Antifa or Antiwar: Leftist Exclusionism Against the Quest for Peace

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By DIANA JOHNSTONE • MAY 21, 2018
A crosspost with UNZ.com and Consortium News, because we all oppose imperialism, social injustice and war.

Wherein the always capable and lucid Johnstone tries to tease out the increasingly perverse Babylonian confusion relating to contemporary political taxonomy: left is left and right is right, or is it? Some things puzzle us, though. Like her enigmatic closing para. What does it really mean?

The War Party’s ultra-left wing uses different arguments to arrive at the same conclusions: Syria & Russia are enemies. Instead of practical solutions to real problems, they spread suspicion, distrust & enmity, argues Diana Johnstone.

By Diana Johnstone Special to Consortium News

CounterPunch has astonished many of its old fans by its current fundraising ad portraying the site as a prime target of Russia hostility. Under the slogan, “We have all the right enemies”, CP portrays itself as a brave little crew being blown off the water by an evil Russian warship out to eliminate “lefty scum.”

Ha Ha Ha, it’s all a joke of course. But it’s a joke that plays into the dangerous, current Russophobia promoted by Clintonite media, the deep state and the War Party. This is a reminder that Russophobia finds a variant in the writing of several prominent CounterPunch contributors.

Yes, CounterPunch continues to publish many good articles, but appears also to be paying its tribute to the establishment narrative.

Put on the defensive by the “fake news” assault against independent media, CP senior editor Jeffrey St Clair seemed to be shaken by Washington Post allegations that he had published articles by a “Russian troll” named Alice Donovan. St Clair never publicly questioned the FBI claim that the ephemeral plagiarist worked for the Kremlin, when she could as well have been planted by the FBI itself or some other agency, precisely in order to embarrass and intimidate the independent website.

The ‘Step Toward Fascism’

St. Clair: Co-founded CounterPunch

The anti-Russian attitude on CP is promoted mainly by the same writers who stigmatize the slightest suggestion of building a broad non-ideological antiwar movement as a step toward “fascism”. This leftist exclusionism goes against the traditions of the website founded by Alexander Cockburn and St Clair, and indeed, CounterPunch was fiercely attacked less than three years ago for its “red-brown”, or “QuerFront” tendencies.

The attack, originating on a German site, warned that leftists who publish on CounterPunch “are unwittingly helping to promote the agenda of the far right”. This article spelled out the Antifa doctrine:

“The idea of a red-brown alliance, or Querfront (German for ‘transversal front’), has been a recurrent motif in far-right thought over the past century. Craving the legitimacy that an alliance with progressive forces can provide, reactionaries seize on ostensibly shared positions, chief amongst them opposition to corrupt élites, to create the impression that progressives could benefit from making common cause with them.

"The exclusionists are less concerned about war with Russia than about the failure of “the left” to be sufficiently critical of Russia – as if a shortage of Russophobia were a real problem these days..."

“Querfront (also known as ‘third position’) propaganda can be highly seductive. Today’s (crypto)-fascist and other hard-right suitors, for example, focus on the commonplace left themes of opposition to war and corporate globalisation, the depredations of the ‘banksters’, civil liberties, and Palestinian solidarity.”

So, you genuine leftists, beware: if someone seems to agree with you, it may be a far righter out to ensnare you into her web.

The article gave advice on how to tell a QuerFront argument from a true leftist one:

“A serious left analysis, say, of US support for Israeli apartheid will start by looking at the documented record of US foreign policy as a whole”, whereas the red-brown, QuerFront third-positions position will say: “A foreign lobby has taken over the US government and media, and is forcing the US to act against ‘American interests’ and ‘American values’, and anyone who says otherwise is a Zionist infiltrator.”

So you mustn’t blame Zionists for Israel, it’s all Washington’s fault.

CounterPunch contributors singled out as dangerous right-wingers included Ralph Nader, Alison Weir, Ron Paul, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, Paul Craig Roberts and even Alexander Cockburn himself.

In his reply to the article, published on its website, St. Clair seemed to understand exactly where this was coming from.

Caity Gets Counter-Punched

Caitlin Johnstone: Counter-punched.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hus it was surprising when, last July, CounterPunch ran a whole series of articles attacking independent antiwar blogger Caitlin Johnstone (no relation) for some inconsequential remark about her willingness to join in opposing war even with male supremacist Mike Cernovich. The purists pounced on the incongruity of a hypothetical Caitlin-Cernovich alliance as an opportunity to ridicule the more general principle of a broad single-issue antiwar movement. For this minor heresy, Caitlin Johnstone was denied her right to respond on the site calling itself “the fearless voice of the left”.

On July 11, 2017, Yoav Litvin opened fire in an aggressive style that may have been fortified by his service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Exclusion is a habit one can learn in the IDF. It’s ours, you have no right to be here, get out! That goes for the occupied left territories too. They decide who can stay and who does not belong.

In an interview last year, Litvin prided himself on adopting “the positive aspect of Zionism,” which is “the image of a Jew who is a fighter.” As a result of Jewish experience of persecution, he said, “We can lead a fight with all our brothers and sisters in minority communities.”

Fight against whom? In order to accomplish fundamental change, one needs to build majorities. Jews leading a fight of minorities will go where? Into the dead end of identity politics?

On July 28, CounterPunch published an even more contemptuous piece in the anti-Caitlin series: “Enough Nonsense! The Left Does Not Collaborate with Fascists”, by Eric Draitser. The Draitser rhetorical pose was to claim to prefer being water-boarded rather than having to write about Caitlin’s “doltish” prose, but felt obliged to do so in order to stop the advance of fascism.

Still, he does not easily tire from coming back to the subject.

As moderator of CounterPunch Radio, Draitser has promoted himself as the voice of CP and thus as a leading authority on what is or is not “left”. His role as mentor was demonstrated on his hour-long April 19, 2018 podcast with CP editors St. Clair and Joshua Frank. Draitser set the tone by elaborately ridiculing those who profess to be afraid of World War III. As if nuclear war were anything to worry about! What nonsense, he implied, getting all three to chortle contemptuously at the mention of Caitlin Johnstone, noted for such absurd concerns.

The Hilarity of World War III

Draitser: WWIII a ‘fun conversation.’

Draitser dismissed the danger of World War III with his own original “class analysis”: since Russia and the United States are both ruled by Oligarchs, they have too much in common to reasonably want to throw nuclear missiles at each other. (In other words, what was precisely the Marxist view of imperialist war.) St. Clair hesitated at this, noting the prevalence of irrationality in high spheres. But Draitser dismissed this objection and forged ahead undisturbed, managing what he called a “fun conversation.”

The exclusionists are less concerned about war with Russia than about the failure of “the left” to be sufficiently critical of Russia – as if a shortage of Russophobia were a real problem these days. Shortly before the anti-Caitlin campaign, Litvin interviewed Draitser and their fellow anti-fascist watch dog, Portland State University geography instructor Alexander Reid Ross, who also publishes frequently onCounterPunch.

