Please read below the Brazil Solidarity Initiative’s urgent statement on the defence of Brazilian democracy and the electoral system in the face of growing political violence and threats of a far-right powergrab from Bolsonaro. The election takes place today (October 2nd.)
On Sunday 2 October, over 150 million Brazilian voters will elect the next president of one of the world’s largest democracies. The choice is between the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and progressive candidate Lula da Silva.
Polls show Lula has a strong lead in the polls and is on track to pass the 50% threshold needed to be elected in the first round.
Lula previously served as Brazil’s president after being elected as the country’s first working class leader earlier this century. When he left office in 2011 he had record-high approval ratings of 83 percent, the result of his government’s success in reducing poverty and addressing social inequality,
Lula was favourite to win the 2018 Presidential election until he was arrested and jailed on trumped-up charges orchestrated by powerful elites in Brazil and Washington.
That injustice opened the door to the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a strong supporter of Brazil’s past military dictatorship and under which he had served as a military officer.
In office, Bolsonaro has repeatedly undermined Brazil’s democracy and trampled on the rights of women, LGBT, Black & Indigenous communities and environmental activists.
The run-up to this Sunday’s Presidential election has been no different. Bolsonaro and his cabinet ministers, nearly half of whom are military generals, have baselessly sought to bring into question the integrity of the election process. They have suggested that the military should have a greater role in overseeing the election and have threatened to reject the results if Bolsonaro loses. Bolsonaro even told supporters that “If necessary, we will go to war” over the election results. While his son has called on the growing number of Brazilian gun-holders to become “Bolsonaro volunteers”.
Threats and a climate of hate whipped up by Bolsonaro and his allies have created a context of rising political violence against supporters of Lula Da Silva. There has been the killing of Lula supporters and Worker’s Party officials and attacks on pro-Lula marches.
We call on all progressives to be alert to the threats posed by Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s democracy and any attempts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. We call on the UK Government to speak out against any efforts to incite political violence and undermine the electoral process and to review relations with any Brazilian government that comes to power through undemocratic means.
Please share the call for vigilance over the Brazilian election on Facebook and twitter. You can also read this urgent statement on the Brazil Solidarity Initiative website here.
]]>His essays on politics and language are re-read in a post-truth age of fake news. His two most famous works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four remain, for many in Central and Eastern Europe a warning of dictatorship and totalitarianism. In the post-Blair years, the Labour Party reached for Orwell to come to a definition of Englishness and nationalism. But it is his political legacy which is most often fought over. Raymond Williams’ Orwell is a socialist who is outside the organised working class. In Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2011) David Goodway paints him in anarchist colours while in Orwell’s Victory (2002) Christopher Hitchens comes up with a figure who looks remarkably like himself, a truth-telling contrarian who is the moral compass for the left. And then there are the multiple works of John Newsinger which include two volumes on Orwell’s politics, interesting for Newsinger’s diligence in showing Orwell to be a Trotskyist after all.i
Most commentators would agree that from late 1936 and his experience of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was committed to democratic socialism. However, during the Second World War and after, his understanding of socialism shifted and became difficult to pin down. His criticisms of Stalinism, informed by his experiences of the suppression of the POUM in Spain made him a stern critic of Soviet communism. However, Orwell, was also an equally stern and opinionated critic of the British left and especially what he saw as the bourgeois socialists and faddists. One of the areas where Orwell stood in contrast to others on the left was in his opposition to birth control.
Orwell and the English People
In 1947 Orwell wrote the text for a short book in the Collins’ ‘Britain in Pictures’ series entitled The English People. The text of less than 50 pages, including pictures, has the following passage:
The English “have got to retain their vitality… There was a small rise in the birthrate during the war years but that is probably of no significance, and the general curve is downwards. The position …can only be put right if the curve not only rises sharply, but does so within ten or at most twenty years”.ii
Orwell stresses that the rise and fall in the birthrate is linked to the national economy stating that in the growth period of the early nineteenth century they had had an extremely high birthrate and children were used in a very callous way in which the death of a child was “looked on as a very minor tragedy”. By the twentieth century a large family has brought economic hardship where “your children must wear poorer clothes”.iii
To encourage an increase in the birthrate (what he calls the “philoprogenitive instinct”) Orwell, states that the “Half-hearted family allowances will not do the trick…” and that “Any government, by a few strokes of the pen, could make childlessness as unbearable an economic burden as a big family is now… taxation will have to be graded so as to encourage child bearing and to save women with young children from being obliged to work outside the home.”iv
He concludes this section of the text with a focus on economic incentives but then calls for “a change of outlook”. This includes a new attitude to abortion which while “theoretically illegal” is looked upon “as a peccadillo”.v
Birth control and socialism
It is interesting that Orwell, not a man known for his orthodoxy, should focus on birth control as a windmill to tilt at. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, population control was an early issue in which socialists and freethinkers united. Before the formation of the Social Democratic Federation, Annie Besant had published The Law of Population (1st edition 1877) which advocated birth control. Some activists such as Tom Mann came to socialism via anti-Malthusianism,vi while, the partner of Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, was also a strong advocate of birth control. In the socialist press of the 1890s, for example, S. Gardiner defended birth control by pointing out that pregnancy kept women from the social world and political life. “Socialists should teach women comrades,” she wrote, “how to lessen their families, have fewer children and healthy ones, and then perhaps, more women would join our ranks, as they would have more time to learn about socialism.”vii
However, like Orwell, some socialists opposed birth control. There were a variety of reasons, firstly, because it diverted attention from the social question, secondly, because overpopulation could be avoided by “natural” means, and thirdly, because women’s control over reproduction would upset the relationships between men and women and undermine the family structure. Lastly, in a way preceding Orwell’s focus on the joy of sex in Nineteen Eighty-Four, sexual pleasure which may be a result of birth control “was not a true measure of happiness and should not be pursued.”viii In many ways socialists in the 1890s as well as Orwell half a century later, tried to uphold conservative morals as a counterbalance to their radical economic analysis.
Despite this opposition, campaigns for birth control and the legalisation of abortion remained at the heart of the socialist and labour movement. Marie Stopes published Married Love in 1918 and Sheila Rowbotham describes how speakers on birth control went out to Women’s Co-operative Guild groups and Labour Party women’s sections. In 1924 the Labour women’s conference resolved that the Ministry of Health should allow local health authorities to provide birth control information to those who wanted it. In 1927, in contrast to Orwell’s later romanticism of the working class family, a miner’s wife from Cannock in the Staffordshire coalfield appealed to the Labour Party conference for support from the miners for birth control in return for women’s solidarity with the miners during the lockout because, as one declaimed “It is four times as dangerous for a woman to bear a child as it is for you to go down a mine”.ix Thus, by the time of the Second World War there was strong support for birth control and free access to abortion included in socialist planning.
Orwell, class and the politics of the family
George Woodcock, who knew Orwell in the 1940s, claims that his proposals on abortion and birth control were “probably his most reactionary he ever made.”x Although the extracts quoted above came from one of Orwell’s more minor publications he had trailed his view on birth control in his previously published works. For example, in the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier (1936) Orwell creates the bogie with the supposed statement of critics who say “I don’t object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists” and he goes on to characterise a typical socialist as “a prim little man with a white collar job” and recites a lengthy list of the earnest causes and habits he feels alienates the ordinary person from socialism. Speaking of the 1920s he states that “contraception and enlightenment were held to be synonymous.” Orwell felt that after the First World War, “England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacifism, internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love, divorce reform, atheism, birth control – things like these were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times”.xi
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, written in 1934-5 but published in 1936, Orwell has his anti-hero curse the money god and its control over procreation. Gordon Comstock denounces contraception as “just another way they’ve found of bullying us.” It is interesting to note who “they” might be here. Dan Hitchens notes that it may be not just Hitler, Stalin, Big Brother and the money god but also the “prim” socialists caricatured in The Road to Wigan Pier.xii
Finally, in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell’s dystopian vision is shown in the Anti-Sex League and the dissolution of his essentially Dickensian ideal of the family when in the future children inform on their parents. Orwell’s view of the singing woman hanging out the washing is presented without irony but comes across as a parody of pure and natural proles. In this eulogy he writes of “the woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened and toughened by work till it was course in the grain like an over-ripe turnip. [This] could be beautiful”. She is, to Winston Smith (Orwell) “an idea of resistance to the Party”. Hitchens writes of this passage that “this remarkable moment throws the eugenicists’ worst nightmare back at them. An impoverished woman who has a large number of children becomes the final, ineradicable sign there is something in the world which is bigger than Big Brother.”xiii
Orwell’s socialism
Over the past seventy years there has been a game of ‘What would Orwell have done?’ Would he have been a staunch Cold Warrior or would he have supported the invasion of Iraq? With his views on abortion and birth control we have a new set of questions which amount to: would he have supported the feminists in Poland or would he have supported the legislation in Texas?
