The Ugly Face of Anti-Communism

Since the Russian revolution, the founding of the Communist International, and the organization of a revolutionary party “of a new type” in nearly every country, Communist and Workers Parties have been in the sights of every country’s bourgeoisie. In nearly all countries, the bourgeoisie, its political parties, its media, and its other henchmen have sought to thwart, even destroy the revolutionary vanguard of the workers. Thus, the existence of maneuvers or actions to suppress or repress Communist Parties comes as no surprise.

Throughout the last one hundred six years, a Communist Party’s size or influence has been reflected in the force or violence to which they are met. That, too, comes as no surprise.

Of course Communists resist the repression that inevitably ensues from capitalism’s defenders. In some cases and on some rare occasions, a deeply embedded sense of fair play or principled belief in liberal values among the masses ensures that Communists enjoy a modicum of permitted activity in spite of the ruling bourgeoisie’s wishes.

So it should come as no surprise that the bourgeoisie in Venezuela would like to bury the Communist Party, consigning it to the political margins or worse. Over the course of the Venezuelan Communist Party’s long and determined history of the defense of Venezuela’s workers, it has been attacked, repressed, and banned by bourgeois politicians or the military. In fact, since its birth in 1931 until 1969, the Party has known little more than five years of legality. 

It should come as no surprise, either, when a popular movement wins electoral victories against the established bourgeois parties, promising to defend Venezuela’s independence and to implement a people’s program, that Venezuela’s Communist Party would enthusiastically offer conditional support. With its own program based on revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, the vigorous support the Communists offered to the government of Hugo Chavez was necessarily conditional, though supportive.

The Chavez program was vaguely socialist-- drawing on Christian ethics, utopian socialism, and a motley assembly of enthusiastic volunteer academic advisors from around the world. Nonetheless, it drew the enmity of US imperialism and its allies for its foreign policy and resource independence. While it defied the influence of the domestic bourgeoisie, the Chavez government did not establish workers’ power or eliminate the bourgeoisie’s economic base.

Despite these weaknesses, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) continued to defend the government and support it against US intervention and counter-revolutionary intrigue. The PCV continued its conditional support in the post-Chavez era-- with Maduro’s election-- but with emerging differences over domestic policy, especially with regards to the working class and corruption.

Over the last decade, the differences grew sharper. In the eyes of the PCV and in its own words: “It is on the reality of total rupture with the Unitary Framework Agreement [an agreement proposed before the 2018 election] and with the programmatic bases of the Bolivarian process initiated by Hugo Chavez that the PCV distanced itself from the Maduro government.”

Of course the distancing does not mean abandoning joint patriotic resistance to US and other foreign intervention.

In the wake of these political differences-- a common enough feature of center-left and left electoral formations-- the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice imposed a new leadership on the PCV on August 11, a wildly arbitrary and unjust move with no possible motivation other than to weaken and disable the PCV. Venezuela’s highest court summarily ruled that a new leadership-- composed of renegades, dissidents, and non-members-- should constitute a new leading body, negating the democratically elected leadership of the PCV from its last Congress in November of last year.

Venezuelan Communists were denied serious participation, due process, and the right to appeal this attempt to disable a historical instrument of the Venezuelan working class.

Some might dismiss this as a rogue court attacking the PCV, but the fact that the Venezuelan government had sought to deny electoral participation by the PCV earlier and that a prominent leader of the leading political party had mounted a campaign against the PCV, demonstrate that Maduro’s party was complicit in the court’s maneuvers. 

Certainly the government, Maduro, and Maduro’s party have had every opportunity to denounce or resist the blatant attempt to disarm the working class’s most dedicated advocates, the Venezuelan Communists. They have not.

Clearly, this is an instance of raw anti-Communism, updated to the twenty-first century. Others can probe the reasons that Maduro and his party have succumbed to anti-Communism, but succumb they have. If they believe that creating a bogus Communist Party will deflect criticism or improve their electoral opportunities, it will not be the first time that fear of Communism leads to the suppression of political choices and dishonors the perpetrators.

But the PCV will endure. Its cadre will find their way through this thicket of distraction and continue to fight for working people.

Many Communist and Workers’ Parties have rallied-- along with many other honest people-- in defense of the PCV and the cause of Venezuelan workers. They understand the cost of anti-Communism on the fate of working people.

