Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30. His legacy?

Under Gorbachev, the Soviet economy fell into recession as the government began to dismantle the planned economy. Under Gorbachev, socialist industry was dismantled.

Russia’s GDP dropped by 40%. Real wages were halved. Poverty ballooned from 2.2 million in 1987-88 to 66 million in 1993-95. Millions died under the brutal regime of privatization and shock therapy. Half a million women were trafficked into sexual slavery. Life expectancy fell to 57 years.

Gorbachev and what followed are now remembered as perhaps the worst period in Russia’s 1,000-year history. This was the greatest economic disaster any country has seen in modern times, in war or peace.

Following is the introduction to “Perestroika: A Marxist Critique” by Marxist leader Sam Marcy, first published in 1990. It gives crucial background to the destructive legacy of Gorbachev.

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Introduction

This book deals with a critique of perestroika (the Gorbachev restructuring reforms), written from the vantage point of the world struggle for socialism. It is impossible to analyze such a vast social and political phenomenon as perestroika solely on the basis of the exigencies of the USSR alone. It can only be understood in the context of the contemporary world struggle and more particularly the struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples everywhere against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.

There is no way to properly discuss the situation of the USSR without continual reference to its relations with the capitalist countries. It is no secret that, ever since the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the USSR has endured the unmitigated enmity, indeed the morbid hatred, of all the imperialist powers and their reactionary servitors of all stripes. Yet the USSR has been able to maintain itself and to grow strong, notwithstanding the most formidable historical objective conditions standing in its way. At the core of the world struggle lies the fact that we are dealing with two diametrically opposed social systems, each of which rests on a different class base.

Much of the material in this book first began appearing in July 1987 as a series of articles on the Soviet economic reforms.¹ For some time, we proceeded cautiously in our evaluation of the scope and character of the reforms. We didn’t want to rush to judgment or present an analysis based on preconceived notions of what would happen.

Can Marxists in the U.S. of all places forget that much of the supposedly constructive criticism of the Soviet Union has in fact been in tune with bourgeois efforts to defame the USSR and socialism itself? A progressive audience in particular is reluctant to listen to criticism of the USSR out of consideration for the enormous objective difficulties it has encountered in its long and arduous struggle against capitalist encirclement and the attempts to hinder the construction of a socialist society through economic and political strangulation.

The objective of the reforms, as it was stated very early in the Gorbachev administration, was to modernize and streamline the Soviet economy through the introduction of new management techniques and technology in use elsewhere in the world, particularly in the highly developed imperialist countries. Through perestroika and the political opening known as glasnost, the new Soviet leadership also promised to tackle social privileges and inequities which had accumulated over the years. But as time went on, it became evident that there was much more to the modernization program than restructuring industry and reequipping the technological infrastructure of the USSR in order to move forward and perfect socialist construction. The enthusiasm evoked in the beginning over the expectation that new techniques would lead to an improvement in working conditions, labor productivity, and the availability of consumer goods has now, four years into the reforms, given way to skepticism and even mass anger. The most forceful evidence of this was given by the Soviet coal miners, who showed what they thought of the Gorbachev administration’s performance by striking en masse. (See Articles 22 and 23.) And no wonder there is such widespread anger among the workers. Instead of perestroika’s promised increase in the material wellbeing of the masses, we have the familiar phenomenon of austerity, so rampant in capitalist society.

As our later articles show, what has emerged is a wholesale retreat from socialist goals in the area of social and economic relations. This retreat went along with the introduction of private cooperatives, the weakening of central planning, concessions to imperialist investors interested in joint ventures and other openings to the Soviet market, and erratic and ill-disguised steps leading away from collective and state farms and toward the privatization of agriculture.

This is what explains the effusive praise for Gorbachev that has come from the imperialist camp, especially from those well-known as arch-foes of the labor movement and social progress. When Margaret Thatcher pronounced her verdict – “I like him” – after Gorbachev’s first visit to London, it might have been taken as a judgment by an individual imperialist politician. But since then the triumphal receptions arranged for him in Washington and Bonn have made it clear that the collective opinion of the imperialist bourgeoisie heartily welcomes the shift in Soviet policies represented by the Gorbachev leadership. This is in striking contrast to the attitude of the countries oppressed by imperialism, which have been able to muster only the most subdued support for Gorbachev, when they haven’t been silent altogether.

The reader will find that our analysis of the reforms has required us to examine them not only as legal abstractions, as pronouncements on economic policy by officials and government bodies, but as specific developments, of a social and political as well as economic character, whose details reveal the direction in which they have been moving. Thus, in the series of articles appearing in Part II of this book, we paid a great deal of attention to the national question. An upsurge of severe national conflicts swept through many areas of the USSR soon after the reforms were introduced. At the time of these struggles in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, as well as the Baltic states (which must be treated separately), we showed how they were inextricably connected to the social consequences of the economic reforms. However, the Gorbachev leadership attributed them to the machinations of local authorities resistant to perestroika, making light of what can only be seen as a most ominous phenomenon fraught with dangers for the future of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Without repeating here our analysis of these events, which appears later in this book, we do want to draw the reader’s attention to comments in the youth paper Komsomolskaya Pravda regarding widespread fighting in Kazakhstan in June 1989 which appears to have caused some loss of life. We feel that this brief extract fully confirms our view of the problem, which is that the consequences of the reforms fall most heavily on those areas of the USSR which were less developed at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution but which – until the reforms – had been advancing due to a broad “affirmative action” program made possible by the revolutionary internationalism of the Bolshevik Revolution and later by nationwide centralized planning. (The attitude of the imperialist bourgeoisie towards these attempts by earlier Soviet governments to raise the level of the less developed republics has been, of course, just as hostile as it is to affirmative action here.)

According to the youth paper, the fighting in the Kazakh city of Novyy Uzen, near the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, began when young people at a dance, many of them unemployed, began arguing about various economic shortages and then set off through the town, turning over newsstands and setting fire to cars. “The young people were demanding an end to all rationing systems and to close down cooperatives, which, in their view, are the main culprits in the rise in prices and the shortages of foodstuffs,” said Komsomolskaya Pravda.² “Special discontent was expressed about unequal social positions and salaries,” the report said.

The cooperatives are a direct product of the reforms. They are new, privately owned ventures that have netted big profits for a growing number of entrepreneurs at a time when there is increasing resentment from the mass of the population over the ill effects of rising prices and unemployment, both recent phenomena in the USSR.

There is another development which we believe illustrates the direction in which the reforms are moving. That is the way in which these economic changes translate into politics. They have brought about a significant shift in the political weight of the different class groups in Soviet society, most importantly the proletariat.

As we have reiterated throughout this book, glasnost or the new policy of openness is unassailable as against reliance on arbitrary methods and repression. These latter run against the grain of the spirit of Bolshevik debate in the resolution of political issues, which had been the norm during Lenin’s lifetime. In those early years, even during the worst days of the Civil War and imperialist intervention, the widest latitude was afforded for political discussion and debate. It was really only when the bourgeoisie resorted to terror that this was modified. The revival of socialist democracy, even on a limited level, has quite exploded the view long popular in the West that the USSR was a hopelessly self-perpetuating totalitarian society.

However, it must be acknowledged that at this time the political opening has favored and been taken advantage of by the more privileged sectors, many of whom lean in a bourgeois direction. The accompanying chart (page xiv) compares the composition of the newly elected Supreme Soviet in 1989 to that of 1984. The most striking change occurred in the percentage of deputies who are workers, collective farmers and office employees. This dropped from 45.9% of the 1984 Supreme Soviet to only 23.1% of the same body in 1989! The chart was published in Izvestia on May 6, 1989, along with an accompanying article which shows that while the workers have been set back, they are not taking it lying down: “There are slightly [!] fewer worker- and peasant-Deputies in the Congress than there were in the 1984 Supreme Soviet. `The workers have now realized that they were deceived,’ a district Party committee secretary said at a meeting of the Bureau of the Odessa Province Party Committee (Sovetskaya kultura, April 18, 1989), and he is far from alone in trying to sharpen the feeling among rank-and-file working people that they have been socially wounded and to direct this feeling against the intelligentsia, which allegedly took advantage of the `free play of forces’ for its own interests.” ³

At the time of the Russian Revolution, although the proletariat was only a minority of the population, it played the leading dynamic role in reshaping society, in alliance with the peasantry. Its political weight was expressed through the Communist Party and the Soviets, where its influence was enormous. Even later, in the time of the great purges, the growing numerical strength and political weight of the workers was reflected in the composition of the Soviets. Until this recent election, as the Izvestia article acknowledges, the nominations to the Supreme Soviet were ” `in accordance with a schedule of allocations’ that retained the sex, age-group, social, occupational, Party, etc., structure of the entire Supreme Soviet in proportion that the architects of that Supreme Soviet considered the most suitable and that more or less correlated (although, needless to say, did not coincide) with the makeup of the country’s active population.” ⁴ Even this was abandoned, however, at Gorbachev’s relentless urging. In the elections for the 19th Party Conference of June-July 1988 and in the 1989 Supreme Soviet elections, he vehemently stressed that the quotas should be dropped and only those who supported perestroika should be elected. Thus everyone with any kind of criticism, suggestion, demand or new idea must frame it within the terms of perestroika.

