Mu
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Saturday, December 9, 2023
What was the Holocaust? – The Militant
The over 1,200 Jews slaughtered in the Oct. 7 Tehran-backed Hamas pogrom against Jews in Israel was the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Nazi Holocaust in the second imperialist world war. Some 3,000 more were wounded and over 240 kidnapped and dragged back to Gaza to have their lives dangled as trade bait.
The Oct. 7 pogrom by the Hamas killers showed their determination to follow the same path as the Nazis. Their slogan — chanted by middle-class radicals in the U.S. and worldwide — is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” They mean, “Palestine will be free of Jews.” It is a call today to implement Hitler’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish question in the Middle East....
Full:
2013 Maidan uprising marked turning point in Ukraine – The Militant
Ten years ago, on Dec. 6 and 8, 2013, tens of thousands of workers and other Ukrainians from all over the country rallied in Kyiv, the country’s capital, joining the battle to oust the pro-Moscow government of Viktor Yanukovych. The powerful mobilizations came in response to bloody riot police assaults on student demonstrators a week earlier, setting off two months of mass mobilizations and battles in the streets.
By early 2014 that became hundreds of thousands of working people across Ukraine as the fight deepened. Tents and barricades sprang up near the Trade Union House building in Kyiv’s Independence Square, giving the “Revolution of Dignity” its popular name, the Maidan.
Behind the depth of these mobilizations lay the national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, who — with the exception of the early years of the Russian Revolution under V.I. Lenin when the Ukrainian language and culture flourished — have chafed under, and resisted, centuries of Russian domination. This stretched from the czars’ “prison house of nations” to the counterrevolutionary Stalin years to Vladimir Putin’s war today....
Full:
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
40 years later: "The Day After"
.jpeg)
It can be viewed here.
This article.appeared in the December 2, 1983 issue of the weekly socialist newspaper The Militant:
By Harry Ring
Surely it was a chilling experience to see the television film The Day After. The mushroom clouds and fire storms. The incandescent bodies ~ The incredible destruction. The nightmarish plight of those who "survived."
The film was powerful to the extent that it gave visual expression to what millions have come to realize ~ we live with the threat of nuclear holocaust.
The final point was driven home even further with the final note advising that what was depicted of the bomb's aftermath was in fact understated.
It's estimated that 100 million people saw the film. ABC spent $8 million on it, and· a good piece of the budget went for publicity. This generated a media campaign that in tum assured a huge audience.
But it took more than media hype to get that audience. The film did reflect the widespread concern about the danger of nuclear war, which was expressed so massively when a million people joined the peace march in New .York on June 12, 1982. The nationwide discussion now sparked by The Day After is not likely to lessen antinuclear sentiment.
Yet the film offers no constructive proposals for this discussion. It effectively depicted ~orne of the consequences of a nuclear blast. But there was not even a clue as to why humanity is. faced with this awesome problem, or how it can be resolved. Presented in that void, the horrors of nuclear war portrayed in the film can, in fact, feed the demoralization of those who believe the situation is hopeless.
To assure the powers-that-be that The Day After was not "un-American," and despite its assurance that it wasn't "political," ABC had the film open with an act of Soviet aggression in Berlin provoking the final confrontation. Who actually struck the ftrst nuclear blow was left ambiguous.
The anti-Soviet opening was matched by ABC's indecent haste to provide the Reagan administration and its . supporters "e.qual time" to debunk the film before the same huge audience.
Robert McNamara, former secretary of war, did suggest negotiations to reduce the number of warheads per missile. "We've got to be more daring," he stoutly declared.
Secretary of State George Shultz avoided meeting antinuclear sentiment head on, demagogically arguing that the nuclear danger underlined the need for the administration's pugnacious anti-Soviet policy and nuclear arms build-up. Put aside, for the moment, was the assertion that a nuclear war is "winnable."
Kenneth Adelman, Reagan's "arms control" director, did make a telling point against Democratic critics by noting that Reagan's nuclear program was but a continuation of that followed by "seven other presidents." (That includes four Democratic ones.)