For Marxists the role of the family is in establishing bourgeois ideology and the gender roles necessary for social reproduction. Orwell’s view of the family as well as his views on birth control and abortion show scant regard for the bodily autonomy of women and are not so much conservative and Victorian as reactionary and authoritarian. His views on the working-class family and attitudes to sex seem to idealise the working class as somehow more natural and pure compared with the strangled views of the prim middle-class socialists he comes across. There are few Marxist or socialist feminists either in the past or currently who would share Orwell’s views.
And so, Orwell is a dead white, “lower upper middle class”, male who was in opposition to abortion and birth control and eulogised the bourgeois family. His reputation for anti-feminism, homophobia and antisemitism are on record. Should he be cancelled? Orwell, could be an anarchist, feel comfortable with Trotskyists and support the Labour Party but he was hard to pin down because he was not doctrinaire. In a time of intolerance and culture wars we can surely disagree with Orwell without silencing him.
i John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics (1999) and ‘Hope Lies in the Proles’, George Orwell and the Left (2018).
ii George Orwell, The English People (1947), p41.
iii ibid.
iv ibid.
v op. cit., p42.
vi Tom Man, Tom Mann’s Memoirs (1923), p25-8.
vii Justice, 23 June 1894
viii A. McLaren, ‘Sex and Socialism: The opposition of the French Left to birth control in the nineteenth century.’ Journal of the History of Ideas (37), 1976, p477.
ix Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (Second edition 1974), pp149-50.
x The Crystal Spirit (1970), p205
xi George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), p156, p125
xii Woodcock, opt. cit. p206, see also, Dan Hitchens, ‘Orwell and Contraception’, First Things, April, 2016.
xiii Hitchens, op. cit.
Outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2A 2LL ]]>
Clifford Slaughter, a working-class Yorkshire boy, was born in the industrial city of Doncaster on 18 September 1928 and brought up – at times during the 1930s Depression in very deprived circumstances – there, and in Leeds, fifty miles to the north-west, where he was to live most of his life. Joining the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1947, and later the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), he chose to work as a coalminer rather than do national service in the military, before, in 1949, taking up a scholarship at Downing College, Cambridge. There he was one of a handful of working-class students who at that time won places at England’s elite universities, where they frequently suffered from upper-class ridicule and bullying. On one occasion, Slaughter had to endure having his books removed from his room and burned in the quad, a crime he was invited by the senior member of College to whom he complained to regard as an understandable aspect of English ‘public school’ culture.
Unimpressed by the conservative History curriculum, Slaughter decided to study social anthropology, a subject that allowed greater scope for the imagination of someone who, tutored by his much-revered father (a sometime Durham miner and Methodist lay preacher, and a wartime recruit to the CPGB in 1943),2 was already well-versed in the available works of Marxism, as well as in creative literature – notably the novels of Stendhal, quotations from which continued to enrich some of his latter-day political writing. Graduating with a first-class degree, Slaughter returned to Yorkshire and a lectureship at the University of Leeds. (He later moved to Bradford, where he taught until retirement.)3
The 1956 crisis in the international Communist movement changed the direction of Slaughter’s life. He was the last prominent survivor of a small group of English communists who – on breaking with, or being expelled from, the CPGB in the aftermath of the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin at the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1956 and the Red Army’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution that autumn – joined the pugnaciously energetic T. G. (‘Gerry’) Healy in his Trotskyist ‘Club’, which, at that time of bitter disillusionment, offered a new perspective to principled revolutionary socialists.4 Amongst them – and amongst those closest to Slaughter, despite decades in which Healy’s sectarian politics made ongoing relationships with non-party comrades difficult – were Brian Pearce (1915-2008) and Peter Fryer (1927-2006). Pearce, a history graduate and a linguist, insisted, against the indifference of the CPGB’s better-known professional historians, on the political importance of rigorous examination of the history of Stalinism: he went on to become a prolific, and prize-winning, scholarly translator from both Russian and French. He was also a great letter writer, and Slaughter often consulted him over the years until his death, particularly on historical questions. Fryer was the Daily Worker journalist who, after his truthful reporting from Budapest was suppressed by the CPGB leaders, published his impassioned critique of Stalinism, Hungarian Tragedy (1956) and was hounded out of the Party: he was later to write the seminal Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain (1984), for which he is still celebrated as a pioneer of Black British history.5 Fryer’s and Pearce’s involvement in what, in 1959, was to become the Socialist Labour League (SLL), and – long after they had been alienated by Healy’s bouts of thuggish authoritarianism and left the organisation – the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), was relatively short-lived. But the participation of comrades of such calibre in the late 1950s helped make possible two significant socialist publications in which Slaughter came to play a major role: the expanded and transformed (from its first volume in the early 1950s) Labour Review (vols. 2-7, 1957-1963), initially edited by John Daniels and Bob Shaw; and a weekly paper established by Fryer, The Newsletter (1957-1969 – latterly twice-weekly).6 Both deserve renewed attention from historically-conscious socialists today.
The unrealised political potential of that period was, I am sure, to play a significant part in Slaughter’s thinking as he reflected on it after the collapse of the Healy WRP in 1985. It was a time when it had been possible to develop real political conversations with militant workers in several industries – coal-miners, with whom Slaughter had particularly close relationships, dockworkers and others. But Healy’s prioritisation of top-down ‘party-building’, based on ideas drawn mechanically and unhistorically from the 1848 Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? – that socialist consciousness has to be delivered to the workers ‘from without’ by theoretically-well-versed intellectuals and party professionals – vitiated, and was often to abort, such organic developments. From an account Slaughter wrote of the funeral in 2000 of an old comrade, Jim Allen (the former seaman and miner, turned scriptwriter and collaborator with the radical film director, Ken Loach), however, we can get a sense of the sort of political force Slaughter hoped the SLL might become, and why he remained, for so long, committed to fighting within an organisation despite being increasingly at odds with its leadership.
In the late 1950s, as an SLL member, but independently of any ‘party decision’, Slaughter wrote, Allen:
was the moving force behind a new newspaper, The Miner … [which]rapidly gained a readership throughout the Lancashire and Yorkshire coalfields … [and appealed because]it told the plain truth about the life and work of coalminers, about their employer (the National Coal Board) and about their union leadership. Thousands of miners recognised it as their own, and … organised around it.
And in a ‘Personal Note’, Slaughter added:
I can honestly say that the years … in the Yorkshire coalfield with this paper were some of the most rewarding and enjoyable of my life … [H]ere was a paper which workers accepted as their own. It had not a trace of sectarianism … written by miners for miners … with fire and with humour. Sales … were not a chore but a pleasure … The paper really was ‘an organiser’. It was workers won by The Miner who formed and led the branches of the SLL in the Yorkshire coalfield … The group of miners around Jim … was a team able to establish immediate relations with miners everywhere, and … the union leadership and the NCB could do nothing about it.