What does the phrase “in accordance with a schedule of allocations” mean? It is a truncated and watered-down version of what was often said hundreds of times in the early Leninist period, i.e., that the class character of the Soviet workers’ state had to be reflected in its representative institutions. The weight of the proletariat as the only class consistently socialist to the end, as well as the relative weight of its peasant allies, had to be fully reflected in the representative institutions if it was to exercise its class dictatorship in a world still dominated by imperialism abroad. That’s what Lenin meant by a Paris Commune-type state, which he so comprehensively analyzed in his “The State and Revolution.” ⁵ The Paris Commune of 1870-71, the most democratic form of the state ever achieved, was to be the model for the Soviet state. Engels, in his introduction to “The Civil War in France,” asked rhetorically, “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.” ⁶

Now, however, when the workers have become an absolute majority in the USSR, there is a substantial decline in their political weight and an increase in the number of bourgeois intellectuals and administrators in the Supreme Soviet, as the chart clearly shows. The current orientation is toward a bourgeois parliament, and away from the Paris Commune-type state. Clearly, the expectation that glasnost will open the way for greater socialist democracy in the true sense, that is, the participation of the masses in running the affairs of society, has yet to be realized (but will happen, as we show later).

The class character of the Soviet Union

The Gorbachev reforms rely so much on capitalist market mechanisms to stimulate the economy of the USSR that all this has inevitably raised once again the question of how to understand the social character of the Soviet Union. This is a subject that has preoccupied both friend and foe of the Russian Revolution, and has provoked commentary from the pedantic to the inane both inside and outside the USSR.

There have been at least three schools of thought on this question. Take, for instance, one of the earliest stalwarts, Winston Churchill, the illustrious prime minister of the British empire. No ivory-tower think-tank analyst was he. Churchill’s claim to fame as a political analyst rested mainly on his career as a cunning practitioner of the art of imperialist diplomacy. His analyses are given far more weight in bourgeois circles than those of any professor precisely because he seemed to combine both theory and practice. During the Second World War in particular, every word he uttered in public seemed to the bourgeoisie like so many pearls of wisdom. Even before the war, when some imperialists looked askance at his advocacy of “collective security” among the great powers, that is, an anti-fascist coalition against Germany and Italy that included the Soviet Union, his views were generally considered profound.

Bearing all this in mind, what are we to make of Churchill’s October 1939 speech in which he described the Soviet Union as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”?⁷ What was he trying to say about the USSR, and what was there in the given historical context that infused it with supreme importance?

An enigma, a riddle, a mystery. Roget’s Thesaurus tells us that these three terms are used fairly synonymously. Any one would well serve the purpose. What was Churchill trying to do by putting all three together without further explanation? Were this said by anybody else, it would have been regarded as tautological rubbish, lacking any glimmer of a sociological appraisal of the USSR. Indeed, what we have here is a bourgeois statesman squirming and attempting to exude profundity, but offering no clue as to the social character of the USSR.

At the time of his speech, Churchill had accumulated nearly 40 years of experience in imperialist diplomacy, 20 of them in venomous struggle against the Soviet Union. As British secretary of state for war and air (1919-1921), he had organized a coalition of 14 capitalist countries to invade the Soviet Union and try to overthrow the Bolshevik government.

To understand Churchill’s statement, one has to remember its historical context. For several years Britain, France and the United States had promoted the concept of collective security with the USSR against the Axis powers. Indeed, the Soviet Union was the leading and original proponent of this strategy. It had so vigorously promoted the concept of collective security against fascism that it would seem the policy was carved in granite. It was beginning to be regarded as a permanent feature of Soviet diplomacy.

Thus, when the Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, and Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, a bourgeois Radical Socialist representing France, decided to make a pact with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich in late September 1938, it seemed that the USSR had no choice but to accept it. By this diplomatic maneuver, Chamberlain and Daladier hoped to direct the aggressive thrust of Nazi Germany to the East, that is, into an attack on the Soviet Union, thus gaining breathing time for themselves. But the Soviet Union needed the breathing space for itself, and was less solicitous of its erstwhile democratic allies than had been expected. And so on August 22, 1939, the Soviet Union turned around and itself signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in order to gain time – essentially what the imperialist allies had wanted themselves. Ten days later World War II began. All of this is vitally important in understanding Churchill’s tautological nonsense in the face of an enormous international development.

But while Churchill’s analysis was faulty at best, his class attitude, his class loyalty, and that of all the imperialist politicians was unambiguous. It was mortal hatred of the Soviet Union and all the revolutionary movements, as well as of the working class at home and the hundreds of millions of oppressed who suffered the yoke of colonialism. He and his class unfailingly knew which side they were on. He showed it very clearly when as chancellor of the exchequer (1924-1929) he lowered the workers’ standard of living, and then, when the trade unions responded with the first and only great general strike in Britain in 1926, his rabid editorials in the British Gazette led the government assault that broke the strike.

While it might have been difficult for Churchill to arrive at a sociological appraisal, that never prevented him from taking a class position on the Soviet Union, on the British general strike, and above all on British colonialism. The bourgeoisie always know where they stand when it comes to the practical, day-to-day struggle. Their class bias in relationship to the socialist countries is merely an extension in foreign affairs of their position in the domain of domestic politics.

In the U.S., this can be seen without fail whenever there is a strike. There hasn’t been one instance where the capitalist class, as represented by its press, has ever taken the side of the workers against the bosses, or urged the bosses to agree to the demands of the workers. Literally not one. Occasionally they profess a treacherous neutrality, urging moderation on both sides, or they will criticize a particular company at a particular time, but never do they cross class lines, never do they go to the extent of actually supporting the workers against the bosses. The only strikes they have ever supported have been in Poland, and then they did it to weaken socialist construction, not to help the workers.

There is a second school of thought on the character of the Soviet state that goes by various names, but is best known as “bureaucratic collectivism,” a term that originated among some adherents to the broad leftist opposition to Stalin, notably Bruno Rizzi and Ciliga, and was eventually taken up in the U.S. by Max Shachtman. According to this view, the political power of the government, Party and managerial bureaucracy completely pervaded all avenues of Soviet society, allowing no movement in the direction of socialist democracy. The bureaucracy as they saw it had become a new ruling class in relation to the means of production. The followers of this view saw in the victories of the Chinese Revolution and others that followed merely confirmation of the tendency for bureaucratic collectivism to ultimately cover the face of the globe.

This political tendency began to disintegrate when the imperialist Allies adopted a posture of goodwill toward the USSR during World War II. However, once the Cold War began it was revived in the works of the Yugoslav ex-communist, Milovan Djilas, who wrote The New Class.

The recent trends in the direction of democratization in the USSR, even though limited as yet and without the independent participation of the working class in the political struggle, certainly invalidate the bureaucratic collectivist view. The prospect for proceeding to genuine proletarian democracy seems far more probable than any backsliding toward what the proponents of bureaucratic collectivism envisioned.

Bureaucratic collectivism saw as fundamental to the Soviet system those elements that in fact are part of the superstructure. Superstructural elements may in a given situation bolster or hamper the structure, as the case may be, but they are strictly derivative in character. Sometimes they serve as palliatives for reviving a decomposing social structure. At other times, they may be encrustations which paralyze a live and growing structure. In a broad and general way, history indicates that ultimately every new social structure which arises out of the needs of development of the productive forces will in time bring into correspondence its superstructure, or, failing that, will overthrow it.

Finally there is the Orwellian school, which contemplated a future in which humanity would be swallowed up by a totalitarian machine from which there can be no exit. George Orwell’s first satirical novel on this subject, Animal Farm, was written in 1946, the year of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech and the beginning of the Cold War. His gloomy outlook projecting a universal totalitarian regime was taken further in 1984, written in 1948. It was taken up as the portrait of the future by writers, politicians and bourgeois publicists of all sorts, as well as economists and sociologists. Now, 40 years later, when all the capitalist media have been full of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings, followed by the Bush-Gorbachev meetings, and have been showering applause on the new hero of peaceful coexistence, one can clearly see that the Orwellian view was a product of the Cold War and had little to do with the evolution of the USSR or an appraisal of its internal dynamics.

Today these views have generally been replaced by a new bourgeois theory that the USSR will inevitably yield to capitalist restoration. This outlook is a product of the present historical conjuncture just as much as the Orwellian view was a product of the Cold War period. Neither is an independent, dispassionate conclusion based upon a study of the internal dynamics of the Soviet Union as a new historical social formation. The current view of the USSR is being pushed by bourgeois economists and sociologists with a vigor and enthusiasm comparable to the critical acclaim accorded the Orwellian view during the period of the Cold War.

By now there have been scores of bourgeois studies of the Soviet reforms. Some give them high praise. Some may profess to show their shortcomings, but all, without exception, start with the built-in bias that a centralized, planned economy is invalid, economically inefficient and unworkable. Therefore, a return to the capitalist market is not only desirable but inevitable. Without this sacred predisposition, no analysis of the Soviet reforms is acceptable to the capitalist class. There are no studies whatsoever from the bourgeois side to show that a planned socialist economy is ever possible or desirable. Such a viewpoint must first be excluded before beginning any kind of analysis. This is true for all the “Sovietologists” – the Gerry Houghs, the Marshall Goldmans, the Ed Hewetts and other analysts of their ilk in capitalist academia.

The way the capitalist class explains the Gorbachev reforms, they are all but carved in stone. It would seem there’s no road open except to move further and faster until the full restoration of capitalism. This we believe to be wholly unfounded, both on the basis of historical evidence as well as on the inherent possibilities for a socialist regeneration which flow from the class structure of the Soviet Union.

