Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end…”

By Stuart Jeffries, Guardian (UK)
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Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it’s 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. “The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation,” says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. “Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today’s.”

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There’s even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital’s renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist’s fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn’t airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was “unsuitable” and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he’s alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You’d think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers’ Party. It’s an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. “The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we’re in now,” Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism’s relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn’t this all a delusion?

Aren’t Marx’s venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple’s reputation for innovation? Isn’t the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: “The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today’s popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there’s a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people.”

That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. “The point is that younger people weren’t around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union,” she says. “We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we’re going through now. Think of what’s happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn’t supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation.”

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism’s renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. “It’s going to be the first time I’ll have spoken on Marxism,” she says nervously. But what’s the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers’ struggles today? “Not at all!” she replies. “What’s happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them.” Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro’s 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year’s riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government’s cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He’s on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. “There isn’t going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people,” he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. “He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it.”

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. “I think that’s the model,” he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he’s not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour’s February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to “Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Let a young man dream.

What’s striking about Jones’s literary success is that it’s premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels’s analysis of industrial society. “If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class,” says Jones. “But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that ‘We’re all in this together’ is offensive and ludicrous. It’s impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we’re all middle class. This government’s reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

“It’s an open class war,” he says. “Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you’re accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way.”

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that “one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that’s to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?”

There’s another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we’re enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between “use value” and “exchange value”.

What’s the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. “It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people.”

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on “the new communism” for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: “A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

“The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture,” wrote Johnson. “Tempting as it is, we can’t afford to just shake our heads and pass on by.”

That’s the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism”.

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? “It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Meeting House London, 5-9 July. Further information: marxismfestival.org.uk
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stuart Jeffries was born in Wolverhampton in 1962.  Stuart started his journalistic career as a cub reporter at the Birmingham Post and Mail in 1985. In 1987, he moved to the Hampstead and Highgate Express, where he had many duties, chief among which was interviewing Hampstead lady novelists, which he liked a lot. In 1990, he started work for the Guardian, where he has remained ever since, been very happy and never used a pseudonym. He has been a subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor, Paris correspondent and is now a feature writer and columnist. He lives in north London with his partner and five month old daughter.

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Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG

 

The announcement that the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsi won Egypt’s presidential election has been widely hailed as a turning point in the country’s history. The international media has described Morsi as, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, Egypt’s “first freely elected president.”

Egypt’s own press was even more euphoric, with the daily Al-Shorouk carrying the banner headline, “Morsi president on orders from the people: The revolution reaches the presidential palace.”

These claims turn reality on its head. Egypt’s workers, students and oppressed masses cannot afford to lend the slightest credence to such fabrications.

It is now nearly 17 months since mass demonstrations and, above all, a widening wave of mass strikes forced out Egypt’s US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak. This eruption of revolutionary struggle was a high point of the response of the international working class to the assault on its jobs, living standards and basic rights carried out in the wake of the worldwide financial meltdown of September 2008.

Egyptian workers rose up seeking an end to conditions of poverty, exploitation, social inequality and political repression. They fought heroically against the Mubarak regime’s security forces and thugs—armed and backed by US imperialism—sacrificing some 1,000 martyrs in the course of the struggle that culminated in Mubarak’s ouster on February 11, 2011.

Nearly a year-and-a-half later, however, none of the demands of Egyptian workers for improved living standards, jobs, social equality and democracy have been met. Instead, the repressive capitalist state apparatus and the domination of the country by imperialism remain intact, minus the odious figure of Mubarak himself, who was recently transferred from Tora Prison to a Cairo hospital.

The installation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi in the presidential palace does not change this reality. It is the end result not of a “free and fair” election, but a vote that was held under conditions of military rule and boycotted by half the registered voters, followed by a sordid backroom deal between the right-wing Islamist party and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) military junta.

In the midst of the run-off between Morsi and his opponent, the former Air Force commander and Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, the SCAF carried out a political coup, disbanding the Islamist-dominated parliament, arrogating to itself control over the writing of a new constitution, and clearing the way for a new round of repression and torture by decreeing the right of the military and state intelligence agencies to arrest civilians. It issued a further constitutional “addendum” assuming all legislative and budgetary powers of the disbanded parliament and formally establishing the complete autonomy of the armed forces from civilian control.

