of the Taiwanese Marxists” (In Defence of Marxism, 5 August). The very title is a capitulation to imperialism. There is no “Taiwanese nation”: as noted, according to Taiwan government statistics, 97% of the island’s population is ethnic Han Chinese,22 while its separate existence was as a Japanese colony and since 1949 as a U.S. neo-colony. The IMT is less effusive in its embrace of Taiwanese independence, and even criticizes “the reactionary nature of Taiwanese nationalism.” But since the IMT also peddles the myth of “Chinese imperialism,” its call for “no to unification with China on a capitalist basis” in practice means opposing reunification with the PRC, and its fantasy talk of a “democratic socialist Taiwan” would just give a left cover for going along with those pushing for in “independent” capitalist Taiwan.
The bulk of the left slanders China as imperialist while refusing to defend it against the real imperialists. As usual they are parroting the capitalist Democratic Party, in particular the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, whose platform in the 2020 primaries declared: “we must work with the international community to deter foreign support for China’s military buildup.”23
Today and for the last decade – ever since Barack Obama’s 2011 “strategic pivot to Asia” – U.S. imperialism has been increasing the economic pressure on China. To what end? There is zero possibility that Beijing would renounce its historic demand of national reunification, which goes back to the 1919 May 4 Movement against imperialist domination of China.24 Nor would Taiwanese nationalists have any chance of mounting a successful military resistance to a determined Chinese takeover. But by ratcheting up U.S. arming of Taiwan to make the island “like a porcupine,” combined with escalating provocations like Pelosi’s trip and Biden’s “bloopers,” Washington is making it clear that it will go all-out to prevent reunification of China. The seemingly perverse effect is to encourage Beijing to move militarily sooner rather than later.
This imperialist “strategy” – shared by Democrats and Republicans alike – is directly tied to U.S. instigation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By refusing any security guarantees to Moscow, or to rule out Ukraine membership in NATO, and by constant anti-Russia war “games,” the Cold Warriors in Washington made it clear that sooner or later Russia would have to militarily confront NATO and its proxies. Similarly, by escalating its provocations over Taiwan, the Biden administration is making clear that it will pull out the stops to block reunification with China, accelerating the push toward war whose ultimate aim is bloody counterrevolution in China and reestablishment of its subjugation to Western imperialism. The LFI calls to defeat the U.S./NATO imperialist war drive against Russia and China, and support the reunification of Taiwan with China, including by military means if necessary.
For International Socialist Revolution!
While the opportunist left tails after the Democratic Party, acting over Taiwan as deckhands on the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of U.S. imperialism, the Internationalist Group calls to defeat the imperialist war drive against Russia and China with international workers revolution. (Internationalist photo)
The would-be masters of the world in Washington and Wall Street rightly see China, with its socialized economy (despite huge capitalist inroads), as a threat because it belies the neoliberal mantra that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to “free market” capitalism. More fundamentally, U.S. world domination is threatened by the very existence of the Chinese deformed workers state, particularly with its growing military and economic power. As we have written:
“[D]espite bureaucratic mismanagement, the Chinese planned economy has made remarkable achievements in improving the lives of working people who had previously been hideously oppressed by imperialist plunder. Since the revolution, the population of China has seen an unprecedented increase in life expectancy, from 35 years in 1949 to 77 years in 2018, and now enjoys a higher healthy life expectancy than the U.S. population. Moreover, from 1998 to 2018, workers’ wages increased by ten times (1,000%), tripling over the last decade, and are now higher than the newest members of the European Union. (U.S. workers’ real wages have stagnated for the last 40 years.) And contrary to the expectations of bourgeois economists and fake leftists who claim that China is capitalist, the state sector has grown greatly since the 2007-09 world capitalist crisis.”25
The reality that capitalism kills was vividly brought home by the COVID-19 pandemic, with corpses piling up in trailers to be dumped in mass graves in the U.S., while China with its socialized economy effectively contained the deadly virus. In the last two years, China has had a little over 5,000 deaths compared to over a million in the United States: a cumulative COVID death rate of 314 per 100,000 in the U.S. in contrast to only 1 per 100,000 in China.26 Meanwhile, the imperialist media keep lambasting China’s successful “zero COVID” policies, the latest variant being to complain about lockdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet.27
As capitalism putrefies, the imperialist rulers increasingly turn toward military might to maintain their fraying hegemony. The IG and LFI, defend the deformed workers states of China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam while warning that U.S. imperialism’s provocations are bringing the planet ever closer to a (thermonuclear) third world war. See for instance: “U.S. Response to Coronavirus: China-Bashing and War Moves” (The Internationalist No. 59, March-April 2020), “Biden Escalates Anti-China War Plans” (The Internationalist No. 64, July-September 2021); “Behind the U.S./NATO War Drive Against Russia, China” (The Internationalist No. 66, January-April 2022). As the fighting drags on in Ukraine, will the next imperialist-instigated war break out in the Taiwan Strait? Or the South China Sea? Or…?
The policy of Stalin and Mao, of “building socialism in one country,” was a nationalist betrayal of the internationalist program of the October 1917 Revolution headed by Lenin and Trotsky, and ultimately led to the destruction of the first workers state in history. The call of the latter-day Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy, from Deng to Xi, for “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” on the basis of “one country, two systems,” further endangers the foundations of the 1949 Revolution. Trotskyists say: Defeat the imperialist war drive aimed at fomenting counterrevolution in China! Defend the remaining gains of the Chinese Revolution through proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, expropriate the capitalists and extend those gains to Hong Kong and Taiwan through revolutionary reunification! ■
If you’re a union member, unfortunately the chances are good that you’ve had, or will have, your heart broken at least once by one of your own leaders.
Maybe it happened when you first tried to get active in your union, but found that leaders didn’t welcome you into their inner circle. You wondered whether there was some special skill you lacked, and you ended up confused and self-doubting. Maybe you just gave up.
Or possibly you brought an issue to your leaders—something that was serious to you and your co-workers—but were ignored, or treated with disdain, or told “there’s nothing we can do.” Or you worked long and hard to reach apparently apathetic co-workers and finally got traction on a specific goal, only to be undercut, abandoned, or straight-up sold out by union leaders.
When this happens, it can feel pretty harsh. You’re not only disappointed with these leaders, but also wondering how it is that your union, an organization that exists to make your work life better, is in the hands of people who aren’t doing that.
I encourage you to recommit to your union and to change the culture into one where leaders respect and serve their members. And, if your current leaders can’t or won’t serve their members with more respect, then start making plans to recruit and support candidates for union office who will.
HOW WE GOT HERE
If you’re bursting with organizing ideas and union leaders shut you down, often it’s not because they hate you. More likely, your ideas make no sense to them.
People serving in union office tend to follow the rules of the system they inherit. Maybe they’re clinging to familiar old patterns because they’re overwhelmed, underprepared, or beset by pressures from different constituencies. Maybe they think the union’s power is limited to filing grievances, and they have little experience about how to do things differently.
How did things get to be this way, and how can we change it? It’s useful to zoom out for a moment to consider the effects of the 40-year corporate offensive known as neoliberalism.
How has the most heavily-bombed nation on Earth managed not only to survive but to continue defending socialism and resisting US imperialism?
Devin Cole
The Lao people’s quest for freedom reached a new stage when the October Revolution brought socialism to east Asia. Its salvoes sounded a death knell for local and foreign exploiters alike, despite the murderous efforts of both French and US imperialism.
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The second of December 2021 marked the 46th anniversary of the end of the Laotian civil war. Not only did the Royal Lao government, in power from 1947 to 1975, fall that day, but the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a socialist nation with a Marxist–Leninist government, was established and remains in power to this day.
The revolutionary resistance was led by Pathet Lao (‘Lao Nation’), also known as the Lao People’s Liberation Army. This was a communist organisation and movement that gained thousands of followers between 1950 and 1975, when Pathet Lao dissolved after their victory over the Lao monarchists.
Since 1975, Laos has been recovering and redeveloping from the wounds of the onslaught by US imperialism; the effects of scorched-earth warfare are still felt. Despite this, Laos has not only prospered through revolutionary solidarity with neighbouring socialist countries China and Vietnam, it has been defended by millions of Laotian people and the 300,000-strong Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.
One can ask: How has a nation that was practically pulverised by a nine-year bombing campaign – making it the most heavily-bombed place on Earth, with people today still dying in Laos from unexploded bombs dropped by the US – managed not only to survive but to continue defending socialism and resisting US capitalism-imperialism?
While other socialist nations like China, DPRK and Cuba are often topics of discussion, Laos and Vietnam, among the socialist nations in the world, are not studied as thoroughly. Laos has a rich revolutionary history that demands careful attention and analysis; a history that exemplifies great resistance against the horrors of capitalism-imperialism, colonialism and monarchy.
‘A fundamental change in the destiny of our nation and society’
The 1975 victory did signal the end of the long feudal oppression of Laos. In Laos’s inaugural declaration of the National Congress of People’s Representatives, a passage reads: “This victory signifies a fundamental change in the destiny of our nation and society.” (Kaysone Phomvihane, Revolution in Laos: Practice and Prospects, 1981, p9)
A fundamental change indeed.
Laotian resistance, however, did not begin with Pathet Lao fighting the monarchy. Laos’s history of resistance against feudalism and other forms of oppression dates back over 600 years, beginning with the unification of the nation under King Tiao Fangum in 1353.
From this point on, the people of Laos fought feudal exploitation by Burmese and Siamese (Thai) landlords, along with two invasions by Burma in 1563 and 1569. Battles ensued over the centuries, all in an attempt to destabilise Laos and return it to feudal landlordism and later to impose other forms of oppression and exploitation.
In the late 19th century, French colonialists invaded Laos and, from 1901 to 1937, an armed uprising was waged against both the French and Lao bourgeoisie by Ong Keo and Ong Kommandam, two Alak fighters and leaders of the Mon-Khmer tribe of south Laos, for independence from colonialism.
In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution ushered in a new epoch of history in which communism was recognised as an attainable goal. This epoch inspired militant revolutionaries across Indochina, one of whom was Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese communist. Ho Chi Minh would later lead Vietnam to revolution against US imperialism; but in 1930 Ho Chi Minh was a traveller and journalist who founded the Indochinese Communist party.