But many on the left have failed this moment. Their reasons constitute a basket of opportunism. They stare at their shoe tops, equivocate, plead ignorance, or soil the banner of solidarity. History will judge.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

    

“....exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual”

The November 2, 2023 edition of The Wall Street Journal acknowledges that “the three-week-long air campaign by Israel… is the most intense in its history and rivals any aerial bombardment this century,” according to “military analysts”. The Israelis have “hit more than 11,000 targets, with missiles, bombs, and artillery, in Gaza, an area that is half the size of New York City that is home to about two million people.”

Reporting only one week after the war began, the Turkish state-run news agency takes note of the following comparisons: 

The Washington Post, citing Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace, reported that Israel is “dropping in less than a week what the US was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area, where mistakes are going to be magnified.”

Garlasco, who is also a former UN war crimes investigator in Libya, told the daily, citing records from the US Air Force Central Command, that the highest number of bombs dropped in a year for the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423. According to the UN, during the entire war in Libya, NATO reported dropping more than 7,600 bombs and missiles from aircraft, the daily reported…

Charles Lister, a senior fellow and director of the Extremism and Counterterrorism Program at the Middle East Institute, was also surprised by the figure.

WOW -- 6,000 bombs in 6 days, in 365 km2 #Gaza,” Lister said on X.

“For comparison, the international anti-#ISIS coalition dropped an average of ~2,500 bombs **per month, across 46,000 km2 in #Syria & #Iraq.**”

In a release on November 2, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports:

Geneva - Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale war on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in a press release issued today.

According to the Geneva-based human rights organisation, the Israeli army has admitted to bombing over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual. Euro-Med Monitor highlighted that the weight of the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in August 1945 was estimated at about 15,000 tons of explosives.

Due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Euro-Med Monitor said, noting that the area of the Japanese city is 900 square kilometres, while the area of Gaza does not exceed 360 square kilometres.

The rights group’s statement underlined that Israel uses bombs with huge destructive power, some of which range from 150 to 1,000 kilograms, and cited a recent statement by Israeli War Minister Yoav Gallant that declared that more than 10,000 bombs have been dropped on Gaza City alone.

Israel’s use of internationally banned weapons in its attacks on the Gaza Strip has been documented, said Euro-Med Monitor, especially the use of cluster and phosphorus bombs, which are waxy toxic substances that react quickly to oxygen and cause severe second- and third-degree burns.

While comparisons are rough, they give some sense of the scale of the Israeli assault on Gaza which is lost in much of the media coverage. The assault on the civilian population of Gaza is savage. The immediacy of this catastrophe on the civilian population of Gaza vastly overshadows the questions that occupy the media, the punditry, and the politicians. They, and others, who fail to recognize this human disaster and fail to call for its ending will be judged harshly by history.

The world-wide outrage voiced by the people is in sharp contrast to the complacency of the elites. Despite the best efforts of elites to minimize and distort the facts and to threaten and ostracize resistance, millions have emphatically called for a ceasefire. The shameful attempt to stifle this resistance should not be forgotten when future political options are weighed.

The effectiveness of global resistance has forced the US State Department warmongers-- the slavish apologists for Israeli policies-- to call for a “humanitarian pause,” a tepid, cowardly attempt to save face in the wake of mass slaughter. Predictably, the extremist Israeli government has turned down this feeble request.

As civilian deaths in Gaza climb obscenely, there is only one honest demand: Cease fire! End the war now!

*****

Like the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza-- in the entire Middle East, for that matter-- can neither be understood nor judged without delving into its history. Simplistic accounts that place ethnicity, religion, or ideology ahead of the machinations of imperialism miss the point. Since the politics of oil has dominated great power interests in the Middle East, the traditional relations of the various peoples and their fate have been largely determined by those powers. Beginning with the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement, the people of the region have been largely side-line observers of British and French imperial designs.

Matters changed after World War II with the upsurge in nationalism, both narrow nationalism and progressive national liberation. The Zionist “victory” over British rule in Palestine and the subsequent purging of Palestinian villages and residents led to a narrow nationalist, theocratic regime in Israel that quickly became a watchdog for US and NATO imperialism, joining in the suppression and manipulation of popular risings in the Middle East.

At the same time, popular, secular, Arab nationalist, independent, proto-socialist movements arose, alongside existing worker and Communist parties, targeting both backward, feudal, and fundamentalist regimes installed or sustained throughout the Middle East by the West, as well as their Western puppeteers.

Arab nationalism and the inspiration of socialism-- encouraged by the 1952 revolution in Egypt-- grew into a powerful movement that, despite relentless efforts to undermine them, lingers to this day. The Ba’ath Party, Yasser Arafat’s PLO, and Quaddafi’s Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya were modern-day remnants of the 1952 revolution’s legacy.