The decision to call the election for Morsi, rather than Shafik, one of the military’s own, followed intense negotiations between the military command and the Brotherhood that continued through the weekend. The precise terms arrived at in the course of these talks, held behind the backs of the Egyptian people, will become clearer in the days and weeks to come. One thing is certain: any deal worked out between the Brotherhood and the SCAF can only produce a counterrevolutionary government whose main aim will be the smashing of the revolutionary struggles of the working class.

That this is recognized within ruling circles in both Egypt and the imperialist centers was made clear as the Egyptian stock market registered its biggest one-day rise on record in the wake of the election announcement. The Wall Street Journal reported that US diplomats, who held “private talks” with the Brotherhood’s leadership and its economic team, said the organization’s “representatives have reassured the US by saying ‘all the right things on the economic side.’”

One of the immediate aims of the SCAF-Brotherhood regime is reaching an agreement with the International Monetary Fund on an emergency $3.2 billion loan. This will be tied to the implementation of so-called economic “reforms,” i.e., drastic austerity measures that will further degrade the conditions of life for the working class in a country where 40 percent of the population subsists on $2 or less a day.

It is vital that Egyptian workers and youth draw a balance sheet of the past year and a half and examine the political forces and programs that brought them from heroic strikes and mass struggles to the installation of the counterrevolutionary SCAF-Muslim Brotherhood regime. In particular, the closest examination is warranted of the role of the pseudo-left organizations, which despite calling themselves “revolutionary” and even “socialist,” represent not the strivings of the working class to put an end to capitalism, but those of more affluent sections of the middle class to carve out a greater role for themselves within the existing social and political setup.

Typifying this layer is the misnamed group Revolutionary Socialists (RS), which opposed the demand raised by workers for a “second revolution,” seeking instead to legitimize the lie that the SCAF military command was the vehicle of a “democratic transition.” In May of last year, the RS asserted that the SCAF “aims to reform the political and economic system, allowing it to become more democratic and less oppressive.”

Later, when popular opposition to the SCAF mounted in response to mass arrests and military trials of workers and youth, the RS promoted the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative to the generals, brushing aside the role of the Brotherhood in collaborating with the military regime. They did so in order to head off the development of an independent movement of the working class.

In the second round of the presidential election, the RS threw its support to the Brotherhood, claiming that a vote for Morsi was a vote against “counterrevolution” and “fascism.”

In an interview posted June 25 on socialistworker.org, the web site of the RS’s American counterpart, the International Socialist Organization, RS leader Mostafa Ali gives an indication of the illusions that his organization is attempting to promote about the Brotherhood, which he credits with stopping the military’s coup.

He poses a series of questions: “Will the Muslim Brotherhood leadership once again compromise with the SCAF? Will they betray the mass mobilization in the square? Will they accept the terms of the deal that has been set by the SCAF?”

In the interview, given on June 22, Ali suggests that the answer is no. The Brotherhood, he states, despite its “wavering and vacillation,” has “to draw a line in the sand in order to stop the coup.” Within two days, this assessment proved completely bankrupt.

The task of the “revolutionary left,” he continued, is to “build a united front of all revolutionary forces against the coup,” in which he clearly includes the Muslim Brotherhood and other bourgeois political forces. Within this “united front,” he states, “the Egyptian working class would be a significant part of a struggle that could combine both democratic political demands and economic demands in weeks to come.”

Thus, the aim of this so-called “left” party is to subordinate the working class to the bourgeois Muslim Brotherhood, which has in turn agreed to serve as a figurehead for the SCAF junta. This is a formula for binding the Egyptian workers hand and foot and delivering them to their mortal enemies.

The only way forward for the workers of Egypt lies in a decisive rejection of this type of counterrevolutionary petty-bourgeois politics. The unpostponable task is to organize a new revolutionary leadership based on an international socialist perspective to mobilize the independent strength of the working class in the struggle for power and the overthrow of capitalist rule. This means building an Egyptian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Bill Van Auken is a political columnist with the World Socialist Web Site, an organ of the Socialist Equality Party (Trotskyst).

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Shamus Cooke, Workers’ Compass
Thank you, Shamus.