‘One of the few compliments’ he recalled ever receiving ‘in a long political life’, he went on, was from one of Allen’s miner-comrades, who, when chairing a meeting introduced him (a non-miner) as ‘an egghead’, but one ‘with his feet on the ground.’7
Relationships made at this time were surely in Slaughter’s mind when, ill-health having prevented him from attending, he sent a heartfelt message to a memorial meeting for Peter Fryer in London in 2019 in which he wrote of how, after the crisis of 1956, ‘Peter never once wavered in [his]communist conviction, fighting and writing to his dying day for the oppressed and exploited [with]works like Staying Power … ’. Forced out of the SLL, Fryer had found other ways of playing a role in the development of socialist consciousness and Slaughter recognised that his break with Healy over his manipulatively inhuman political regime was of a piece with his communist convictions. His ‘experience had taught him,’ Slaughter wrote, ‘how to be a good communist, following in the footsteps of the young Marx [who wrote of the]impassioned man [who]feels that he is himself a human being, and that others are human beings yet are for the most part treated like dogs … ’ Fryer, after being, as he once put it, ‘twice bitten’ (by Stalin and then by Healy), had decided he needed time to reflect. And this, acknowledged Slaughter, who remained in Healy’s organisation over the next three decades, strenuously fighting him over many issues but always feeling constrained by loyalty to party discipline, had allowed him to see – ‘much earlier than I did’ – that Healy’s idea of ‘building the revolutionary leadership at the expense of all personal needs and talents,’ and his effective downgrading ‘of independent working-class action as mere ‘spontaneity’’, was fundamentally wrong.8
In the aftermath of the defeat of Britain’s miners in the great strike of 1984-5, which exposed the vacuity of the WRP’s predictions of incipient revolution and claims to revolutionary leadership, and drove Healy to hysterical predictions that fascism was around the corner, a key group of WRP members finally rebelled and exposed their leader as a sexual predator. Slaughter immediately aligned himself with the rebels and, having played a key role in calling time on Healy’s organisation, worked to repair, wherever possible, the damage its sectarianism had done to valuable political relationships. In his message to the Fryer memorial meeting, he noted with retrospective delight, that ‘Peter was overjoyed [at Healy’s expulsion]and … embraced with enthusiasm our invitation to join us and write in [the paper we then published]Workers Press.’9 Pearce also became a regular contributor.
Although well-respected in the university as scholar and teacher – one with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Marx’s writings – Slaughter always eschewed the potential relative comfort of a socially detached academic life. Despite his growing distance from Healy’s authoritarian methods and subjective political predictions, he was indefatigable in carrying out serious political and educational work, not only amongst British workers but also internationally. As secretary of the Healy-led version of the Fourth International – the International Committee (ICFI) – he made many valued relationships, notably amongst comrades in the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), such as the much-respected, independently-minded militant, ‘Raoul’, remembered by his comrade, the historian and Trotsky biographer, Pierre Broué, in a lengthy and insightful tribute in the journal Cahiers Leon Trotsky.10
The fissiparous sectarianism of the Trotskyist ‘parties’ of this period as they struggled to connect with the real movement of the working class, however, meant such comradely friendships were often broken off, and a focus of Slaughter’s work in the difficult and still conflict-prone years that followed the end of the Healy WRP was on restoring them where he could. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and then, in 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union, it at last became possible to clarify many underlying political differences on the basis of the understanding that Stalinism no longer had the material base that had made it the ideological – and sometimes the very real and violent – enemy of revolutionary Marxism and its adherents. The bitter disputes about which group or sect was the true bearer of Trotsky’s legacy, to which Slaughter had had to devote so much energy, had lost their political, if not entirely their historical, rationale. It was a time for new thinking, which for Slaughter included recognising the reality that, as a practical expression of working-class internationalism, the ICFI had been – as he put it years later to an interviewer – ‘virtually a fiction’, consisting of small groups, only a few of them having had any real influence within the organisation.11
In his scholarly work, Slaughter never felt constrained to hide his class commitment under an academic bushel. He researched and published, jointly with Norman Denis and Fernando Henriques, the seminal study of a Yorkshire mining community, Coal Is Our Life (1956), which has been much reprinted.12 An associated article on gender relations appeared in the leading professional journal, The Sociological Review, in which Slaughter continued to publish a number of specialist reviews, always from an explicitly Marxist standpoint.13 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he participated in a major project designed to address the crisis in Greek archaeology, the Cambridge/Bradford Boeotian Expedition.14 This interest led to an important review article on Geoffrey de Ste Croix’s highly original Marxist study of class struggle in ancient Greece.15 But for Slaughter there was also a political motive: this was a period of great volatility when the 1981 Greek elections brought to office a majority reforming administration of the left social-democrat Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK, led by Andreas Papandreou. Relationships Slaughter made with left-wing activists and intellectuals endured and were to be valuable three decades later in informing his response to the Syriza government and the defiant ‘OXI’ (or ‘No!’) referendum vote in 2015 against European Unity-imposed austerity. This was a moment Slaughter greeted for its potential – real though alas unrealised – to act as ‘a signal to the masses of people throughout Europe that it is both necessary and possible to reject and oppose the demands of big capital.’16
In 1980 came his book of critical essays, Marxism, Ideology and Literature, presented by Slaughter as a much-needed ‘confrontation between Marxism and the sociology of literature’, and recognised in Marxist circles as a significant anti-Althusserian study.17 (Slaughter’s views on Louis Althusser were elaborated in the WRP journal Labour Review).18 An introductory book on Marx and Marxism appeared in 1985; a critique of the at-the-time fashionable work of Jon Elster, who argued that Marx could be read as in some way a functionalist, contributed to an Inquiry symposium the following year; and an essay on ‘Engels and Class Consciousness’, written for the 150th anniversary of Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) was published, a little belatedly, in 1996.19
During the 1960s and seventies and into the eighties, however, much of Slaughter’s time was spent on making voluminous contributions to ‘party’ literature, in Britain and for the International. He found himself more and more at odds with Healy’s increasingly opportunist politics and eccentric philosophising, but he came to recognise that his work (and that of other party ‘intellectuals’) had served, in the eyes of loyal, and politically-exploited, activists at least, to give Healy, by association, an undeserved cachet of theoretical respectability. He made a self-assessment of his role in those years when he spoke to a meeting of international supporters in 2012:
Recently I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s book about his childhood. His upbringing in a house of professors, filled with books, led him to put words and phrases ahead of the reality. He spent his life trying to get rid of this nonsense. It made me rethink all our talk of theoretical work, the role of intellectuals, and so on. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t really doing any real theoretical work or analysis. Most of it – if you look through internal bulletins and papers – consisted essentially of finding the right quotations for every occasion: something in Lenin or Trotsky or Marx that would explain what was going on. That’s not real research or real theory.20
In the 1970s, Slaughter had opposed Healy on the ‘pre-revolutionary’ nature of the period and on other questions.21 But he failed to overcome the leadership’s manoeuvring that ensured his disagreements were always sidelined, and kept from the active membership. Acquiring the resources for creating the party apparatus – printing facilities for a daily paper, party offices, bookshops, training centres to attract a hoped-for mass youth movement and so on – that Healy thought his perspective demanded, went along with the degeneration of a politics in which, inter alia, principled internationalism and conditional support for national-liberation movements were increasingly superseded by opportunist relations with often corrupt nationalist regimes open to the exchange of material resources for supportive propaganda. This left the group that sought, after the termination of the Healy party and led by Slaughter, to recover a critical Marxist orientation with much to reassess. Slaughter’s focus was on serving the future rather than bemoaning the past, but he recognised the need to correct mistakes, amongst the most damaging of which had been the essentially uncritical support the WRP had given to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Yassamine Mather, the Iranian socialist activist and scholar, now based in Oxford and chair of Hands Off the People of Iran, remembers meeting Slaughter in the mid-1980s:
He was the first British left-wing activist I met who apologised for his former organisation’s support for Khomeini. He was adamant that the British working class should show solidarity with Iranian workers, and [that]slogans of an anti-Western (as opposed to an anti-imperialist) government should not confuse the left. He remained a solid ally of the Iranian working class to the last days of his life.22
In the excitement of the post-soviet years, though still – working with some highly committed comrades who were fighting to rescue a positive legacy from the WRP experience – grappling with the idea of party-building as a key element in contemporary revolutionary practice, Slaughter increasingly extended his rejection of ‘Healyism’ to a more complete critique of the foundations of the ‘Trotskyism’ that based itself on the 1938 ‘Transitional Programme’, the document that launched the Fourth International. The vital significance of Trotsky’s courageous fight against Stalinism stood undiminished. But the proposition that ‘the world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat’ because the ‘economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism’ had quite simply been proved wrong.23 Lenin’s definition of imperialism as ‘the highest [or final]stage of capitalism’, whatever else the organisational genius of the October Revolution had been right about, had been misleading in promoting the idea that capital now lacked inherent resilience and the ability to overcome cyclical crises, even extreme ones. Each recovery – including the long post-war ‘boom’ in the West – however real its technological advances, has carried within it the seeds of even greater destructiveness. But the implication that the coming of socialism (‘truly human society’) has been thwarted simply by the failure – primarily through the (albeit very real) ‘betrayals’ of social democracy and Stalinism – to create revolutionary leadership in the working class had become a major obstacle in the way of the creative development of Marxism as practical revolutionary theory. The truth had to be embraced, concluded Slaughter, who had often been a cuttingly effective scourge of ‘revisionism’, that certain tenets of established theory do, in the face of empirical reality, have to be revised.