The ICP was to include communists from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and from here, the struggle for national democracy and socialism in Laos began to grow.
First independence, Pathet Lao and the ‘Three Princes’
World War 2 ended with the crushing defeat of fascist Germany and Italy, as well as militarist Japan. This defeat was doled out not by the USA, as is popularly told by reactionary history, but by the Soviet Union’s Red Army, and it sent shockwaves throughout the world, bringing tidal waves to the global south, where struggles for national democracy and socialism were growing rapidly. US imperialism responded by inciting the cold war.
Laos was no exception. Its revolutionary forces developed for decades and, seizing the moment of heightened national-liberation struggles of the 1940s and 1950s, mobilised the masses to overthrow the Japanese militarists, who had replaced French imperialism, establishing an independent Laos on 12 October 1945.
Almost immediately, French colonisers reinvaded Laos, this time with the aid of the USA and Britain. The imperialists enlisted Lao mercenaries in larger towns to terrorise and crush national-liberation rebellions. This resulted in a neocolonialist recapture of Laos in 1949. France then joined Laos with Vietnam and Kampuchea (also known as Cambodia) to form French Indochina, controlled by a puppet government ruled by France.
In 1950, Pathet Lao was formed out of a former anti-French nationalist movement known as Lao Issara by Prince Souphanouvong, who was, coincidentally, the half-brother of two of the former prime ministers of Laos during its French colonialist rule: Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa, the first prime minister of Laos, and Prince Souvanna Phouma.
Souphanouvong, although from the royal family and educated in France, came to know Ho Chi Minh while studying in Vietnam and became a communist. He petitioned the Viet Minh, a national-liberation coalition in Vietnam, for aid in forming a guerrilla force for the liberation of Laos.
Throughout the 1950s, Pathet Lao, supported by Vietnamese communists, began liberating large sections of Laos from colonialist rule. In 1954, at the same time as Vietnam defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, Laos liberated the province of Phongsaly and most of the province of Luang Prabang, breaching the front of the French colonisers stationed there.
At this point, France was forced to sign the Geneva agreement, which recognised the sovereignty of Laos, Vietnam and Kampuchea. Under this agreement, Laos was deemed independent and controlled by a monarchy, fronted by Sisavang Vong.
Despite this agreement, Washington accelerated its push to conquer all of Indochina, which lead to the US war against Vietnam and to the ‘secret wars’ that culminated in a campaign of terror against the people of Laos for 20 years.
The US ‘hidden war’ against Laos
While the US openly propped up an illegitimate government in southern Vietnam and waged war against the National Liberation Front and northern Vietnam, it denied its invasion and occupation of Laos and suppressed news of it. Laos borders Vietnam on the east and allowed the Vietnamese revolutionary government to use a system of roads inside Laos to ship soldiers and military equipment to southern Vietnam to fight the USA. Known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this system totalled roughly 12,000 miles of roads that made it possible for more than two million liberation fighters to deploy to the south.
While the trail also ran partially through Cambodia, which was just as vital to the NLF fighters, the USA chose to focus its secret bombing campaign primarily on Laos.
From 1964 to 1973, the US carried out over 580,000 bombing missions, dropping 2m tons of bombs on Laos. At least 50,000 people in Laos were killed in those nine years — from a country with just 3.5 million people – more than 1 percent of the population. Not all of the bombs detonated; and since 1973 (49 years ago!), 20,000 Laotian people have been killed by stepping on hidden bombs.
In 2016 then-president Barack Obama pledged $90m to help Laos find and disarm the millions of bombs left undetonated. Despite this, no US president, including Obama, has bothered to apologise to Laos for the US military’s crimes against humanity in the country.
Communist victory and the rise of the LPDR
In April 1975, the NLF drove the US forces out of Vietnam, crushing its puppet government in the south and establishing a socialist nation. This victory pushed the USA out of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
In December 1975, after months of communist-led uprisings centred around the capital Vientiane, the little infrastructure of the Laotian monarchy that remained fell apart completely, leading to the victory of Pathet Lao. Souphanouvong was named president and Kaysone Phomvihane prime minister.
At this point, Pathet Lao reorganised itself and became the ruling party of Laos, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, which still governs the country today.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic was proclaimed in December 1975 and immediately underwent a process of restructuring. Production and land were nationalised, and collectivisation was implemented.
Restructuring was a challenge for Laos at first, partially because very little industry even existed in Laos that could be used as a base for productive forces, and partially because the ground was still saturated with undetonated bombs that made agriculture extremely dangerous (as of 2022, 30 percent of land in Laos still remains unsafe, which still obstructs economic expansion).
Despite these conditions, Laos has cut the poverty of its residents in half and nationalised healthcare and education. Laos’s smaller population means there is room for rapid expansion of hydroelectric facilities and dams, which provide clean, safe electricity.
Laos contains more hydropower potential than most countries and is projected to become a hydropower giant by 2025, being able to export up to 14,600MW (megawatts) of power to neighbouring countries, or 14.6bn watts of electricity. Over the last three decades, Laos has shifted away from agricultural collectivisation into industrial work; rubber production is heavily centralised in Laos. Unlike in the US, where industrial workers are exploited for their labour often without union representation, the industrial workers of Laos are well represented by unions and workers’ councils.
With its nationalised healthcare, paid sick leave and pregnancy leave are mandatory and are ample in length and pay.
Laos and Covid-19
A 27 April 2020 Workers World article offered an early analysis of Laos’s incredible handling of Covid-19, with just 19 people in the entire country being infected and no deaths. Laos, upon seeing the spread of Covid-19 across the world, immediately put the entire country on a lockdown, closing schools and border checkpoints and freezing all travel to and from the country.
How is Laos faring almost two years later? According to the World Health Organization, significantly better than the USA. Laos has unfortunately seen 553 deaths from Covid-19, with the total infection count being 135,000. The Laotian death rate from Covid is less than 3 percent of the shockingly high death rate from Covid experienced in the USA.
In Laos, market relations were, similar to China, expanded following the collapse of the USSR. This allowed a capitalist class to still exist in Laos, albeit small and heavily regulated and controlled by the government.
Laos has continued to prosper in its quest towards communism. Its people celebrate 46 years of socialist triumph and look forward to many, many more celebrations.
THE PALESTINE FILES IS A NEW MINTPRESS SERIES EXPLORING AND HIGHLIGHTING THE MANY REVELATIONS ABOUT THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE THAT WIKILEAKS DOCUMENTS DISCLOSED. IT HOPES TO SHED LIGHT ON MANY OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND UNDERREPORTED REVELATIONS THE PUBLISHING GROUP EXPOSED.
by Alan MacLeod
As Israel was launching a deadly assault on Gaza, killing thousands of civilians and displacing more than 100,000 people, many of America’s top TV, music and film producers were organizing to protect the apartheid state’s reputation from widespread international condemnation.
Together, the Sony Archive – a cache of emails published by Wikileaks – prove that influential entertainment magnates attempted to whitewash Israeli crimes and present the situation as defending itself from an impending “genocide”, liaised with Israeli military and government officials in order to coordinate their message, attempted to cancel those who spoke out against the injustice, and put financial and social pressure on institutions who hosted artists criticizing the apartheid government’s actions.
AS ISRAEL ATTACKS, HOLLYWOOD PLAYS DEFENSE
“[Israel’s message] Must be repeated ad infinitum until the people get it,” wrote Hollywood lawyer and producer Glenn D. Feig, in an email chain to many of Tinsel Town’s most influential executives. This was in response to the unprovoked 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza, one of the bloodiest chapters in over half a century of occupation.
Named “Operation Protective Edge”, the Israeli military engaged in seven weeks of near-constant bombing of the densely populated coastal strip. According to the United Nations, over 2,000 people were killed – a quarter of them children. 18,000 houses were destroyed, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless.
The Israeli military deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, knocking out Gaza’s only power plant and shutting down its water treatment plants, leading to economic, social and ecological devastation in an area Human Rights Watch has labeled the world’s largest “open air prison”.
Many in Hollywood expressed deep concern. “We must make sure that never happens again”, insisted producer Ron Rotholz. Rotholz, however, was not referring to the death and destruction Israel imposed on Gaza, but to the fact that many of the entertainment world’s biggest stars, including celebrity power couple, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, had condemned Israel’s actions, labeling them tantamount to “genocide.”
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“Change must start from the top down. It should be unheard of and unacceptable for any Academy Award-winning actor to call the legitimate armed defense of one’s territory…genocide” he continued, worrying that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – a worldwide campaign to put economic pressure on Israel in an attempt to push it to meet its obligations under international law – was gaining steam in the world of the arts. Israel’s legitimacy rests upon political and military support from the U.S. Therefore, maintaining support among the American public is crucial to the long term viability of its settler colonial project.
Rotholz then attempted to organize a silent, worldwide pressure campaign on arts venues and organizations, including the Motion Picture Academy in Hollywood and the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals, to stamp out BDS, writing,
What we can do is urge the leaders of major film, TV and theater organisations, festivals, markets and potentially the heads of media corporations to issue official statements condemning any form of cultural or economic boycotts against Israel.”
Others agreed that they had to develop a “game plan” for opposing BDS.
Of course, when influential producers, festivals and heads of media corporations release statements condemning a certain position or practice, this is, in effect, a threat: stop taking these positions or suffer the professional consequences.
LOACH ON THE BRAIN
The Sony emails also reveal a near obsession with British filmmaker and social activist Ken Loach. The celebrated director’s film, “Jimmy’s Hall” had recently been nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in the wake of Israel’s assault on Gaza, he had publicly called for a cultural and sporting boycott of the apartheid state.
This outraged many in Hollywood. Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of Relativity Media, a film producing company responsible for financing more than 200 movies, demanded that not only Loach, but the whole Cannes Film Festival be cancelled. “The studios and networks alike must join together and boycott cannes,” he wrote. “If we don’t we are sending a message that another holocaust is fine with Hollywood as long as it is business as usual,” he added, framing the Israeli attack on a near-defenseless civilian population as a Palestinian genocide of Israelis.