The recent coup against Paraguay’s democratically elected president is not only a blow to democracy, but an attack against the working and poor population that supported and elected President Fernando Lugo, whom they see as a bulwark against the wealthy elite who’ve dominated the country for decades.

The U.S. mainstream media and politicians are not calling the events in Paraguay a coup, since the president is being “legally impeached” by the elite-dominated Paraguayan Congress. But as economist Mark Weisbrot explains in the Guardian:

The Congress of Paraguay is trying to oust the president, Fernando Lugo, by means of an impeachment proceeding for which he was given less than 24 hours to prepare and only two hours to present a defense. It appears that a decision to convict him has already been written…The main trigger for the impeachment is an armed clash between peasants fighting for land rights with police…But this violent confrontation is merely a pretext, as it is clear that the president had no responsibility for what happened. Nor have Lugo’s opponents presented any evidence for their charges in today’s “trial.” President Lugo proposed an investigation into the incident; the opposition was not interested, preferring their rigged judicial proceedings.

What was the real reason the right-wing Paraguay Senate wanted to expel their democratically elected president? Another article by the Guardian makes this clear:

The president was also tried on four other charges: that he improperly allowed leftist parties to hold a political meeting in an army base in 2009; that he allowed about 3,000 squatters [landless peasants] to illegally invade a large Brazilian-owned soybean farm; that his government failed to capture members of a [leftist] guerrilla group, the Paraguayan People’s Army… and that he signed an international [leftist] protocol without properly submitting it to congress for approval.

The article adds that the president’s former political allies were “…upset after he gave a majority of cabinet ministry posts to leftist allies, and handed a minority to the moderates…The political split had become sharply clear as Lugo publicly acknowledged recently that he would support leftist candidates in future elections.”

It’s obvious that the President’s real crimes are that he chose to ally himself more closely with Paraguay’s left, which in reality means the working and poor masses of the country, who, like other Latin American countries, choose socialism as their form of political expression.

Although Paraguay’s elite lost control of the presidency when Lugo was elected, they used their stranglehold over the Senate to reverse the gains made by Paraguay’s poor. This is similar to the situation in Egypt: when the old regime of the wealthy elite lost their president/dictator, they used their control of the judiciary in an attempt to reverse the gains of the revolution.

Is it fair to blame the Obama administration for the recent coup in Paraguay? Yes, but it takes an introductory lesson on U.S.-Latin American relations to understand why. Paraguay’s right wing — a tiny wealthy elite — has a long-standing relationship with the United States, which has backed dictatorships for decades in the country — a common pattern in most Latin American countries.

The United States promotes the interests of the wealthy of these mostly-poor countries, and in turn, these elite-run countries are obedient to the pro-corporate foreign policy of the United States (The Open Veins of Latin America is an excellent book that outlines the history).

Paraguay’s elite is incapable of acting so boldly without first consulting the United States, since neighboring countries are overwhelmingly hostile to such an act because they fear a U.S.-backed coup in their own countries.

Paraguay’s elite has only the military for internal support, which for decades has been funded and trained by the United States. President Lugo did not fully sever the U.S. military’s links to his country. According to Wikipedia, “The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) provides technical assistance and training to help modernize and professionalize the [Paraguay] military…”

In short, it is not remotely possible for Paraguay’s elite to act without assurance from the United States that it would continue to receive U.S. political and financial support; the elite now needs a steady flow of guns and tanks to defend itself from the poor of Paraguay.

The Latin American countries surrounding Paraguay denounced the events as they unfolded and made an emergency trip to the country in an attempt to stop them. What was the Obama administration’s response? Business Week explains:

As Paraguay’s Senate conducted the impeachment trial, the U.S. State Department had said that it was watching the situation closely.

“We understand that Paraguay’s Senate has voted to impeach President Lugo,” said Darla Jordan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs…“We urge all Paraguayans to act peacefully, with calm and responsibility, in the spirit of Paraguay’s democratic principles.”

Obama might as well have said: “We support the right-wing coup against the elected president of Paraguay.” Watching a crime against democracy happen — even if it is “watched closely” — and failing to denounce it makes one complicit in the act. The State Department’s carefully crafted words are meant to give implicit support to the new illegal regime in Paraguay.