Draitser complained that: “You see a lot of leftist academics, intellectuals and activists who have in many ways abandoned a real class analysis in favor of a loosely defined politics of opposition. Within this mindset, everything that opposes the United States, Israel, the Saudis or the EU is automatically good and should be supported irrespective of its qualities.”

That simplistic dismissal of the antiwar “mindset” qualifies Draitser for his future place in mainstream media.

Ross’ Red-Brown Chaos

Reid Ross, went him one better. “I see a number of red-brown alliances forming today, particularly in the field of political geography. A number of far-right groups view the modern-day axis of Syria, Iran and Russia as a kind of international counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which has always been seen by fascist groups as a kind of nemesis led by the nations that defeated the Rome-Berlin axis in 1945.”

This is pure delirium. The nemesis that did the most to defeat the Rome-Berlin axis in 1945 was the Red Army. By conjuring up unidentified “far right groups”, Ross manages to identify Syria, Iran and Russia with the fascist Axis powers in World War II. In reality, NATO has been a magnet for attracting European fascists, from Italy, where they cooperated in clandestine “Gladio” operations to destroy the left, to Ukraine, where genuine fascists are in a “partnership for war” with NATO.

Most Americans have not been well educated in the complexities of modern history. In his Antifa hoodie, Ross can dazzle his audience with a plethora of unfamiliar facts strung together by extremely questionable analysis, unchallenged by genuine experts.

Reid Ross: Article pulled. (Photo European Graduate School.)

In the Litvin interview, both Draitser and Ross add their small bit to prevailing Western Russophobia by dwelling on Putin’s alleged support for European right-wing groups. Both stress the danger represented by Russian ambitions to establish a Eurasian empire, based on the ideology of Alexander Dugin.

Dugin is a religious reactionary, a tendency that may alarm Jews still haunted by Tsarist pogroms. They are also alarmed by Dugin’s devotion to the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, an ardent believer in Nazism and party member. This is ironic, since Heidegger has been the favorite of a whole line of post-World War II French philosophers, from Sartre to Foucault, considered to be “on the left”. This merely shows that philosophy can be a source of great confusion.

In an Intercept article last September, Ross was quoted as saying that, “Assad is a figure that is central to a realization of Eurasionism,” embodying the idea that, “Russia will lead the world out of a dark age of materialism and toward an ultranationalist rebirth of homogenous ethno-states federated under a heterogeneous spiritual empire.”

It’s hard to see what is so terrifying about such a vague aspiration, with so little chance of realization. But it does provide a new angle for condemning the Russian connection with Syria.

Ideological ‘Iron Curtain’

Ross went so far on March 9 in his vituperations, that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which first published his article on its “Hate Watch” site, felt obliged to withdraw it. The title perfectly echoes the QuerFrontaccusation earlier leveled against CounterPunch: “The Multipolar Spin: how fascists operationalize left-wing resentment.”

In this gem of guilt by association, Ross applied the “six degrees of separation” theory to show that people have been seen with the wrong people and thus must be red-brown. The long list of untouchables included Ray McGovern, Brian Becker, Global Research, Margaret Kimberly of Black Agenda Report, Daniel McAdams, “conspiracy theorist” Vanessa Beeley, and special focus on Max Blumenthal, guilty of having spoken favorably of a “multipolar world.”

The main problem with “multipolarism”, according to Ross, “may be that it supports not the emergence of Russia as a world power but the rise of the Kremlin’s authoritarian conservative political ideology.”

So, we may conclude, we need an ideological Iron Curtain to protect the “liberal leftist” West from Russian “authoritarian” conservatism.

Westernizers vs. Slavophiles

Russian relations with the West have historically been marked by ideological rivalry between Westernizers and Slavophiles. It is obvious that Dugin is no more than the latest prophet of Slavophilia, the idea that Christian Russia is a beacon of virtue to the world.

Historically, Westernizers in Russia have repeatedly gained influence and then lost out, because their overtures to the West were rebuffed on one pretext or another. (The British geopolitical tradition, based on the timeless dictum divide et impera, has traditionally favored policies to keep the continent divided) This merges easily with the Brzezinski doctrine of maintaining separation between Western Europe as a whole and Russia to maintain U.S. global hegemony.

Western rejection of Russia naturally favors a rise of the Slavophiles. It also obliges Russia to look to Eurasia rather than Western Europe. This is happening again.

Gorbachev: His dream.

Vladimir Putin is clearly in the Westernizing tradition. Not an ignorant buffoon like Yeltsin, ready to give away the shop to get a pat on the back from Bill. But rather someone who, as an intelligence agent (yes, KGB people learn a lot) lived in the West, spoke fluent German, and wanted Russia to have a dignified place in Europe – which was the dream of Gorbachev.

But this aspiration has been rudely rebuffed by the United States. Russians who yearned to be part of Europe have been disappointed, humiliated, and finally, angered. All their efforts at friendship have been met with increasingly outlandish portrayals of Russia as “the enemy”.

And yet despite everything, Putin persists in demonstrating his desire to work with Western partners, both by cutting back on military spending and again proposing to keep the pro-Western Dmitry Medvedev as Prime Minister.

If the West were really worried about Duginism, the remedy has always been obvious: improve relations with Putin.

Even Stalin did not really consider it Moscow’s job to convert Western Europe to communism, and it is certain that Putin has no illusion about converting his Western neighbors to Duginism. Russia is not out to change the West, but to make peace and do business, with whoever is willing.

The Russophobic exclusionists really constitute the ultra-left wing of the War Party, which uses different arguments to arrive at the same conclusions: Syria and Russia are enemies. They offer no practical solutions to any real problem, but spread suspicion, distrust and enmity. They discredit the very idea of joining with Russia in peaceful mediation between Israel and Iran, for example. The real thrust of this odd campaign is to minimize the danger of war with Iran, or of direct confrontation with Russia, as Netanyahu continues to drag the United States and its European sidekicks deeper into Middle East wars on behalf of Israel’s regional ambitions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diana Johnstone is a political writer, focusing primarily on European politics and Western foreign policy. She received a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota and was active in the movement against the Vietnam War. Johnstone was European editor of the U.S. weekly In These Times from 1979 to 1990, and continues to be a correspondent for the publication. She was press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. Her books include Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, CounterPunch Books (2016) and Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press (2002).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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MIKE FAULKNER: Musings on the state of the Left, Marxian dogmatism, and the meanderings of history

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. WE MUST BREAK THE CORPORATE MEDIA ABILITY TO MISLEAD.

A recent internal discussion among TGP editors, writers and friends, about the role of the Western left, its current state (dilapidated by constant systemic attacks, fifth columnists, and self-inflicted wounds), the role of Marxism, and possible tactics and strategies to stop the drift to complete corporate fascism and/or nuclear war, elicited many brilliant opinions which we hope to be able to edit properly and collate into a separate post at a later date. Meantime, we are pleased to present this statement by our London correspondent, historian and longtime activist Mike Faulkner. —Patrice Greanville

Karl Marx: One of the greatest political minds of all time. Hated by untold millions who never read a word of his writings.