The problem with so many bourgeois analysts of the Soviet Union is their utter inability to really and truly come to grips with the social character of the USSR as a brand-new, dynamic social system. Invariably they view it mechanically, often statically, but not dialectically. Lenin explained “the essence of dialectics” as “the splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts.”⁸ What the bourgeois analysts fail to see in the USSR is precisely this contradiction, between the revolutionary social structure of the USSR and its superstructure, which is all too frequently at variance with its class basis. There is a continuing struggle between structure and superstructure, now open, now hidden, often violent.

This contradiction has its origin in the fact that the legacy of czarism left the USSR with extremely low productive forces which were incapable of affording the USSR a socialist character immediately after the war. To a large extent, this has persisted for close to 70 years. Now, however, that the Soviet Union has achieved the rank of second only to the United States in its total productive forces, the contradiction which holds back its development is the urgent need to upgrade the social relations, to move forward in communizing the social relations especially in areas of the economy which have not sufficiently advanced from bourgeois forms. This cannot be resolved on the basis of a retreat to anachronistic, capitalist reforms that suit some privileged groupings.

History teaches us that no new society, no new social system ever vanishes without fully exhausting its possibilities. Furthermore, no new social system ever emerges without the ground being fully prepared for it. It is often said that the USSR might not have emerged as a revolutionary new social formation without the conjuncture of the imperialist war. It had always been affirmed that the Russian Revolution occurred as a break in the weakest link in the imperialist chain. But the fact that it has survived for over 70 years and has not been reabsorbed into the imperialist system, and that moreover the Russian Revolution has been followed by socialist revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Albania, Ethiopia and elsewhere – all this demonstrates that a new social system has emerged from the old. It thereby proves not only the inevitability of socialism but its viability as well, especially when one considers the continuing unparalleled historic struggle between the two systems.

That each of the succeeding governing groups of the USSR has been unable to achieve the stability, the correspondence between base and superstructure, which capitalism developed after several centuries (and then only among the very richest capitalist powers with immense overseas colonies), attests to the severe birth pangs which a newly emerged society must go through and upon whose body politic the birthmarks of the old society continue to persist.

The Soviet Union is a contradictory social phenomenon. An attempt to unravel it would show that this phenomenon has a revolutionary class structure, in that it overthrew the landlords, bankers and industrialists, but has had a superstructure, for most of the time the USSR has existed, which is relatively at variance with its class structure. The still fragile class structure is vulnerable in the face of the global capitalist economy.

In bourgeois society, the governing groups can change many times, from monarchists to fascists, from democrats to military dictators, but because the capitalist system is based upon the automatic forces of the capitalist market and private property, the system continues with its superprofits and with its poverty. The fact that one clique of administrators is ousted and another takes its place may somewhat retard capitalist development at one time or accelerate it at another, but the system continues under the domination of the same ruling class. For instance, when Donald Regan, a multi-millionaire from Wall Street, was forced to resign his post as Ronald Reagan’s White House chief of staff, he did not thereby cease to be a capitalist and owner of millions of dollars in cash, stocks and bonds. He did not lose his membership in the capitalist class, he merely lost his office in the governing group. Needless to say, the same was true of Nelson Rockefeller after his tenure as vice president.

It is otherwise with the Soviet government. From the point of view of administration, the Soviet state is in the hands of a vast bureaucracy. But the ownership of the means of production, meaning the bulk of the wealth of the country including its natural resources, is legally and unambiguously in the hands of the people – the working class, who make up the overwhelming majority of the population. Those in the governing group are merely the administrators of the state and state property. If Politburo members Gorbachev, Ligachev or Yakovlev were to lose their posts, they would not take with them the departments or ministries they headed. They have pensions due and even may have accumulated personal funds, but they do not own a part of the state as such. The ownership of the means of production in the hands of the working class is truly the most significant sociological factor in the appraisal of the USSR as a workers’ state, or socialist state as it is called in deference to the aspirations of the people.

Even the Gorbachev reforms, which tend to erode the power of the working class, would have to go a long, long way in order to invalidate the ownership of the means of production by the working class.

When capitalism established its class dictatorship, it not only assimilated the experiences of previous exploiting societies but also integrated some of the social strata of the previous ruling classes, even at the cost of serious concessions to them. These helped the new ruling bourgeoisie to exercise its class dictatorship over the exploited workers and oppressed peoples. Capitalism was not born full-blown. It took centuries of development to achieve a degree of stability as against the insurgent masses. But finally it could afford to have two or three different governing or warring groups expressed in political parties which managed the affairs of the bourgeois state. That is what bourgeois democracy has meant in the epoch of the bourgeoisie. In Britain, Holland, Belgium, France and also Japan, this democracy and stability, however precarious, was achieved by the super-exploitation of the hundreds of millions of colonial peoples, allowing some of the super-profits to reach the upper echelons of the working class in the metropolitan countries, the so-called labor aristocracy.

The bourgeois scholars of today are incapable of facing up to the real problems of historical appraisal, that is, charting the course of social evolution. Human history shows a universal sequence from communal life to slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism. They won’t dare deny that capitalism is the product of social evolution, but they want to stop there. They exclude even the possibility that capitalism is being replaced by a new social system which inevitably brings with it the ownership of the means of production by society, beginning with ownership in the hands of the working class.

The retreat by the Soviet leadership into bourgeois norms and capitalist innovations will unquestionably fail. They will become a danger to the social foundations of the USSR; the base (the workers’ state) will rebel against the superstructure (the political and economic bureaucracy) to bring the superstructure into conformity with its needs. We can already see evidence of this forthcoming development in what happened in China, where the reforms went as far as they could. The government in June 1989 had to say bluntly, “Thus far and no further.” A forceable solution was the only viable course.

   The lesson of China is of tremendous importance. The bourgeoisie can’t get over it. Not all their sanctions, all their bulldozing can change what happened. It’s the most significant lesson that has come out of the socialist camp in the last 30 years. It is too early to tell how far the new course in China will or can go, given the new effort at economic strangulation by the imperialist bourgeoisie. But it is impossible that this will not have reverberations in the USSR, and it is particularly important in the light of the renewal of normal relations between these two great socialist countries.

References

1. From July 1987 until August 1989, 23 articles on the Soviet reforms appeared in Workers World newspaper. This previously published material makes up Part II of this book.

2. Komsomolskaya Pravda of June 18, 1989, as quoted in the Washington Post of June 20, 1989.

3. “The Choice Has Been Made,” Izvestia, May 6, 1989, translated and excerpted in The Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Columbus, Ohio), Vol. 41, no. 18, p. 5.

4. Ibid.

5. V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. 25, pp. 381-492.

6. Frederick Engels, introduction to Karl Marx’s “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Vol. 2, p. 189.

7. Winston Churchill, “A World Broadcast” October 1, 1939 Winston Churchill War Speeches, 1939-45 Compiled by Charles Eade. (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1951), pp. 108-12.

8. V.I. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Vol. 38, p. 357.

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Recent news of people overrunning the presidential palace in Sri Lanka, followed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country, took Western media by storm. What is not reported is the ongoing police repression by the current president, Ranil Wickremesinghe. 

His latest attack took place on a peaceful protest Aug. 18 that was organized by the Inter-University Students Federation (IUSF) in Colombo, along with other progressive forces and artists. Witnesses say they were attacked unprovoked, and individuals were chased, beaten and arrested. Some of them were kidnapped by unidentified militia and held for hours in undisclosed locations. 

Many progressive organizations and union leaders have condemned the police repression and demanded immediate release of those who were arrested. They are also demanding an investigation into the incident. 

After Gotabaya’s resignation and exit, it was time for Sri Lankans to decide the next steps towards the future. There was hope of a real change in the country. However, this new hope was short-lived.

It turns out that when Gotabaya left the country, he had carefully planned to secure his family’s and his close allies’ future by handing over power to official opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. 

Even though Gotabaya is very unpopular at this time, he was elected by the majority of Sri Lanka’s radical Buddhist nationalists. His political party still holds a majority of seats in parliament. Furthermore, when it was time to select the new president, it was clear that the decision was carefully orchestrated in order to preserve the status quo. 

People’s demands disregarded

When the people of Sri Lanka came out to the streets, they demanded not only the exit of the president, they demanded the exit of all members of the parliament, who maintained the corrupt system cycle after cycle. Their demands were very clear: They wanted the current government gone and those who were responsible for the crises and corruption prosecuted. 

However, these demands were blatantly disregarded by President Wickremesinghe in attempting to form a national government with his own agenda, so he can continue to stay in power without calling for a general election. So far he’s done this by getting votes from the former president’s parliamentary allies, promising to secure their futures and thus avoid prosecution. 

But all progressive forces in Sri Lanka are demanding that Wickremesinghe should not stay in power, unelected for the remainder of the term, which is three more years. He must start the election process. 

Since the uprising began on July 9, there have been many protests by various progressive forces. These protests have been brutally suppressed by Sri Lankan police, who portray the protests as a fascist rampage similar to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

The current government in Sri Lanka is using the same methods that the U.S. often uses to track down and prosecute its political opponents. For example, they arrested the internationally recognized trade union leader Joseph Stalin and held him in custody for weeks. It was only after international pressure that his release was secured. 

Media ignores repression

To the surprise of many, these latest police repressions were not widely reported in the Western media. The news is not being prioritized by social media, and there is no mention by major outlets like CNN and BBC. The kind of media presence we saw leading up to the resignation of Gotabaya disappeared without explanation. 

Moreover, the current government, in attempting to appease the International Monetary Fund, is considering privatizing national assets in Sri Lanka. On top of that, the government has borrowed money from many pension/retirement funds that belong to the workers and trade unions and is now in the process of canceling 20% of those debts. This will significantly reduce retirement funds for people who worked their entire lives.  