Edelman could well have boasted that that policy has now been escalated with the deployment of over 500 U.S. nuclear missiles in Europe in the face of deep-going public opposition there. The European deployment of cruise and Pershing 2 missiles, which is proceeding right on schedule, enjoys bipartisan support in Washington.
What is the root source of the nuclear threat?
U. S . imperialism. That's a hard fact confirmed by the record.
Washington's policies in relation to war and peace can be adequately comprehended only by recognizing that it is a government of big business dedicated to defending its profiteering interests at home and abroad.
That explains why Pres. Harry Truman dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 after Japan began suing for peace.
James Byrnes, Truman's secretary of state, later openly. admitted that the bomb was dropped on Japan as a "demonstration shot" for Moscow. It was necessary, he conceded, not against Japan, but to "make Russia more yielding" (Foreign Affairs, January 1957).
That sinister threat was followed by the systematic military encirclement of the
Soviet Union. The Pentagon today commands some 300 land, air, and naval bases in ·more than 110 countries. And now there is the addition of the European-based nuclear missiles. The Soviet Union is not paranoid in thinking it's threatened.
Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington has made at least 12 specific threats to use the bomb.
In 1950 during the U.S. invasion of Korea, Truman threatened the Chinese with the bomb.
In 1953, the threat was repeated by Eisenhower.
Pres. John Kennedy brought ih~ world to the nuclear brink during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
There are additional documented cases of such nuclear blackmail.
Meanwhile, Washington has waged a series of aggressive wars with such "conventional" weapons as napalm, lethal chemicals, and cluster bombs to crush rebellions in countries under the heel of imperialist domination.
In 1950, it intervened in the Korean civil war to save capitalism in South Korea and, hopefully, to overturn the workers state in the north.
In the 1960s and 70s it unsuccessfully repeated this in Vietnam.
In 1961 it organized an unsuccessful counterrevolutionary invasion of Cuba.
In 1965, Pres. Lyndon Johnson dispatched the marines to the Dominican Republic to quell a popular uprising there.
This, however, is not just a historical question.
The government of the United States is waging war today. Thousands of people are dying in these wars and the coffins of GIs are again being shipped home.
It is in these ongoing· wars - and the threat of their escalation - that the nuclear danger is lodged. [Emphasis in original].
By official count, 239 Gls died in the explosion at the U.S. encampment in Beirut. The danger that the U.S. intervention there will escalate is substantial.
Meanwhile, closer to home, the war in Central America and the Caribbean. steadily deepens.
Vietnam-style "advisers" are intervening in El Salvador's civil war. The dictatorial regime there cannot survive against the liberation forces without the increased use of U .S . forces. And Reagan is ready to use them.
Meanwhile, U. S.-organized mercenaries are trying to destroy the revolution in Nicaragua. A big U .S. strike force is being mobilized on the borders of Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan people are making urgent preparations for an imminent U.S. invasion and their preparations are obviously well justified.
In recent weeks we have seen the brutal occupation of Grenada, designed to eradicate the revolution there.
It is these ongoing acts of aggression that indict U. S. imperialism as the central threat to world peace and the source of the nuclear war danger.
Since its World War II victory over Japanese and German imperialism, it has assumed the mantle of world cop. To assure the safety of business investments and trade, it has undertaken to crush· the worldwide rise of liberation movements - by any means necessary.
It persistently expands its already swollen nuclear stockpile and openly declares its readiness to strike first.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has publicly pledged it will never be the first to use the bomb and it has made countless offers to reduce nuclear stockpiles. Each of these offers has been rejected on one pretext or the other by successive administrations in Washington.
It is this record that points to the source of the nuclear danger. That danger will not be overcome until Washington's stockpile is totally scrapped. And the prospects for peace in the world will not be achieved until the people of this country replace the capitalist government in Washington with a workers and farmers government. Only in this way will the capitalist warmongers be disarmed and the deadly drive for profits ended.