3/14/18 1:45 PM, Mike Faulkner wrote:

I have followed much of this discussion with considerable interest but have refrained from commenting so far because I have not felt sure that anything I might have to say would be of any great value as a contribution to it. I am still not sure about it but I've decided to say something anyway. I have no intention of entering into polemics with anyone individually. I will simply set out my views on some of the issues, that in my view are relevant to these exchanges, that seem to me to be important. Some of what I have to say may not be related directly to what others have said. Although it may seem only tenuously relevant to the discussion, I'll open with the text of a letter I sent to The Guardian at the end of January, prompted by reviews and letters eulogizing Churchill, the movie Darkest Hour and the myths around Britain's 'heroic' part in defeating Germany in the second world war. I include it because it refers to some of my earliest memories and experiences that led me to the political convictions I have held since I was in my teens.

"I was born in London in June 1937. My earliest memories of life are of autumn 1940 and winter 1941

squatting in an Anderson shelter with my parents, my grandparents and baby sister listening to the sound of bombs falling around us.

In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, aged 18 but without the right to vote in elections, I was conscripted against my will into the armed forces. During basic training as part of bayonet practice, which involved emitting blood-curdling shrieks as we charged with fixed bayonets at hanging sacks filled with straw, our drill instructor told us to imaging we were stabbing 'a fat Russian.' Telling him that I had no enthusiasm for that as the Russians had been our allies during the war, I said I preferred to imagine the sack as a 'fat Nazi.' Obviously annoyed, he expostulated that the Germans 'were our new NATO allies.' Times had certainly changed.

I have great respect for Churchill's inspiring leadership during those dark months of 1940 and 1941 when Britain really did stand alone. But that ended in July 1941 when, following the Nazi invasion of Russia, the Anglo-Soviet alliance was formed. Between than and 1944 the Soviet Union withstood the full fury of the Nazi invasion. Eventually, in Churchill's words 'It was the Red Army that tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine.'

The Anglo-American "Second Front" opened on my seventh birthday - D. Day, 6th of June 1944 - a day I remember well. By the end of the war the USA had lost a total of 419,000 dead and Britain had lost 451,000.

Our Soviet allies had lost 25 million dead in their titanic struggle to rid the world of the genocidal Nazi regime. That unparalleled sacrifice is seldom mentioned amidst the apparently endless stream of nostalgic mythologizing about Britain's standing alone and winning the war against Germany.

It should never be forgotten."

The Guardian did not publish my letter.

In his contribution to this discussion, Patrice has, quite properly in my view, stressed the importance of Marxist theory, mentioning in particular the application of materialist dialectics to interpreting the world in order to change it; that is, historical materialism. I have tried, since I was in my late teens to absorb and understand Marxism which, in my opinion provides the only social-scientific guide to how humanity may put an end to capitalism and save the planet from destruction. That cannot be done solely by steeping oneself in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the numerous others up to the present day who have added to the corpus of Marxist writings. Without active engagement in the struggle to change the world such scholasticism is worse than sterile.

I joined the Young Communist League in London when I was nineteen. It was in October 1956. For two years I had hesitated to take the step. Two weeks after I joined, the Hungarian uprising occurred and Soviet tanks entered Budapest. 7,000 members left the British Communist Party. I smothered whatever doubts I had and stayed where I was. I now recognize that it was to a large extent and act of faith on my part. But I don't regret it. During the next few years I read as much as i could absorb. My introduction to dialectical materialism came through a chapter in Stalin's "History of the CPSU(B)"; I read Marx's "Poverty of Philosophy", "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", "The Civil war in France" as well as Engels' "Dialectics of Nature" and "Origin of the Family". Then followed Lenin's "The State and Revolution", "Imperialism", "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" ,"Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder", Plekhanov's "The Development of the Monist View of History", and much else. I steeped myself in the writings of later twentieth century Marxists like Christopher Cauldwell and George Lukacs and the crop of English Marxist historians associated with the Communist Party's History group. Later, my reading extended to some of the works of Mao, of Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and yes - also of Trotsky. I mention all this NOT to pretend some prodigious familiarity at an early age with Marxist theory, but to stress two things: (i) an understanding of Marxism cannot be achieved unless one has some serious familiarity with Marxist writings, and (ii) unless this is combined with active participation in the struggle to put an end to capitalism and bring about socialism, it remains sterile scholasticism.

For me that realization came when I spent some months in Cuba in the summer of 1960 during the second year of the revolution. Until then I had no real idea of what imperialism was. Being at the heart of a socialist revolution in its euphoric infancy was a life-changing experience. I learned more in those few months, living and working in the Sierra Maestra, than I had from anything I had read. I was with comrades from Cuba and many other countries, all totally dedicated to the struggle in which the Cuban people were engaged. But, without my grounding in Marxist theory, rudimentary though it was, I know I would not have grasped the full significance of what the Cuban revolution meant in the struggle against U.S. imperialism. The threat from the "giant to the north" was palpable. And I learned something else; among communists there were differences; differences of opinion about the international situation including the disagreements that were beginning to emerge between Soviet and Chinese communists. There were still sharp differences between some of the East European delegates and the delegates from Yugoslavia. I remember heated discussions between them. But, in Cuba they could be openly discussed and the differences aired.

A few years later the so-called "great debate" between the leaders of the CPSU and the Communist Party of China became an open split. I was part of a minority in the YCL and the CPGB that believed that the Chinese communists had right on their side. We were particularly impressed with what we regarded as the Chinese communists' principled stand against U.S. imperialism. We openly defied the CP and we were expelled for "Maoist deviation" from the party line, which was loyally pro-Soviet. We dismissed them as "revisionists" and they condemned us as "ultra-left sectarians". I still think that some of our criticism of the pro-Soviet line was right, particularly the view put by the Chinese that the Soviet communists' policy of "peaceful co-existence" with the US amounted to open collaboration with and capitulation to US imperialism. The Chinese leaders, including Mao, accused the Soviets of being prepared to sell out the Vietnamese struggle at any price to achieve "peace in Vietnam". But also, the pro-Soviet communists were not entirely wrong when they accused some of us of being ultra-leftists. This ultra left tendency became most pronounced during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" that was launched in China under Mao's leadership in 1966. We, who belonged to various groups in the pro-Mao Marxist-Leninist movement had been not only strong supporters of Mao but also of Liu Shaoqi, who was the President of China and whose famous book "How to be a Good Communist" was almost required reading along with works by Mao. In the first edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, (The Little Red Book)in 1966, Mao quoted Liu very favorably. In the second edition in 1967, this quotation had been removed, shortening the book by one page. Liu had been arrested and condemned as a "person in authority taking the capitalist road", and "a big poisonous weed". It was later claimed that he had been a traitor since the beginning of his long political career as a communist and had in fact been a secret agent of the Kuomintang. Lin Biao, who had compiled the Red Book of Mao's quotations, was personally designated as Mao's chosen successor and the constitution of the People's Republic was changed to this effect. But then Lin was exposed as an agent of the Soviets and died in a plane crash while trying to escape to Moscow. The affair is still surrounded in mystery.