Others agreed. Ben Silverman, former co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios and producer of shows such as “The Office”, “The Biggest Loser” and Ugly Betty” said that the industry should “boycott the boycotters”. Rotholz, meanwhile, wrote to the head of the Cannes Film Festival, demanding that he take action against Loach for his comments. “There is no place for [Loach’s intolerant and hateful remarks] in the global world of film and filmmakers”, he insisted.
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Others came up with another way of countering Loach. “How about we all club together and make a documentary about the rise of new anti-Semitism in Europe,” suggested British film producer Cassian Elwes, adding,
I would be willing to contribute and put time into it if others here would do the same. Between all of us I’m sure we could figure out a way to distribute it and get it into places like Cannes so we could have a response to guys like Loach. Perhaps we try to use it to rally support from film communities in Europe to help us distribute it there”.
“I love it,” replied publishing oligarch Jason Binn, “And I will promote it in a major way to all 3.2 million magazine subscribers across all on and offline platforms. I can even leverage Gilt’s 9 million members,” he added, referring to the shopping and lifestyle website he managed.
“Me too,” said Amy Pascal, the Co-Chairperson of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Meanwhile, Mark Canton, producer of movies such as “Get Carter”, “Immortals” and “300” busied himself drumming up more Hollywood support for the idea. “Adding Carmi Zlotnik to this growing list”, he replied, referencing the TV executive.
This whole correspondence was from an email chain of dozens of high-powered entertainment figures entitled “Happy New Year. Too bad Germany is now a no travel zone for Jews,” which ludicrously claimed that the European country had become a Muslim-controlled Islamic theocracy.
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“It is horrible. But in the end, it is no surprise, because apologists for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians will go to any length to prevent the people opposing them,” Mr. Loach said, when asked for comment by MintPress. “We shouldn’t underestimate the hatred of those who cannot tolerate the idea that Palestinians have human rights, that Palestine is a state; and they have their country,” he added.
SHUTTING DOWN FREE EXPRESSION
The pro-Israel group in Hollywood also put serious pressure on American institutions to crack down on support for Palestinian human rights. Silverman revealed that he had written to Peter Gelb, the general manager of the New York Metropolitan Opera, in an effort to shut down a performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer”, an opera that tells the story of the 1985 hijacking of an airliner by the Palestine Liberation Front. “I suggest though that we each call him on Monday at his office at the Met and your point about the Met’s donors’ leverage is important,” he advised the other entertainment oligarchs, thereby shining a light on how the powerful move in secret to silence speech they do not approve of, and how they use their financial clout to coerce and strong-arm others into toeing their line. A lot of pressure was necessary, because, as Silverman explained, “as members of the artistic community it is very hard to be pro free speech only some of the time and not all of the time.”
Ultimately, the performance did go ahead, but not without a large and coordinated protest both inside and outside the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, as individuals attempted to shut down the performance, claiming it was “antisemitic.”
LIAISING WITH THE IDF
The email conversations of many of Hollywood’s most influential individuals show that they believe they are on the verge of a worldwide extermination of Jews, and that Israel – and themselves – are the only things standing in the way of this impending fate. As Kavanaugh wrote, “It’s our job to keep another Holocaust from happening. Many of you may think that can’t happen, that is extreme…[but] If you pull newspapers from pre Holocaust it seems eerily close to our world today.”
It is imperative that leading figures in the LA/NY film, tv, media, digital and theater communities who support a strong and potent Jewish state develop a strategy for liasing with colleagues in London and Europe and also with the creative communities here and in Europe to promote and explain the Israeli cause.”
The Sony Archive emails also show that, not only were Tinsel Town’s top brass coordinating strategies to silence critics of Israel, but that they were also closely liaising with the Israeli government and its military.
Producer George Perez, for example, messaged his colleagues in the chain email to introduce them to an IDF colonel, stating (emphasis added),
Everyone please use this “reply all” list from here on. I have included Kobi Marom a retired commander in the Israeli army. Kobi was kind enough to give my family and I a jeep tour of the Golan Heights during our June trip to Israel. He also took us to visit an army base on the border of Israel and Syria, an area which has been in the news lately. Hard to imagine that the “kids” that we met at the base are most likely engaged in combat with our enemies.”
Seeing as the large majority of those who died were Palestinian civilians, it is unclear whether he considers all Palestinians or just Hamas as enemies of Hollywood. Perez also noted that “Kobi works closely with the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) who are in need of donations,” and advised that Hollywood needed to “dig deep to help in the constant struggle for the survival of Israel.”
Hollywood celebrities, including famed producer Haim Saban and actress Fran Drescher, pose with IDF soldiers at the FIDF Western Region Gala
The group also attempted to recruit Israeli-American movie star Natalie Portman into their ranks. But the Academy Award-winning actress appeared more concerned that her personal details were being shared. “How did I get on this list? Also Ryan Seacrest?” she replied, before directly addressing Kavanaugh, writing,
[C]an you please remove me from this email list? you should not be copying me publicly so that 20 people i don’t know have my personal info. i will have to change my email address now. thank you”.
While Portman’s open contempt for the group of rabidly pro-Israel producers is notable, more so was Kavanaugh’s response, which revealed how close the connection between the Israeli state and Hollywood is. Kavanaugh wrote back,
Sorry. You are right Jews being slaughtered for their beliefs and Cannes members calling for the boycott of anything Israel or Jewish is much much less important than your email address being shared with 20 of our peers who are trying to make a difference. my deepest apologies…I had lunch yesterday with Israel consulate general who brought J street up to me. He was so perplexed confused and concerned when he heard you supported them that he begged me to connect you two.”
Thus, the leaked emails prove beyond any doubt that both the Israeli government and the IDF liaise with some of the most powerful people in the entertainment world in order to push forward a pro-Israel message and stamp out any deviance from that line.
HIP HOPPERS FOR APARTHEID
While their efforts at recruiting Portman fell flat, one star who responded enthusiastically was hip hop mega producer Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records and the brother of Joseph “Rev.Run” Simmons, one third of Run DMC. Simmons has recently been the subject of controversy, after 20 women have come forward, charging him with rape or other sexual misconduct.
The emails reveal that promoting engagement with Israel within the African-American community is one of Simmons’ primary interests. When asked if he had any ideas how to improve Israel’s image, he said, “Simple messaging from non Jews specifically from Muslims promoting peace and Israel’s right to exist…We have resources and the desire to win rather than lose the hearts of young Muslims and Jews.”
We have hundreds of collaboration programs between Imams Rabbis and their congregations We have many respected imams who would join former chief rabbi metzker (spelling) rabbi Schneier and non Jews in promoting the Saudi peace plan”.
“Through this campaign we will be helping Israel,” he concluded.
TURNING THE TIDE
Despite the best efforts of Simmons and others, however, American public opinion has, in recent years, begun to turn against Israel. Young Americans, in particular, are more likely to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people and support an independent Palestinian state.
Much of this has to do with the rise of social media and a new generation of activists breaking through the barriers to highlight injustices being carried out by their government. Today, Americans are more likely to see first-hand, unvarnished accounts of Israeli brutality on social media platforms. As veteran political scientist Noam Chomsky explained to MintPress last year, “[T] veil of intense propaganda [is] being lifted slowly, [and] crucial U.S. participation in Israeli crimes is also coming more clearly into view. With committed activism, that could have salutary effects.”
Nevertheless, U.S. government support for Israel continues to rise. Between 2019 and 2028, it is scheduled to send nearly $40 billion in aid, almost all of it military, meaning that American taxpayer funds are contributing to Palestinian oppression and displacement.
Loach was even more upbeat on the issue, telling us that those who stand in the way of justice will be judged poorly by history, stating,
The denial of human rights of the Palestinians is one of the great crimes [of the modern era] and Palestinian rights is one of the great causes of last century and this century. We should all support the Palestinians. If you have any care for human rights, there is no question: the Palestinians have to be supported. And these people who oppose them, in the end, will fade away. Because history will show this was a terrible crime. Palestinians suffered ethnic cleansing of their homeland. We have to support the Palestinians, full stop.”
Those people, however, have no intention of “fading away”, and continue to organize on behalf of the Israeli government. Thanks to the leaked documents, those who care about Palestinian self-determination have a clearer understanding of how they operate.
A conversation with film historian Max Alvarez about Hollywood blacklist victim, actress Marsha Hunt (1917–2022): “The entertainment industry hierarchy is … more acquiescent than ever”
David Walsh
Actress Marsha Hunt died September 7 at the age of 104. She was one of last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Never a Communist Party member, Hunt nonetheless became identified with opposition to the vicious witch-hunting in the film industry as a member, along with many other prominent Hollywood figures (Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, William Wyler, Danny Kaye, Lucille Ball, Burt Lancaster), of the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947.
That ad hoc body, which was organized to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigation into left-wing activity in the movie industry, came under immense pressure and collapsed ignominiously amid the “anti-Red” hysteria of the time.
Marsha Hunt in Raw Deal (1948)
As a result of her activism, Hunt was named in Red Channels, the notorious anti-communist publication, in 1950, and “that ended my career,” as the actress told interviewer Glenn Lovell for Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (1997).
Hunt, who was born in Chicago (three weeks before the October Revolution in Russia!) and grew up in New York City, first worked as a model before being “discovered” by the film industry in the mid-1930s. She made a number of films for Paramount Pictures (1935-38) and then for MGM in the 1940s.
Hunt’s more important appearances included roles in the Greer Garson-Laurence Olivier Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940); Kid Glove Killer with Van Heflin (one of Fred Zinnemann’s early Hollywood efforts, 1942); The Human Comedy (based on William Saroyan and directed by Clarence Brown, 1943); Andre de Toth’s staunchly anti-Nazi work None Shall Escape (1944); The Valley of Decision (Tay Garnett’s drama about class and personal relations in the Pittsburgh steel industry, 1945); Edgar G. Ulmer’s fictional film about Carnegie Hall (1947), featuring a variety of legendary classical music performers; Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (Stuart Heisler, 1947); and Anthony Mann’s scintillating film noir, Raw Deal (1948).