Obama acted as he did because Lugo turned left, away from corporate interests, towards Paraguay’s poor. Lugo had also more closely aligned himself with regional governments which had worked towards economic independence from the United States. Most importantly perhaps is that, in 2009, President Lugo forbid the building of a planned U.S. military base in Paraguay.

What was the response of Paraguay’s working and poor people to their new dictatorship? They amassed outside of the Congress and were attacked by riot police and water cannons. It is unlikely that they will sit on their hands during this episode, since President Lugo had raised their hopes of having a more humane existence.

President Lugo has unfortunately given his opponents an advantage by accepting the rulings that he himself called a coup, allowing himself to be replaced by a Senate-appointed president. But Paraguay’s working and poor people will act with more boldness, in line with the social movements across Latin America that have struck heavy blows against the power of their wealthy elite.

President Obama’s devious actions towards Paraguay reaffirm which side of the wealth divide he stands on. His first coup in Honduras sparked the outrage of the entire hemisphere; this one will confirm to Latin Americans that neither Republicans nor Democrats care anything about democracy.

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By John Grant

The government and the Pentagon have launched a 13-year propaganda project to clean up the image of the Vietnam War. As President Obama preached at the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day, the war made us a better people. Vietnam veterans like myself disagree with that profoundly. The war was an historical debacle of immense proportion. Nothing has changed.

Vietnam, a story of virtually unmitigated disasters that we have inflicted on ourselves and even more on others.—Bernard Brodie, 1973
 

The Vietnamese won the Vietnam War by forcing the United States to abandon its intention to militarily sustain an artificially divided Vietnam. The history is clear: It was the United States, not the Vietnamese, who scotched the unifying elections agreed on for 1956 in the Geneva negotiations following the French rout at Dien Bien Phu. Why did the US undermine these elections? As Dwight Eisenhower said in his memoir, because everyone knew Ho Chi Minh was going to win in a landslide of the order of 80% of the population of Vietnam.

So much for Democracy.

“We can lose longer than you can win,” was how Ho described the Vietnamese strategy against the Americans. Later in the 1980s, a Vietnamese diplomat put it this way to Robert McNamara: “We knew you would leave because you could leave. We lived here; we couldn’t leave.”

The Vietnam War was finally over in 1975 when the North prevailed over the US proxy formulation known as South Vietnam, which then disappeared as a “nation,” as many thousands of our betrayed Vietnamese allies fled in small boats or were subjected to unpleasant internment camps and frontier development projects deep in the hostile jungles.

In a word, the Vietnam War was a debacle for everyone involved.

Now, we learn the United States government is planning a 13-year propaganda project to clean up the image of the Vietnam War in the minds of Americans. It’s called The Vietnam War Commemoration Project. President Obama officially launched the project on Memorial Day with a speech at the Vietnam Wall in Washington. The Project was established by Section 598 of the 604-page National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2008. It budgets $5 million a year.

“Some have called this war era a scar on our country,” Obama told the specially invited Vietnam veteran crowd at The Wall. “But here’s what I say. As any wound heals, the tissue around it becomes tougher, becomes stronger than before. And in this sense, finally, we might begin to see the true legacy of Vietnam. Because of Vietnam and our veterans, we now use American power smarter, we honor our military more, we take care of our veterans better. Because of the hard lessons of Vietnam, because of you, America is even stronger than before.”

Vietnam toughened us up, made us better human beings. I would submit the President is wrong on that score, that there are profound lessons we have failed to learn.

Phase One of the Commemoration Project goes through 2014 and “will focus on recruiting support and participation nationwide. There will inevitably be international, national, regional, state, and local events planned, but a focus will be on the hometown level, where the personal recognitions and thanks are most impactful. The target is to obtain 10,000 Commemorative Partners.” Phase Two, through 2017, will encourage these Partners to commit to two events a year. “The DoD Commemoration Office will develop and host a “Master Calendar’ to list all the events, reflecting tens of thousands of events across the nation, as we thank and honor our Vietnam veterans.” Phase Three, from 2017 to 2025, will focus on “sustainment” of the positive legacy established in Phases One and Two and will involve “targeted activities” as deemed necessary.