Trump's coarse, narcissistic and unfiltered anti-democratic character is showing the masses the true face of their class enemy. Hence all the fretting among those who prefer their criminal rule to be shielded by elegant demagoguery.

I found much of this very disturbing. What was particularly disturbing was the way in which most of those who regarded themselves as Marxist-Leninists made no attempt to apply Marxism in any meaningful way to what was happening. They seemed happy to accept whatever issued from Beijing as the truth. In fact, a prominent member of the editorial board of a publication with which I was connected told me that he thought it was our job to be clear about what the Chinese were saying and to repeat it in language more suited to an English readership. They often acted more like followers of a religious faith, accepting edicts from an infallible priesthood. This became impossible to accept when the Chinese leadership, on the basis of what was claimed to be the application of Mao's theory of contradiction, came to the conclusion that the principal contradiction in the world was no longer the contradiction between the peoples of the world and imperialism, led by U.S. imperialism, but rather that between the peoples of the world and what they had now come to call "Soviet-Social Imperialism". I was told personally by a representative of the New China News Agency in London that every aspect of Soviet foreign policy should be opposed as the Soviet Union was now a capitalist-imperialist power and a greater enemy than U.S imperialism. Thus, the news agency even quoted approvingly anti-Soviet articles in Franco-fascist Spanish newspapers (this was before Franco's death). This was something I just could not accept. I, and those of my comrades who felt as I did, severed our links with the so-called M-L organizations. In the later 1970s Cuban military support for the MPLA fighting against the US backed UNITA counter-revolutionaries of Jonas Savimbi in Angola, were condemned by the Chinese leaders as "mercenaries" in the pay of the 'Soviet Social-Imperialism'. China backed the UNITA counter-revolutionaries funded by the U.S. This implacably anti-Soviet phase of Chinese policy had already come to a head with the rapprochement between China and the U.S. which resulted in first Kissinger's visit to Mao (which was secret) and then to Nixon's. All this was while the Vietnam war was still raging. Later, in the 1980s China also backed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan who were armed and funded by the U.S. through Pakistan, in their protracted war against the Soviet-backed leftist government. The final outcome of that US-backed enterprise resulted in the destruction of the leftist regime and eventually in the rise of the Taliban, a Frankenstein's monster indirectly brought into being by U.S. imperialism.

We who had supported the courageous Vietnamese people since the early 1960s in their prolonged, heroic struggle against the murderous onslaught by U.S imperialism and its puppets, were overjoyed at the final Vietnamese victory in 1975. Most of us were also delighted when in December 1978 the Vietnamese, having suffered countless border attacks by the forces of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in neighboring Cambodia, finally moved in January 1979 against the Khmer Rouge and liberated Cambodia from the stranglehold of Pol Pot. But Pol Pot was backed by the United States - and also, astonishingly to us, by China, now led by Deng Xiaoping. When 200,000 Chinese troops invaded Vietnam in February 1979 we were dismayed. Needless to say this attack on Vietnam by its erstwhile ally, was backed by the U.S., gleeful at the "punishment" of the small country whose people had fought them to a standstill and driven them out. But such was the Vietnamese resistance that the PLA was forced to withdraw. Up to 50,000 were killed. Border clashes between Vietnam and China continued until 1990. At the United Nations, the U.S. and its allies, supported by China, continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge, in exile in Thailand, as the legitimate government of Cambodia.

My reason for revisiting these turbulent historical events is to see whether anything worthwhile may be learned from them. No simplistic comparisons should be made between Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s-1980s and the global roles Russia and China play today. Both countries, have undergone tremendous changes since then. However one defines socialism (and there is plenty of room for discussion about that), it is widely and reasonably held that both countries were socialist until the end of the 1980s. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russia is very obviously not a socialist country in any sense, but a capitalist country "red in tooth and claw", ruled by a kleptocratic oligarchy. In my view, on the basis of the Marxist studies I have read, China's extraordinary economic progress over the past three decades has resulted in a form of state capitalism. I am not convinced by claims that this is part of a long transition to socialism - albeit with Chinese characteristics. However, this is in no way to deny that the transformation of China has been breathtaking.

The Sino-Soviet dispute of the 1960s was initially conducted within an ostensibly Marxist-Leninist framework. On both sides this often took the form of quotation-mongering. At its best it raised and dealt with profound questions pertinent to the nature of class and state power, and to the nature of imperialism and the role of nuclear weapons and diplomacy. The issues of anti-imperialist struggle and the meaning of "peaceful co-existence" were dealt with seriously. But, at its worst, the dispute degenerated into an increasingly bitter slanging-match. The Cuban communists tried hard to avoid taking sides in this but their attempt to avoid taking sides were criticized by both sides. Finally, the Chinese characterization of the Soviet Union as a "social-imperialist power" more dangerous than U.S imperialism, went beyond anything that could reasonably be contained by the parameters of serious Marxist dialogue. The onset of the Cultural Revolution, however genuinely Mao's intention to "bombard the Bourgeois headquarters" of what was considered to be a bureaucratic elite that had taken the road to capitalism, the outcome was a descent into a multi-faceted chaos, characterized by plotting, intrigue and internecine violence. The outcome of all this was disastrous. The divisions and the split were exploited by the U.S. imperialists to their own advantage by co-opting China in pursuit of their global aims, the full scope of which aimed at the complete destruction of the communist states. In the first instance, this meant the Soviet Union.

It is clear that U.S. imperialism, still the world's hegemonic military power and determined to hold and extend its global reach, remains deeply alarmed at the growing strength of both China and Russia. The determination of both these countries to withstand and repel this menacing pressure is completely justified and, in my view should be supported by all progressives. As I have argued in articles published on TGP, NATO is an expansionist, aggressive military alliance which threatens Russia. The U.S. bears the main responsibility for the crippling of Russia after the collapse of the USSR. The theft of state property on a scale unknown to history proceeded under the darling of the West, Boris Yeltsin, with the full approval of the U.S. government and the Friedmanite economists who descended on the country like vultures. James Baker's promise to Gorbachev that NATO would "not expand one inch eastwards" was never intended to be kept. Putin, whatever one thinks of him and the domestic regime he presides over, is in my view completely justified in resisting this. He is a Russian nationalist and, as was Soviet policy before him, his defense of Russia's borders is completely justified.

In conclusion, two observations:

(1) Trump. Some on the left have seemed very reluctant to criticize Donald Trump. I find this puzzling. Maybe it is because they regard him as some kind of anti-elitist populist who will steer U.S. foreign policy into more peaceful channels. Perhaps some have become so used to the reins of U.S. foreign policy, with all its aggressiveness, resting in the hands of liberal-imperialists masquerading as doves, that they think anything - however far right - is preferable to that. I regard all this as completely deluded. In my view the Trump administration, despite all its chaotic lurches hither and thither, as the unmediated rule of multi-billionaire corporate power. The White House is in the hands of the most rabidly and openly racist section of the U.S. ruling class. Trump as their representative has cast aside all pretense that the administration represents a diverse nation. The mask is off; this is the face of unadorned finance-monopoly capitalism. It is a form of neo-fascism. The only advantage that i can see here is that it should be easier for those who are seriously dedicated to changing the system and ultimately putting an end to capitalism, to make the case that this is the face of the ruling class enemy.