After being named in Red Channels, Hunt’s film offers more or less dried up. After the official end of the blacklist, she worked in movies and, most often, television in the 1960s and 1970s.
Asked by Lovell, “When did the blacklist end for you?” Hunt replied, “Never really. Never fully. Well, I can’t say the blacklist never ended, but what is true is that the momentum never was recaptured. I had such an ongoing, thriving career. What was it—fifty-some movies before the dark ages? Then, since 1950, I’ve made about eight.”
We recently spoke to Max Alvarez about Hunt’s life and career. The conversation occurred almost 75 years to the day since the launching of the blacklist in September 1947 when dozens of left-wing figures in Hollywood were subpoenaed by HUAC.
Alvarez is a film historian and lecturer on world cinema culture whose presentation partnerships include The Smithsonian Institution, New Plaza Cinema in New York City, and numerous libraries and cultural organizations. His book The Crime Films of Anthony Mann was recently issued in paperback from University Press of Mississippi, and he was a major contributor to Thornton Wilder: New Perspectives from Northwestern University Press. A former newspaper film critic, he was film curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts from 1998-2005.
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Max Alvarez (Photo credit–Bryan Goldberg Photography)
David Walsh: What’s your overall evaluation or response to Marsha Hunt’s life and career? What stands out about her life?
Max Alvarez: Well, the central thing was her involvement with the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947 and then being named in Red Channels.
Marsha Hunt was a liberal-minded person who, unlike many so-called left-wingers, stuck by the principle of not cooperating with those who were doing terribly undemocratic things like HUAC and other government agencies. She had these firm ideas about the American system of justice and American institutions, which we have to respect. She saw the witch-hunt as an aberration and thought it was wrong. She refused to cooperate with any of the efforts to make her recant. She could have signed statements, like many others did, and done all kinds of things, and she refused to do that.
DW: It’s interesting, because she was more principled in some ways than a lot of people who had been far more radical in their views, so to speak.
MA: Yes, it’s true. She was one of the last from that era who was still with us. It’s coincidental of course, but she died almost exactly on the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist.
DW: Can you give an overview of her life?
MA: She comes out of Chicago. Her father was an insurance executive and her mother was a former operatic soprano and a vocal coach. She was raised in New York and became a Powers model. John Robert Powers had a modeling agency known for its beautiful women, and Hollywood culled from that agency for its future talent. Joanne Dru came from there, also Janis Carter and Adele Jergens.
One of the disadvantages we have about analyzing the first stage of Hunt’s career is that she was under contract to Paramount, she joined them in the late 1930s. Paramount’s library is controlled by Universal Pictures and so many of the Paramount films from the 30s and early 40s are impossible to see. They’ve never been released to home video or DVD.
Lee Bowman, Marsha Hunt and Van Heflin in Kid Glove Killer (1942)
It would be wonderful to be able to check out the young Marsha Hunt from the late 30s, but that stuff is just not available. I’ve never seen any of those early films. In Kid Glove Killer, she spars well with Van Helfin in Fred Zinnemann’s film. I’m not usually a big fan of crime noirs that have comic relief, but their scenes are genuinely charming and funny.
But then two years later we see her in Andre de Toth’s None Shall Escape, which was written by one of the future members of the Hollywood Ten, Lester Cole. It’s promoted or regarded as the only Hollywood movie addressing the Holocaust while the Holocaust was going on, even though it was 1944. Marsha Hunt plays a Polish teacher. This is a film that has the framework of some sort of future tribunal against the Nazi criminals. It anticipates in some fashion the Nuremberg trials.
The film contains a flashback of what was going on in Poland. Alexander Knox, who, grimly, was also going to be a casualty of the blacklist himself, plays a Nazi war criminal who’s on trial for war crimes. The film takes place at the end of the war and it is available now on DVD, finally, after being unavailable a long time.
Lester Cole, who is going to be one of the Hollywood Ten members, wrote the screenplay for that film, which was made by Columbia Pictures. Marsha Hunt would consider that one of her finest works. It was a film she was very proud of.
Marsha Hunt and Trevor Bardette in None Shall Escape (1944)
She was also a fan of a film that was made for United Artists called Carnegie Hall. She plays an older character. It’s kind of clunky, but it’s fascinating with the collection of famed musicians and performers. It’s director Edgar Ulmer rising to the occasion and dealing with a bigger budget for once.
Hollywood had its prejudice that a woman couldn’t be beautiful and funny, but Hunt proves that she had a tremendous skill for humor in a sketch she does, I want to say, with Red Skelton in Thousands Cheer [1943], which she made when she moved over to MGM. She’s very funny and has a very natural screen presence. She demonstrates a poise and elegance, even if the films themselves were not worthy of her all the time.
Earlier, Pride and Prejudice is another case where she is given a chance to show her comic side, her loonier side. Hunt was very fond of The Human Comedy, directed by Clarence Brown, who will later be a presence in the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, even though she knew it was a quite sentimental MGM movie. Sentiment doesn’t necessarily age well, but it was valuable in its time, she felt.
The Happy Time [Richard Fleischer, 1952] was more of a high-profile picture she made with Charles Boyer, produced by Stanley Kramer’s company. There were already problems with her being in that because she was officially not supposed to be hired. Well, nothing’s ever official. So they had to apply pressure on the Kramer company to use her in that film because there was one person there, not Stanley Kramer, but another executive, who was not keen on using her. He eventually also had a hand in Carl Foreman being pushed out during High Noon [Fred Zinnemann, 1952].
DW: Let’s speak for a moment about Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal because it’s a film we both admire.
MA: So Raw Deal Marsha Hunt makes during a stopover at Eagle-Lion Films, which is eventually going to be folded into United Artists. It has grown from Poverty Row into a production house that provides second-run movies, bottom halves of double bills.
Eagle-Lion is trying to increase its budgets. Anthony Mann spends a few years there. He makes T-Men [1947], he works on He Walked by Night [1948] and he directs Raw Deal.
DW: That is an impressive trio of films.
MA: It is very, very impressive. Marsha Hunt attended a screening of Raw Deal, I believe it was for the Turner Classic Movie film festival. This would have been in the early 2010s, as my book on Mann was being prepared. My research associate attended that screening of Raw Deal hosted by Eddie Muller, the “Film Noir Czar,” with Marsha Hunt present. She was very funny because they asked her what she thought of the part she played in Raw Deal, Ann Martin, and she said, well, she’s kind of a goody-two-shoes.
It’s true, because her character in Raw Deal was a classic example of what the Breen censorship office mandated as “the eloquent voice of morality.” Joseph L. Mankiewicz in his movie, I think it was The Honey Pot [1967], made a joke about “the eloquent voice of morality” that censors look for.
Here was a case of it. If I remember the censorship memos for Raw Deal correctly, they actually were saying that they wanted her to give pious lectures to Dennis O’Keefe as Joe Sullivan about his pursuing crime as a career—he’s not the only one who’s had it tough, she had it tough too and she wasn’t a criminal, etc.
But Ann can’t help but fall in love with him and their chemistry, I think, is very strong. Of course, we have Claire Trevor as well, but she has a dark side.
DW: As I recall it though, Hunt’s character may start out as a goody-two-shoes, but she ends up falling outrageously, head-over-heels in love with O’Keefe’s Joe.
MA: As he does for her. She’s visiting him in prison and she’s going to be taken hostage by him and Claire eventually, but she can’t help her feelings for him. There’s a great line in Raw Deal when Claire Trevor visits O’Keefe in prison. The Marsha Hunt character has something to do with the law firm handling the case. Claire Trevor says, with a delivery that only Claire Trevor can give, “She was practically sitting on your lap throughout the whole trial.”
Dennis O’Keefe, Marsha Hunt and Claire Trevor in Raw Deal (1948)
DW: Let’s talk about the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947 and the blacklist.
MA: The Committee was organized in September 1947 in response to the upcoming hearings of HUAC in Washington D.C. It was composed of liberal members of the Hollywood community, people like John Huston, William Wyler, screenwriter Philip Dunne, Sterling Hayden, Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Paul Henreid, Richard Conte and others.
They flew in an airplane to Washington. You’ll never guess who donated the airplane. Howard Hughes. How did that happen? I know I’m not going to even try to make sense of that. They fly to D.C. to show their support for the Hollywood Ten. They have not been members of the Communist Party. They have not been members of radical left organizations per se, but they are taking a First Amendment, free speech stand.
Marsha Hunt is part of this group. It’s a whistle-stop tour. They’re actually appearing in other cities for crowds who clearly want to see the stars. But this is giving these actors a chance to speak out about what HUAC is doing.
Once they get to D.C., they’re in the House committee chambers and they see how frightening it is, the yelling and screaming that’s going on. Certain historians say they were shocked by how badly the members of the Hollywood Ten were behaving. First of all, HUAC was behaving abominably. The committee was not allowing Ten members to read statements, which they had allowed “friendly witnesses” to read. HUAC was not letting them finish sentences and a few of them got a little irritated by that. But also, I think the Committee for the First Amendment members suddenly realized this is not a movie. This is the real deal. They just got terrified by it all. They were not prepared for this.
When they left D.C., several were read the riot act by the studios with whom they were under contract. Warner Bros. called Bogart and Bacall on the carpet and said you are not to be associated with this if you want your careers to continue. Bogart famously recanted and wrote his really sad “I’m no communist” article. Huston was furious at Bogart for that and apparently Key Largo [1948] picks up on some of the tensions that were taking place.
Many things were going on simultaneously. People like Sterling Hayden caved under the pressure and informed, and then later publicly regretted that. Others seemed not to be affected, like Danny Kaye. John Huston had to make nice with the Motion Picture Alliance people like Ward Bond and John Wayne, but never turned informer.
So what happened to Marsha Hunt is part of the fallout from all that. Three years go by and she’s mentioned in Red Channels.
DW: She wasn’t called to testify or name names, I suppose, because everyone knew that she was never in the CP and that she had no names to name.
MA: So she experienced a three-quarters blacklist, because she did make a couple of films, she appeared on television a few times. It was a peculiar gray area.