A dialogue with the Marxist political philosopher, István Mészáros, then on the cusp of publishing his masterwork, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, fed productively into Slaughter’s new thinking. It began when, in the early 1990s, they found themselves amongst a minority on the revolutionary left that wholeheartedly welcomed the so-called ‘collapse of Communism’.24 Where many others mourned the death of ‘really existing socialism’, they recognised that the end of Stalinism as a material force had removed a decades-long obstacle to socialist revolution and severely weakened a major source of ideological confusion. The time was ripe for Mészáros’s book, which was the product of his experience in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and subsequent exile, and of over two decades of rethinking three key questions: how had capitalism survived so long from the first recognition of its historical transience in the 1840s?; what had gone wrong with the soviet experiment?; and how could Marx’s theory be recovered as the practical guide to the revolutionary transformation required and its realisation in a way that will avoid the mistakes and disappointments of the twentieth century?25
All this was grist to Slaughter’s mill. In his Not Without a Storm, published in 2006, he addressed the need to be ‘brutal’ about the reality that, despite all the efforts of those ‘of us who for a good part of the twentieth century tried to work as Marxists in the working-class movement’, the ‘world’s working people remain, in the new millennium, at the mercy of a capital system that has survived all their struggles and confronts them with greater threats than ever before.’ Vital to his attempt to address that ‘one big sobering fact,’ he acknowledged, ‘was the work of István Mészáros’; and most importantly his demonstration that it was with what was being called ‘globalisation’ that ‘the capital system [had]encountered its historical limit, its structural crisis.’26
Mészáros’s comprehensive rethinking of Marxism – prefigured as early as 1970 in his Marx’s Theory of Alienation and his Isaac Deutscher Memorial lecture on ‘The Necessity of Social Control’ the following year, continuing with, amongst other work, The Power of Ideology (1989), and reaching fruition with Beyond Capital – developed into a multi-volume project still incomplete when he died in 2017.27 The ‘Himalayan’ task before humanity in its twenty-first-century confrontation with Rosa Luxemburg’s century-old choice of ‘socialism or barbarism’, he argued, had to be understood as involving much more than the political victory of the working-class over capitalism. What is needed is rather the social-metabolic transition – in what Slaughter articulated in 2013 in the subtitle of his Bonfire of the Certainties, as ‘the second human revolution’ – beyond capital itself, the power that has dominated different forms of society over many centuries. Slaughter’s own work, building on the foundations of new thinking Mészáros had laid, increasingly focused on going further – particularly in rethinking the problem of transitional agency. His next book Against Capital, in 2016, accordingly, was a collective study of contemporary, practical ‘experiences of class struggle’ and of ‘rethinking revolutionary agency’.28 In a richly engaged Critique review, Bridget Fowler recommended it for its penetrating global, socio-political analysis; for its ‘timely’ rejection of the ‘bankers’ fatalism of the ‘end of history’ ideologists’; and, particularly, for its ‘scrupulously honest’ confrontation with acknowledged error, ‘not about Marxism as such – which rightly remains a treasured resource – but rather about the imposition of doctrinaire ‘democratic centralism’.’29
Slaughter’s theoretical work continued until shortly before his death; and his final Critique article was designed to signal a yet more radical new beginning. As Mészáros said, in paying tribute to him at a launch meeting for Bonfire of the Certainties in 2012:
… my friend Cliff Slaughter … always remained firmly in a revolutionary orientation even if the organisation he was attached to [the WRP]was … extremely problematical. He [always]maintained this determined position of thinking in terms of a revolutionary perspective.30
And it was commitment to that perspective that had led Slaughter to play an indispensable role in the break-up of the WRP in 1985, when Healy was finally denounced from within the ranks of his own organisation as a political opportunist with a cowardly predilection for discipline enforced by intimidation rather than argument and persuasion; and incontrovertibly – the decisive charge leading to his expulsion – a sexual predator, exploiting the idealism of young women comrades for personal gratification.
Andrew Burgin, now the International Officer of Ken Loach’s Left Unity, who was a WRP member at the time of the 1985 crisis, spoke for many when, on hearing of Slaughter’s death, he posted on social media his account of the ‘important part’ he had played in his own political education; and of how, when Healy’s corruption was revealed and WRP national organiser, Sheila Torrance, defended him with the argument ‘that [his]role as a revolutionary socialist was a more important consideration than the allegations of sexual abuse’ (an argument repeated by Healy’s ‘celebrity’ allies, Corin and Vanessa Redgrave), Slaughter led, and gave direction to, the opposition.31 He:
dissect[ed]her argument and, in a hugely powerful speech, made the case for a revolutionary morality and linked the abuse directly to Healy’s politics. He concluded that the abuse itself expressed the degeneration of Healy’s politics and of those who now sought to defend him … [Slaughter] was one of the central figures … who sought to repair the damage and set the organisation on its feet politically speaking … At every point [he] … attempted to raise the level of discussion and to overcome the abuses of the past … He deeply regretted the part he had played in sustaining Healy’s regime but tried to overcome that through the building of a healthy political tendency in the post-split period … 32
Slaughter’s internationalist commitment was undiminished by his recognition that the corruption of the WRP had permeated the politics of what, as far as he was concerned, was now, for practical purposes, the defunct ICFI. In addition to his determination to correct the opportunist errors of the WRP’s past – and the Iranian revolution referred to above was only one question amongst many – it was manifested particularly in his enthusiastic support for Workers Aid for Bosnia (and later for Kosova), which in the 1990s organised working-class aid convoys to miners and other trade unionists fighting for national liberation from the Milosevic dictatorship in the former Yugoslavia; and also in his solidarity work in southern Africa, where he went with the Marxist social anthropologist Frank Girling (1917-2004) – another former CPGB member who had briefly joined with Healy after 1956 – in support of anti-Stalinist fighters in the liberation movements there.33 He was particularly inspired by the courageous Namibian twin sisters, Panduleni and Ndamona Kali, who had fought – at the cost of great personal suffering – against both apartheid and the brutal and dehumanising internal regime of the military wing of SWAPO, the South West Africa People’s Organisation, which replicated that of its close ally, the African National Congress. Appropriately an image of these two women graced the cover of Slaughter’s last published book, Women and the Social Revolution, co-authored with Vivien Slaughter and Yassamine Mather: it was dedicated (no doubt with the reactionary, bourgeois gender relations that had prevailed in the WRP partly in mind) to the memory of the American liberationist Maria Turner and her appeal – at the time of the Southampton slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831 – on behalf of ‘the fair daughters of Africa’, that they should no longer ‘be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles’ or have to tolerate the fruits of their labours being enjoyed by exploitative men.34
In Africa too Slaughter met with militant students, one of whom, Jade McClune – now a committed fighter for social justice, campaigner for land rights in Namibia, and eloquent polemicist against neoliberalism – has written that he remembers Slaughter as ‘perhaps the most civilized man I ever met’, a judgement based ‘not so much [on]Cliff’s theoretical insight as his demeanour and non-bourgeois character.’ McClune recalls:
Attending a lecture in Windhoek where he came dressed in denims and delivered a myth-shattering analysis – that had such a profound impact on me as a student, and on my view of the world and of my place in it that it somehow altered the course and trajectory of my life.