Wherever these secular movements rose in stature, the Western powers and Israel sponsored anti-Communist, religious fundamentalists as a bulwark against secularism, progressive nationalism, and tolerance.

Famously, this sponsorship has often backfired on the sponsor-- what Chalmers Johnson cleverly dubbed “blowback” -- as it did when the US courted the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Opportunistically using Islamic fundamentalism to combat Afghani revolutionaries and Soviet assistance, the US enabled a powerful new reactionary force in the Middle East that led directly to the infamous jihadist attack on September 11, 2001.

Hamas is a similar creature. Nourished and encouraged by Israel as an alternative to the secular PLO, it turned on its masters. As Avner Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer affirmed recently in The Wall Street Journal:

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah.

Since October 7, the regarded Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, has posted a series of articles chronicling the Israeli government’s efforts to strengthen Hamas in order to ensure that Palestinian governance would be divided between the West Bank and Gaza: divide and conquer.

The great tragedy of the Palestinian people is brought forth by today's massacre at the hands of Zionist zealots: the death of thousands of civilians and the injury of many more. But its roots lie in the machinations of Western imperialism, the indifference, even hostility, of many Arab states, and the failings of the left.

Kemal Okuyan, General Secretary of the Turkish Communist Party addresses the failing in a recent speech:

Because today, political Islam has turned into an effective tool in the hands of the ruling classes not only to attack, divide or control the workers but also to gain advantage in the competition within the imperialist system. When its class-based characteristics is missed, in Europe and North America, political Islam is either viewed with an orientalist approach as "an anti-imperialist, even revolutionary revolt of the backward world," or, as in the case of ISIS, as a medieval barbarism. I regret to say that both approaches lead us to mistakes. It must be recognized that political Islam is an important reality of the modern world, it is fundamentally a class phenomenon and a problem that cannot be overcome by romanticism or feelings of terror. We will not allow the Palestinian resistance to be reduced to Hamas. But we need to answer the question why religion has become decisive in social dynamics of the Islamic world.

 

Comrades, the regression in the Middle East is ultimately due to the same reason as the decline of the working-class movement in the rest of the world today. This reason can be summarized as the abandonment of the class positions and the perspective of revolution. One of the most important, if not the only, reasons for the rise of right-wing populism or the far right in Europe today is the gaps left by the left. Capitalism constantly generates problems that require radical responses. The same mechanism is also at work in the Middle East, which has a very different historical, cultural and political background. Politics does not tolerate any gaps. The truth is that they are stealing the anger of the poor and they are stealing it from us. We cannot accept this. The moment we put aside the actuality of the revolution; we commit mistakes. Anti-US positions without the goal of socialism leads us to consider political Islam or the so-called national bourgeoisies as allies; putting democracy before socialism often leads us to co-operate with the US or the EU or other bourgeois forces. This is a vicious circle. This vicious circle traps us in Europe, Latin America or North America as much as it does in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt or Palestine. 

The power of Okuyan’s analysis lies in underscoring the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance while insisting that Palestinian liberation requires different options, revolutionary options that will better serve the interests of the Palestinian masses. 

Whatever else the Hamas attack has done, Israeli reaction has exposed the brutality of the Israeli regime to millions of people who were unaware or in denial of the oppression, abuse, and destruction of the Palestinian people in their historic homeland and in Gaza. Even the Western media has, to some extent, been forced to acknowledge the horrors of life in Gaza under Israeli attack, leaving their political patrons exposed for their sheer indifference and their lack of moral principle. Leaders of Arab countries are forced to face their unprincipled relations with Israel or face their outraged populations.

Yet the political strata continue to escalate both their support for Israel and their suppression of domestic resistance. They will pay dearly for this, as the Israeli government further shows its brutal face to the world.

The people of the world must demand the end of the Israeli attack on Gaza. That victory might begin the march to restoring dignity to the long-suffering Palestinian people.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

An Overdue Look at the Environmental Crisis

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Our global environmental crisis is widely understood to be reaching a crucial moment; the danger signals are flashing almost daily. Yet a certain complacency follows the many catastrophic climate events attributable to a critically injured environment. People talk easily of a climate Armageddon, while maintaining business as usual.

Is this fatalism? Are there onerous sacrifices necessary to save the planet? Are there insurmountable obstacles to finding solutions? Are we beyond the point-of-no-return? 

These questions need urgent answers.