Red Channels came out in 1950 and it was primarily designed to report on “communist influence” in radio and television, but clearly there’s a spillover to motion pictures.
In her interview in Tender Comrades, Hunt said, “They had listed several affiliations under my name—some I’d never heard about, complete lies. One, I think, had me attending a peace conference in Stockholm. I had never been to Stockholm, nor to a peace conference. The rest were innocent activities that Red Channels viewed with suspicion. One of these was the movement in the theater to stop a proposed bill in the city legislature to empower a ‘morality czar’ of Broadway with the authority to close any production. The whole theatrical community rose up in protest over that issue, and it was duly reported in the press that I was part of it. The bill was defeated, of course, but that made me ‘suspect’ in the eyes of Red Channels. Red Channels, I think, was what sealed my fate.”
Marsha Hunt in No Place to Hide (1955)
Actually, what they cite in relation to Marsha Hunt in Red Channels is that she signed a petition to the Supreme Court to review the conviction of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, two of the members of the Hollywood Ten. As she says, she had also been part of a stop-censorship committee that held a rally at New York’s Hotel Astor in March 1948 to protest censorship on Broadway. She had been part of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, she also signed a petition protesting against the Tenney Committee [a California version of the federal HUAC]. She had spoken as part of the Progressive Citizens of America at a rally against HUAC in honor of the Hollywood Ten held at the Shrine Auditorium on October 16, 1947. And then there was her work for the Committee for the First Amendment. She took part in their broadcast on November 2, 1947. All of this was enough to get her named in Red Channels and become persona non grata.
DW: Here we are 75 years later. Do you see any indication that the entertainment industry would be any less susceptible to blacklisting and witch-hunting today?
MA: Do I see them as less susceptible? No, I do not. In fact, I think as any reader of the WSWS knows, the entertainment industry hierarchy is more vulnerable now than ever and more acquiescent than ever. We see this in their caving in to the current war propaganda efforts. You and I discussed in 2018 the #MeToo campaign. We took our lives in our hands for that discussion and we survived somehow. That was a case of what you have described as “sexual McCarthyism.” We see how easily the industry acquiesces and, unfortunately, it took these events of the last five years to make me understand, wow, they really do cave under pressure.
What’s particularly chilling is how quickly the industry will acquiesce or alter or adjust its political views depending on the political climate. We see this at film festivals now, as you’ve been covering, we see this at awards ceremonies. They’re “progressives” one year and then flag-wavers the next.
DW: Back to Marsha Hunt for a second. She seems to have been a principled person. She said she wasn’t a Communist and she probably wasn’t, but she didn’t cave in. She made this statement in the 1990s, also cited in Tender Comrades: “‘It was a shameful period, demanding conformity, stifling dissent,’ she now says. ‘Young people today don’t believe it happened. This being the fiftieth anniversary of the blacklist, I’ve been asked to do some college lectures. I didn’t want to talk about it before. I wanted to get away from it, not look back. But now I think it’s important for young people to know, to understand the grip of hysteria, and paranoia, that crippled our society, and to guard against it happening again.”
MA: She was the first to admit that she was an innocent when a lot of this was starting. She was surprised that these things were happening in the United States and felt that they were wrong and one had to speak out against them. A very brave thing to do at a very terrifying time.
DW: Yes, she took democratic rights, free speech, due process seriously.
MA: As she said, as a result, her career never recaptured its momentum. The short-term and long-term impact of the blacklist was devastating. It has never been adequately addressed, or redressed.
DW: We might say that it wasn’t only Hunt’s career that never “recaptured its momentum.” Hollywood as a whole has never recaptured its momentum to the present day. I don’t think the shameful blacklist era will fully be “redressed” until there is a powerful social movement against capitalism and there’s a different artistic mood and the scoundrels who run the industry are tossed out.
I re-posted this picture with the quote recently online. I got censored because some report ‘Orwell spam’ because he was a ‘snitch.’
Strange how people react to the words of a Leftist writer who fought in the Spanish Civil War fighting against the fascists. Orwell points out that the workers must be armed to have any chance of a real democracy.
But, critics are not interested in the ‘main idea’ of the simple statement above. They want to talk about George Orwell being a political opponent of other Leftists who he named to the government authorities in the UK. The man has written very perceptively about Leftwing ideas and created some of the best critiques of Stalinism and totalitarianism. He is a notable English writer. But, for some the response to his call for an armed workingclass is to point out that he informed on Stalinists to the capitalist government.
To be clear – the Stalinists in Spain supported the Left capitalist government, and in WW2 Orwell supported the capitalist government in the UK. But in Spain when the Stalinists who supported the capitalist Republican side abducted opponents and killed them. John Dos Pasos saw his translator taken away an executed by the Stalinists. When Dos Pasos complained to Hemingway, Hemingway said that the man was only one life in a vast struggle and that the Leftist side must be defended. Dos Pasos said, “Sacco and Vanzetti were only single individuals, but we campaigned for their lives for years.” Dos Pasos began to evolve into a Right Winger and lost his writing gift and ended up as a Right Wing activist in the US writing for Reader’s Digest.
In the UK the Stalinists Orwell denounced to the authorities were not disappeared and executed at night. Most lost their jobs and status, not a good thing, but hardly to the level of what Stalinists dish out to their enemies. Orwell was wrong to act as he did, but compared to many Leftists and socialists and honest communists who supported and defended the Stalinists were much, much worse.
Orwell saw first hand in Spain how the Stalinists strangled the revolution. At the time many on the Left were praising the Stalinists as the best defenders of the Spanish left capitalist government. After Orwell wrote ‘Homage to Catalonia’ Leftist publishers did not want to publish the work. One publisher wanted him to take out the chapter where he described how the Stalinists undermined and attacked other socialists and anarchists. Orwell responded, “That’s why I wrote the book.”
But Leftists who see politics as a kind of religion and leaders and movements that are currently popular as some kind of saints are outraged at any criticism. The Stalinists are mostly gone, and no one wants to claim they follow the Stalinist ideas – and George Orwell’s works and words live on. By 1940 George Orwell’s 1938 book ‘Homage to Catalonia’ had only sold 800 copies while Stalin’s books were distributed by the millions. Who reads Stalin today? Would you ‘snitch’ on Stalin or his followers? Since the topic of this quote is Orwell advocating armed workers – did Stalin ever advocate workers being armed and allowed to keep weapons in their homes?
A recent study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry sent shockwaves across the scientific community and popular outlets as it disproved the predominant “serotonin hypothesis” of depression. In just two weeks since its publication it has been accessed by nearly half a million people and the subject of dozens of subsequent articles. The researchers analyzed a total of seventeen systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other large studies focused on the following six tenets pertinent to the “serotonin hypothesis” of depression:
“(1) Serotonin and the serotonin metabolite 5-HIAA—whether there are lower levels of serotonin and 5-HIAA in body fluids in depression; (2) Receptors—whether serotonin receptor levels are altered in people with depression; (3) The serotonin transporter (SERT)—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter in people with depression (which would lower synaptic levels of serotonin); (4) Depletion studies—whether tryptophan depletion (which lowers available serotonin) can induce depression; (5) SERT gene—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter gene in people with depression; (6) Whether there is an interaction between the SERT gene and stress in depression.”1
None of the studies were able to prove any significant link between serotonin levels and depression based on the above tenets, leading the researchers to conclude that “there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity.”2
The researchers further argue, “The idea that depression is the result of abnormalities in brain chemicals, particularly serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT), has been influential for decades,” such that today “80% or more of the general public now believe it is established that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance.”3 In light of this finding, one must ask—how did a hypothesis which failed to substantially prove the connection it is based on achieve such general acceptance?
The serotonin hypothesis wasn’t always the dominant explanation for depression. Shortly after the Second World War, “the first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, was synthesized when chlorine was added to the promethazine structure.”4 This synthesis formed “the basis of the development of the first antidepressants” which emerged following Roland Kuhn’s 1957 presentation in the World Psychiatric Association Meeting, where shortly after the first tricyclic antidepressant was released for clinical use in Switzerland.5
A decade later, in the mid-1960s, a series of studies introduced serotonin as the “molecule behind depression.” These studies culminated in the work of Lapin and Oxenkrug, who postulated in 1969 the ”serotonergic theory of depression, which was based on a deficit of serotonin at an inter-synaptic level in certain brain regions.”6 In the following years, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly created a serotonin-depression study team, which found that fluoxetine hydrochloride was “the most powerful… selective inhibitor of serotonin uptake among all the compounds developed.”7 The results led to the 1987 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the clinical usage of Prozac (the brand name given to fluoxetine), the first major selective serotonin receptor inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant drug.8
Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness.
The release of Prozac revolutionized the commodification of medicine, incorporating a new field of mass advertisement which has since become the norm. However, as the documentary, Prozac: A Revolution in a Capsule demonstrates, the drug obtained its prominence not only through advertisement—which, interestingly enough, first occurred through business and finance magazines—but through its incorporation into culture as an iconic symbol of the zeitgeist.9 From Woody Allen movies to TheSopranos to late night talks shows, Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness. This quickly resulted in the “Prozac boom,” making it by 1990 the most prescribed drug in the United States, and within ten years of its 1988 release, visits to the doctor for depression doubled and the prescribing of antidepressants tripled.10
The association of depression with low levels of serotonin was an intentional result of institutionally supported (e.g., American Psychiatric Organization) marketing campaigns from the pharmaceutical industry. This has provided “an important justification for the use of antidepressants” and perpetuated an antidepressant drug market that was valued at almost $16 billion in 2020 (a number expected to rise to $21 billion by the end of the decade);11 in today’s antidepressant epidemic, one in six Americans are on antidepressants.12 This phenomenon cannot be understood separately from the general commodification and marketization of medicine. As Joanne Moncrieff has argued, “there are some obvious drivers of this trend, such as the pharmaceutical industry, whose marketing activities have been facilitated both by the arrival of the Internet, and political deregulation, including the repeal of the prohibition on advertising to consumers in the US and some other countries in the 1990s.”13
This is how and why the serotonin theory gained and sustained its hegemony since the 1990s. However, within the scientific community this hypothesis has been on the chopping block for almost two decades as individual studies have disconfirmed various parts of the hypothesis. The scientific community, in general, is much more skeptical of the “serotonin hypothesis” than the general public. This disconnection between the much more nuanced science on depression and the public perception of the issue has been the subject of various articles and speaks to both the separation of science from everyday life and to the effectiveness of medical marketization.14 Nonetheless, the explosion the recent study caused is a result of its comprehensive character as an “umbrella review” which examined all parts of the serotonin hypothesis at once—and in doing so, went well beyond the many studies which have focused on separate parts in the last couple of decades.