Though he clearly did not have much time for nonsense, he always treated us with genuine … respect. As people who grew up under the boot-heel of soul-destroying racism, his humane and intelligent approach to us as brown socialists certainly had a deep effect on our sense of self-worth, to the extent that since then I have found myself incapable of tolerating to be treated by any lesser standard of comradeship and respect than Professor Cliff Slaughter showed us. Even when we were young and foolish, he treated us with full dignity and respect as thinking beings, necessary agents of change … 35
From the time he played his key role in the overdue destruction of the Healyite WRP and began work to overcome its sectarian legacy, Slaughter, assisted first by his discussions with Mészáros, and then by his fresh reading of Ernst Bloch (whose The Principle of Hope, he came to think of as ‘the most thorough and complete exposition’ in the twentieth century of Marx’s active and humanist materialism), devoted himself to the radical critique of existing Marxist theory and practice, including much of the thinking that had guided his own life. It culminated in the 2020 Critique essay, ‘More Than a Theory … ’, written in the passionate belief that political activism, however courageous and determined, if it is not informed by Marxist theoretical development, cannot guide the transition ‘beyond capital’ on which the future of human society depends. For Slaughter, Marx’s dictum that ‘the emancipation of the working class’ – and through that the emancipation of humanity as a whole – must be the task ‘of the working class itself’ remained a basic principle, although, in practice, it had been largely forgotten in the WRP.36 But what he sometimes described as the ‘refoundation’ of Marxist theory, he argued, means beginning anew from a re-examination of its origins in the period of the 1843 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’; and recognising, Slaughter argued, that ‘Marx’s materialism has not been understood by Marxists [he included himself], and that, without a radical reorientation, [the]new beginning – essential today – is impossible.’37
Further work on the challenge he had thus issued would certainly have followed. But it is now for others to decide to pick up the gauntlet Slaughter threw down. In Bloch’s excitingly diverse The Principle of Hope, I think he found inspiration: here was an approach to Marxist philosophy that embraced all human practice – human achievement – including artistic and scientific work; and elaborated a materialist way of confronting the future, the ‘not-yet’ that is immanent but yet to be realised in the ‘here-and-now’. Bloch recaptures for materialism the ‘active side’ that mechanical, contemplative materialism leaves open to idealism and subjectively determined political practice. As the oppressed and exploited masses are more and more forced into struggles for survival, and towards consciousness that it is the hegemonic system as a whole that is the obstacle to a world of social cooperation and real human relations (and indeed planetary survival), Marxists, participating where they can, have a vital role to play in the orientation of such actions – which too often seem to come to a crescendo but then fade away – on a sustainable trajectory towards the essential goal, the radical social-metabolic transition ‘beyond capital’.
In February 2018, Slaughter, who did not believe in the value of autobiography, circulated what he called ‘a sort of profession of faith’, a document entitled ‘Some things I learned – some of them I learned later than I should have – on the rocky road’.38 It consisted of aphorisms, some drawn from Bloch, including Hegel’s assertion that ‘Nothing great has been achieved without passion’;39 and – a favourite he had used in the passages on aesthetics in his recent books – John Keats’s ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’40 From Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch he chose: ‘The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed’; to which he added that this goes for men too, with the implication that men must learn it from women.41 In a moment of apparent sentimentality that might have seemed uncharacteristic to many who knew him only through politics, he included a popular song title, ‘Love is a many-splendored thing’.42
For an epitaph (‘if I ever need one’) he turned again to Hegel: ‘The best bet is to keep a close eye on the advancing giant.’43 And, of the principles he thought should act as a guide to a 21st-century life, ‘[t]he greatest,’ he asserted, ‘ … is Hope!’ – hope ‘informed, inspired and sustained by determination to understand and to struggle to bring forth the shoots (until now obscured and suppressed by the rule of capital) of the flowering of the future community of free and equal individuals.’ It was with that principle in mind, I believe, that he wrote what proved to be his valedictory article in Critique.
Acknowledgement
My thanks to those who read previous drafts, often making corrections and/or valuable suggestions, or who responded to requests for information. Remaining mistakes are my responsibility, and I am aware of many lacunae in the background history referenced. This appreciation is a personal one that can only scratch the surface of a rich, richly contradictory, and sometimes bitterly contested, political life. I hope others will add to it. My primary purpose is to draw attention to Cliff Slaughter’s open-ended theoretical legacy and to his call for a radical, forward-looking reassessment of how Marx’s materialism was understood and practised in the twentieth century.
This article was originally published in Critique.
]]>Could it be the ‘New Management’ of the current Labour front bench? They certainly believe their shift to the right will save us all from the ‘Trots’, the ‘Tankies’ and the ‘Corbyn cultists’. Yes, I’ve been labelled all those things – socialists who remain in Labour are seen as ‘barnacles on the boat’. Starmer and co are of course present at Labour’s deathbed, but those who know history realise that Labour has rarely offered true democratic socialism in its over 100 year history and its actual decline began under Kinnock and – I would suggest – continued with the Labour victories from 1997 onwards.
Blair’s victory in 1997 followed 18 years of Tory, neoliberal rule. The British public were restless and ready for change. Labour’s electoral success was an opportunity for radical, transformative policies: public ownership, a fully comprehensive state education service, investment in health and social care. Three terms of opportunity for real, transformational change were largely lost, in my view.
We may discuss the success of Sure Start or a million fewer children in poverty, but Labour didn’t deliver what was possible. They didn’t end child poverty and they could and should have done.
Yes, Sure Start did begin to improve multi-agency working and support vulnerable families. As a Head teacher at the time, I witnessed how it all began. Even that good work, however, was not embedded, properly evaluated, or delivered alongside significant investment in the welfare state.
It was Blair’s Labour which introduced PFI contracts, binding health, education and public services into debt still being paid off by cash-strapped local authorities, decades later. They also brought in Academisation, removing local authority oversight and taking away local community assets.
The legacy of the invasion of Iraq remains the albatross around Blair and his supporters’ necks. So many innocent lives lost and so many millions of people displaced from their homes. Establishment honours, or the few remaining Sure Starts, will never give Blair, or his then front bench, redemption.
Margaret Thatcher said that Blair was her ‘greatest achievement’ and we now live with her legacy. With the return of New, New Labour who are advising the current LOTO, we see the same style and strategies, but as I learned through my Headships, you cannot use the same style of leadership in every school or community; political leadership too has to adapt to societal, environmental and economic change.
The world has changed massively since 1997; we’ve had 12 years of austerity, we face a climate emergency, a covid pandemic and now the threat of a world war. All these crises have exposed massive inequalities, and a lack of democracy and accountability in our political system. Unlike the Blair years, the younger generation in particular, savvy on social media, see through the spin and soundbites. They are living with the consequences. The mainstream media, still a sinister influence for establishment messaging, is no longer the only voice and new and emerging left platforms are growing in number and influence.
The ‘new management’ of Labour under Starmer and co is currently offering:
- a predominantly right of centre Parliamentary Labour Party, many of whom were actively working against Corbyn-led Labour from 2015 to 2019;
- expulsion of lifelong Labour members, councillors and Constituency Labour Party officers;
- proscribing of specific left campaign groups, previously welcomed as members of the Labour movement;
- advocating a shoot to kill, ask questions later policing policy, whilst naming and shaming drug users.
The disrespect towards striking workers and general lack of support for union members has now resulted in cuts to funding from Unite, the disaffiliation of the Bakers’ Union, threats to cut funding and pull their support from ASLEF and GMB. Crisis? What Crisis? say loyal Starmerites, yet Labour is now so right-wing that a hard-right Tory is warmly welcomed as he crosses the floor to join the Labour benches.