A government of working people will extend the hand of friendship to all people. Socialism is, in fact, the only road to peace.
http://themilitant.com/1983/4744/MIL4744.pdf
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Israel and Ukraine: Two fronts for the working class – The Militant
There have been two sharp and significant watershed moments in the class struggle that, one after the other, have changed the world. The first was Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, met by the determination of Ukrainian working people to defeat their attacker. The second was the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel planned by Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the response everywhere of Jews and other defenders of the right of Israel to exist.
Working people around the world have a big stake in the outcome on these two war fronts, as Israel and Ukraine, and the workers within them, both face a fight for survival....
Full:
Israel and Ukraine: Two fronts for the working class – The Militant
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Defend Israel’s right to exist! Call for cease-fire is support for Hamas – The Militant
[....] a cease-fire would allow Hamas’ leadership to survive, only to prepare endless new rounds of murderous anti-Jewish pogroms, while continuing to keep its boot on the neck of the people of Gaza. Hamas uses the disaster facing Palestinians under its rule to evoke sympathy abroad.
Its death squads still hold some 245 hostages that Hamas intends to use as bargaining pawns.
Hamas’ goal, which it had been planning for years together with its backers in Tehran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, was to kill, torture and take hostage as many Jews as possible. It carried out the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. This highlights the necessity for working people to understand the special danger of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch and to fight it whenever it raises its head....
Full:
Sunday, October 29, 2023
Why does Israel exist? – The Militant
Why does Israel exist? – The Militant
Israel has existed as a refuge for Jews for 75 years. Its existence was made inevitable by three key historical facts: the betrayal by counterrevolutionary Stalinist parties of ripe prospects for workers to take political power in Europe; the refusal by the imperialist rulers in Washington and London to open their borders to Jews seeking to flee Nazi persecution before, during and after World War II; and the horror of the Holocaust, the slaughter of 6 million Jews — 40% of the Jews worldwide....
Saturday, October 14, 2023
Biggest massacre of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust – The Militant
The murderous pogrom Oct. 7 by Hamas and its allies is a stark warning to all working people that Jew-hating slaughter and demagogy are a permanent reality of the world imperialist order. These heinous acts and the bourgeois leaderships that carried them out — from Hamas itself, to Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and their command post in Tehran — are united around one aim: annihilation of the Jews.
Their Nazi-like operation was far and away the largest roundup and slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust during World War II. It is a sharp reminder of the living threat of Jew-hatred in today’s capitalist world — from the Middle East, to Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the Americas and beyond.
In a single day last week, Hamas-led death squads murdered over 1,200 Israeli men, women and children and wounded more than 3,000 inside Israel near the Gaza border.
The vast majority were Jewish civilians, as well as a number of Arab Israeli citizens and more than a dozen immigrant farmworkers from Thailand. Today 20% of Israel’s population are Arabs. Dozens of soldiers died fighting to defend people from the onslaught.
Hamas also kidnapped over 150 hostages, including children, whom they are threatening to kill if the Israeli government doesn’t accede to its demands. The blood-soaked operation is an assault on Israel’s place as a safe haven for Jews the world over in the face of rising anti-Jewish demagogy and violence.
The pogroms began in the early morning of Oct. 7, which was both the Jewish Sabbath and holiday of Simchat Torah. Hamas claims they and their allies launched 5,000 rockets at Israeli cities and kibbutzim (farm collectives), and simultaneously used bulldozers and other rams to break through barriers to surge into Israel. Targeting some 22 locations, the death squads used pickup trucks, motorbikes, paragliders, drones and inflatable boats, all assembled with the help of Tehran.
The Hamas units also hit a handful of military bases to keep Israeli soldiers from getting in the way of their efforts to kill as many Jews as possible.
A central target was an all-night music festival in the desert near Kibbutz Re’im, where some 3,500 people had gathered. The Hamas operatives fired rockets, grenades and thousands of bullets at unarmed festivalgoers.
Over the next six hours they killed at least 260 people, many at point-blank range, riddling fleeing vehicles with bullets and shooting people on foot in the back as they fled. Dozens were slaughtered in bomb shelters where they sought refuge. Hamas triggermen looted the pockets and bags of many of their victims.