(2) Observations on Marxist-Leninist terminology. (i) Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Marx used the expression several time in the 1850s. It was never used by him or Engles to mean the rule or dictatorship of a political party and there is no reference to it as such. By it they meant the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and their exercise of rule as a dominant class for the duration of time necessary for the transition of a socialist society based on common ownership of the means of production and the establishment of a classless society. Marx may have considered the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but he didn't elaborate on the concept. It was Engels who described the Commune as "the dictatorship of the proletariat". The term is most closely associated with Lenin who elaborated on it in "State and Revolution" (1917). Lenin bases himself largely on Marx's writing on the Paris Commune ("The Civil War in France") but he does not deal with the role of the "vanguard party" under the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is nowhere in the writings of Marx, Engels or Lenin of how the concept of the vanguard party relates to the dictatorship of the proletariat. One thin is clear though; none of them regarded the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship by a political party and certinly not as the dictatorship of an individual. What was intended by the term was the communal exercise of power by the formally oppressed and subjugated class, which, in expropriating the old ruling class - the bourgeoisie - now were themselves dominant and able to exercise power. Their role was to establish a society in which no class would dominate - i.e. a classless society. Lenin described the dictatorship of the proletariat as the most extensive form of democracy because it represented the temporary rule of the many over the formerly dominant few until the formerly dominant and powerful minaority would become absorbed themselves into a classless society. The term as used by Marxists has been misunderstood (and sometimes deliberately distorted to mean something sinister) because of the unfortunate meaning the"dictatorship" came to have in the twentieth century. (ii) People's Democratic Dictatorship. This seems to have developed from the concept of People's Democracy which was used from the late 1940s to describe the states of Eastern Europe that came within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence after the second world war. The "people " in these cases included the working class, the peasantry and various other intermediate classes. There were often several political parties that were supposed to represent the interests of these different strata. but they were all subordinated to and dependent upon the dominant political party which, under whatever name it was known, was the communist party. Mao Zedong and the CPC used the term "People's Democratic Dictatorship" to describe the political nature of the society established after the revolution of 1949. The Chinese industrial working class constituted only a very small minority of the population of China, the vast majority of whom were peasants. As I understand it the "People's Democratic Dictatorship" did not simply refer to the proletariat. It referred to the broad alliance of oppressed classes in the country - rather like the worker -peasant alliance - that the Bolshevik's tried to forge after the 1917 revolution. But unlike the Bolshevik revolution in which the Russian industrial proletariat had played the leading class role, in China the revolution over its thirty year gestation period, was based almost entirely on the peasantry. So, the "People's Democratic Dictatorship" does not mean quite the same as the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." From a Marxist perspective none of this terminology adequately explains the role of the vanguard party within post-revolutionary society.

—Mike Faulkner

Addenda

From: Mike Faulkner
Sent: 15 March 2018 16:40
To:guardian.letters@theguardian.com
Subject: Assassinations ordered by foreign states. Letter for publication.

Before rushing to lay claim to the moral high-ground about the involvement of foreign states and their leaders in assassination plots by their agents against those perceived as enemies, it is worth looking at the record of this country and its "closest ally", the United States. (Theresa May is right to confront Putin's troll state. Thursday, 15th March 2018)

In 1956, after Egypt's President Nasser had announced his intention to nationalize the Suez Canal, but before he had actually done so, British prime minister Anthony Eden ordered Nasser's assassination by British agents in order to facilitate a coup in Egypt. The plot was exposed and the MI6 agents seized by the Egyptian secret police. The assassination plot was handed over to other agents including James Mossman who was posted to Egypt under the guise of a Daily Telegraph correspondent. But a package containing £20,000 in UK banknotes that was supposed to be delivered to Nasser's doctor as payment for poisoning him, was given to the wrong person and Nasser survived. This was all recounted in the 2010 Daily Telegraph obituary of MI6 agent John McGlashan.

In 1961 President Kennedy pressured the CIA to "get rid of Castro." In their attempts to oblige they involved the Mafia. It has been estimated by Cuban counter-intelligence that between 1959 and 2000 there were 638 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. They were made under every president from Eisenhower to Clinton.

In 1976 the prominent exiled Chilean political opponent of the Pinochet dictatorship, Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington by agents of DINA, the Chilean secret police, in a car bomb attack that killed him and a companion. It was carried out on the direct orders of Pinochet. The CIA knew of the plans two months beforehand but failed to act to stop it. In 2010 it was discovered that a State Department communique that should have warned the Chilean government against the assassination attempt was blocked by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Mike Faulkner

London

About the Author

Mike Faulkner is a Senior Contributing Editor and our London Correspondent. He is a British citizen living in London. For many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column, Letter from the UK, for The Political Junkies Magazine since 2008. Over the years his articles have appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United States where he has friends and family in New York City. Contact Mike at mikefaulkner@greanvillepost.com

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

The Intercept Is Transitioning From Guard Dog To Attack Dog For The Establishment

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

And we trust Caitlin far more than we trust The Intercept, no offence to Glenn Greenwald and his solid body of work.

The Ecuadorian embassy in London cut off Julian Assange’s internet access in October of 2016, but the WikiLeaks Twitter account kept posting about leak drops uninterrupted. The embassy’s action made headlines all across mainstream media. It is common knowledge for anyone who was paying attention to WikiLeaks during that time. The Intercept‘s editors are unquestionably aware of this.

They are aware of this, and yet they allowed an article to be published about allegedly leaked Direct Messages on Twitter which continuously, pervasively and fundamentally assumes that the WikiLeaks account is controlled by Assange and Assange only. The account is referred to as “Assange” throughout the entire article.

“Throughout this article,” the latest establishment effort at undermining public opinion of WikiLeaks states, “The Intercept assumes that the WikiLeaks account is controlled by Julian Assange himself, as is widely understood, and that he is the author of the messages, referring to himself in the third person majestic plural, as he often does.”

There is no basis whatsoever for The Intercept to assume this. In addition to the obvious implications of the WikiLeaks account continuing to tweet despite Assange’s lack of internet, WikiLeaks has made repeated public statements that it is a shared staff Twitter account. There is absolutely no excuse for such a spectacular journalistic failure to be interwoven without apology throughout an entire article of a widely esteemed publication. Even if The Intercept does end up retracting this grotesque embarrassment and extensively editing the article to reflect fact instead of fiction, there will be no reason to believe that this was due to anything other than public outcry, and the damage is already irreparable.

This matters because the article shows some DMs made by the WikiLeaks account which in the limited context provided are, quite frankly, kind of gross. There’s nothing damning in them about the way WikiLeaks operates, nor anything confirming Russia ties, nor indeed anything whatsoever that should give anyone pause when trusting in the nature of the documents that WikiLeaks publishes, but there are some remarks which, if you can attribute them to the head of the organization, necessarily make that organization look sleazy. There are joking remarks about women and trans people that are cringey, and there’s an antisemitic comment in there that in my opinion is particularly yuck.