The truth is that some leftists have been addressing these problems and ringing the alarm for decades. But some of us, though recognizing the crisis, have paid only lip-service to its solutions, neglecting to apply the unique perspective that Marxism could bring. Looking at the crisis through the lens of class and exploitation surely offers a deeper understanding than the sensationalism and superficiality of the capitalist media and their punditry.

Mea culpa.

Hopefully, my own absolution began with acquiring a copy of Monthly Review’s July-August issue devoted to perspectives on the environmental crisis from a left, Marxist-friendly perspective. Entitled Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development (volume 75, number 3), the volume offers eleven contributions, with an important, essential, introductory essay by John Bellamy Foster. Foster has labored productively in the vineyards of ecosocialism for some time. The journal number comes highly recommended.

Much of the popular response to the unfolding environmental disaster is reducible to cultural environmentalism. Advocates call for a change in consumption patterns-- switching from products whose production, reproduction, or disposal is most harmful to our land, water, or air. Some cultural environmentalists demand a radical overall cut in consumption, insist on the elimination of conspicuous consumption, or even pose a philosophical challenge to the very concept of consumerism so prevalent in capitalist societies. 

But cultural environmentalism alone does not thoroughly address the institutions that encourage or incur needless carbon emissions, senseless waste, and the depletion of precious resources-- institutions like the military, the security, judicial, and penal system, the sales and marketing effort, mass entertainment, etc. Nor does it challenge capitalism itself.

On a global level, conserving only the twentieth-century resources allocated for war making, the social wealth lost to the destruction of past wars and necessitated by the remedial costs of death and suffering would put us uncountable years behind our current rendezvous with disaster. Even eliminating today’s bloated military budgets and stopping the current wars would lessen the immediate crisis dramatically. 

Most of the mainstream liberal and social democratic cultural environmentalists ignore these institutions that are deeply embedded in the capitalist infrastructure, instead opting for campaigns to eliminate or recycle the most energy-soaked articles of convenience-- cans, bottles, plastic bags, etc. or forcing the issue into the thick, impenetrable muck of bourgeois politics, legislative decision-making, and state regulation.

The Green New Deal, the consensus approach of the techno-environmentalists, promises to restructure capitalism by rewarding positive changes in energy generation and use, while sanctioning corporate foot dragging and avoidance. Implementation rests with the commitment of political puppets of corporate power-- the political strata. Again, there is no substantial challenge to capitalism and its institutions with techno-environmentalism.

The contributors to the Monthly Review anthology more or less understand the shortcomings of the liberal/social democratic approach. They grasp that capitalism-- with its insatiable thirst for accumulation-- cannot meet the challenge of environmental catastrophe. That reality animates all of the selections in Planned Degrowth. Yet, among the writers, there is little agreement on how to move beyond capitalism (of all the contributors, Ying Chen makes the strongest case for a robust, planned socialist economy genuinely independent of the capitalist mode of production).

Resolving those differences is made all the more difficult by the ambiguities and confusions accompanying the central concepts of planning and degrowth. 

It is commendable that nearly all of the participants understand that market forces alone are inadequate to extract humanity from the catastrophe awaiting us. Moreover, the alternative to markets necessarily is some form of economic planning-- some form of conscious human-based decision making. This alone is a departure from the left’s post-Soviet love-fest with market mechanisms and market socialism-- indeed, a welcome departure opening the way to a more robust socialism. But what form should the planning take? Who should make the plan?

Foster wisely sees the cause of environmental disaster in the capitalist’s insatiable need to “accumulate! accumulate!” -- borrowing Marx’s succinct summation. Accordingly, the challenge is to organize the economy around social usefulness, and not profit-- “focusing on use value rather than exchange value,” to employ Foster’s words.

Certainly, contrasting use value against exchange value, advantaging the former, requires some exiting from the market mechanism and a turn toward a different mechanism for the allocation of resources: conscious human decision-making, i.e. planning.

This makes a neat, compelling argument for some form of planning.

Unfortunately, most of the contributors have little regard for the rich twentieth-century experience in planning afforded by the now-defunct European socialist community. It is fashionable, among Western academic Marxists (or Marxians, as they sometimes like to be called), to heap scorn on the Soviet central planning mechanism in its different iterations despite its relative successes even without the benefit of today’s astounding computational powers. Apart from Paul Cockshott and some of his colleagues, there is little interest in exploring how a similar planning mechanism could be optimized using available technologies.

Foster, to his credit, offers a very modest defense of Soviet planning, especially regarding its impact on the environment. But others acknowledge the need for planning without providing even a sketch of how that would be done. 