The planners of the Project decided the Vietnam War began in 1962, which makes 2012 the 50th Anniversary of the start of the war. Just that decision alone exhibits disingenuous calculation. Anyone who has read anything beyond a pop novelization of Rambo knows it’s impossible to understand US involvement in the Vietnam War unless one goes back at least to 1945 and the decision to succumb to Cold War hysteria and support the re-colonization of Vietnam by the French. When you understand how Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh soldiers fought side-by-side with US soldiers against the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam, when the Vichy French colonial garrisons were cowed by the Japanese, you begin to understand the profound betrayal at the root of the entire war.

The problem is that understanding is the last thing the Pentagon and the US Government want the American people to wrestle with. If President Obama’s launching language is any indication, the purpose of the Vietnam War Commemoration is to create a malleable and supportive populace for future military operations — especially under the new doctrine of focused killing with drones and special-ops units now being established around the world.

Everyone in Washington knows the post-World War Two behemoth United States faces an inevitable decline vis—vis former third world, colonial nations like China, India and Brazil. It’s also clear globalized actors like al Qaeda founded as a reaction against our international interventions are not static and will evolve with our changing tactics. The world is, thus, getting more and more frightening for Americans, especially those who insist on holding on to the good-old-days of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism.

It has to do with an insistence on living in a glorious western colonial past, a bubble that’s part historical fact and part illusion and that entails ignoring what the Buddhists call the fundamental impermanence of life or what the Greek Heraclitus meant when he said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Today we might say: sh*t happens and things change. But for an imperialist, these are subversive thoughts. Just the mention the word “imperialism” and people turn into Sergeant Schultz: “I see nah-thing.”

In our schools and institutions it’s unfortunate American citizens are rarely taught to understand historical events like the Vietnam War. History is subversive, and our leaders have all become corporate panderers who want what every other pandering leader in history has ever wanted: a compliant populace waving the flag and not asking questions. Thus we have the Vietnam War Commemoration Project.

John Ford’s America

I’m a cineaste, a subversive-sounding French word for film buff. Nothing dramatizes all this quite as perfectly as two iconic John Ford movies, in which the director, a Navy reserve admiral, employs John Wayne as a key player in the patriotic task of burying Truth in American popular history. John Wayne, of course, was key to the imagery that got us into Vietnam. Wayne even co-directed and starred in the 1968 patriotic clunker The Green Berets. For those who question the relevance of classic film to American political meta-narrative, one need only mention Ronald Reagan who rose to power by confusing the two realms.

The two Ford movies are Fort Apache in 1947 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962. The former is a cavalry and Indians story and the latter is a gunfighter and bad man story. Ford was an amazing director and both are excellent fiction films that reinforce Manifest Destiny and American cultural values — to the point of necessarily burying unpleasant truths and encouraging popular legends.

At the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor learns that dude lawyer Jimmy Stewart really didn’t shoot the bad gunman Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin. The shooting of Valance in a western town at night made Stewart famous and got him elected a US senator. The editor learns that gunfighter John Wayne knew Valance would kill his tenderfoot pal Stewart, so Wayne had dry-gulched Valance with a rifle from a nearby alley.

The question is, will the editor spill the beans and destroy good-guy Stewart’s senatorial career. In what is now an iconic line, the editor says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Both the official and popular histories of the Vietnam War are rife with this kind of slippage. The emotional emphasis on anti-war activists “spitting” on soldiers and the emphasis on the heroics of individual soldiers in Vietnam are just two examples. In both cases, the larger, historical realities are buried in favor of popularly endorsed and highly publicized narratives on an individual and personal level. The fact anti-war activists were actually opposing LBJ, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and the cruel and insidious war they and the institutions they controlled were determined to escalate is lost in the cynical, patriotic focus on individual heroism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am a 62-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a 19-year-old kid who has been studying US counter-insurgency war ever since. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I am a photographer and a writer — sometimes a video filmmaker. I have been a member of Veterans For Peace for 24 years. I think the economic reckoning we are living through, that has only just begun, makes it clear we need to re-evaluate who we are as a nation and ratchet down the imperial world policeman role and look after our own deteriorating nation’s problems. I like good writing, good film, good music and good times. I drink alcohol and smoke dope responsibly. I confess this because I think the Drug War is an abysmal failure. I’m a committed pragmatist who believes in the old line: My Country Right Or Wrong. The fact is, it’s wrong a lot of the time. And I’m sticking around.