But The Intercept couldn’t allow its readership to view these remarks as potentially belonging to one of WikiLeaks’ staff members, the personal shortcomings of a talented and indispensable asset to the team whose bigotry can be made harmless to WikiLeaks’ greater mission by the guidance of its leadership. They knowingly and deliberately pinned attribution onto the face of the organization, knowing that Assange couldn’t directly deny it without giving away more information about the account, and they did that with the intention of harming WikiLeaks’ public reputation.

WikiLeaks operates by bringing truth to the people. That is its entire mission. The unelected transnational Orwellian empire which stands the most to lose from their releases understands that the less people like and trust WikiLeaks, the less damage they can do to the ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchy that is driving our species toward extinction. By attempting to paint Assange as an evil Nazi, they are minimizing the impact the next leak drop will have on the public, thereby neutering WikiLeaks by that much.

WikiLeaks poses no threat to the public. The only people who stand to suffer any harm from WikiLeaks are the powerful and corrupt, which The Intercept‘s Pierre Omidyar most certainly is. An article by Whitney Webb from last month details Omidyar’s deep state ties and shows a clear anti-WikiLeaks agenda on the part of this dangerous plutocrat. Never trust a billionaire.

Beyond this deliberately misleading attribution, independent journalist Suzie Dawson has also documented how the article reversed timelines, downplayed and omittedconflicts of interest in its “disclosure”, including the extent of the author Micah Lee’s deeply personal beef with Assange, and other key distortions. Much like The Atlantic‘s November article featuring deceitfully edited quotes from leaked DMs between Donald Trump Jr and the WikiLeaks account, this was a blatant smear piece disguised as a promotion of transparency.

As noted by Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald, people are already ripping the published DMs out of context and reporting on them falsely, which Greenwald seems to depict as an irresponsible and unfortunate response to the publication. But come on now. Anyone who knows anything about America’s current political climate, as Greenwald surely does, could have predicted that people would be doing this. It was not only known that partisan hacks and empire loyalists would be running around making ridiculous claims about Assange supporting the Republican party because of this publication, it was intended. The deliberate distortions and omissions in the article make this abundantly clear.

Pierre Omidyar: The shady billionaire behind The Intercept He who pays the piper...well, it was too good to be true.

Unlike others in my field I’m not willing at this point to say that Greenwald himself is actively complicit in this deliberate manipulation on the part of his employer, but at best he’s certainly turning a blind eye to it.

Back in September The Intercept ran an article trying to conflate opposition to Syrian interventionism with white nationalism, and I said back then things were getting increasingly shady with this particularly outlet. The repeated WikiLeaks smears, which have no place outside mainstream media, mean that people like me are going to be distancing ourselves from that publication and ceasing to look at it as a reliable outlet. There is already a multibillion dollar mainstream media empire that is fully dedicated to slandering and disrupting government transparency activists, and if The Intercept chooses to stand with that lot, we should let them.

Last year comedian Jimmy Dore called out Washington Post reporters for having ceased to function as guard dogs for the establishment, merely protecting and promoting the preferred narratives of the oligarchic empire, and having become instead attack dogs for the establishment, actively chasing down and smearing anyone who speaks out against that empire. We are seeing the mainstream media function in this way more and more, and let’s not kid ourselves: The Intercept has joined them.

_________________

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About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

And the Golden Globe award goes to … Witch hunting!

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By Trévon Austin & David Walsh, wsws.org

Oprah: Queen of daytime banality. Now the presidency? The bar is by now so low that even Caligula's horse might be proposed to run the empire.

This year’s Golden Globe Awards, with its unchallenged support for the #MeToo movement, was a wretched spectacle, Hollywood and identity politics at their worst. The smug crowd of millionaires, and in the case of Oprah Winfrey, a billionaire, expected viewers to believe that the “MeToo” movement constituted an epic chapter in the struggle for human liberation.

The self-absorption, self-obsession and endless self-pity of these people was ridiculous, pathetic, and utterly inappropriate. Amidst all the misery in the world, including the impending deportation of 200,000 Salvadorans, the devastation produced by US militarism and aggression across the globe, the thousands of Americans dying from drug overdoses and a hundred other social atrocities, the Hollywood celebrities devoted an entire evening of prime-time television to feeling sorry for themselves.

It is no wonder that the American film industry seems incapable, except for rare exceptions, of producing decent work. Its concerns are trivial and misdirected, or worse.

The actual handing out of awards, deserved and undeserved, was overshadowed by the sexual misconduct witch-hunt and the overwhelming stamp of approval that the film and television industry gave it Sunday night.

"The self-absorption, self-obsession and endless self-pity of these people was ridiculous, pathetic, and utterly inappropriate..."

The general character and tone of this year’s Golden Globes was established days or perhaps weeks ago. The appeal for women to wear black supposedly in solidarity with struggles against sexual harassment was almost universally heeded. Intimidations and conformism are the order of the day in Hollywood. What star would have dared to appear in an unsanctioned color?

Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and other actresses on stage receiving award for Big Little Lies, their winning TV series. A clutch of successful and privileged and self-pitying beauties totally removed from ordinary people's lives.

No one seemed troubled by the rampant violations of rudimentary due process and democratic rights. The fact that careers are being destroyed overnight on the basis of unproven and even anonymous allegations did not elicit a single objection. It was as if no one in the audience had ever heard of, or read a book about, the McCarthy era. It is back to “Scoundrel Time.”

Actress Ashley Judd, one of the leaders of the sexual misconduct campaign, posted on Instagram, “Today, we wear black. Why? Nearly 1/2 of men think women are well represented in leadership roles and 1/3 of women think women are well represented in leadership roles.” The post continued, “The *reality* is, only 1 in 10 senior leaders are women. #TimesUp #WhyWeWearBlack.”

In other words, this entire “struggle” is about celebrity and big money.

The host of the Golden Globes program, Seth Meyers, of NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” has already shown his reactionary colors on a number of occasions. Last year, he eagerly lined up with the Democratic Party’s anti-Russian campaign and outright anti-communism. On Sunday Meyers set his mark on the event with an opening monologue characterized by cruel jokes about those in Hollywood accused of sexual misconduct. He began the evening’s hilarity with his introduction, “Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen.”

Meyers made an especially vicious jab at Kevin Spacey, a remarkable actor, who was kicked from his role in the popular Netflix series House of Cards on the basis of allegations about events that happened thirty years ago.

“Well, despite everything that happened this year, the show goes on. For example, I was happy to hear they’re going to do another season of ‘House of Cards,’” Meyers said. “Is Christopher Plummer available for that, too? [Referring to Plummer’s replacing Spacey in All the Money in the World. ] I hope he can do a Southern accent, ‘cause Kevin Spacey sure couldn’t. Oh, is that too mean? To Kevin Spacey?” It is despicable to “pile on” like this, kicking those who are disgraced and excluded. One can only imagine what jokes Meyer would have told at the expense of Oscar Wilde had he been around when the disgraced playwright was rotting in prison.