After the Cuban Revolution, a journalist asked Fidel Castro why he didn’t kill the former dictator Batista. He explained that killing Batista wouldn’t change anything, since the capitalist class would simply replace him with another and the cycle would continue. “The only way we can change that is to change the system itself. And that’s what we did.” 

The uprising in Sri Lanka was not a revolution like in Cuba. It’s also true that Western forces took advantage of the situation and even manipulated the situation through social media. But no one can deny the fact that people rose and demanded change. 

It is the lack of real political organization that held them back. Progressive forces in Sri Lanka know this. They have been consistently speaking out and continue to reorganize the struggle in an attempt to build new leadership. 

Over the last 40 years, Sri Lanka lost generations of youth to the civil war and the rebellion during 1989-1991. Now, decades later, there is a whole generation of youth out of work and without any hope. They continue to come out against the repression. 

Therefore, there’s a real fear that the current government will resort to the brutal methods used during the repression of the 1989 rebellion. The silence of the Western media during this latest wave of repression is appalling.  

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan ended a year ago. For a year leading up to the U.S. troop pullout, Afghanistan’s national army had been surrendering its weapons to the Taliban. The process was transactional – the Taliban paid the soldiers to walk away. Objectively though, it revealed that the U.S. puppet regime did not have the loyalty of their army and did not have any support at all from the Afghan population. The occupation had not in any way, shape or form improved the lives of the people.

But imperialist punishment and torture of the people of Afghanistan didn’t end after the chaotic troop withdrawal. Economic starvation has simply replaced the expensive and pointless military presence.

The Biden administration seized $7 billion in funds belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank that had been held in British banks. They’ve already announced that half of the funds will be used to compensate families of those who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and Biden’s administration announced that there are no plans that the remainder will not be returned. 

During the 20 years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan relied on humanitarian aid and poverty was deep and wide. Under imperialist pressure, even this aid that had barely kept the government functioning was ended.

U.S. sabotaged progress

There was a moment in history when Afghanistan could have moved forward. The 1978 Saur Revolution that brought socialist leaders to power was an expression of a growing sentiment among youth and students in Kabul and other cities for socialism. 

The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) took over with support from a substantial part of the Afghan military. Immediately they worked to eliminate the crushing debt owed by agricultural workers to feudal landlords, and build up women’s rights and workers’ rights, along with other progressive initiatives. 

It was the CIA’s Operation Cyclone that turned the attempts at progress back. The spy agency recruited among the most reactionary fundamentalists from the region to build the mercenary mujahedeen army to overthrow the April Revolution. Later, in the 1990s, the Taliban emerged from among the mujahideen forces that had come to dominate Afghanistan. 

From the time that Operation Cyclone was launched in 1979, until the retreat of U.S., NATO, and mercenary troops last year, direct warfare, sabotage and economic pressure have kept any reemergence of the ideals of the Saur Revolution from happening. 

Desperation has replaced the hope of 1978. The consequences for the people of Afghanistan have been immense. 

Officially, at least 71,334 Afghan civilians and nearly 70,000 Afghan police and military were killed directly by the 20-year war launched after 9/11. About 7,500 U.S. soldiers, NATO troops, and mercenaries died. More than 50,000 Taliban were killed. Nearly 500 journalists and aid workers perished.

Today, after years of war and occupation and the imperialist theft of government funds after the withdrawal of troops, the country is in ruins. According to a United Nations report released in May, at least half of the Afghan population are facing acute hunger, and tens of thousands in Ghor province in the northeast of the country are “facing catastrophic levels of hunger.” 

The economic warfare has been exacerbated by a long period of drought that has wrecked what agricultural activity existed. Many people in Afghanistan have resorted to selling their organs to survive.

Execution of Al-Zawahiri

The troop withdrawal ordered by the Biden administration drew howls of condemnation. As U.S. troops beat a hasty retreat, thousands of people packed the airport. Many had collaborated with the U.S. occupation. Some had been U.S.-employed mercenaries. Others were desperately looking for an opportunity to escape the deep poverty. Amid the chaos, a suicide bomb killed some 200 people, including 13 U.S. troops.

Right-wing opponents and the mainstream capitalist press bashed the Biden administration. Among the many betrayals of campaign promises and myriad failures, the Afghan withdrawal contributed to the unpopularity of the administration.

The administration has cited the presence of Ayman Al-Zawahiri (the alleged leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan) in a Kabul safe house as proof that the Taliban government has failed to live up to commitments to not “harbor terrorists” as part of the Doha agreement. 

U.S. intelligence forces (now regularly carrying out military operations) executed Al-Zawahiri on July 31. The alleged breach of the Doha agreement is how the administration justifies its recent announcement that it will not release the Afghan government funds that were seized in spite of the widespread hunger.

But CNN reported that a U.S. intelligence assessment after the execution concluded that Al-Qaeda “has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan” since U.S. troops left the country last August. 

Al-Qaeda has often been a proxy for the Pentagon in Syria and in West Asia. The execution of Al-Zawahiri was nothing more than a cynical ploy by the administration to justify the continued domination of Afghanistan, to blunt the criticism over the withdrawal, and try to establish some credibility among the most vociferous warhawks and right-wingers in the U.S. 

Based on opening remarks given at the Socialist Unity Party national plenum on Aug. 13.

A discussion on the continuing danger of imperialist war must lead our political discussion.  

Nancy Pelosi’s reckless and provocative actions in Taiwan could have easily touched off a military response that would have had wide consequences. I think it’s accurate to say that the Communist Party of China’s careful and measured response prevented that. This does not change the dangerous threat of war and the key importance of Taiwan. 

The amoral servants of finance capital – who conspire in their think tanks and board rooms, or in the Pentagon war room and the White House – may well have differences about when and how to pull the trigger. But the one thing that remains constant is the necessity of capitalism to expand or die. They are servants to that.

China is now second to the U.S. in gross domestic product and that nagging fact keeps most of them up all night.

Generals over the White House

I wanted to preface further remarks with a quote from Sam Marcy’s “Generals Over the White House.” It’s good to review this pamphlet for both a historical perspective and as a guide to understanding the present.

“The military-industrial complex is an historically inevitable outgrowth of the inherent tendencies in capitalist production in the epoch of imperialism, that is, monopoly capitalism.

“Our view of the military differs fundamentally from the anti-militarism of the liberal and progressive elements in capitalist society. Their anti-militarism takes as its point of departure the split of political, social, diplomatic and military policy from economics. 

“It fails to recognize that the structure of capitalist society, that is, the relationship between the basic classes, between exploiter and exploited, determines the politics of the capitalist state, no matter which policy the governing group may pursue. This policy is inevitably imperialist and today inexorably serves the military-industrial complex, which, willy-nilly, is propelled in the direction of imperialist war.

“Yet, revolutionary Marxists do not view the inevitability of imperialist war fatalistically. There are deterrents, of course.”

Afghanistan withdrawal

We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The U.S. military exit was more than just a political debacle for the Biden administration, as important as this is in calculating the trajectory of this past year, which shifted to a U.S. confrontation with Russia and the destruction of Ukraine.

Military contractors and U.S. banks made a fortune during the 20-year war on Afghanistan. The war was financed to the tune of $2 trillion. The U.S. Treasury will be paying the banks until 2050. With interest added, they will shell out $6.5 trillion in costs. This is surplus value stolen from the working class both now and in the future.

The military-industrial complex profited off of the death of close to 150,000 Afghan people. U.S. withdrawal didn’t end the pillage, destruction or misery. The U.S. immediately seized $9.5 billion from Afghanistan’s central bank held in the New York Federal Reserve. It enacted debilitating sanctions and prompted widespread starvation.  

This scorched-earth misery has played out in U.S. proxy wars and occupation from Yemen to Palestine, from Iraq to Libya, and around the globe.

Donbass, Russia and Ukraine

We should be proud of the work of our comrades – particularly of John Parker, who literally went to the front line in Donbass and Russia. And equally of the analysis and coverage that Struggle-La Lucha published and the actions we organized.  

All of this took place under the most difficult avalanche of bourgeois propaganda and the capitulation of a significant segment of the anti-war movement.

This has to be attributed to comrade Melinda Butterfield, who may be credited as one of the very few communists in the United States who not only wrote about the war on Donbass consistently from the beginning in 2014, but also initiated and organized protests.

The NATO build-up has nothing to do with the so-called defense of Western Europe or Japan.  Its purpose is to force upon them planes, guns, missiles and weapons systems made in the U.S. and sold at extortionate profits.  

The European Union countries should keep in mind the words of Victoria Nuland, who is currently the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, the fourth-ranking position in the Department of State. At the time of her famous private conversation in 2014 she was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs when she proclaimed, “F*** the EU.”

That quip sums up the relationship that U.S. imperialism has with its junior imperialist powers.

This same scenario is played out on the continent of Africa. The U.S. exports weapons, whether outdated or not, exacerbates divisions, plots coups and operates AFRICOM – while China is building infrastructure.  

There is not enough time to go over the global debt crisis instigated by U.S. finance capital – as important as it is – that threatens most of the poorer countries around the world. We wrote about Sri Lanka, which is good, but a lot more can be said.  

All of this is inexorably bound to what is taking place inside the U.S.

Political and economic crisis in U.S.

Of course, the chickens come home to roost, as Malcolm X proclaimed. 

We need to shift to some of the current problems that we are facing inside the U.S.

The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the Department of Justice Investigation is continuing to dominate the news cycle. It will be important to go over all of this, especially in relation to the response of the FBI raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.  