Videos show terrified festival participants being forced onto motorcycles, jeeps and trucks to be carted off to Gaza as hostages. Hamas documented its heinous atrocities and ostentatiously posted them online for the world to see.
One of those taken captive by Hamas was Shani Louk, a 23-year-old woman from Germany. Hamas broadcast a video of her apparently lifeless body being paraded through the streets of Gaza on a flatbed truck, stripped half naked, as Hamas members cheered, chanted and spit on her. Her mother told the press Oct. 11 she has gotten reports her daughter is still alive, though severely wounded, in the hands of Hamas.
When Israel Defense Forces finally arrived at the site where the slaughter took place, they were joined by groups of Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel who had driven there to rescue survivors. One of those they helped was Maya Alper. “This is not just war,” Alper said. “This is hell.”
More than 100 Jews, some 10% of the population, were exterminated by death squads going door-to-door in the Kibbutz Be’eri. One survivor, 70-year-old Amit Shalvi, told Haaretz, “Where am I, in a pogrom in Lithuania?”
Dozens more were murdered in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some 40 children and babies, some beheaded. Much of this depravity was caught on video or in photos by the attackers themselves, or by Israeli surveillance cameras, and have been publicly released.
When IDF forces got there and held a press conference, one soldier shouted, “Tell the world what you saw here!”
What you see there is exactly what you see.
In all its horror.
Coming on top of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, this massacre of more than 1,000 Jews and others marks a turning point in world politics. Capitalist rulers everywhere — from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Beijing to Washington — are looking for new openings and new imperialist pacts and alliances to best defend their national class interests. The dangers and realities of new conflicts and wars are growing.
Slaughter aimed to massacre Jews
The Wall Street Journal quoted unnamed senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah Oct. 8, who said officers of the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been holding regular meetings with the two groups since August to prepare for the pogrom. They said Iranian security officials greenlighted the attack at a meeting in Beirut on Oct. 2.
Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose regime openly calls for the destruction of Israel, claimed Tehran wasn’t involved, that this was the work of Hamas and Islamic Jihad alone. But he hailed the atrocities, saying, “We kiss the foreheads and arms of skillful and intelligent designers.” He added, “God willing, the cancer of the usurper Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces.” For these groups, “Zionist” is a synonym for Jew.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is the banner of Hamas, the Iranian government, and their supporters abroad, including in the U.S. Their real aim, however, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Jewish-free!”
In recent years these misleaderships have actively sabotaged any opportunity for negotiations to recognize Israel and carve out an independent Palestinian state. They have no interest whatsoever in a so-called two-state solution — a mantra that not only offers no viable solution to the exploitation and oppression of the region’s toilers, nor is any longer remotely feasible.
The decision by Hamas, Tehran, Hezbollah and others to attack now was coldly calculated. Relations had been expanding between Israel and a growing number of Arab regimes, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Discussions were underway on normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Israeli government. The counterrevolutionary leaders in Tehran view this as a serious threat to their expansionist aims and military operations in the region.
Tehran also believed that sharp bourgeois political divisions inside Israel between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his critics had turned attention from the border and weakened the Israeli government’s military preparedness.
And they questioned the willingness of the Joseph Biden administration in Washington to respond decisively to an attack.
Middle-class left applauds Hamas
Virtually the entire middle-class left in the United States rushed to applaud Hamas’ bloody terror against Jews in Israel.
An Oct. 8 demonstration in New York’s Times Square, initiated by the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the People’s Forum, was joined by Workers World Party, the Communist Party and Democratic Socialists of America. “We don’t want two states. We want all of it!” participants shouted. Some openly chanted slogans against Jews. At least one person held up a cellphone picturing a swastika.
Similar actions — all saying not a word about the calculated slaughter of Jews carried out by Hamas, its allies and benefactor in Tehran, instead calling the massacre “resistance” — have taken place elsewhere.