Instead, several writers revisit the old New Left fetish of participatory democracy, as though the more fingers in the planning pie, the better, regardless of the results. This reaches the limits of absurdity with the Venezuelan rural commune proposed as the model for a planning mechanism to rescue the world economy from the throes of environmental crisis, a utopian fantasy.

The other Western Marxist obsession is decentralization. Apparently, the political model beloved by the North American-European left is the Swiss canton, the landsgemeinde, combining the smallest possible political units with the most direct democracy. How such decentralized planning could successfully redirect a modern juggernaut economy to escape the tyranny of markets requires a giant leap of faith (As Nicolas Graham understates, “... it is quite difficult to imagine effective planning… without some coordinating authority and external arbiter.”) 

Planned Degrowth’s other key idea, degrowth, is also underdeveloped. Informing this concept is the looming disaster cited by Foster and implicit with all of the authors: 

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5-degree Centigrade increase over pre-industrial levels this century-- or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2-degree Centigrade increase-- if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe… All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Understandably, faced with these limits, most of us recognize that, in some sense or another, we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. That is, growing carbon emissions, growing consumption patterns, more broadly-- growing GDP as support for growing consumption or growing population, and any and all other forms of growth that potentially increase carbon emissions cannot be simultaneously sustained without an existential threat to life on the planet.

But is it misleading, simplistic, and maybe even harmful to popularize degrowth in general as the solution to the life-or-death challenge of carbon-emission limits? Are there different kinds of “growth” -- minimal emissions, emissions-neutral, or even emissions-free-- that sidestep the rendezvous with climate disaster? Would not market-free, planned economic growth, itself, forestall that rendezvous? Can we not envision a growing, planned socialist economy that stems or reverses increases in emissions?

In the historically nuanced Marxist perspective, growth of the productive forces of society need not be coupled with an anarchical, unfettered, profit-driven economy, nor has it always been so associated. On the other hand, the preferred capitalist measuring stick of growth-- gross domestic product-- reflects that association: in the capitalist industrial era, growth (GDP), national wealth, the unregulated exploitation of carbon-based energy, and the exploitation of labor are inextricably bound. 

For Marxists, there is no such necessary link. Free of the wasteful uses of social wealth for class aggrandizement, class suppression, and endless accumulation, growth can be redefined as the unbounded improvement in both the quality and prospects of all human life. For example, the development of vaccines for Covid or future attacks of new viruses requires the further development of productive forces and constitutes a growth in social wealth, but with far less impact on the environment when undertaken outside the framework of the profit-driven capitalist system.

Marx and Engels gave us a different perspective on growth in The German Ideology, linking the development of forces of production directly to the improvement of humanity’s survivability and flourishing, while faced with ever-arising challenges from nature and other humans. They remind us that the mode of production is not only what people produce but how they produce. That ever-present, evolving challenge may, in some sense, at some time, require “growth,” but growth away from carbon emissions, waste, excess, inefficiency, and greed. Thus, we would define a new, humane concept of growth and production.

Foster comes close to recognizing this possibility by distinguishing “a quantitative as well a qualitative sense” of productive forces. But he seems to overlook that the qualitative expansion of productive forces might well be qualitative production, production independent of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and environmental degradation-- production of new ideas, new living arrangements, new divisions of labor, etc. This would be a more refined notion of growth, far more useful than the BEA or OECD definition of gross domestic product that degrowth addresses. 

Two contributors, Isikara and Narin, are dismissive of the explanatory power of the second law of thermodynamics in the social world. Yet it does capture the fundamental struggle that only humans wage with ultimately limited, but astonishing success against a system’s tendency toward disorder. The development of productive forces was-- qualitatively or quantitatively-- the primary effective human response to this law: the law of entropy. The idea of degrowth, so superficially compelling in its simplicity, fails to account for this universal struggle. The environmental crisis is only the latest chapter in the perpetual struggle against species extinction. Like previous struggles, it will take development (and in the broadest sense, growth) of the productive forces to win, even if only temporarily from the inevitable disorder of closed systems.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a just, viable solution to the environmental crisis is the gross inequalities found in the capitalist countries and found between the advanced capitalist countries and those less advanced. The weakness of the degrowth mantra aside, any immediate solution to the crisis will require limits to carbon emissions, limits that will fall unfairly upon the disadvantaged unless some compensatory distribution-- national and global affirmative action-- is established. In other words, should sacrifices be necessary, they must be fairly imposed. No poor country or poor population should be required or even asked to make commensurate sacrifices with wealthy countries or wealthy elites. More importantly, their development-- their ‘catching up’-- should not be delayed as long as they lag behind their wealthier counterparts. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan make a powerful historico-empirical argument that capitalism can never meet this demand in their contribution. 