Flag waving and jingoistic rhetoric are the order of the day for the New, New Labour defence policy. As with Covid measures, Labour is often in agreement with the government on defence and many proposals are to the right of the Liberal Democrats. No wonder over 200,000+ members have left the party over the past two years. Labour seems to be constantly running to keep up with the populist policies of the Johnson government. On many occasions abstaining, when they should be challenging and opposing, or even supporting and voting with the government. This is something that, I believe, will come back to haunt Labour at the next General Election.
Democracy itself is under threat in Britain. The government has already prorogued parliament and threatened the powers of the judiciary. Ministers have broken, and been found guilty of breaking, the ministerial code, with few consequences.
Legislation currently moving through Parliament includes:
- the Nationality and Borders Bill to, strengthen and reinforce the hostile environment created first under Theresa May;
- the Elections Bill which even the Electoral Commission is campaigning against. A Bill which in effect delivers voter suppression in the demand for photo ID, which of course will prevent those without a passport or driving licence from voting – the most vulnerable in our society;
- the Overseas Operations Bill;
- the Police, Courts and Sentencing Bill will result in our right to protest peacefully being taken away and police powers increased.
What we are not witnessing at present, is the Labour front bench opposing effectively. A recent vote in the Commons saw Labour whip to abstain on a Bill to cap pensions and benefits. A small number of Socialist Campaign Group MPs held on to their integrity and voted against the government, to the great shame of the Labour leadership.
Nelson Mandela said, ‘To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity’. The fact that there has been no comment from the Labour front bench on the recent Amnesty International report declaring Israel an ‘Apartheid state’ and that, according to the Amnesty report, Palestinians are being ‘systematically deprived of their rights’, speaks volumes about the change in Labour’s foreign and humanitarian policy.
Recent polls show that Labour has lost well over 400 council seats since 2020. Loss of members means not just loss of funding but loss of hard-working activists. As an experienced campaigner, I know that to knock on doors in all weathers, you need to really believe in why you’re doing it and who for. For those of us on the left who had that belief and hope in 2017 and 2019, the current Labour Party is without vision and does not inspire hope.
Almost 16 million people did not use their vote in the last General Election. The turn out in most of the recent by-elections has been between 40 and 50%. Many in our country believe that there is no one listening and no one who will make their lives better Trust in politicians is at an all time low and I can see why. So what is the answer for socialists in Britain? Is there now somewhere else to go? I believe so. As socialists we are part of a movement and we are coming together.
As founder and current Chair of the People’s Alliance of the Left (PAL), I realise it will always be a struggle to bring, what has historically been, a splintered Left together. Our alliance is currently an organisation of like-minded socialists. Members include leaders of campaign groups, unions and new and established radical left political parties. Many are former Labour members. Currently, the political parties involved are Breakthrough, Left Unity, Northern Independence and TUSC. We have a shared progressive policy platform in our agreed memorandum of understanding (MOU). Each party, however, maintains its own distinctiveness. The parties have their own electoral strategy but aim to cooperate, wherever possible in forthcoming elections, with wider PAL member support for the named socialist candidate.
Our alliance is not about narcissists or egos, it is about working together with the shared goal of achieving a future socialist government.
Our opponents criticise and deride what we are aiming to do, but every political party started somewhere and we now see the successes of political alliances, internationally. Socialist candidates are having electoral success, in some European countries, and especially in the countries of South America.
We do, however, have to learn from where the Left make mistakes too. In the French Primaries currently ongoing, a split between the left groups and centre left has meant no Left candidate will go forward. The idea of the People’s Primary, I believe, was a good one, and gained over 400,000 votes but it was too little too late and individual egos – as has happened in the past and is at times a current challenge – meant it was doomed to fail.
With the current First Past the Post voting system, the two party equilibrium of Labour and Tories, Westminster over-centralisation and the control of the mainstream media, the challenges seem overwhelming. But as an alliance we can change the political narrative, pushing to the Left just as UKIP pushed to the Right over Brexit. At the next general election there may not be a clear majority, so there is the chance for just a few socialist MPs to have influence and have a significant impact.
Last November, I was in Brussels as a delegate at the European Forum. It was a privilege to join comrades, not just from Europe, but from across the world.
The conference was opened by Pierre Laurent, Vice-President of the European Left Party. He spoke about the need for a new environmental and social pact with no return to austerity economics. He spoke of peace, brotherhood and humanity.
Heinz Bierbaum, President of the European Left Party, emphasised the common struggle against the growth of the far-right in Europe and creeping militarism. A number of speakers, including Bierbaum, criticised COP26, held in Glasgow for a lack of direct action to address the climate crisis.
Chloe Meulewaeter from the International Peace Bureau, spoke about the need for disarmament and reducing the ballooning level of military spending. She pointed out a 1% world wide cut in military spending would fund covid vaccination for the whole world. A 10% cut would fund universal education.
As I write, Putin’s forces have invaded Ukraine and NATO is imposing sanctions on Russia and supplying arms to Ukraine. There is the real and imminent threat of world war. Peace negotiations must continue because without compromise on both sides, the situation will escalate and could, with nuclear powers involved, reach an unthinkable conclusion.
The man of peace, Jeremy Corbyn, former Labour leader, was given a rapturous welcome from delegates at the European Forum. His speech included a reference to a proposed European Youth manifesto, which would include economic, social and creative policies. ‘We can have bread and roses too’, he declared.
Natalie Bennett, former leader of the English Green Party and representative of the Green European Foundation, spoke of the problem with the Westminster establishment. It is the need to end the centralisation of government in Westminster, the need for regional investment and autonomy, and the break from the control of neoliberal politicians and big business interests which is the goal of the #PAL alliance. The work of the European Left Party and the conferences being held, are of such great significance in building international solidarity.
I have had first-hand experience as a Labour MP from 2017 to 2019, of how the Parliamentary Labour Party works. Frankly, it is an anachronism and not fit for purpose. The Westminster Bubble is a reality and there is so little understanding from most MPs about the reality of the daily struggle for the majority of people in our country. Many (not all) just serve themselves, their egos and their careers. This is why the need for electoral and constitutional change is of such urgency.
Britain has the most over-centralised government in the developed world. We need not only constitutional and electoral reform but also social and climate justice. The PAL alliance is in its infancy, but our voices are growing stronger and we can push for radical reform outside of Westminster. We can also offer socialists across our country an alternative to the establishment parties. Socialists now have a choice and somewhere to go.
As we watch the terrifying events in Ukraine escalate, it is as if the world is holding its breath. If the current crisis is teaching us anything, however, it is the importance of working across borders to achieve peace and avoid future conflict. Together, as socialists, we can build an international movement to deliver a fairer, greener, more equal society.
Thelma Walker was Labour MP for Colne Valley from 2017 to 2019. She served as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.
]]>These goals have been the subject of much ridicule, some of it deserved, yet the formulation of Russian war aims in these terms represents the culmination of a long period of conflict-gestation, which finally spilled over into a reckless and brutal conflict. The struggle quickly turned into a proxy war between Russia and the West, with the Ukrainian people suffering the brutal effects of the assault. The war will shape Ukraine, Russia and the West for generations to come.
The purpose of this paper is to explain how we arrived at this point. It should be stressed that to explain the logic does not mean its endorsement. In fact, analysis of this sort over many years has tried precisely to avert this tragic outcome. The war was predictable, predicted and, most tragic of all, avoidable. Instead, we have a collective West mobilised to the highest degree since 1945, far more even than at the height of the First Cold War (Cold War I). The Second Cold War (Cold War II) in Europe turned out to be far shorter than anticipated, and very quickly turned into the sort of hot war that had been avoided throughout the entire postwar period on the continent. How did we get into a position of a war between a nuclear-armed Russia and the collective West?