Since Hamas smashed their rivals in a bloody civil war for control of Gaza in 2007, their repeated rocket barrages and other terror attacks aimed at Israeli Jews inevitably drew sharp responses from Israeli forces, worsening even more the dire conditions of the 2 million people in Gaza. Hamas has done little to provide for the population. While constructing deep networks of underground tunneling for their commandos — where they are likely holding hostages today — there are few bomb shelters or protection for civilians.
Hamas exploits these conditions to appeal for funding from the U.N. and other agencies, much of which they use for their military and political purposes, not the needs of Gazans.
The fact is, Hamas is a political obstacle both to the national aspirations and class interests of working people in Gaza. The organization and its bourgeois Islamist leadership care nothing whatsoever about them.
In response to this week’s bloody pogroms, the Israeli government declared war on Hamas. It has begun aerial operations striking targets in Gaza and has mobilized 360,000 reservists in advance of a possible incursion into Gaza. The state of Israel is determined to eliminate Hamas’ ability to launch murderous attacks on its citizens and other residents ever again.
Monday, September 25, 2023
As 2024 nears, Democrats step up attacks on political rights – The Militant
[….] The gamut of laws targeting Trump today have always been used first and foremost against workers, especially those opposed to the rulers’ wars and those attracted to fighting to replace capitalist exploitation with something better. And, no matter who is targeted today, these laws will be turned against working people tomorrow.“Every constitutional protection that allows workers to debate a road forward and to organize to defend ourselves from attacks by the bosses and their government must be safeguarded,” Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida, told the Militant. “Workers use these freedoms whenever we resist bosses’ assaults, like striking United Auto Workers are doing today. And they are crucial to organizing opposition to the threat of new wars and actions against Washington’s embargo of Cuba.
“That’s why we speak out against the witch hunt against Trump today. To protect our rights, we say, drop the charges against Trump! Defend constitutional freedoms!”
Saturday, September 16, 2023
With proper leadership, the working class can overcome – The Militant
With proper leadership, the working class can overcome – The Militant
The relevant elements of the class-struggle program needed by the trade unions should be introduced realistically on a transitional basis. In that way the unfolding labor radicalization can be guided from its present stage toward higher forms of development along the following lines:
Proposals for immediate action should center on problems involving the workers’ urgent material needs and the defense of their democratic rights. It is also important that the fight around those issues be attuned to the existing levels of consciousness in the union membership. Then, as significant forces are set into motion through that approach, several things take place. Rank-and-file militancy rises. Increasingly sharp clashes with the bosses result, during which the workers begin to shed class-collaborationist illusions and acquire class-struggle concepts. Lessons thus learned during industrial conflicts can prepare the union ranks for an advance toward action on a political plane. In short, a foundation is laid from which to initiate transformation of the trade unions themselves into instruments capable of developing far-reaching revolutionary perspectives.
As the transitional process from where they are to where they should be continues, the workers’ attention can be focused on broad questions which go far beyond day-to-day issues on the job. They will learn in that way to generalize their thinking in class terms, and the development of a conscious anticapitalist outlook will follow.
If, during the course of their experiences in struggle, the labor militants are helped to analyze the causes of the social and economic ills facing them; if they are aided in perceiving the essence of an outlived capitalism — they will learn that the existing problems are not incidental and episodic at all, but the consequence of a deep structural crisis of the system. They will then see why governmental control must be taken away from the capitalists by labor and its allies.
Basic to such a rise in the workers’ class consciousness is understanding that a fundamental change must take place in the role of the trade unions, which constitute the existing form of mass organization among the workers in this country. These broad instruments of struggle must be turned away from reliance upon so-called friends among the capitalist politicians. They must break off the self-defeating collaboration with the bosses’ government, that has been imposed by bureaucratic misleaders. The unions must be transformed into mechanisms for independent and militant action by the workers all along the line. Restrictions on the right to strike must be vigorously opposed and freedom to exercise that right firmly asserted. Internal union democracy must be established so that all questions can be decided on the basis of majority rule. Then, and only then, will organized labor manage to bring its full weight to bear in confrontations with the employers at the industrial level.