The attempted coup on Jan. 6 is just the tip of the iceberg. The domestic counterpart to war and militarism is the growth of the violent far right.

The attack on abortion and transgender rights that is in full swing is just one of its symptoms. Every effort to defend these rights and arouse the working class is critical.    

In my opinion, it is likely that Donald Trump will run for president in 2024, short of some physical catastrophe for Trump or the possibility of his indictment, which could also spur another Jan. 6 type event prior to the elections.

This development may also subjectively push the Democratic Party establishment, particularly the Biden administration, toward open war with China – that is, if it doesn’t happen sooner. 

A fascist development, however you define it, will ultimately be aimed at the heart of the workers’ movement. This is particularly true if there is a deep capitalist crisis, perhaps even collapse, and a broad response by the working class takes shape. Monopoly capitalism is inclined to turn to fascism as an alternative to working-class revolution. 

This includes what is currently happening – the burgeoning development of young workers who are reviving the labor movement from Starbucks to Amazon and numerous other organizing efforts. 

The gloomy prospect of a deeper capitalist crisis is trumpeted everywhere. Anyone who looks at Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has to come away shaking their head at its hollowness. 

We would be badly remiss not to take into consideration that an acute catastrophe, i.e. a major hurricane, flood, fire or other event, could become a social crisis which would figure into the equation prior to the 2024 elections.

How can we organize the working class and develop an immediate program of action around the climate crisis? It could be helpful for us to look at how the Cubans handle this.

Put struggle for socialism on the agenda

I want to end by saying something about the World Marxist Political Parties Forum that took place on July 28, and the urgent need to put the struggle for socialism on the agenda.

This conference was hosted by the International Department of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee and President Miguel Diaz-Canel, and Chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov.

More than 300 representatives from over 100 Marxist political parties, left-wing parties and political organizations in 70-plus countries attended the forum online. Chinese President Xi Jinping opened the forum with a congratulatory letter.

It’s perhaps hopeful and interesting that this gathering is taking place in the context of the potential for world war. Whether this represents a realignment of Marxist forces or not, its message of socialist unity and affirmation of Marxism, especially from Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel, is welcome.

I wanted to read two quotes from his address:

First: “We are firmly convinced that socialism is the only way toward development with social justice, as a creative overcoming of capitalism, its unsustainable irrationality and the values that guide it.”

Second: “The reality of today’s world confirms that it is increasingly necessary and urgent for us Marxist parties to unite in order to face the great challenges that lie ahead. Only unity in diversity will assure us victory. Long live the emancipatory ideas of Marxism!”

The fight for revolutionary socialism must be high on our agenda.

Going back to Sam Marcy’s pamphlet: “Revolutionary Marxists do not view the inevitably of imperialist war fatalistically. There are deterrents.”

Class struggle is one of the most potent deterrents. And the fight for socialism, both practically and in theory, is the most important weapon of the working class.

In its Article 9, the Japanese constitution promulgated in 1946 under the U.S. post-war occupation renounces war as a means of resolving international disputes and proscribes maintaining land, sea and air forces. This article is widely supported by the Japanese people. To those in the countries and areas in Asia that Japan invaded and colonized during the Asia-Pacific War, Article 9 is a pledge by the Japanese people not to repeat colonial and military violence.

Yet, in the early period of the Cold War, the U.S. occupation changed its course from disarming Japan to turning it into a bulwark against the communist bloc. Around the time of the Korean War, Japan started to re-arm itself, first with the National Police Reserve, which soon became the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF). Despite the persistent argument by peace activists that the JSDF is a breach of Article 9, the Japanese government has won public support for the JSDF through decades of promoting the forces as the disaster rescue organization and an insistence on an “exclusively defense-oriented-policy.” The JSDF have now grown to be one of the world’s largest militaries.

In addition to this fundamental contradiction concerning the possession of an armed force, the Japanese constitution encounters a profound problem because Article 9 was never implemented on Okinawa, the southernmost archipelago of the country that was directly occupied by the U.S. military from 1945 to 1972. Even after Okinawa’s reversion to the Japanese administration, the U.S. military continued to be stationed in Okinawa, which consists of only 0.6% of the entire land mass of Japan yet hosts about 70% of the U.S. military facilities in Japan. These Okinawan facilities have catered to the various needs of the U.S. military in waging wars in Asia and beyond. Meanwhile, for more than seven decades, the U.S. military has violated the basic human rights, safety, and security of the people of Okinawa with virtual impunity. The U.S.-Japan military alliance has caused tremendous negative impacts on the people of the host community, including contamination of the soil and water by toxic materials, unbearable noise caused by military training, and sexual violence committed by the troops and other personnel, to name a few.

The upgraded RIMPAC 2022, with the largest-ever number of participating countries, reinforces the military ties between the United States and Japan. To this year’s RIMPAC 2022, Japan Maritime Self Defense Force is sending its largest vessel, JS Izumo (DDH-18), and other vessels and aircrafts including JS Takanami (DD 110), JS Kirisame (DD 104), P-1 maritime patrol aircraft, and others as well as about 1,000 troops. Although Izumo is categorized as a helicopter destroyer, it underwent modification in recent years to become effectively an aircraft carrier with increased interoperability with the U.S. military and where fighter jets such as F-35B of the U.S. Marine Corps can land and launch.

The JSDF units participating in RIMPAC 2022 are part of their annual Indo-Pacific deployment, which lasts for several months and involves other joint exercises and calls to various ports in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Under the strategy of “Open and Free Indo-Pacific,” a central framework of Japan’s defense policies laid out in the most recent Defense White Paper, this is part of the intensification of the military alliance against China led by the United States in the Indo-Pacific region.

This ideology of deterrence, involving the competitive exhibit of coercive power, is a deeply masculine and militarized idea. This patriarchal ideology and the structure of the security policies undermine the security and well-being of people, particularly those who are made vulnerable and deprived of their autonomy, as feminist peace activists/scholars have pointed out.

These JSDF activities have already gone beyond the “exclusively self-defense-oriented policy,” yet public discussion on the issue is hardly found in Japan. It is partly because there is very little media coverage, and also because the negative impacts of reinforced militarization disproportionately affect only a small portion of the entire Japanese population, most notably the people of Okinawa, which constitutes a racist aspect of the military security of Japan and the United States.

The Japanese government is also moving forward with its plan to construct a new, massive U.S. military facility in Henoko, which the people of Okinawa have long opposed and which even a conservative U.S. think tank believes won’t be completed in a decade. Last year, it was revealed that the JSDF and the U.S. military made a secret agreement in 2015 to station the JSDF’s amphibious unit at the Henoko facility. This planned “replacement” of the U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station has proven to be equipped with more functions than an air station to become a staging area for the display of U.S.-Japan deterrent power in the region around Taiwan against China.

The JSDF has been slowly and carefully increasing and consolidating its presence in Okinawa, which has required overcoming a deep-seated antagonism that goes back to the Japanese Imperial Army’s strategy during the last stage of the Asia-Pacific war to protect the Emperor in Tokyo by prolonging the ground battle in Okinawa. Now, the JDSF, as evident in the secret deal with the U.S. military, is gaining more of a foothold in and around Okinawa, particularly on the small remote islands of Miyakojima and Yonaguni, as it replaces the U.S. deterrent capabilities near the Taiwan Strait. Once again, Okinawa is being made the forefront of the military strategies of Japan and the United States.

The U.S. military stationed in Okinawa continues to be a source of insecurity for the people of Okinawa.  PFOS and PFAS, toxic materials with possible carcinogenicity used for fire extinguishers by the U.S military, were found outside the military bases and even in the drinking water. Troops have been arrested for drunk driving and crimes against the local population. Service members have committed sexual assaults. U.S. military aircraft drop their parts and other materials in civilian residential areas. Stray munitions have damaged civilian homes.

These are not accidents. Rather, they represent a structural problem of militarism, which prioritizes the military activities and values, and of a patriarchal and racialized defense alliance, which fans the flames of military competition. RIMPAC 2022 is exacerbating further the hostile environment in the region, imposing more burden on the people of Okinawa. Article 9 has become an even hollower provision of the constitution. RIMPAC is a giant step in the wrong direction for peace in the region.

—–

Kozue Akibayashi works with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Kyoto. Suzuyo Takazato works with Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence. This is part of a series produced between the Feminist Peace Initiative and Foreign Policy In Focus featuring critical voices on the militarization of the Asia-Pacific region. You can read the first essay in the series here as well as other articles on U.S.-NATO coordination, South Korea’s expanded military footprint, the U.S.-China arms race, the militarization of Hawai’i, and the view from Guam.

Source: FPIF

Joe Biden didn’t go to Arabia in July to beg for oil. That’s not the nature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

He didn’t go to Palestine to promote peace. The U.S.-Israeli relationship is based on endless war. And war is what Biden’s trip was about.

He went on a mission for his corporate masters. His job: To cement a military alliance of U.S.-armed states for a proxy war against Iran.

Since 1991, when the Soviet bloc fell, the U.S. has been bombing, invading and sanctioning energy-producing countries. That 30-year war is a desperate effort to regain the stranglehold U.S. corporations once held on the world’s energy reserves.

In the 1960s, most of the region’s oil was owned directly by Western monopolies. Half of the overseas profits of U.S. corporations came from Arab and Iranian oil. Revolutions in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran took much of that wealth out of their hands. They want it back.

War and destruction in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and now Ukraine saved U.S. oil monopolies and their bankers from financial disaster. In fact, it brought them their biggest profits ever. And it made the U.S. the world’s top oil and gas producer.