To answer this question the paper will examine Putin’s war aims, and assess the logic underlying them. It assumes that Putin is a rational actor, and although quite possibly mistaken he was motivated by more than what some simplistic analysis suggests is his desire to recreate some sort of Soviet or Russian empire. Equally, the view that Putin took the decision to invade because he was in some way mentally unbalanced is dismissed. The balance within the regime was disrupted and from late 2019 the hardline view predominated, resulting in the attempt to crush the last embers of the independent political opposition and critical thought, the 2020 constitutional amendments and finally escalation of the confrontation with Ukraine. It is clear that in the final period before the war Putin was under enormous mental strain. The strategy of coercive diplomacy was generating few dividends, and the implicit threat of violence was counter-productive. The decision to go all-out with a military offensive, possibly taken as early as August 2021, could not have been more high-risk, threatening to destroy two decades of domestic development.
The tension was evident in his late-night speech of 21 February announcing that Russia would recognise the independence of the two breakaway republics in the Donbass, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR). In an emotional and long-winded speech he recounted his idiosyncratic version of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks created the modern Ukrainian state, and why Russia would recognise the independence of the two republics.2 His speech was preceded by a bizarre, televised meeting of the Russian Security Council in which each member was invited to approve the measure, thus rendering them all complicit.
We will return to the immediate events before the war but first we will examine the tensions and contradictions in the post-cold war peace order, and how in the end they exploded into conflict.
The peace that was no peace
Two peace systems – new world orders in the jargon of the time – were on offer when Cold War I ended in 1989. The first is the one that the United States, the Soviet Union, China and other victors helped constitute at the end of World War II in the form of the United Nations system and its associated body of international law, norms and practices. This is the international system based on the UN Charter which combines state sovereignty, rights of national self-determination and human rights. The UN Charter of 1945 banned war as an instrument of policy and provided a framework for the peaceful resolution of international conflicts. The Charter peace order was given backbone by the creation of an internal ‘concert of powers’ represented by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the P5 group comprising the US, Russia, China, France and the UK. It was to this international system that the Soviet Union appealed as the model of civilisation and development as it launched into reforms at the end of the 1980s. This peace order is based on a modified form of great power politics, with its associated lexicon of the balance of power, buffer states and spheres of interest. However, it is modified by the type of international politics that it advocates, which tempers the great power logic. This is a model based on sovereign internationalism, where the respective interests of all the powers, great and small, are respected. The assertion of sovereignty is tempered by an internationalism based on the Charter system yet it remains within the realist tradition of international relations.
The second ‘new world order’ was the one more narrowly created and led by the US, also at the end of the war. In the nineteenth century Great Britain acted as the champion of free trade and open navigation, a role assumed by the US after 1945. This is a model based on liberal internationalism consisting of two key elements: the open trading and financial system created within the framework of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944; and the military arm that took shape as Cold War I intensified, culminating in the signing of the Washington Treaty on 4 April 1949 to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The term ‘liberal’ in the cold war largely signified ‘anti-communist’ rather than ‘liberal democratic’, yet it provided a powerful and ultimately successful framework to overcome the Soviet adversary. This was a ‘hegemonic’ peace order dominated by the US and its allies. After the end of the cold war and the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 it proclaimed not only its victory but also its universality – there could be no separate ‘spheres of influence’ since the leadership of the US-led hegemonic peace was proclaimed as a global and universal project. In effect, a global Monroe Doctrine was applied. Cold war bipolarity was gone and in the subsequent unipolar years there was no-one left to contest the assertion. Moscow grumbled but post-communist Russia was in no position to challenge US leadership, while China used the opportunity to engineer its ‘quiet rise’. This model cannot be called ‘idealist’, in the classic international relations sense of the term, because of the expansionist power system at its core. Hence this expansive system (perceived as aggressive to outsiders) is usually described as liberal hegemony.3
The two models of post-cold war order – the Charter and the liberal peace systems – were not entirely incompatible since both drew on the postwar settlement. This explains why the two ordering principles were incorporated into the various documents at the end of the cold war. Indeed, the tension between the declared sovereign right of nations to choose their own security alignment and the indivisibility of security was present in the founding document of what was to become the new era, the Helsinki Final Act of August 1975. This contradiction was then repeated in all the fundamental documents of the post-cold war era. The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, adopted on 21 November 1990 heralded ‘a new era of democracy, peace and unity’, stressing that ‘Europe is liberating itself from its past’.4 The focus was on the temporal challenge – overcoming the past; but the new spatial order entailed the logic of enlargement. The tension between these two logics, each rational in its own terms, contained the seeds of later conflicts. The Istanbul OSCE meeting in November 1999 adopted a Charter for European Security, restating the fundamental principles of the Paris Charter.5 The seventh OSCE heads of state in December 2010 adopted the commemorative Astana Declaration, which talked in terms of the establishment of a security community. Meeting 11 years after the Istanbul summit, the leaders recommitted themselves ‘to the vision of a free, democratic, common and indivisible Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok, rooted in agreed principles, shared commitments and common goals’.6 Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov repeatedly stressed that both declarations committed member states ‘to indivisible security and their pledge to honour it without fail’. The freedom of states to choose their military alliances was balanced by the ‘obligation not to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states’.7
A modicum of good will and trust could have allowed some sort of reconciliation between these two models. However, the tension between the two was reinforced by the geopolitical contest between two divergent spatial visions. On the one side, the Euro-Atlantic alliance system, created to fight Cold War I, did not dissolve after 1989 but instead enlarged into the area vacated by the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. Even one of the most passionate advocates of NATO enlargement, Zbigniew Brzezinski, understood the implications of splintering European security, contrary to the promises of ‘indivisibility’ in the Helsinki Final Act, the Paris Charter and other acts. He argued that Russia should have been offered ‘a deal it could not refuse’, namely ‘a special cooperative relationship between Russia and NATO’.8 His idea was to ‘create a new transcontinental system of collective security, one that goes beyond the expansion of NATO proper’.9 This would have been a genuine expression of the ‘mature partnership’ between the US and Russia much lauded at the time and could have avoided Moscow’s sense of betrayal. NATO enlargement would have been mediated by some sort of robust pan-continental framework, thus removing the creation of a hard edge of enlargement with Russia placed firmly on the other side. This is in keeping with the alternative post-cold war spatial vision, the pan-continentalism espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev in his ‘common European home’ vision and which was later taken up in the ‘greater Europe’ (bol’shaya Evropa) idea.
Two normative models contested and the contradiction was reinforced by divergent geopolitical representations of the appropriate spatial configuration of the region. The failure to reconcile the two visions of post-cold war European order generated growing distrust that grew into outright hostility. Both sides believed that truth and justice was on their side, thus prompting the denigration of the alternative and even demonisation of the opponent. Classic cold war Manicheanism was reproduced to a degree that even surpassed that of Cold War I. By 2022 Moscow assumed that the contest would be a rather more equal one. US power had relatively declined and faced not a USSR in crisis and a barely surviving Russia, but a country that had recovered economically and was led by a wily and experienced politician. Russia sought to change the NATO-centric peace order with a more multilateral one in which Russia would become an equal partner. This ambitious attempt to reforge the post-cold war settlement was unlikely to find much support among those whom the existing settlement worked well, placing Russia in the position of a demandeur state. Its demands had been ignored for 30 years, so it was unwarranted to believe they would be accepted now. For at least a year Russia had been open in its contempt for its European partners, above all the EU, but perhaps it believed that some sort of opening could have been forced with Washington – unless the whole treaty exercise was an elaborate charade whose failure would justify more forceful action.
A New European Security Treaty
The question now was how these demands would be advanced. In November 2021 Russia cut diplomatic ties with NATO after the bloc expelled eight Russian diplomats from its mission to the alliance in Brussels. Against the background of Russian military deployments adjacent to Ukraine, on 17 December 2021 Russia submitted two draft European security treaties repeating some of the themes of Dmitry Medvedev’s proposal in 2009. One was addressed to the US and the other to NATO. The documents contained three key demands: no further NATO enlargement, covering in the first instance Ukraine as well as Georgia; no deployment of weaponry or military forces on the border with Russia; and NATO’s return to the force posture of May 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed. This would entail removing forces from the countries that had joined since then, including the multinational battlegroups from the Baltic republics and Poland. Subsidiary demands included the removal of INF-range nuclear strike weapon systems from Europe and the end of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. The NATO document focused on the danger of military exercises, with three (1, 2 and 7) of its nine draft articles raising the issue. Article 1 called on NATO and Russia to ‘exercise restraint in military planning and conducting exercises to reduce risks of eventual dangerous situations in accordance with their obligations under international law’.