Whenever conflicts of significant magnitude erupt within industry today, the government intervenes on the employers’ side; and this interference is bound to intensify as capitalist decay gets worse. From this it follows that trade union action alone will prove less and less capable of resolving the workers’ problems, even on a limited basis. Objectively, industrial conflicts will assume more and more a political character, and even the most powerfully organized workers will be faced with an increasingly urgent need to act on the new and higher plane of politics.
Therefore, efforts to build an effective left wing in the trade unions will run into insurmountable obstacles unless the workers move toward resolving the problem of political action. A vigorous campaign must be conducted to break the labor movement from subordination to capitalist politics and to launch an independent labor political organization. This campaign will have to focus initially on educational propaganda for a change in labor’s political course, but it should not be conducted in an abstract, routine manner. Ample opportunity will be found to concretize the propaganda by drawing the lessons of setbacks caused by the misuse of labor’s inherent political strength. This can lay the basis for an advance, as soon as it becomes realistic, to an agitational campaign designed to convince the ranks of the urgency of forming a labor party.
In the process of creating their own mass party, based upon and controlled by the trade unions, the organized workers can draw unorganized, unemployed, and undocumented sections of their class into a broad political alliance. Labor will then be in a position to act both in a more unified manner and through advanced forms of struggle.
The workers will learn to generalize their needs, as a class, and to address their demands on a political basis to the capitalists, as a class. …
As Leon Trotsky insisted in discussions during the 1930s, the American workers must learn to act politically and to think socially if they are to attain the class consciousness and solidarity needed to defeat the exploiters. This is the opposite of the narrow class-collaborationist course pursued by the labor bureaucracy. …
As the Teamster story demonstrates, the principal lesson for labor militants to derive from the Minneapolis experience is not that, under an adverse relationship of forces, the workers can be overcome; but that, with proper leadership, they can overcome.
Saturday, August 5, 2023
Friday, August 4, 2023
CLIMATE CHANGE PANIC AND THE RENEWAL OF THE MALTHUSIAN DELUSION The Alarmism Juggernaut
https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/climate-change-panic-and-the-renewal?publication_id=850683&utm_medium=email&action=share&isFreemail=true
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
How workers mobilized to resist the McCarthyite witch hunt – The Militant
....Behind the general smoke screen of anti-communism, one of the most sinister anti-union bills was introduced into the Senate in April 1953 by Senator John Marshall Butler, Maryland Republican. He had been elected with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s direct aid. Butler’s bill required the National Labor Relations Board to deny collective bargaining recognition or elections to any union under “investigation” by the Subversive Activities Control Board set up under the McCarran-Kilgore Act of 1950. Such investigation and denial of NLRB certification were to be based on any employer’s mere complaint that a union seeking collective bargaining rights was “communist dominated.” If the Subversive Board should “find” against the union, the latter would be permanently banned by the NLRB unless and until such a ruling was reversed by a regular federal court.
Sunday, July 9, 2023
Defend constitutional freedoms won in over two centuries of class struggle – The Militant
Won over two-and-a-half centuries of bloody class struggle, key constitutional protections against government interference are under attack by President Joseph Biden’s administration. The push for even more prosecutions against former President Donald Trump, Biden’s main rival for the presidency, is a dangerous attempt to criminalize political differences. It goes hand in hand with increasing attacks on the right to legal representation....
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine
'Monroe Doctrine' aided fight against colonial rule in the Americas
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
July 3, 2023
Mural in Chihuahua, Mexico, depicts from left, Abraham Lincoln, leader of Union forces in 1861-65 U.S. Civil War; Benito Juárez, Mexican national hero who fought foreign occupation, 1861-67; and Simón Bolivar, who led 1811-25 Latin American independence struggles against Spanish colonial rule.
The Monroe Doctrine, whose 200th anniversary is marked this year, has been the subject of countless articles in the press. Many argue that the foreign policy position announced by President James Monroe in 1823 was a declaration of "imperialist" designs on Latin America, and that Washington's course today is simply a continuation of that policy.