From Biochemical Determinism to Dialectical Materialism There is a prevalent myth which holds that those who function in society as professional “intellectuals” are somehow “autonomous and independent” from the dominant social order and the interests of the ruling class.15 This myth predominates in the community of the “hard” sciences perhaps more than in any level of traditional intellectuals. Here it is taken as sensum communem that science is objective and disconnected from ideology and social factors. For these folks, as Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin said, “nothing evokes as much hostility… as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.”16 But it is in this illusion of non-ideological objectivity where ideology can be seen to be the most entrenched, functioning as unknown knowns, that is, as unrecognized assumptions or inherent biases which mediate how scientists approach the world.
This does not mean, as the postmodernist disease17 which influences some of the philosophy of science holds, that we should maintain a “deep epistemological skepticism” which often, as Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, conflates “the forms of knowledge with its objects… as if they are saying not only that, for instance, the science of physics is a historical construct, which has varied over time and in different social contexts, but that the laws of nature are themselves ‘socially constructed’ and historically variable.”18
On the contrary, in Marxism, as Helena Sheehan argues, there is “no conflict between [stressing] the historical and contextual nature of science and [affirming] the rationality of science and the overall progressive character of its development.”19 In essence, the Marxist tradition’s understanding of the socially determined character of scientific production does not mean that scientific objectivity is rejected and that the object of scientific study itself is conceived of as relative. The form of abstract and unmediated objectivism which prevails in the sciences is rejected and what is affirmed is a necessarily socially mediated understanding of scientific objectivity. This overcomes, as Sheehan notes, the stale “objectivist/constructivist” binary which today structures the discourse about science and affirms instead a dialectical both/and attitude.20 This is important to clarify so that the forthcoming analysis of capitalism’s influence on science is not confused as an embracement of relativism and a rejection of science’s ability to produce objective knowledge of the world.
The serotonin hypothesis emerges from what Levins and Lewontin called “Cartesian reductionism” (the objectivist extreme), which they held to be the “dominant mode of analysis” in all spheres of today’s sciences. In psychiatry this shows up as genetic and biochemical determinism, an attempt to reduce the complexity of mental health issues to genetics or to biochemical mechanisms which, with respect to the latter, somehow the major pharmaceutical companies always have a pill for. But, as Moncrieff has argued, “mental health problems are not equivalent to physical, medical conditions and are more fruitfully viewed as problems of communities or societies.”21
Reductionism, in essence, is a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.
For instance, studies have shown that “within a given location, those with the lowest incomes are typically 1.5 to 3 times more likely than the rich to experience depression or anxiety.”22 The plethora of factors that stem from and contribute to poverty has allowed researchers to establish “a bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and mental illness,” such that poverty both increases the likelihood of mental illness and is proliferated further by it.23 The fact that the poorest in any context are up to three times more likely to experience depression than the rich shows that any analysis of depression must necessarily take into account the socioeconomic context of the individual. This inequality induced dissatisfaction allows one to understand both poverty and depression relationally. As Marx had already noted in 1847,
Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature… A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut… if the neighboring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.24
The Cartesian reductive framework contains various methodological flaws which prevent the concrete understanding of the world. It treats, for instance, the interactions of parts and whole one-sidedly—as if parts are homogenous entities ontologically prior to the whole, and hence, as if the whole was simply the sum of its parts. In so doing, this outlook draws artificial hard and fast lines between causes and effects and fails to see how parts and wholes are reciprocally conditioning, i.e., how “their very interaction structures the way they are interrelated and interpenetrated, resulting in what is called a whole.”25 In short, how wholes are not simply the sum of their parts, but the totalities through which the parts themselves attain the functions which form the whole. It is, in essence, a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade26 forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.
However, biochemical determinism/reductionism does not necessarily have to reduce explanations to only one factor. For instance, the inconsistent success of SSRIs27 in treating depression has led some scientists to sustain ex juvantibus28 (from reasoning backwards) that serotonin’s role in depression is interactive and dependent on its relations with adrenaline, dopamine, and other chemical processes. Although this represents a more complex view of the serotonin hypothesis in particular, and of the often wrongly conflated “chemical imbalance” view of depression, it is nonetheless a form of biochemical determinism.29 This is because it fails to see how the “chemical imbalances” don’t arise out of a void but are produced by the concrete environment the individual is in. The point, again, is not to diminish the biochemical in order to elevate the role of the environment, but to see both the biochemical and the environment as dialectically interconnected, acting “upon each other through the medium of the [individual].”30 As Levins and Lewontin argue, the individual “cannot be regarded as simply the passive object of autonomous internal (biochemical composition/genes) and external (environment) forces;” instead, the individual functions as a subject-object which is both conditioned by these factors (as object) and reciprocally conditions them (as subject).31
The limitations of the prevalent serotonin hypothesis also helps to demonstrate what Friedrich Engels noted in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature: although “natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it… they are no less in bondage to philosophy but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy.”32 This reductive, bio-determinist outlook straitjackets science within abstract thought, preventing it from seeing things in their movements and interconnections. It forces the reduction of larger problems to simple components—since these are seen as the ontological basis of wholes—and limits the possibility of observing issues like depression dynamically and comprehensively.
It is much easier to reduce depression to a biochemical phenomenon in the brain than to analyze how the social relations prevalent in the capitalist mode of life create the conditions for the emergence of depression. Similarly, once this reduction is established, it is much easier to treat the “solution” through individualized drug consumption than through socially organized revolutionary activity. As Moncrieff has argued, “by obscuring [the] political nature” of mental illness, certain “contentious social activities” are enabled, and attention is diverted “from the failings of the underlying economic system.”33
Tracing depression to the exploitative and alienating relations sustained between people and their work, their peers, and nature, is not only a much more laborious task, but one which would necessarily end in the realization of the systemic root of the problem. Given capitalism’s universal commodification, and the form this takes in what Levins and Lewontin call the “commoditization of science,” such a result is directly against the interests of the institutions that control scientific knowledge production.34 As one of many other fields in which the universalizing logic of commodity production has penetrated, the aim is, of course, profitability; the quest for truth and scientific discovery is subsumed under the quest for profit. This is especially true after four decades of neoliberalism, where, as Moncrieff notes, “more and more aspects of human feelings and behaviour” have been commodified and turned “into a source of profit for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.”35 “Investing in research,” as Levins and Lewontin argue, is but “one of several ways of investing in capital.”36
In the West, this reality was clear to the rich tradition of British Marxists scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and others which emerged following the 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. As J.D. Bernal stated in 1937, “production for profit can never develop the full potentialities of science except for destructive purposes,” only “the Marxist understanding of science puts it in practice at the service of the community and at the same time makes science itself part of the cultural heritage of the whole people and not of an artificially selected minority.”37
Towards Socialist Science and Medicine The serotonin theory gained prominence because: 1) it fits within the one-factor, causally linear framework of the Cartesian reductionist outlook prevalent in mainstream science; 2) it was a diagnosis which facilitated the greatly profitable solution embodied in the tens of billions of dollars’ worth antidepressant drug industry; 3) it plays a hegemonic role in steering the diagnosis of the depression epidemic away from its real source—capitalist social relations which sustain the mass of people alienated from what they produce, from other people, and from nature—and, specifically with respect to the United States, in drowning debt for getting sick, pursuing an education, or attempting to own a home.
Socialism removes these material difficulties upon which many mental health issues are grounded and places the working class in control of the economy, state, and civil institutions, making them function in the service of human and planetary needs, not profit. By abolishing poverty and war; guaranteeing healthcare, housing, and education as a right for all; providing everyone with meaningful well-paying jobs; amongst other things, a socialist society creates the economic and social security which radically transforms the environment in which most cases of depression are rooted. If one seriously seeks to overcome the depression epidemic capitalism is hurling the mass of people into, socialism is the only real solution.
In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds and incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.
Likewise, only socialism can de-commodify science and provide the general social atmosphere for a move away from a hegemonic outlook dominated by static, reductive, abstract, individualist, irrationalist, deterministic, and binary thought, and towards a dialectical materialist one which emphasizes change, interconnection, reciprocity, sociality, emergence, and concrete investigation of the concrete.38 The extraordinary successes of Cuban science and medicine testify to what can be done when the profit motive is removed and comprehensive, preventative, and community-based care becomes the norm.
While enduring an internationally denounced blockade from the most formidable of empires, the Cuban revolution’s commitment to a science for the people has allowed it to construct what is internationally recognized as one of the best health care systems in the world.39 Cuba’s comprehensive social care emphasizes the impact of biological, social, cultural, economic and environmental factors on patients. Far from the United States’ drug-first approach of dealing with mental health issues, Cuba’s comprehensive social care allows all medical issues to be better understood at their source, treated, and prevented from occurring.40 In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds,41 and when not hampered by the blockade, incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.42
Cuban scientists see mental health issues and treatment “within the context of the community,” not isolated individuals.43 As Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, president of the Cuban Society of Psychology, said: “At all times, the community—like the family—are participants and necessary contributors in each action taken to move toward an improvement in the wellbeing of people with mental illness.”44 Additionally, unlike the disease-centered model of care which predominates in most capitalist countries, this human-centered approach promotes multidisciplinary and integrative relations between mental and medical care within the different fields of medicine—various forms of medical doctors, psychologists, nurses, and other health care professionals train side by side each other within the communities they serve in.45 This socialist model has afforded the Cuban people the conditions where, despite the enormous material difficulties created by the US blockade, depression in Cuba affects only 3.8 percent of the population, whereas in the United States 4.8 percent.46
In their 1985 book, The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin reformulate Marx’s Eleventh Thesis and state that “dialectical philosophers have thus far only explained science. The problem, however, is to change it.”47 In the West, the seeds of such a change are emerging once again. As Nafis Hasan wrote in Science for the People, “recent developments in the fields of immunology, cancer, theoretical and evolutionary biology lend credence” to the view that “any non-reductionist approach (e.g., systems biology) to studying biology will advertently end up using a dialectical approach.”48 The fall of the reductive serotonin hypothesis in depression research is but one instance in many pointing to the fact that the dominant outlook presents a fetter for the development of the sciences. Just like a socialist revolution is needed to free humanity and the forces of production from the fetters of the capitalist system of waste, a revolution in outlook is needed to free the sciences from its archaic Cartesian reductionism and furnish it with “the most scientifically apt method for understanding the world”—dialectical materialism.49
Notes:
Joanna Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” Molecular Psychiatry (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0.