The only large-scale affirmative action program ever effectively actuated was the post-World War II collaboration of the socialist countries, coordinated by the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, known in the West as Comecon). The CMEA based itself on the Leninist doctrine and the history of intensive investment of Soviet resources in the former Russian empire’s disadvantaged oppressed nations. Cognizant of the uneven development produced and reproduced by class society, the Soviet Union proportionately devoted far more resources to the “backward” constituent republics than to the more advanced Russian Republic.

The CMEA sought to continue this policy with the post-war socialist community. For example, the Soviet Union would offer an extended contract for oil to Cuba at the lowest market price of a previous period, while agreeing to purchase a fixed amount of sugar at the highest market price of that period. In addition, the Soviet Union would grant the poorer member state favorable, extended payment terms. It should be noted that the Soviet beet crop was more than adequate to supply Soviet sugar needs at a lower cost. At the same time, the Soviet Union would provide grants and low-interest, long-term loans for Cuban infrastructure and industrial development.

This, and most internal CMEA agreements, typified affirmative action on a massive scale to correct uneven development.

Given that capitalism has never known or even devised such a leveling, developmentally egalitarian approach in international affairs nor that any country today practices it (apart from socialist Cuba, generously, but with limited resources), the necessity for global affirmative action on the environment would seem to be a powerful argument for socialism among leftist activists. 

True to the history of Western Marxism, European-North American socialists find little worthwhile in the history of the Soviet Union, so the argument seldom sees the light of day.

That is not to say that the contributors to Degrowth Planning are unaware of the inequalities standing in the way of any fair and equitable answer to the environmental crisis. Foster is explicit: “At the same time, the poorer countries with low ecological footprints have to be allowed to develop in a general process that includes contraction in throughput of energy and materials in the rich countries and the convergence of per capita consumption in physical terms in the world as a whole.”

But what is lacking with all the participants’ accounts is agency. Who will tackle these challenges? Who will adopt a program that incorporates these considerations? Who will build a movement to move a program forward? 

It would be unfair to fault the twelve academics contributing to this issue for having no ready answer to these questions. Nonetheless, if theory is to matter, we must have practical answers (Isikara and Narin almost broach this issue, but deliver it in unnecessarily opaque academic language) and avoid utopia-spinning. Too often intellectuals deliver theory in the passive voice: “What is objectively necessary at this point in human history is therefore a revolutionary transformation… governing production, consumption, and distribution… a shift away from the system of monopoly capital, exploitation, expropriation, waste, and the endless drive to accumulation.”

Yes, but who is to accomplish this and how are they to do it?

It is far easier to say who will not do it! But surely it can be conceded that we need a class-based revolutionary party committed to a robust socialism that will wrest political and economic power from the capitalist class. Should we not be vigorously working toward that end if we want to avoid our date with doom?

Despite my reservations, I strongly recommend the special Monthly Review issue devoted to the environmental crisis, entitled Planned Degrowth: ecosocialism and sustainable human development.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Our Dirty Little Secret Revealed

I grew up in a small Midwestern town that was part of an industrial oasis located in the midst of corn and soybean fields. The oasis existed because bituminous coal had been discovered under the flat lands well over a hundred years ago. 

The mines attracted thousands of workers from Eastern and Southern Europe, including my two grandfathers. The large immigrant working class, in turn, attracted industry as well. General Motors, General Electric, Hyster, and several other corporations soon made a home in this rural area. 

At the time of my birth, the mines were exhausted for profitable exploitation (My grandfather had the dubious distinction of being one of the last miners killed). But industry continued on until the deindustrialization that wracked the entire Midwest in the 1990s.

I probably first heard the expression “DP” in the late McCarthy era when family 

and friends spoke of some people who were new to the area. My inquiring mind soon learned that these DPs were “displaced people” -- Eastern European refugees from camps in Western Europe relocating to the US through humanitarian agencies. In keeping with the tenor of the time, I was told that they were fleeing Communism. 

Since Chicago was the choice of many of the first wave of Lithuanians arriving in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it was no surprise, then, that many Lithuanian DPs found their way to Chicago, then sometimes merged into the large Lithuanian immigrant community where I lived.

Given the time and the reigning sympathy for the “victims” of Communism, they were unsurprisingly welcome. Their children went to school with me and socialized with my circle of friends.