How to really tame inflation

If Biden seriously wanted to bring down fuel costs, he would order those monopolies to roll back prices. If he wanted to expand the global energy supply, he would lift sanctions on Iran, Syria and Venezuela, not to mention Russia.

If Biden wanted to promote peace in the “Middle East,” he would stop sending $3.8 billion worth of arms to the Israeli war machine every year. He would end massive U.S. arms sales to the Saudis and other royal tyrants of the Arabian peninsula. He would get U.S. troops out of Iraq and Syria, get the Sixth Fleet out of the Mediterranean, and the Fifth Fleet out of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

Those actions would also crush inflation. But taking them would mean standing up to Big Oil, the military-industrial complex and Wall Street. Biden didn’t go to the “Middle East” to oppose their interests. He went to serve them.

‘Normalization’ means war

In Jerusalem, Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid issued a “strategic partnership joint declaration.” Biden pledged the U.S. to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” and to continue the 2016 memorandum of understanding (MOU), signed by Barack Obama’s administration when Biden was vice president, that went into effect in 2018. That’s a $38 billion arms transfer to the Zionist state over 10 years. The U.S. provided an additional $1 billion over MOU levels in supplemental missile defense funding in 2021.

Biden promised the Israeli occupation regime even more money if it launches a war. And that another 10-year MOU would follow.

In 2021 Israel borrowed $2.5 billion from Citibank for arms purchases over and above the $38 billion. It used the next U.S. MOU as collateral.

The “Abraham Accords” is a military pact

Biden and Lapid also said they would “broaden and strengthen” the Trump regime’s vaunted Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and the U.S. That so-called “normalization” deal is in reality a war pact aimed at the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance and countries like Iran and Syria that don’t pay tribute to “Corporate America.”

Palestine, petrodollars and pipelines

There is another aspect to the accords: Washington and Wall Street want to use the region’s natural gas to battle Russia for Europe’s energy market. Since the 1980s the U.S. has been trying to take that market over. “Normalization” would allow gas and oil from the Gulf states to flow across occupied Palestine to the Mediterranean and Europe.

That’s on top of the natural gas U.S. oil giant Chevron already plunders from the stolen waters off Palestine. Chevron and other U.S. firms are exploring and drilling in Palestinian, Egyptian and Cypriot waters. Their Israeli agent now seeks to steal Lebanon’s gas as well.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops occupy Syria’s oil fields. And U.S.- Israeli military operations in Syria block a planned pipeline to bring natural gas from Iran to the Mediterranean.

In 2020, when the Abraham Accords were signed, Washington and Tel Aviv wanted Saudi Arabia and Qatar to openly join the alliance. The House of Saud has long collaborated covertly with the Zionist state, including in its war against Yemen.

Biden leaves, Isreal’s murder spree continues

On July 15, Biden left Jerusalem for Jeddah. That night Israel’s U.S.-made planes again rained U.S.-made missiles on the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza. Israeli troops resumed their murderous terror raids, cruel home demolitions and killings in towns and refugee camps on the West Bank.

Six West Bank Palestinians have been murdered by U.S.-paid Israeli troops in the 12 days since Biden’s visit. On July 29, Amjad Abu Alia, 16, was shot to death by occupation soldiers in the village of Al Mughir near Ramallah.

Within days of Biden’s visit, Israeli forces also launched new airstrikes on Syria, killing at least three people.

A summit of tribute states

In Saudi-ruled Arabia, Biden addressed a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The presidents of Egypt and Iraq and the king of Jordan attended. Along with Israel, those nine countries account for half of U.S. arms sales in the past decade.

The GCC is a gang of oil-rich monarchies that pay tribute to the United States. That is, they fork over their oil and gas revenues to U.S. oil companies, arms contractors and Wall Street banks.

Sixty percent of the private wealth of the GCC countries is invested in the U.S. Lockheed Martin opened a new production plant in 2021 to supply F16s to GCC states. Bahrain is the home base for the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Before the 1979 Revolution, the Shah made Iran a cash cow for Wall Street. When the new Islamic Republic of Iran stopped paying tribute, it became a target of Washington’s wrath.

In his speech to the GCC +3 (the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan), Biden warned of threats to the “rules-based international order” — the one under which the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia bomb and kill with impunity.

He lied that U.S. troops are no longer “engaged in combat” in the region. What are they doing in Iraq and Syria against those countries’ wishes?

There are 65,000 U.S. troops in Southwest Asia, including air and naval forces. There are 5,500 in Iraq and 600 in Syria, where they deny Syrians access to their own oil. They have no business being there.

Biden praised the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he helped engineer. He rambled about “energy security” and “regional cooperation” and “economic integration.”

Then he got to the main point: War. He invoked the oldest pretext in the imperialist box of lies: “The free flow of commerce.”

Biden claimed the U.S. had to defend “freedom of navigation” through the Bab el Mandeb and the Straits of Hormuz, which he implied is under threat by Iran. Not a word about the Saudi blockade of Yemen, Israeli attacks on Iranian tankers and U.S. sanctions on Iran, Syria, Eritrea and Yemen.

“We’ve established a new naval task force to work in partnership with many of your navies to help secure the Red Sea,” the president said. “That includes the first naval task force to use [un-manned] surface vessels and artificial intelligence technology to enhance marine — maritime awareness. … We’re also integrating air defenses and early warning systems to ensure that we can defeat airborne threats.”

He didn’t explain what business the U.S. Navy has “securing” the Red Sea, 7,413 miles from U.S. shores. But control of that waterway would allow the U.S. and Israel to choke off access to the Suez Canal.

Shirin Abu Akleh and Breonna Taylor

Palestinian journalist Shirin Abu Akleh could not report on Joe Biden’s visit to her occupied homeland. She was among 70 Palestinian civilians murdered by U.S-armed Israeli occupation troops so far this year.

Akleh was a U.S. citizen and reporter for Al Jazeera. On May 11 she was covering an Israeli army attack on the Jenin refugee camp. An Israeli sniper shot her in the head with a rifle made in Connecticut.

The murder weapon was one of hundreds of thousands of rifles the U.S. has given the Israeli army for free. The bullet that took her life was a standard U.S. Army issue.

Shirin Abu Akleh was a household name in the Arab world. The Israeli army wouldn’t assassinate a U.S. citizen working for an international news agency without approval from the top. The White House and State Department said they would demand “accountability.”

Biden forgot all about that when he landed in Israeli-occupied Palestine on July 13. Just like he forgot about Black medical worker Breonna Taylor, murdered in her bed on March 13, 2020, by Louisville cops.

On the campaign trail, Biden promised justice for Taylor. Since taking office he has refused to order the Justice Department to act against her killers in blue.

When Biden arrived in Palestine, he smiled and shook hands with rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, alternate PM Naftali Bennet, former PM Benjamin Netanyahu and war minister Benny Gantz. Gantz gave him a “video tour” of Israel’s “cutting edge” missile technology, developed with U.S. funds.

Biden accepted the settler state’s Medal of Honor from its president, Isaac Herzog. He refused to meet with the family of Shirin Abu Akleh.

Genocide in Yemen and a murder in Istanbul

On July 15, Biden flew to Saudi Arabia. Exiled Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi was not alive to write about it.

On October 2, 2019, the U.S. resident was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His fiancé waited for him on the sidewalk outside. He never came out.

A hit team sent by Saudi crown prince Muhamad Bin Salman awaited Khashoggi inside the consulate. They strangled him and dismembered his body with a bone saw.

Donald Trump, then President, protected the Saudi prince. “I wouldn’t let Congress touch him,” he bragged. Earlier that year Trump had also vetoed a bill restricting U.S. involvement in the genocidal Saudi war against Yemen.

Joe Biden said in his campaign speeches that he would make the Saudi kingdom a “pariah.” He also condemned the kingdom’s genocidal war against neighboring Yemen. “I would end the … sale of materials to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children,” the future President said.

The war on Yemen continues; so do U.S. arms sales

When Biden took office last year, he did declare a “freeze” on “offensive weapons sales” to the Saudi regime. But in November, the White House approved a $650 million sale of “defensive” air-to-air missiles and launchers to the kingdom.

On July 11, four days before Biden’s visit, U.S.-armed Saudi troops opened fire on a village in Yemen, killing 17 people. That same day Reuters reported that “the Biden administration is discussing the possible lifting of its ban on U.S. sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia.”

Although there is supposedly a truce in Yemen, the Saudi Navy’s U.S.-made ships continue to blockade the impoverished country, where 17 million people face starvation.

Eighty-five thousand Yemeni children have starved to death since the Saudi blockade began. Over 10,000 children have been killed by the Saudi Kingdom’s U.S.-made bombs.

The Trump regime imposed sanctions on Yemen in 2020. Biden has not lifted them.

There was talk that Biden would refuse to shake hands with Prince Bin Salman. When he arrived in Jeddah, he gave the butcher of Yemen a fist bump. The next day he warmly shook hands with his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz.

All U.S. presidents, without exception, serve the U.S. corporate war machine. The point of this article is not to expose Biden’s dishonesty and corruption. It’s to point out the real nature of the U.S.-Israel-Saudi-GCC relationship, which the corporate media conceals.

It is a bloody protection racket. It has brought trillions of dollars in profits to U.S. corporations over the past 75 years at a cost of millions of lives. It depends on endless war.

Since its creation on stolen Palestinian land, the racist state of Israel has acted as enforcer in this protection racket. Pentagon officials routinely call the Zionist state “our unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

The only solution: ‘U.S. Out’ and a ‘Free Palestine’

Peace and cooperation in Southwest Asia, the region they call the “Middle East,” demands that the U.S. get out, with all its troops, planes, warships, weapons and spies. That includes an end to the flow of arms and dollars to the Israeli occupation regime and arms sales to the GCC.