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Por Fernando Avila I., MAPU
See critical addendum/ Ver apéndice crítico

El senador Patricio Walker ha declarado que “el Presidente Piñera fue claro y categórico al condenar la existencia de los presos de conciencia en Cuba y en pedir su libertad. Ojalá el gobierno de Bachelet hubiese tenido esa misma actitud” (El Mercurio, 21-03-2010), luego señaló que “condena las dictaduras de izquierda y de derecha”.

Walker en ambos casos está equivocado, en la primera desconsidera la afirmación de Bachelet, en su momento, en orden a que Cuba es una democracia diferente, si ella tiene esa idea lógicamente es atentar contra su “conciencia” demandarle algo respecto de lo cual Bachelet tiene un concepto distinto a Walker y Piñera.

Sin embargo, Bachelet, y luego Walker, tampoco tienen razón porque Cuba no es una democracia diferente, sino que es una dictadura distinta, tanto en su origen como en su quehacer al frente de su país, comparemos y veamos.

El dictador Batista huye de Cuba y con él sus “partidarios” de derecha. Tres formaciones políticas establecen y conforman el nuevo gobierno. Luego “en 1961, con el apoyo secreto de Washington, un comando anticastrista desembarcó en Bahía Cochinos, pero fue derrotado por las milicias revolucionarias”. Después de este hecho, sólo después, es proclamada la república socialista y los tres partidos deciden voluntariamente constituirse en un solo partido.

Pero hay más, el “apoyo” de Washington tenía en Cuba un largo precedente : “Cuba elaboró y promulgó su propia constitución republicana, a la cual el gobierno de los Estados Unidos impuso la llamada Enmienda Platt (1901), que le autorizaba a intervenir en los asuntos cubanos. Tomás Estrada Palma fue el primer presidente de la República (1902), y al término de su mandato los Estados Unidos hubieron de intervenir como lo harían frecuentemente hasta la abolición de la Enmienda Platt en 1934. Fulgencio Batista ocupó la presidencia de 1940 a 1944, y en 1952 efectuó un golpe militar para deponer al presidente Carlos Prío Socarrás” (todas las citas corresponden al Larousse Moderno, 1991, pág, 220, cursivas en el original).

Ahora bien, la dictadura de la derecha en Chile, que encabeza Augusto Pinochet, se entroniza por medio de un golpe militar contra un gobierno constitucional, elegido democráticamente por el pueblo.

No es en absoluto nuestra intención reabrir “heridas del pasado”, pero es necesario atenerse a los hechos, así, el senador Andrés Zaldívar ha declarado que “han estado y están contra toda dictadura”, pero es un hecho que el golpe de estado de 1973 y los primeros meses de la dictadura contaron con el apoyo formal del PDC y de la mayoría de sus miembros, fundados en su creencia (equivocada) de que Chile con el gobierno de Salvador Allende se encaminaba hacia una “dictadura marxista”. Sólo 13 destacados dirigentes DC declararon su oposición al golpe y a la recién instaurada dictadura.

Sin embargo, los porfiados hechos le dieron la razón a los 13. En efecto, al momento del golpe en Chile :

Todas estas constituyen diferencias esenciales en el origen y, especialmente, en el carácter de una y otra dictadura. En el plano económico y social ni hablar : mientras la dictadura en Cuba logra, en el marco de un país subdesarrollado, la mayor equidad en las condiciones de vida de su población, en Chile la dictadura conduce las cosas hacia la más alta inequidad y desigualdad de casi todo el continente.

Pero atengámonos a la cuestión principal que plantea Walker, los “presos políticos y/o de conciencia”. Sin siquiera hacerse cargo del hecho que el gobierno de Cuba sostiene que algunas de esas persona están presas por delitos comunes, la cuestión central es que ellas están encarceladas en virtud de las leyes cubanas y por resolución de las respectivas autoridades cubanas.

Entonces, podremos estar en desacuerdo con esas leyes, de igual modo que estamos en desacuerdo con algunas de nuestras propias leyes y disposiciones de la Constitución establecida por la dictadura (al punto que nuestro candidato planteó en la reciente campaña nueva constitución por medio de Asamblea Constituyente, con lo cual, de paso, no estuvimos de acuerdo), pero el hecho irrefutable es que las leyes en Cuba y en Chile son asunto de absoluta competencia de los cubanos y chilenos respectivamente.