That explanation is false. It blurs together different historical periods. To understand where we came from and where we are going, working people need to study the history — the concrete conditions and evolution — of the conflict between class forces that has driven U.S. and world politics.
Today we live in the imperialist epoch. But we can't look at history through 21st century eyeglasses. When the United States was established as a republic in the late 1700s, capitalism was on the ascent. It was the most progressive social system the world had ever seen — a revolutionary advance over outmoded feudalism, which had prevailed for centuries.
As capitalist trade, agriculture, industry, transportation and communications were revolutionized and spread worldwide between the 15th and 19th centuries, humanity's productive capacities multiplied more than during all its previous existence put together.
Most importantly, capitalism created the working class — the only class that has the capacity and material interest in leading a successful struggle to replace the rule of the propertied, exploiting classes with a society organized in the interests of the vast majority.
The United States was born through a deep-going popular revolt. "The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars," Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin explained in his 1918 "Letter to American workers."
"That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery."
Over the first half of the 19th century, the U.S. developed rapidly, expanding coast to coast. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the 1846-48 war with Mexico, and the 1846 Oregon Treaty were all part of securing for the American capitalists the land, waterways, ports and internal market that helped consolidate a modern bourgeois nation.
From a historical perspective, this process was in the class interests of working people. Only the most thoroughgoing development of capitalism could bring about such a vast expansion of productive forces and put the working class in the strongest position to lead the next historic battles to advance humanity. A more in-depth explanation of this dynamic can be found in the book Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History, by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, George Novack and Mary-Alice Waters.
Another leap forward took place with the Second American Revolution — the 1861-65 Civil War, which overthrew chattel slavery, followed by Radical Reconstruction. By its end, Karl Marx wrote that he could see the social forces that would lead the next American revolution — the developing working class, exploited Western farmers and the oppressed Black population.
The U.S. became the most politically advanced nation in the world. Marx, co-founder with Engels of the modern revolutionary workers movement, called it the "great Democratic Republic." The Bill of Rights, added to the U.S. Constitution as a result of struggles by farmers and workers after the First American Revolution, contained democratic protections beyond any recognized in Europe: freedom of speech and assembly, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, the right of citizens to bear arms, and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, among others.
European colonial threat
Now let's take a look at where the Monroe Doctrine fits into this history.
In an 1823 message to Congress, Monroe warned European powers that Washington would not tolerate any "future colonization by any European powers" or interference against "governments who have declared their independence" in the Western Hemisphere. There was good reason for this concern.
Despite what some opponents of U.S. imperialism argue today, the biggest threat to struggles for independence and sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean through most of the 19th century was not the United States. It was the European powers — especially the British rulers.
The British Empire continued to interfere with the sovereignty and economic independence of the fledgling United States. That led to the War of 1812, and then to London's support to the Southern slaveholders in the U.S. Civil War.
The British rulers flexed their muscles throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, seeking to replace Spain — which lost most of its American colonies between 1810 and 1825 — as the dominant power.
Eduardo Galeano, in his classic book The Open Veins of Latin America, describes how British bankers and merchants dominated South America's export market — Chilean copper, Peruvian nitrates, Brazilian coffee, Argentine beef. British and French warships blockaded Buenos Aires in 1845 to try to open up Argentina to unrestricted imports of European goods.
Monroe Doctrine
In 1822 the Monroe administration recognized the new republics of Chile, Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Colombia, and soon after, the newly independent Central American Federation.
In Europe, however, a reactionary coalition of the Austrian, Prussian and Russian monarchies — the "Holy Alliance" — had defeated Napoleon's armies and was making clear its determination to wipe out all vestiges of the French Revolution and threats of republican rule. They were also concerned that the French invasion of Spain had weakened the Spanish crown and spurred the independence wars in its New World colonies. The Holy Alliance began preparations to back renewed efforts by Spain's Bourbon monarchy to subjugate insurgent Latin America.
That was the context for Monroe's warning to the European powers not to interfere in the affairs of newly independent Latin American nations.