Victor Silva Pereira and Vinícius Antonio Hiroaki-Sato, “A Brief History of Antidepressant Drug Development: From Tricyclics to Beyond Ketamine,” Acta Neuropsychiatrica 30, no. 6 (February 2018): 307–322, https://doi.org/10.1017/neu.2017.39.
Joanna Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System: A Marxist Analysis,” Frontiers in Sociology 6 (2022): 771875, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.771875.
Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect Between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature,” PLOS Medicine 2, no. 12: e392, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392. Note: This article also shows how the disconnection between the science and the advertisement violates the laws of the FDA, but that the FDA has been deliberately inactive in cracking down on marketized misinformation because these advertisements are given “to the fraction of the public that functions at no higher than a 6th grade reading level.” Basically, the FDA allows this misinformation to disseminate because the viewers are too unintelligent to understand the truth.
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 7.
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4.
“Postmodern Disease” is a concept introduced by Ellen Meiksins Wood in the Monthly Review collection In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, which deals with themes relating to the hegemonization of postmodernism in academia and how it serves, in various and often indirect ways, the capitalist “end of history”’ narrative. Its rejection of history, comprehensive outlooks, socially informed scientific objectivity, class struggle, etc., establishes it as an enemy of Marxism while passing itself as “more radical.” The paradox, however, is that it not only fails to oppose the existing order, but actively serves as one of its key hegemonic tools. As Ellen Meiksins Wood states, “Postmodernism is no longer the diagnosis… it has become the disease.”
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “What is the ‘Postmodern’ Agenda,” in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 5, 7, 10.
Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 46.
“The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 83.
For instance, studies have shown that “approximately 80% of the response to medication was duplicated in placebo control groups.” See Iving Kirsch et al., “The Emperor’s New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” Prevention & Treatment 5, no. 1 (July 2002), https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2002-14079-003. A similar conclusion was arrived at in a recent study which pooled 73,000 patients and showed that only around 15 percent of the time do the drugs work better than the placebos. As the researchers concluded: “Patients with depression are likely to improve substantially from acute treatment of their depression with drug or placebo. Although the mean effect of antidepressants is only a small improvement over placebo, the effect of active drug seems to increase the probability that any patient will benefit substantially from treatment by about 15%.” Marc B. Stone et. al., “Response to Acute Monotherapy for Major Depressive Disorder in Randomized, Placebo Controlled Trials Submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration: Individual Participant Data Analysis ,” BMJ 378 (2022): e067606, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2021-067606.
As was noted by the study referenced above, this “line of reasoning is logically problematic—the fact that aspirin cures headaches does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain.” Jeffrey R Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression.”
The conflation is distinctly present in marketing.
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 89.
It is also important to note that “every part or activity of an organism acts as environment for other parts,” such that this dialectical integration does not just occur mechanically between the whole organism (individual X) and their environment, but within various sub-levels which themselves function as part and environment. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 58.
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Books, 2012), 213.
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 200.
J.D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science,” Science and Society 2, no. 1 (Winter 1937): 63.
This refers to the method of ascending from the abstract (less determinations, more superficial, less complex) to the concrete (more determinations, more complex, more comprehensive) which is at the core of both idealist and materialist dialectics. For instance, Marx’s Capital (as a whole) is at its core a categorial ascension from the less concrete categories in volume one (commodity, money, capital, absolute and relative surplus value) to the more concrete categories in volumes two and three (various capital circuits, turnover of various forms of capital, etc. for volume two and price, rate of profit, various types of capital, etc. for volume three). This categorial ascension allows for the most concrete—capitalist production as a whole (the title of volume three)—to be reproduced concretely in thought. The same movement can be seen in Hegel’s Logic’s ascension from being (most abstract category) to absolute spirit (the most concrete category).
For more on the United States’ hybrid warfare on Cuba, see my article for Covert Action Magazine or my seminar on the 26th of July movement for the People’s School for Marxist Leninist Studies.
Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Great Britain: Yale University Press, 2020), 127.
This includes activities like psycho-ballet and other exercises and arts, yoga, martial arts, etc.
Sheila J. Linz and Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba: An Interview with the President of the Cuban Society of Psychology,” Perspectives In Psychiatric Care 57, no. 1 (January 2021), https://doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12548.
“A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professional wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown… Better to live on your feet than die on your knees…”
Well, gosh, this is kind of embarrassing. For approximately the last two and a half years, I have been documenting, analyzing, and occasionally satirizing the so-called “New Normal,” i.e., the new, pathologized, official ideology that has been rolled out all across the planet by the global-capitalist ruling classes under the pretext of combating an apocalyptic pandemic … or at least that’s what I thought was going on.
As it turns out, I was totally wrong.
Apparently, the global-capitalist ruling establishment (or “GloboCap,” as I often refer to the unaccountable, supranational network of global corporations, banks, governments, and non-governmental governing entities that unaccountably govern our world) has not been rolling out a new official ideology, or pathologized form of totalitarianism, or not intentionally in any event.
No one has been methodically gaslighting anyone, or terrorizing anyone with propaganda, or censoring or segregating anyone, or coercing anyone to get needlessly “vaccinated” with any sort of dangerous experimental drugs, or consciously conspiring with anyone to do anything.
Everyone has simply been suffering from Mass Formation Hypnosis Disorder!
I know, you probably find this hard to believe, especially because I have been making precisely the opposite case for over two years now, but I saw it on the Alex Jones show! Mattias Desmet, a professor from Belgium, and “the world’s leading expert” on this new disorder, explained it all in meticulous detail.
According to Desmet, the way this disorder works is, people feel “lonely and isolated,” which makes them feel angry, but they don’t have anything or anyone to unleash their anger on, so they form a mass and hypnotize each other, and invent a new fanatical ideology that they all fanatically hypnotically believe in, which, at that point, their rulers, who are also hypnotized, have no choice but to go full-totalitarian, and hypnotize everyone even more, because that is what the hypnotized mass demands, so that they can finally unleash their anger on someone, i.e., those who have managed to avoid being hypnotized (one assumes with some special anti-hypnosis technology, but I don’t think Professor Desmet explained that part).
And, OK, before you hypnosis deniers start sending me emails denying the power of hypnosis to totally totalitarianize society, listen to Professor Desmet explain how surgeons in Belgium are routinely performing open-heart surgery on hypnotized patients without any anesthetic whatsoever! They just saw right through their breastbones with a sternum saw, ratchet open their rib cages with a sternal retractor, and start slicing into the patients’ hearts … and these patients don’t even flinch or anything! He has witnessed this with his own two eyes!
Or, all right, it seems he hasn’t actually witnessed this with his own two eyes. It seems he was actually just lying when he said that, which he confessed to in a lengthy Facebook post (after people pointed out that he had lied) in which he publicly wondered why he had lied, and then rationalized his lie with various excuses, and posted several misleading links in an attempt to suggest that he hadn’t actually lied, despite the fact that he had just admitted he did, and just generally tried to muddy the waters with a lot of awkward psychobabble.
But I don’t mean to cast aspersions. Professor Desmet is, after all, “the world’s leading expert” on “Mass Formation Psychosis” or simply “Mass Formation” or whatever you want to call this fairy tale that he and others have been peddling, not just on clown shows like Alex Jones’, but to massive audiences like Tucker Carlson’s …
Seriously now, I have been aware of Desmet’s theory for some time, but I had mostly held my tongue about it because (a) I considered it relatively harmless, and (b) I’m generally reluctant to tear another vocal opponent of the New Normal a new asshole. We get enough of that from the New Normal “fact checkers.” However, unfortunately, this “mass hypnosis” gibberish has gained enough traction that it has now become dangerous, so I need to do a little new-asshole-tearing. (Fanatical fans of Professor Desmet will probably want to navigate away at this point.)
Ready? OK, here we go.
What we’ve been experiencing for the past two and a half years — and arguably the last six and a half years — is not the result of “mass hypnosis.” The global-capitalist ruling establishment is destabilizing and restructuring societies, globally. The people that staged and published this photograph in January 2020 and lied to the masses about the Covid death rate (i.e., 3.4%) a few months later were not mass-hypnotized. They knew what they were doing.
Likewise, the people who went New Normal (i.e., the vast majority of most societies) were not “mass hypnotized” or in some kind of trance. They were simply looking out for themselves by conforming to the new official “reality.” This is standard behavior in totalitarian systems, and cults, and even non-totalitarian systems. I explained it this way in a recent interview …
“Totalitarianism can be imposed on any society if the government, or whatever structure rules it, controls the essential elements of power (i.e., the military, the police, the media, the culture industry, etc.). Once the transition to totalitarianism begins, you can count on roughly two thirds of the society either embracing it or acquiescing to it, not because they are in some vulnerable psychological state, but rather because they correctly perceive which way the wind is blowing and they don’t want to challenge the totalitarian regime and be punished for doing so. They are not hypnotized or under any other kind of spell. It’s pure survival instinct. … Not to put too fine a point on it, but most people are either perfectly content to conform to whatever type of society those in power impose on them as long as their basic needs are met, or they are not content [to do so], but they are cowards, so they stand by in silence. I don’t mean that as a judgment or an insult. Cowardice and the ability to abandon one’s principles (or not having any principles in the first place) are very positive traits to have if your goal is survival. When a society goes totalitarian or is otherwise occupied and radically transformed, it’s the rebels and dissidents who get lined up against the wall and shot, not the cowards and collaborators.”