Sólo atañe a las poblaciones de cada país el sistema político, las leyes e instituciones que los rigen y gobiernan, o la modificaciones que quieran establecer sobre ese tramado institucional, tal cual aconteció en nuestro país, respecto de la dictadura, a contar de la victoria en el plebiscito de 1988.

En este sentido, hasta aquí, nadie, ni lo más extremos adversarios del gobierno de Cuba han afirmado que la mayoría del pueblo cubano quiera cambiar su régimen, como sí se podía sostener con algunos años de anticipación respecto de la dictadura chilena. Todavía más, las imágenes televisivas muestran que el número de contra manifestantes de las “mujeres de blanco” son abrumadoramente mayoritarios, pues bien, en Chile, quienes nos manifestamos en las calles contra la dictadura nunca debimos a enfrentar a partidarios “civiles” del régimen, sí a las fuerzas represivas. Esto es una diferencia significativa que no se puede obviar de manera simplista.

Naturalmente cualquier persona o ente no gubernamental puede criticar lo que estime pertinente sobre cualquier país, pero otra cosa es para quienes tienen responsabilidades estatales. Así, ante los dichos del Presidente Piñera sobre Cuba, el senador Patricio Walker declara que “estas declaraciones las recibimos con mucha alegría”. Más aún, Walker señala que promovió 10 proyectos de acuerdo contra el gobierno de Cuba en la Cámara de Diputados y, ahora, se celebra de dos acuerdos adoptados por ambas cámaras.

Grave asunto por parte de ambos personeros, esto es nada menos que una injerencia estatal chilena sobre asuntos del estado cubano. Por este camino de la injerencia político-verbal se puede perfectamente, como ha ocurrido en ocasiones precedentes, llegar a la injerencia por la vía de las invasiones armadas o, al menos, prestándoles patrocinio

Todavía más, con contadísimas excepciones, la política exterior chilena se ha caracterizado por procurar mantener las mejores relaciones posibles con todos los países, independientemente de su régimen político y económico, y por su no injerencia en los asuntos internos de otros estados, condición indispensable para esas “mejores relaciones”.

Se ha dicho que desde la izquierda tenemos una postura ideológica respecto de Cuba, pues bien, aquí sólo se exponen hechos objetivos y concretos. También se ha dicho que tenemos un doble estándar, pero qué decir, entonces, de quienes no promueven ningún acuerdo para protestar ante el descubrimiento a fines del año pasado de una fosa común con cerca de 2.000 cadáveres de dirigentes sindicales y líderes campesinos asesinados por paramilitares y fuerzas especiales del ejército colombiano.

Qué decir del hecho denunciado por un analista político colombiano, en entrevista a CNN en español, de que la bancada de senadores narco y paramilitares se incrementó de 8 a 22, todos miembros de partidos que apoyan a Alvaro Uribe y, además, que éste vetó un proyecto de ley que impedía a políticos pro-narcos acceder al Congreso colombiano ?

Ahora, está acreditado que allí donde no hay hechos la CIA los inventa, tal como se constató con los argumentos fabricados para justificar la invasión a Iraq, y la mayoría de los medios de prensa internacional se hacen eco de esos montajes, esto es relevante a la hora de establecer comparaciones.

Así, a modo de síntesis, se pueden establecer las siguientes diferencias entre Cuba y la dictadura de Pinochet :

Fernando Avila I. es un analista político con el Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario (MAPU). El MAPU fue un partido político de izquierda chileno que se formó de la escisión de un sector rebelde de la Democracia Cristiana.
_______________________________________

APENDICE / ADDENDUM

PARTIDO DEMÓCRATA CRISTIANO
Provincia Santiago Oeste
Lo Prado – Cerro Navia – Quinta Normal
Lo Prado 25 de Marzo, 2010

DECLARACION PÚBLICA

La directiva provincial de Santiago Oeste del Partido Demócrata Cristiano, en conjunto con otros militantes, ante el bochornoso y mediático episodio provocado por los nuevos tres senadores DC, Rincón, Zaldívar y Walker en contra de Cuba, y en perjuicio de la identidad democratacristiana, manifestamos nuestro más absoluto rechazo a dicha actuación y repudiamos además que se intente representar al Partido Demócrata Cristiano en materias que no se les ha otorgado ninguna delegación.

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