Today, some opponents of Washington's policies assert that U.S. "imperialism" has been seeking to conquer Latin American territory since the founding of the U.S. But that's not accurate.
Prior to the U.S. Civil War, small groups of American adventurers organized armed expeditions to Mexico, Central America and Cuba. They sought to grab land for U.S. Southern slaveholding interests. The most notorious was William Walker, who landed in Nicaragua in 1855, proclaimed himself president, and declared slavery legal there, until he was driven out in 1857 by the united Central American armies.
Such adventures were historically doomed to fail — as was the Confederacy's war of conquest to establish a reactionary slave empire extending into the Caribbean.
Lincoln and Benito Juárez
The best illustration of the progressive character of the Monroe Doctrine took place during the Second American Revolution. It was the response by President Abraham Lincoln's administration to the French invasion and occupation of Mexico.
In 1861, the Mexican government of Benito Juárez, after winning a revolutionary democratic war against the power of the semifeudal landholding classes and Catholic Church hierarchy, declared a two-year moratorium on onerous foreign debts. In response, the British, Spanish, and French governments launched a joint military intervention against Mexico, which Marx denounced as a "new Holy Alliance." Their goal was not only to make Mexico pay the debt, but to prop up reactionary class forces there and regain a foothold in the Americas. It was also part of efforts by the European powers to aid the U.S. slavocracy in the Civil War.
Although the British and Spanish governments backed out of the adventure, the French regime of Napoleon III carried through the invasion and installed Austrian Prince Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico.
The Lincoln administration backed the Juárez government and opposed the French-led war on Mexico, a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Union Army generals Ulysses Grant and Philip Sheridan massed 50,000 troops near the Texas-Mexico border and transferred weapons to Juárez's forces.
After the victory of the North in the Civil War, some 3,000 Union Army veterans joined and fought in Mexico's republican army. And in U.S. cities from San Francisco to New Orleans, groups called Defenders of the Monroe Doctrine and the Society of Friends of Mexico held public meetings to promote solidarity and recruit volunteers for the Juarista army. By 1867, Juárez's forces expelled the French invaders, a revolutionary victory celebrated annually as Cinco de Mayo.
It's no surprise that José Martí, leader of Cuba's independence struggle against Spanish rule, wrote in 1889, "We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting." Francis Cutting was a leader of the American Annexationist League, which agitated for Washington to seize Cuba from Spain.
Martí was contrasting his admiration of the bourgeois-revolutionary heritage of the U.S. with Washington's transformation, then underway, into an imperialist power.
What Lenin and Sankara explained
It's Lenin, in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, who best described how world capitalism had outlived its progressive character. He explained that imperialism is marked by the domination of finance capital, the rise of monopolies, and the division of the world among the big capitalist powers.
Lenin pointed to the 1898 U.S. rulers' war against Spain over its colonies — Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam — as the first war of the imperialist epoch.
Imperialism, Lenin noted, is not a policy that a government chooses. The drive toward war and plunder is inherent to imperialism. It can only be ended by organizing a revolutionary movement of workers and farmers to take state power and overturn capitalist rule.
In taking a historical materialist approach to understanding developments like the Monroe Doctrine, we can also learn from Thomas Sankara, the outstanding communist and leader of the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina Faso.
"Our revolution in Burkina Faso," Sankara said in a 1984 speech, "draws inspiration from all of man's experiences since his first breath." We "draw the lessons of the American Revolution, the lessons of its victory over colonial domination and the consequences of that victory. We adopt as our own the affirmation of the Doctrine whereby Europeans must not intervene in American affairs, nor Americans in European affairs. Just as Monroe proclaimed 'America to the Americans' in 1823, we echo this today by saying 'Africa to the Africans,' 'Burkina to the Burkinabè.'"
Sankara saluted the powerful legacy of the French Revolution of 1789, the 1871 Paris Commune and "the great revolution of October 1917" led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia.
We are, Sankara said, "the heirs of all the world's revolutions."
From:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)