Later, when in graduate school and taking more than a superficial interest in European history, I had a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment about the DPs: What-- I asked myself-- were Lithuanians doing in Nazi Germany at the close of World War II? 

If they were anti-fascists, surely, they would have remained East. If they were forced laborers or prisoners-of-war, they would have been repatriated. Since the Nazis were not kind to the ordinary untermenschen of the East unless they were sympathizers or collaborators, it would be a reasonable assumption that many, if not most, traveled ahead of the Red Army across Poland and Eastern Germany with the help or acquiescence of the Nazis-- they were collaborators and would have been treated accordingly. Of course, there may have been myriad explanations for some displaced Lithuanians who found their way to these camps, but not thousands.

This squared with my US experience. Unlike the impoverished peasant wave of immigrants who came to the US at the turn of the century, the post-World War II immigrants brought a heavy dose of cultural nationalism and tradition. The first wave had their cultural ties to the old country severed at Ellis Island when our names were butchered by the immigration officers. Assimilation was made easy in the mines, mills, and factories; and cultural identity grew thin.

Where the first wave was shaped by oppressive, exploitative working conditions and welcomed, even led progressive unionism and a solidarity culture, this second wave was decidedly conservative and battled to move many of the existing ethnic organizations away from their secular, progressive direction.

Of course, it was not only Lithuanians, but other Eastern and Central European peoples who were welcomed to the US and Canada because their anti-Communism was unwelcome in the country-of-origin, but welcome here. That ticket was valid for collaborators as well, especially if they had skills useful to the anti-Communist crusade.

Much of this history is rarely spoken. We all know about the Nazi, Werner von Braun, the father of the US missile and space program, but little else besides an occasional death-camp guard who flies too close to the flame and is exposed.

Therefore, the recent Canadian parliament fiasco comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with the embarrassing welcome mat extended to the fascists, ultra-nationalists, and collaborators with Nazism after World War II. Indeed, that collaboration with collaborators evolved into an open door for the exiled reactionaries from every anti-Communist, client regime that the US has sponsored since 1945. From the Cuban gusanos to Venezuelan golpistas, the US government has found a happy haven for the world’s most violent anti-democrats, thereby polluting our own politics.

So, watching the standing ovation for a 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen-SS by every Canadian parliamentarian and most of the Canadian government only underscores the hypocrisy of Western governments that presume to lecture the world on democracy and human rights. 

Imagine that people who want and expect to be taken seriously on world affairs wildly applauding a rare surviving participant in history’s greatest mass slaughter. It should be even more embarrassing that a mainstream corporate media had to be reluctantly goaded into indignation over this outrage, a media that wallows in sanctimonious self-righteousness and smugness.

Major media commentators have a short, selective memory.

Upon the July 5, 1986 death of Yaroslav Stetsko, the former Ukrainian Premier during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, President Ronald Reagan sent condolences to his widow celebrating his “courageous struggle” and closing with “Your cause is our cause. God bless you.” Stetsko had no doubt cherished the pictures taken with Reagan, Bush, and UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

Stetsko, a notorious anti-Semite, was instrumental in forming the infamous Nachtigall and Roland battalions made up of Ukrainian fascists who worked alongside the Nazis in killing Jews, Communists, prisoners, gypsies, and members of the resistance. In July after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stetsko sent a warm, fawning letter to Adolf Hitler expressing gratitude and admiration for the Nazi action and hoping for a victory against the Soviet Union. 

He is the ideological father of Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist, anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, racist, Nazi-nostalgic party that, continuing Stetsko’s ideology, exercises far-too-much influence in modern Ukraine’s political life. 

Outrages like the Canadian parliamentary fiasco and Reagan’s celebration of the life of a war criminal occur because no one in official circles or the capitalist media expects the public to know about the vast amount of collaboration with Nazism that occurred as the Wehrmacht and the SS marched East in their Lebensraum im Osten campaign. Nor are most people in North America aware that Nazis and their Eastern European collaborators were welcomed to our shores by the thousands.

Also, most people in North America have not learned of the incredible crimes committed against Jews and other ethnic groups, as well as Communists and anti-fascists in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Poland by the ultra-nationalists, fascists, anti-Semites, and anti-Communists of those countries (one mustn’t forget that fascist volunteers from Finland, Romania, Norway, Hungary, and Italy also fought with the Nazis on the Eastern front).

Countless studies, memoirs, and documents exist recounting the role of Eastern European collaborators in ethnic and political murder, though they garner no interest from the pundits, the commentators, and the popularizers. Instead, a book like Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocide, ed. B.F. Sabrin (1991) goes unheralded, unreviewed, and relegated to a few library shelves.