It demands that the settler state U.S. generals call “our unsinkable aircraft carrier” be replaced with a democratic state in all of Palestine. It demands that Palestinian refugees have the right to return and that every Palestinian has the right to live in peace and freedom in every corner of the land of Palestine.

The scenes of massive people’s protests that have forced Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee to Singapore have filled the news media. On July 20, Ranil Wickremesinghe, the former prime minister, was appointed interim president. 

This choice is unlikely to quell the masses of people protesting in the street who view Wickremesinghe as part of the previous government that is reviled for corruption and is held responsible for the recent economic crisis. 

Characterizing the revolt

It is difficult to have a full picture of the opposition from working-class parties and the left or at least to make immediate conclusions. For the most part, we are being fed a narrative from the capitalist press. 

So far the mass protests and upheaval have not changed social or property relations in Sri Lanka. Sections of the mass movement have demanded the formation of a representative people’s council that could act as a consultative body to parliament. It is unknown at this point whether or how far the Sri Lankan working class will be able to propel things forward under present conditions. 

But we should keep in mind the experiences and expectations of the Sri Lankan people who have had free education since 1944 and universal health care since 1951. It was the attempt to privatize education that pushed students and teachers into the streets in earlier protests. 

At the same time the danger of increased U.S. involvement and deeper privatization looms large. There is already evidence of attempts by U.S. imperialism to jockey and insert its interests into the equation.

Danger of the IMF

In June 2022, International Monetary Fund representatives made visits to Sri Lanka to dangle the potential of more loans to address the debt crisis. 

On July 22, the IMF is reported to hope to complete talks “as quickly as possible” according to Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. “The IMF will not lend into a situation where they deem their money will not be repaid,” according to John Hopkins Professor Deborah Brautigam. 

At the same time on July 22, Wickremesinghe, the newly appointed president, ordered security forces to raid an encampment occupying government grounds in Colombo. Soldiers in riot gear and assault rifles tore down the encampment, beat and arrested protesters.

It should be noted that there have been 16 IMF “agreements” since 1965.

Debt crisis lies – China & Russia

The U.S. capitalist press has been quick to trumpet the lie that the crisis in Sri Lanka was precipitated by loans from China for infrastructure development. But even in the fine print of these reports, they have to admit that the majority of debt in Sri Lanka is due to private Western loans, not China.

The truth is that only 10% of Sri Lankan debt is linked to Chinese development and investment. It has been the larger commercial borrowing in capital markets that has pushed Sri Lanka into debt. According to Advocata Institute, a Colombo-based think tank, BlackRock, Allianz, UBS, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Prudential, are listed in the top 20 bondholders.

Sri Lanka’s relationship with China is not new. At the end of the Korean War, Sri Lanka imported rice and exported rubber. Between 1956 and 1976, Sri Lanka was part of the Non-Aligned Movement and had close relations with China. 

Similar to blaming China, the “Russia is to blame” also found in the U.S.-dominated media is turning the truth upside down. It has been the U.S./NATO proxy war and the U.S. sanctions that have disrupted the flow of food and fuel to Sri Lanka. While mouthpieces for the U.S. military-industrial complex blame Russia for blocking grain shipments, it was the Ukrainian military that mined the Port of Odessa and refused to remove the mines that had blocked shipments on the Black Sea.

Is the U.S. involved more directly in Sri Lanka?

The National Endowment for Democracy, which specializes in regime-change operations, along with other Western NGOs are on the ground inside Sri Lanka and engaged in the recent protests. A Reuters report confirms this. It highlights the role of digital strategist Chameera Dedduwage who was a so-called volunteer at the NED. The report by Reuters details how much of this was organized on Facebook. 

Pentagon wants a ‘military logistics hub’

The U.S. sees strategically located Sri Lanka as a “military logistics hub” at the center of its “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Region Policy.” This alliance between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India is aimed at countering China’s Maritime Belt and Silk Road Initiative. 

It’s estimated that two-thirds of the world’s oil and half of all container shipments use the East-West shipping route. This major shipping route lies just 6 to 11 nautical miles from the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s eastern Trincomalee Port has a natural harbor that is one of the best in the world. 

It’s in this context that the Pentagon conspired and bludgeoned its way to obtain a status of forces agreement (SOFA) and an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA), formerly known as the NATO Mutual Support Act.

In the 2019 renewal, the Sri Lankan Parliament was never able to review the full document; not even Sri Lanka’s military leaders had viewed it before it was signed. There was much opposition from Sri Lankans who saw this as a threat to their sovereignty. The Colombo Telegraph headline says it all: “Draft SOFA Reveals American Plan to Turn Sri Lanka into a Military Colony.”

26-year civil war 

It is beyond the scope of this article to detail the ravages of the war between Sri Lanka’s government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The amount of suffering is deep and profound. 

Here again, the mainstream narrative has reduced the civil war to “ethnic differences,” ignoring the role of British colonialism’s divide and conquer policies that were key to its conquest. It also ignores the complicated class divisions and what has driven right-wing nationalism. Sri Lanka did not get independence until 1948. British colonialism began in 1796 in the lowlands of Sri Lanka and was completed in 1815.

In the case of the war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. had a duplicitous role which included supplying arms to both sides. Later the U.S. dangled military assistance in the war to the Colombo government in return for support for ASCA. 

When the war ended in 2009, Sri Lanka was viewed as a postwar economy ripe for plundering.

Not just corruption

The narrative that corruption, no matter how disastrous or real it may be, is the cause of the crisis is superficial and is uninformative on solutions. 

The severe capitalist debt crisis that broke out in a dramatic way in Sri Lanka is faced by developing countries across the globe including Ghana, Egypt, El Salvador, Tunisia, Pakistan, Nepal and many others. COVID-19 and U.S. sanctions exasperated the crisis and sped it up.

The result has been desperate poverty, scarcity of food – even an absence of food and fuel – and instability in governance regardless of whether local governments are good, bad or in-between. 

The crises are rooted in the dependence on imports by smaller countries in the dollar-dominated global market and the chokehold held by the imperialist banks.

In the case of Sri Lanka in particular, COVID-19 decimated the tourist industry that brought in hard currency along with remittances from Sri Lankan workers abroad who have lost jobs and income during the COVID crisis. 

The problems facing the Sri Lankan people are a result of the greater global economic crises of capitalism, which have intensified. The contraction of U.S. capitalism has had its political and military expression manifested in its dangerous and virulent anti-China campaign and the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia. 

The well-being of the people of Sri Lanka is of no consequence to U.S. imperialism. 

Struggle is at a crossroads

The struggle is at a crossroads: the challenge is whether it can move in the direction of changing class relations and break the imperialist stranglehold in the country or whether Sri Lanka’s elite turn toward more repression. 

The biggest immediate danger is most notably U.S. imperialism and its neoliberal policies which will deepen misery for the Sri Lankan people. This is why we must demand U.S. hands off Sri Lanka! The Sri Lankan people have a long history of defending their sovereignty regardless of the twists and turns, and we have confidence that they will resist U.S. imperialism no matter how difficult or long the journey.

The Atacama salt flat in northern Chile, which stretches 1,200 square miles, is the largest source of lithium in the world. We are standing on a bluff, looking over la gran fosa, the great pit that sits at the southern end of the flat, which is shielded from public view. It is where the major Chilean corporations have set up shop to extract lithium and export it—largely unprocessed—into the global market. “Do you know whose son-in-law is the lithium king of Chile?” asks Loreto, who took us to the salt flat to view these white sands from a vantage point. His response is not so shocking; it is Julio Ponce Lerou, who is the largest stakeholder in the lithium mining company Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) and the former son-in-law of the late military dictator Augusto Pinochet (who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990).

SQM and Albemarle, the two major Chilean mining companies, dominate the Atacama salt flat. It is impossible to get a permit to visit the southern end of the flats, where the large corporations have set up their operations. The companies extract the lithium by pumping brine from beneath the salt flat and then letting it evaporate for months before carrying out the extraction. “SQM steals our water to extract lithium,” said the former president of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Atacameño, Ana Ramos, in 2018, according to Deutsche Welle. The concentrate left behind after evaporation is turned into lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, which are then exported, and form key raw materials used in the production of lithium-ion batteries. About a third of the world’s lithium comes from Chile. According to Goldman Sachs, “lithium is the new gasoline.”

What necessity does

Ownership over the salt flat is contested among the state, Chile’s Indigenous communities, and private entities. But, as one member of the Lickanantay community—the Indigenous people who call the Atacama salt flat their home—told us, most of the owners of the land do not live in the area any longer. Juan, who raises horses and whose family were herders, tells us that people “live off the rents from the land. They do not care what happens to the area.” However, Juan knows that these rents are minuscule. “What they pay us as they mine our land is practically a tip,” he says. “It is nothing compared to what they earn. But it is still a lot of money.” For most Lickanantay people, Juan says, “lithium is not an issue because although it is known to damage the environment, it is providing [us with] money.” “Necessity drives people to do a lot of things,” he adds.