The super-rich and super-banal Oprah Winfrey lectured the crowd about racial and gender inequalities, telling the audience, “speaking your truth” is the most powerful tool they had. “For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up,” she said after accepting her award. The crowd went wild.

The pious, hypocritical nonsense never stopped.

Needless to say, not a word was said Sunday about the many social ills plaguing American society.

Where was the discussion of the deteriorating social conditions in the US or the danger of war? Where was the call for support of Puerto Ricans still devastated by Hurricane Maria? Last year, Donald Trump was a hot topic at the Golden Globe Awards. He was barely mentioned this year. This year’s calls for “solidarity” were narrow, utterly half-hearted and self-congratulatory in nature.

The Golden Globes ceremony stank of reaction and self-satisfaction. It was a celebration of inquisitions and unsubstantiated allegations. Increasingly, masses of working class people, female and male, struggling to keep their heads above water, will see through this.

About the Author

The authors are cinema and cultural critics for wsws.org.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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WSWS on Iran protests: Good leftists going bad at the worst time, again

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Iranians venting symbolic anger at US and Israel, proven enemies of their country. One of many pro-government manifestations.

When perhaps the top daily-news leftist website - the World Socialist Web Site - has the phrase “brutally exploited Iranian working class” in their first sentence, something is clearly out of balance.

Because if Iran’s working class is “brutally” mistreated, then what is the working class in, say, the United States? Do they call it the “astronomically, incredibly, stupendously, racially exploited US working class”?

Because the increase in Iran’s Human Development Index since 1990 - a measurement taken by the United Nations, the best (and only) global political organisation in the world - is second only to South Korea.

Does the UN’s HDI exclude the working class, or something? Of course not.

I like to bring up this statistic, and many others which prove the bona fides of Iranian Islamic Socialism, but it goes nowhere with so very many people that I wonder: Is thing on? Habla usted ingles?

The World Socialist Web Site is ardently Trotskyist, so they may prefer Esperanto, but to them I would say: Kaj vi, Bruto? (And you, Brutus?)

The WSWS is a darn great site, and I’ve read it for too many years to count. They are exceptional in many ways, adored in the Third World, and are perhaps the most widely-visited truly leftist web site. They are so committed and so ideologically-rigorous that the “universal, permanent revolution” of Trotskyism compels them to end every article with one or two paragraphs that essentially say: “But this sucks and is a useless waste of our time because it’s not Trotskyism.”

Hey, I get it: Every medium has an editorial line to toe, and thankfully they are not pushing capitalism, imperialism, identity politics, fake-leftism, etc. Far from it, usually.

But this article on the Iran protests is a good example of good, impassioned leftists going astray.

A problem with such ideological rigour is that it can descend into ineffectual, ivory-tower idealism. It is especially glaring during times of crises, when people are looking to the WSWS for guidance.

For example, I can probably link to dozens and dozens of articles where the good-old WSWS decried an obvious political reality…but which suddenly transforms into “spurious” when the same idea comes out of the mouth of an Iranian:

Spontaneous rallies repudiating the anti-government disturbances have now sprouted throughout Iran.

The rulers of the Islamic Republic are trying to justify their brutal crackdown with spurious claims that the protests are being manipulated by Washington and its principal regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as part of their incendiary drive for regime change in Tehran.

Well which is it, WSWS?

Call me biased - I am an Iranian civil servant, after all - but I think most non-dogmatic leftists will say that Iran is getting the same “capitalist-imperialist treatment” we have seen in Ukraine, Venezuela and about 9,000 other times in the past few hundred years.

Some people love it when you lose - they love dirty laundry

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut the WSWS is not fully on your side unless you are Trotskyist.

A problem with such ideological rigidity is that it violates a key socialist concept, one which Trotskyists are less supportive of than Leninists or Stalinists: “auto-critique”, also known as “self-criticism”.

In short, this idea is based around the concept that you do not air your dirty socialist laundry in public.

China adheres to this quite strictly, and it is likely further helped by their cultural concept of “not losing face”. They do NOT criticise the Party in public, abroad or at home. Iran does this very well, too, but more so when dealing with foreigners, as we love a good needling (and potentially embarrassing) joke to be so concerned about saving face in our own home.

But make no mistake: this socialist concept insists that just because criticism is supposed to be saved for in private, criticism is ABSOLUTELY supposed to be done and not avoided - socialists are far more democratic than capitalists, after all.

What the WSWS could have done with this article, instead of jumping on Iran during a time of (not all that serious) crisis, is to practice some auto-critique and say…well, essentially what I am saying:

“Hey, what about UN’s HDI statistic - let’s not forget about that hard-won fact! Hey, what about the West’s proven manipulation of normal, democratic protests - are we rushing to judgment before we know all the facts? Hey, what about the fact that the world assumes that at this very moment some White American cop is killing or torturing a Black teenager somewhere in the US - so should we care what their opinion is?”

That - pointing out the immoral, perpetual, inescapable crimes of capitalist societies - is what is needed ALL the time. Especially in a time of crisis. The USSR used to do this superbly…then Gorbachev came along and renounced the class struggle.

But the WSWS does the same thing for Venezuela, China, etc. - I’m sure citizens of those countries feel similarly left to twist in the wind in their times of crisis.

People demonstrating support for existing leadership.

The fact is, unless you are 100% Trotskyist, nothing is ever good enough for the WSWS. They aren’t really trying to “win” - they are trying to be “right”.

Yeah, being right feels nice, but that means Venezuela topples and the gains of Chavismo get rolled back; that means the capitalist-imperialists defeat the one Muslim country actually physically fighting for Palestine, Lebanon, Syria & Iraq. Do they care that we have also lost Kashmir, Afghanistan and Libya? Is the WSWS actually considering how we will ever get back the far-gone nations like Egypt & Morocco?! Is Trotskyism outperforming Iranian Islamic Socialism in any of those countries?

Bah….what I just listed are real-life concerns. The WSWS ignores this when “the stuff hits the fan” in the very countries they should be supporting (and in countries they usually support).

For certain, a crisis is not the time to pile on along with the capitalist-imperialists - I think common sense makes that quite clear.

Do Trotskyists realize that a key step is ‘preserving’ actual socialist gains?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] wonder how much the WSWS really knows Iranian society, and I do know that they consistently appear convinced that “universal revolution” is around the corner.

“The (communist) Tudeh party had deep roots in the working class,” is a prime example.

“Deep roots”? Islam had “deep roots”, not communism. I guess communism had “deep roots” if - let’s return to our first paragraph - if the WSWS will write that Islam had “super, mega-deep, core-embedding roots in the working class”. But, again, things are now losing their balance, accuracy and efficiency….

Communism in 1979 was one of the two main propelling ideologies, yes, but it was often limited to the intellectuals and the students. Islam, however, definitely was not.

You certainly don’t need to be literate to want to understand or promote socialism, but it was a bit difficult when less than 40% of Iranian women were literate in 1979 (but check those numbers now).