Gruesome first-person accounts and documents portray the terror, cruelty, and murder conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists. Told mainly by surviving Jewish victims, Alliance for Murder focuses on the nationalist murders in the Tarnopol region of Ukraine but shows the systematic collaboration of the Ukrainian nationalists. The book quotes a former Nazi general, Otto Korfes:

[The trenches] were filled with men, women, and children, mostly Jews. Every trench contained some 60-80 persons. We could hear their moans and shrieks as grenades exploded among them. On both sides of the trenches stood some 12 men dressed in civilian clothes. They were hurling grenades down the trenches… Later, officers of the Gestapo told us that those men were Banderists (July 3, 1941) [Banderists were followers of Stefan Bandera, a founder of the OUN nationalist organization].

Another book, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism, by Douglas Tottle (1987), dared to challenge the mythology of a calculated, purposeful famine in the Ukraine organized by the Soviets. The so-called Holodomor has become the standard Western narrative that fuels and justifies Ukrainian hatred and contempt for Communism and Russia-- much like today’s Western angst over the Uyghurs in the Peoples’ Republic of China-- while distracting Westerners from the brutal actions of Ukrainian nationalism from its beginnings until today. 

Tottle’s book was of special interest because it came after Robert Conquest-- a serial contriver of Communist perfidy-- published his widely influential book on the 1930s famine-- The Harvest of Sorrow. Tottle, a Canadian union activist, former editor of the USW The Challenger, and a movement organizer, rocked the smug, well-connected Conquest’s carefully constructed anti-Soviet tome so effectively that the nationalist Ukrainian diaspora was rattled and motivated to hurriedly convene an “international commission” to determine the “truth” about Ukraine. Organized and hand-picked by the nationalist World Congress of Free Ukrainians, the inquiry set out to place its stamp of approval upon Conquest’s accusations and dismiss Tottle’s rejoinder. 

The biographies of former top leaders of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (later the Ukrainian World Congress) exhibits the political flavor of the organization: Anton Melnyk, member of Stepan Bandera’s fascistic OUN; Mykola Plaviuk, member of the Nazi-collaborationist Ukrainian National Army, 2nd Division; and Peter Savaryn, member of the notorious 14th Waffen-SS volunteer Division “Galicia.” With this illustrious group of former leaders of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, it is not difficult to imagine how objective their inquiry into the so-called Holodomor would be. 

The ultimate tribute to the impact of Tottle’s research comes from the arch anti-Soviet pundit, Anne Applebaum, who proclaimed that Tottle-- a mere Canadian leftist with no elite credentials-- could not have written his book without Soviet help.

Citing Reuben Ainsztein, Tottle says: “In the first three months of Nazi occupation of Western Ukraine, 15 per cent of Gallician Jews-- 100,000 people-- were slaughtered by the joint action of the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists.”

He concludes:

…collaboration between the Nazis and Ukrainian Nationalists began long before the war and continued throughout the war, even after the Germans were completely driven out of Ukrainian territory. The Nationalists were firmly locked into the Nazi occupation machine. Their police and punitive units mass-murdered Jews and Ukrainians alike. Vast numbers of Ukrainians were also rounded up, with the help of Ukrainian collaborators for shipment to Germany as slave laborers. Thousands of actions were carried out by Nationalist militias, SB, UPA and Ukrainian police units, often under German supervision. Nationalist-recruited troops served Hitler in Ukraine, Poland, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Ukrainian collaborators assisted in the murder of hundreds of thousands in death camps like Trblinka, Sobibor, Yanowska and Trawniki.

As Max Blumenthal notes, after the war the Canadian government in “Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship” while classifying thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens.” Undoubtedly, the US government welcomed even a greater number of Nazi collaborators who were “proven” anti-Communists.

If the brief glimpse into the sordid history of Ukrainian (and other Eastern European) collaborators afforded by the Canadian parliamentary fiasco serves any purpose, it is to remind us of the lingering disease of twentieth-century European nationalism and its ugly inhumanity. Those who turn their eyes away from this legacy and its continuing influence over today’s Ukrainian politics will never begin to understand the dynamics of the conflict within that country and with its neighbor. The symbols of Ukrainian nationalism, so readily embraced by Western armchair warriors raging at Putin, are dripping with the blood of Jews, Poles, Russians, Communists, partisans, and anti-fascists who encountered Ukrainian nationalism and its virulent practitioners.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com