The negative environmental impacts of mining lithium have been widely studied by scientists and observed by tourist guides in Chile. Angelo, a guide, tells us that he worries about the water supplies getting polluted due to mining activities and the impact it has on the Atacama Desert animals, including the pink flamingos. “Every once in a while, we see a dead pink flamingo,” he says. Cristina Inés Dorador, who participated in writing Chile’s new proposed constitution, is a scientist with a PhD in natural sciences who has published about the decline of the pink flamingo population in the salt flat. However, Dorador has also said that new technologies could be used to prevent the widespread negative environmental impact. Ingrid Garcés Millas, who has a PhD in earth sciences from the University of Zaragoza and is a researcher at the University of Antofagasta, pointed out that the currently used of lithium extraction has led to the deterioration of the “ways of life of [the] Andean peoples” in an article for Le Monde Diplomatique. An example she provided was that while the underground water supply is used by the lithium industry, the “communities are supplied [with water] by cistern trucks.”

According to a report by MiningWatch Canada and the Environmental Justice Atlas, “to produce one ton of lithium in the salt flats in Atacama (Chile), 2,000 tons of water are evaporated, causing significant harm to both the availability of water and the quality of underground fresh water reserves.”

Meanwhile, there is no pressing debate in the Atacama region over the extraction of lithium. Most people seem to have accepted that lithium mining is here to stay. Among the activists, there are disagreements over how to approach the question of lithium. More radical activists believe that lithium should not be extracted, while others debate about who should benefit from the wealth generated by the mining of lithium. Still others, such as Angelo and Loreto, believe that Chile’s willingness to export the unprocessed lithium denies the country the possibility of exploring the benefits that might come from processing the metal within the country.

Natural commons

Before the presidential election in Chile in November 2021, we went to see Giorgio Jackson, now one of the closest advisers to Chile’s President Gabriel Boric. He told us then that Chile’s new government would look at the possibility of the nationalization of key resources, such as copper and lithium. This no longer seems to be on the government’s agenda, despite the expectation that the high prices for copper and lithium would pay for the much-needed pension reforms and the modernization of the country’s infrastructure.

The idea of nationalization was floated around the constitutional convention but did not find its way into the text of the proposed constitution, which will be put to vote on September 4. Instead, the proposed constitution builds on Article 19 of the 1980 constitution, which provides for “the right to live in an environment free from contamination.” The new constitution is expected to lay out the natural commons under which the state “has a special duty of custody, in order to ensure the rights of nature and the interest of present and future generations.”

In the waning days of the government of former President Sebastián Piñera, Chile’s Mining Ministry awarded two companies—BYD Chile SpA and Servicios y Operaciones Mineras del Norte S.A.—extraction rights for 80,000 tons of lithium each for 20 years. An appeals court in Copiapó heard a petition from the governor of Copiapó, Miguel Vargas, and from various Indigenous communities. In January 2022, the court suspended the deal; that suspension was upheld in June by the Supreme Court. This does not imply that Chile will roll back the exploitation of lithium by the major corporations, but it does suggest that a new appetite is developing against the widespread exploitation of natural resources in the country.

Until 2016, Chile produced 37 percent of the global market share of lithium, making the country the world’s largest producer of the metal. When Chile’s government increased royalty rates on the miners, several of them curtailed production and some increased their stake in Argentina (SQM, for instance, entered a joint venture with Lithium Americas Corporation to work on a project in Argentina). Chile is behind Australia in terms of lithium production in the world market presently, falling from 37 percent in 2016 to 29 percent in 2019 (with an expectation that Chile’s share will fall further to 17 percent by 2030).

Juan’s observation that “necessity drives people to do a lot of things” captures the mood among the Atacameños. The needs of the people of the region seem to only come after the needs of the large corporations. Relatives of the old dictators accumulate wealth off of the land, while the owners of the land—out of necessity—sell their land for a propina, a tip.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Taroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020). She is a member of the coordinating committee of Argos: International Observatory on Migration and Human Rights and is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación.

In the last 20 years, Panama has shown macroeconomic figures that the neoliberals love, in particular a sustained growth of the GDP based on private accumulation as a result of the reversion of the canal to Panamanian sovereignty.

But the numbers that make neoliberals happy hide the reality that this country, before the pandemia (2018), was already considered by the World Bank as one of the most unequal in Latin America and the world. According to the ECLAC, as of 2018, twenty percent of the population was below the poverty line, and 10% below the extreme poverty line. All this spurred on by a precariousness of employment that has been going on for 40 years, in which informality exceeded forty percent.

All of which got worse in 2020, due to the economic effects of the pandemia. Private sector wage earners, as of 2019, were 873,750 people, of whom only 30% kept their jobs in the midst of the pandemia; 37% were fired; and 33% (284 thousand) went into a legal limbo called “suspended contracts”. A high percentage of which were reactivated, to be immediately laid off in 2021.

Under these circumstances we can understand the degree of discontent of the Panamanian population with the inflation of the fuel, food and medicines’ prices.

Despite the fact that in Panama inflation does not reach extraordinary figures (like in Venezuela or Argentina), and in June 2022 it reached 5.2% compared to the previous year, this increase in prices drives families to despair given the job and salary insecurity.

The Chamber of Commerce demands that the government contain public spending, along layoffs and austerity. The government of Laurentino Cortizo, without admitting the high degree of corruption that corrodes it, has accepted part of the business sector argument and has decided to contain spending with a 10% reduction in the state payroll, which could mean the dismissal of up to 27,000 employees, which would add to the already serious employment crisis.

On the contrary, popular organizations, such as Polo Ciudadano, and the most advanced unions, have pointed out that the central problem of the public administration and the lack of resources necessary to cover social spending lies in the high tax evasion to which is added the policy of exonerations that are made to the main areas of the economy. The problem is not subsidies to the poor but subsidies to the rich.

The economist Juan Jované has estimated that tax evasion in Panama, in the decade from 2009 to 2019, totals about 46 billion dollars. This process of unpunished evasion has been growing from an average of 3,000 million dollars per year to reach 6 billion in 2019, where it is estimated to remain.

Add to this the policy of tax exemptions and you see a paradise for big business and hell for the working classes. What’s more, the reduction in fuels that is being demanded will become a subsidy for the monopolies that control their importation and distribution, without any control over excessive profits.

The historical task is: the construction of a popular and anti-neoliberal alternative political project. That is why the underlying debate is between two national projects:

1. on the one hand, what is proposed by business associations and traditional parties, who only talk about corruption without modifying the social and economic structure of the country, but to impose an austerity that the working class will pay for;
2. on the other hand, what the popular movement proposes are measures that solve the underlying structural problem, starting with a progressive tax reform in which those who earn the most pay more taxes and that tax evasion is ended and penalized, to begin with. Changing the economic model requires changing the oligarchic and corrupt political regime through a new Constituent Assembly.

Dr. Olmedo Beluche is a Panamanian sociologist, professor in the University of Panamá and member of the political organization Polo Ciudadano.

New York ― A terrible heat wave didn’t stop a hundred people from demonstrating in front of the Philippines mission to the U.N. on July 24. Filipinos, Filipino-Americans and their supporters were protesting the newly installed regime of President Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos, Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte.

Marcos is a son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who instituted martial law in 1972. Thousands of people were killed and at least 70,000 jailed during the 14-year long martial-law era that was blessed by four U.S. presidents.

Sara Duterte is the daughter of outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte, whose mis-named “war on drugs” involved thousands killed by police and army units.

The Sunday protest on Fifth Avenue was called by the Northeast Coalition to Advance Genuine Democracy in the Philippines. In a leaflet that was handed out, the coalition raised the following issues:

• The questionable results of the May 2022 elections that included faulty voting machines along with cases of vote-buying, violence and disenfranchisement of voters. The elections were held after decades of lies that covered up the crimes of the bloody Marcos dictatorship. These crimes include the looting of billions of dollars, some of which the Marcos family still controls. Much of the loot must have been siphoned off by U.S. banks and the greasy fingers of U.S. power brokers.
• The continuing economic crisis that includes a tenth of Filipino citizens having to work in other countries. Their remittances keep millions of Filipinos alive. New York City hospitals would collapse without Filipino and Haitian workers. Poorly paid Filipino sailors keep thousands of ships on the oceans operating.
• The humanitarian crisis that has led to murders committed by Philippine police and military. One of the signs at Sunday’s protest was “activism is not terrorism.” Among those assassinated have been peasants, workers, union organizers, teachers, journalists and LGBTQ2S activists. Police and army officials slander the victims by claiming they were terrorists. “Red-tagging” ― that is, labeling people as communists ― is used as an excuse to murder.

A representative of the women’s organization Gabriela spoke of the arrest and disappearance of four women activists in the last two months: labor organizers Elizabeth “Loi” Magbanua and Alipio “Ador” Juat and land rights activists Elena Cortez Pampoza and Elgene Mungcal.

People’s agenda for change

Many Filipino organizations have come together to support the new coalition including the Malaya Movement; Gabriela, National Alliance of Women and BAYAN-USA. Also supporting the rally was the International League for Peoples’ Struggle, an anti-imperialist alliance.

A banner said “prosecute Duterte, justice and accountability for the Filipino people.” One of the signs read “Oust Marcos.”

On the same day in Quezon City, the Philippine capital, thousands of people demonstrated against the Marcos-Duterte regime.

The new coalition along with other Filipinos has put forward a 9 point People’s Agenda for Change in the Philippines. The items include regulating prices; reviving agriculture; enacting land reform and developing national industrialization; fighting disinformation while promoting freedom of expression; free health care and social services; and ensuring environmental protection.

For more information on the North East Coalition contact: linktr.ee/NE4DemocracyPH

The rally was closed by Nina Macapinlac representing Bayan USA. After she spoke, protesters stomped to pieces painted cardboard boxes representing social injustices in the Philippines. 

Read the fiery speech by Nina Macapinlac here.