I realize how harsh that sounds. It’s meant to, and at the same time, it isn’t. We are, all of us, capable of such cowardice and betrayal of our fundamental principles, given the right set of circumstances. Everyone has a breaking point. If you haven’t experienced yours yet … well, I hope you never do.
The point is, we are dealing with questions of power, not a psychological condition. Desmet’s theory pathologizes the political essence of totalitarianism, just like the official New Normal narrative pathologizes and displaces its political character, rendering it immune to political opposition, and rendering its opponents “conspiracy theorists,” or “paranoid,” or otherwise divorced from “reality,” thus stripping us of political legitimacy.
In this “Mass Formation” fairy tale, the political conflict disappears. The totalitarian system and those who resist it are replaced by a psychiatrist and a psychiatric patient. In this story, there is no one and nothing to fight. We just need to find a “cure” or a “treatment” for this bizarre new psychiatric disorder that keeps causing the masses to hypnotize each other and invent some new fanatical totalitarian ideology in order to alleviate the pent-up frustration caused by their loneliness and isolation by unleashing their rage on unhypnotized persons!
Or whatever … maybe I don’t understand the nuances of “Mass Formation” theory. I’m not a professional psychologist or anything. I’m sure one or two of Professor Desmet’s fans will be happy to explain it all to me, if they’re not too busy undergoing open-heart surgery without anesthetic. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that!
CJ Hopkins September 11, 2022 Photos: InfoWars; Twitter; FOX News; The Guardian
DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.
The analysis reinforces the historical case for armed self-defense in response to racist violence.
(New York Public Library)
In her 1892 pamphletSouthern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, the journalist Ida B. Wells argued that firearms were an essential tool in preventing the deadly white supremacist violence that she chronicled. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky, and prevented it,” she wrote. “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.”
Wells thought the lesson was clear: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”
Many African-American leaders, including Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, T.R.M. Howard, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King Jr., took a similar position, which was supported by voluminous anecdotal evidence. A recent paper by Clemson University economists Michael Makowsky and Patrick Warren reinforces Wells’ case for self-help by showing that “rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access” during the Jim Crow era.
Makowsky and Warren’s data on lynchings come from a 2019 inventory by University of Georgia sociologists E.M. Beck and Stewart Tolnay. “Our sample includes a mean of 2.16 lynching deaths per year, with 41% of state-years experiencing at least one Black lynching death and a maximum of 13 in Georgia in 1922,” the economists write. “Lynching deaths per state capita steadily decrease through our window, with upticks in 1919 and 1933.”
During this period, Makowsky and Warren note, “Black citizens were subject to state and local governments that were rarely better than indifferent to their safety and, at their worst, actively supportive of terrorist violence targeting them.” This was the context in which Wells et al. urged armed self-defense to provide “that protection which the law refuses to give.”
As a proxy for firearm access, Makowsky and Warren use the percentage of suicides committed with guns, which they calculate based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau from 1910 to 1950. Since gun control laws in Southern states were used to selectively disarm black residents, the authors also consider the police resources available to enforce those laws. And they take into account fluctuations in retail gun prices, as reflected in Sears-Roebuck catalogs and records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“From 1920 to 1940,” Makowsky and Warren report, “White firearm access increased substantially alongside a decline in Black firearm access.” Their analysis supports the hypothesis that racially motivated gun control policies had something to do with that.L
“Although policies like increased police employment or the enactment of pistol bans were, on their face, race-neutral, these results show that, in practice, they had the consequence of disarming Black residents without having a similar effect on Whites,” Makowsky and Warren write. “This differential disarmament could go a long way toward explaining the Black-White firearm access gap that arose in the Jim Crow South.”
That racist strategy, the data suggest, had a lethal impact. “In states and years in which Black residents had more access to firearms, there were fewer lynchings,” Makowsky and Warren report. “In all three estimation strategy variants, the estimated negative effect of Black firearm access on lynchings is quite large and statistically significant.” An increase of one standard deviation in firearm access, for example, is associated with a reduction in lynchings of between 0.8 and 1.4 per year, about half a standard deviation.
“Drawing on historical vital statistics, we show that efforts to disarm Black residents under Jim Crow were successful, as the intra-war period was characterized by a significant relative decline in Black residents’ access to firearms,” Makowsky and Warren write. “This decline may have had substantial consequences in a world in which the formal institutions of the law would not protect Black citizens’ lives and property. Using suicide records as a proxy for firearm access, we find a negative relationship between Black firearm access and the number of recorded lynchings.”
Makowsky and Warren think their results “tell a consistent story about how Black firearm access can shift the lynching risk that Black residents of the Jim Crow South faced.” That story, “consistent with the historical record, is one in which Blacks residents in fear of lynchings seek out firearms to protect themselves. But in places and times where policy choices and economic circumstances made it difficult, Black residents had less access to firearms, perhaps due to the increased enforcement of disarmament laws targeting Black residents. That reduction in access led to more lynching victims, as Black residents were not able to protect themselves or rely on the institutions of law enforcement to protect them.”
It was a hot summer night in July 2003 and I was admiring the Eiffel Tower from the open window of a nice penthouse at the Avenue Émile Zola in Paris. I was talking to Tatiana Poppel, a Russian friend who lived there. We were discussing literature and I told her about my favourite novel, Cien años de soledad, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And then it was her turn. She told me a strange, but funny story about the Devil visiting Moscow. I was listening and I was amused, but without really trying to remember the name of the novel nor its author. But the story never left me. It was saved in my brains forever.
One year later the images came back, and how! Another Russian friend of mine, Irina Ternovaya, advised me to read The Master and Margarita, written by Mikhail Bulgakov. And so I did. With quite some dramatic consequences. I lost my heart in Moscow, it will stay there forever and I started learning Russian because, one day, I want to be able to read it in the original language…
You can use the menu at the top to learn more about Mikhail Bulgakov, the story and its themes, the political and social context, the characters and the locations, and discover how this novel inspired many others to create music, movie pictures or theatre plays. Have a regular look at the newspage too, because Bulgakov is still alive…
The world changed on 24 February 2022 when Russia sent forces into Ukraine to aide the Russian speaking republic in Donetsk and Luhansk. After thirty years of retreat the former Soviet states stopped retreating in the face of Western Imperialisms advance. Eight years of low level war had killed thousands under Ukrainian shelling of the breakaway republics.
Having a few chances to hear the leaders of the republics speak I could not help but think of World War Two, the Great Patriotic War as they call it in Russia, as the leaders sounded like WW2 Communists. Some of the leaders spoke with Soviet Hammer and Sickle flags behind them. I have no idea what the social system is in Luhansk and Donetsk is, but I noted eight years ago that they called themselves “People’s Republics” as in Soviet times.
I suppose I was preparing for this war in my own way. I have been reading ‘War and Peace’ during lockdowns along with many other Russian and leftist novels. I have seen many video series and movies about WW2 and the battles between the Nazi led Germans and the Stalinist led Russians and Soviets. So many of the geographical locations are familiar. The names of the Ukrainian heroes are also familiar as Nazi collaborators.
Victory Day – Red Square – 2021
I noted that their are holdover flags on Russian ships and Russian tank units with Sovit Hammer and Sickle flags. Perhaps the just left the symbols as empty connections to the past. But then there was the liberation of the Nazi Azov Battalion dominated Russian speaking city Mariupol. A red Hammer and Sickle flag was hoisted at a high point. What do these flag wavers believe? I don’t know.
Putin was a Stalinist KGB lawyer who has expressed disapproval of Lenin and the idea of letting territories break away from the Soviet Union. While he quit the Communist Party of Russia in 1991 he said that he did not take his official Communist Pary membership card and burn it as many others did with the implosion of the USSR. Putin says that he has the card at home in draw somewhere. Putin also has said that the young communist training book “had many good ideas.” The main opposition to Putin’s United Russia Party in Russian elections is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation which routinely gets 20% of the vote to United Russia’s 80%. The pro-Western Imperialist ‘intelligencia’ has virtually no political power or influence according to many.
Below are some photos of Russian Communists demonstrating with Hammer and Sickle flags in Moscow. Putin has allowed Communist protests, but the police limit the number of people who attend. The Communist support the war in the Ukraine.
Bizarrely some in Western media circles where hoping that Russia’s war in Ukraine would upset China and force the Communist country to back Western Imperialism. As the months have passed it is clear that China sides with Russia.
In Germany the government banned Soviet Hammer and Sickle flags in some temporary restriction around protests. So… people see power in this flag in the EU.
To see the Russian tanks flying Red Army banners advancing on the Ukrainian Nazis with their Swastika tattoos does look like history repeating itself. But, how do the soldiers waving these flags see them? We shall see…
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One Hour of Russian Post-Soviet Communist Music One Hour of Instrumental Communist Music
China During August 4-7, in response to Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, China’s People’s Liberation Army carried out missile drills in six areas bracketing the island (shaded blocks), and live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait.
Bemedalled tinpot dictator Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Guomindang (Chinese Natioinalist Party) and butcher of the 1927 Shanghai workers uprising, fled to Taiwan in 1949. (Photo: public domain)
Mao Zedong and U.S. president Richard Nixon sealed treacherous anti-Soviet alliance in 1972. (Photo: AP)
On the occasion of her war-mongering visit, Nancy Pelosi was awarded the “Order of Propitious Clouds with special Grand Cordon” by Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen (right). (Photo: Taiwan Presidential Office)
Anti-communist social democrats in action. Socialist Action (Hong Kong), part of the International Socialist Alternative tendency, campaigning with sign calling to “Defeat the Chinese Communist Party Dictatorship,” next to the Taiwan “Republic of China” flag.
While the opportunist left tails after the Democratic Party, acting over Taiwan as deckhands on the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of U.S. imperialism, the Internationalist Group calls to defeat the imperialist war drive against Russia and China with international workers revolution. (Internationalist photo)
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