With the advantage of hindsight, it should not be at all surprising that a relatively-new political philosophy did not sweep aside the very birthplace of monotheism (Zoroastrianism) and a place where Islam is a living, vibrant, daily force; a place where a recent poll says 76% of people responded to the question - "to what degree should our country's policymakers take religious teachings into account when they make decisions" - with either "a lot" or “somewhat", while just 5% responded with (a very West European secularist) “none at all”. (Question #8 in this poll.) Iran is not France or West Germany, the very birthplace of socialism, and I note that socialism even failed in those two places, too. ]

So if the Trotskyists may like to imagine that Trotskyism was about to sweep Iran in 1979….if only those mullahs hadn’t gotten in the way!…but that was not accurate and certainly not reflective of the democratic will.

Socialism clearly and democratically ran second fiddle in the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and thankfully so, when the alternative is to be influenced by imperialist capitalism.

If the WSWS wanted to actually help Iran, they would list the vast ocean of statistics and proofs which show the positive differences between pre- and post-1979 Iran; they would suspend their seemingly anti-Muslim (and anti-religion) attitude permanently (much like Cuba has, and which places like Vietnam and Eritrea don’t need to suspend because they never started on that terrible “forced atheism” route); at least they could not join in on the Iran-bashing when the forces of imperialism are acting rather “spuriously”; they could be using this time to credit a country whose socialist bona fides far, far, far outweigh about 98.5% of the rest of the world.

What the WSWS gets right, kind of

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] am an Iranian civil servant, so I don’t want to get into internal Iranian politics and my stances. Anyways, this is not a Farsi-language article, and it is targeted for non-Iranians. But I would like to give some very basic clarifications about the “true nature” of these protests - economic issues - as I totally disregard the laughable “fake nature” of these protests - toppling a democratic government:

Regarding the economic demands of this protest:

Firstly, the blockade and sanctions. Secondly, the blockade and sanctions. Thirdly, I almost wish upon your country a blockade and sanctions so you can then tell me if I am making excuses!

But I’ll move on, and in an even-handed manner:

The WSWS website is correct that Iran has embraced some neoliberal capitalist changes. This goes way back to the era of not only the war reconstruction effort of Rafsanjani, but also Reformist politician Khatami, so it is not all that new. Iran was not just rebuilding a country and promoting a totally unique and modern revolution, but it was doing so after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Therefore, much of these changes I attribute to the global “socialism is dead” hysteria which went full-tilt in 1991, which was so contagious that it spared NO country.

And we all know that neoliberalism doesn’t work, so….

But if there is one country which is “exceptional” it is Iran, and allow me to explain: After a decade of hot war, 20+ years of Cold War, and an increasingly-brutal economic sanctions campaign, many in Iran felt pro-capitalist reforms might be the only solution.

After all, Iran is not China: we do not “call the shots”.

Iran cannot be strangled forever, the Reformists argued. Those who favoured Khamenei’s nationalist “resistance economy” have a popular idea with many adherents, but Iran is a democracy, after all: there IS NO autocrat, most of our politicians are trying to win re-election, and - I’ll play along here with your nonsense - why would we even begin with the assumption that all mullahs think alike on economics?

So when Rouhani came to France and Italy in 2016 and made dozens of billions of euros in business deals, I gave the bargaining team a ton of credit: I read the fine print and - in a highlight of my career - I reported on that fine print for 17 continuous minutes in an interview on Press TV. Why so long? Because I was describing how this deal included technology transfers; how that deal is a joint venture and not just a capitalist sell-off to foreigners; how this other deal is going to let us learn how to build this vital piece of infrastructure which we need in our other cities, etc.

These deals were capitalist, ok…but they weren’t. They definitely were not neoliberal, free-market, sell-off-your nation to foreign high finance! They defied easy dogma, but they were - and thankfully for the People in France and Italy as well - “mutually beneficial”. That’s a key phrase you hear in Iran and China all the time but never in the West. We must use the tools of capitalism to build socialism (is this on, again?), but they must be mutually beneficial for both countries and their peoples, no?

“Opening up” our economy was also a tactic to win much, much, much needed political favor as well, the Reformists argued.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile Trotskyists may be already bristling, Iranians are trying to survive and have no time for the WSWS ancestor-worship of Trotsky. We are hoping that money talks with the Eurozone; that huge deals with Iran will pull them away from the Americans' policy of murdering Iran.

Will this work? Well, France’s Total is now talking about pulling out of the key oil deal so…too soon to say. If they do China will take their part over, so no real worries, and I can’t say I’d be too surprised: the US is a larger market than Iran for France, and France is a capitalist country that has no ideology, no solidarity, and would step over its own mother to make a buck (but they won’t cross Angela Merkel).

China has opened up in a similar economic fashion (though they call more shots, due to their weight), and their inequality has indeed increased…but the lower class - the focus of socialism and Iranian Islamic Socialism - has been enormousy lifted, while at the same time the Western capitalist lower class has not.

“So open up towards China and not the West!” many will cry!

The Iranian government did!

Iran has been making trade deals with China for some time, and…we all know how hard it is for any nation’s industries to compete with Chinese products. Their products have increasingly entered Iran markets and…you can imagine the results. But - and I wasn’t privy to the discussions - I assume that Iran HAD TO make these deals to keep China on our side. If we lose China and Russia - goodbye UN Security Council protection and hello invasion. While there are capitalist interests in the democracy of Iran, I assume that these concessions were granted mainly because the blockade has been so terrible. No blockade, and it’s far less likely any of these deals get made on anything less than a 50-50 basis.

Will Rouhani’s economic Reformism work? Well, what is certain is that Iranian voters appear to think so. The West claims the protests are about “regime change” (LOL), but they ignore the glaring fact that he has been re-elected with a voter participation rate that far exceeds the “mature”, “stable”, “democratic” countries of the West.

Where is the WSWS with these rather basic observations which are not just sympathetic towards leftism, but entirely correct and objective?

Why does an article dated January 4 not mention the pro-government protests on January 3 which were multiple times larger (not quite “exponentially larger” I think) than the anti-government protests? How is the WSWS aiding any type of democracy, capitalist or socialist, here?

The WSWS probably accuses all religious people of not adhering to their principles strongly enough, but I can say without reservation that I accuse the WSWS of not following their Socialist principles because: with that article…I can’t tell whose side they are on! And in a time of crisis, no less!!!

But the WSWS is far from the problem - after all, the article notes the capitalist nature of the Green Movement of 2009. Which media can we count on for going that far left, at least?

So I ain’t mad at ya, WSWS!

As an Iranian I cannot be as dogmatic as you are. It’s not that I work on a sliding scale - it’s that we are trying to keep winning—and surviving.

Good luck with the universal Trotskyist revolution. Please do let me know when you get one country. And when you do, I’ll push my Iranian comrades not to step on your neck when the capitalists come for you…which they will, and just like they are coming for us now, or haven’t you noticed? I think Trotsky would agree with this decision…

About the author

RAMIN MAZAHERI, Senior Correspondent & Contributing Editor, Dispatch from Paris • Ramin is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.