The combination of military and diplomatic initiatives forced a substantive US-Russian dialogue on European security for the first time since the negotiations over German unification in 1990, which already signified a major Russian achievement. Putin had long signalled Russian dissatisfaction, dating at least from his Munich Security Conference speech in February 2007. For the first time in 30 years Russia’s security concerns were being discussed at the highest diplomatic levels, although that did not mean that they were being taken seriously. Russian force deployments along Ukraine’s borders increased, with a contingent in the north conducting exercises with Belarus, and the garrison in Crimea was significantly strengthen. Coercive diplomacy may have a place in the armoury of international politics, but no one likes to negotiate with a gun held to the head.
Russia was effectively demanding veto rights in European security matters, something that had never been granted since 1990. This was crisis diplomacy of the first order. As far as the western powers were concerned there was nothing to discuss since the fundamental principles had been established. The liberal peace order promised freedom and prosperity, and in any case presented itself as defensive. The US worked with European partners and NATO to expand its model of the post-cold war peace order, and between 1990 and 2021 effectively suppressed the existence of the second model. Critics argued that there was no need to revisit the Helsinki principles as developed in the Paris, Istanbul and Astana documents, hence rejected the idea of a Helsinki II conference. Worse, the fact that the main dialogue was conducted between Washington and Moscow, with at most consultations with European powers (the EU was entirely marginalised) reeked of some sort of Yalta II, where the fate of small states was decided by the great powers. The problem was that many of the small states were irreconcilable in their hostility to Russia and contemptuous of its security concerns. There could be no negotiated resolution to the crisis with their participation, but any agreement without their participation would lack legitimacy and smack of the logic of Yalta. In the absence of a reconvened Helsinki II conference, unless Washington and Moscow came to some sort of agreement the impasse was complete. In presenting its draft security treaties, Moscow promised a ‘military-technical’ response if negotiations failed, but did not specify what form they would take.
The response when it came on 26 January was disappointing for Moscow although hardly surprising. The demand of a written guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO was rejected, insisting on ‘the right of other states to choose or change security arrangements’. The NATO response offered general transparency and confidence building measures, such as briefings on each other’s military exercises, consultations, establishing a civilian hotline, and re-establishing respective missions in Brussels and Moscow. The US response insisted on maintaining the ‘open door’ policy on enlargement, but it was ready to discuss ‘reciprocal commitments by both the United States and Russia to refrain from deploying offensive ground-based missile systems and permanent forces with a combat mission on the territory of Ukraine’. As for returning to the force status of 1997, Washington insisted their current deployment was ‘limited, proportionate, and in full compliance with commitments under the NATO-Russia Founding Act’.
Continuing dialogue was promised, although Russia needed to ‘de-escalate’ its forces on Ukraine’s border. The US was ready to continue arms control discussions with Moscow, including limits on the deployment of ballistic missiles and nuclear-equipped bombers. A new idea was a ‘transparency mechanism’ to verify the absence of Tomahawk missiles, capable of reaching Russian territory, at the two NATO Aegis ballistic missile defence (BMD) sites in Romania and Poland, in return for which the US would be offered access to two missile sites of its choice in Russia. The main difference with NATO’s response was that the US was ready to accept the concept of ‘indivisibility of security’, the principle that had been reiterated in the Astana Declaration in 2010.10 In sum, the US response offered limited concessions – arms control of medium range weapons, confidence-building, transparency, and verification measures along the NATO-Russia borderlands. It was not as much as Moscow wanted, but it was more than the West had been willing to offer for a generation. The question of European security was once again on the agenda, something that Moscow had long been pushing for.
Putin was not satisfied, even though the door to continued diplomacy was kept open. He noted that ‘It’s already clear now … that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored’. Worse, he believed that the US strategy was to lure Russia into a conflict that would weaken its power, just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had done a generation earlier:
I still believe that the United States is not that concerned about Ukraine’s security, though they may think about it on the sidelines. Its main goal is to contain Russia’s development. This is the whole point. In this sense, Ukraine is simply a tool to reach this goal. This can be done in different ways: by drawing us into armed conflict, or compelling its allies in Europe to impose tough sanctions on us like the US is talking about today.
He outlined a scenario in which Ukraine was admitted to NATO and then tried to recapture Crimea: ‘Let’s imagine Ukraine is a NATO member and starts these military operations. Are we supposed to go to war with the NATO bloc? Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not’.11 Various ideas were advanced to stabilise the situation, including a lengthy moratorium on Ukraine joining NATO (membership was not an immediate prospect in any case), the provision of weapons for Ukraine to defend itself but accompanied by a pledge not to establish bases or deploy troops, missiles and other strike weapons on Ukrainian territory. Ukraine declared itself neutral on independence in 1991, and although this had been rescinded by the radically pro-western presidency of Viktor Yushchenko after the Orange Revolution of autumn 2004, it had been restored following Viktor Yanukovych’s election in 2010. Ukraine’s official stance until December 2014 had been neutrality, and thus the idea was part of the Ukrainian tradition. Above all, there had to be some sort of resolution of the Donbass conflict if a balance in European security was to be restored.
This bitter, disappointed and uncompromising tone permeated the official Russian response of 17 February 2022, handed to the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan. The 11-page document roundly criticised the US and detected ‘no constructive answer’ to Russia’s key demands, including a guarantee of no further enlargement and a return to the force deployments of 1997. Amid a deepening confrontation on the Ukrainian border, ‘The package nature of Russian proposals has been ignored, from which “convenient” topics have been deliberately chosen, which in turn have been “twisted” in the direction of creating advantages for the US and its allies’. The text stressed that there would be no ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, but reaffirmed the principle of the ‘indivisibility of security’. The US insistence on NATO’s ‘open door’ policy was characterised as running against the alliance’s own principles, which at its foreign ministers’ meeting in Copenhagen on 6-7 June 1991 resolved ‘not to gain one-sided advantage from the changing situation in Europe’, not to ‘threaten the legitimate interests’ of other states or ‘isolate’ them, and not to ‘draw new dividing lines in the continent’. The door was kept open to further diplomacy, noting that ‘We propose to work together to develop a new “security equation”’. The document threatened that if Moscow fails to receive the requisite ‘legally binding guarantees’ it would react with ‘military-technical means’.12 The nature of these means was left unspecified. There was some room for negotiation, including over arms control and risk reduction, but Russia’s main concerns had been left unaddressed. The issue was then forced by military means, which may have been the plan all along.
War in Europe
It appeared that everything was leading to war. This was long anticipated, but when it actually started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, it came as a surprise. All the warning signs were there, yet a full-scale invasion in the heart of Europe in the twenty-first century appeared inconceivable. However, as we have argued, the logic of conflict was inherent in the failure to establish an inclusive and indivisible security order in post-cold war Europe. However, up to 2022 Russia had limited itself to short and usually reactive interventions such as in Georgia in August 2008, where the possibly of marching on to Tbilisi was rejected, Crimea in March 2014 and then, to a degree unwittingly, in the Donbass from April of that year.
A flurry of diplomacy followed the western response to Moscow’s security treaty proposals, with numerous western leaders visiting Moscow. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was particularly active, but in his final meeting with Putin in Moscow on 7 February he was unable to offer much. The Normandy Format leaders (France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine) met in the run-up to the war, but it was clear that Ukraine was in no mood to fulfil the Minsk-2 agreement of February 2015, which provided a formula for the return of the Donbass to Ukrainian sovereignty. There are good reasons why Kiev may not have wished to fulfil its terms, which effectively amounted to a transformation of the polity, but some version was the only way of resolving the conflict peacefully. The two sides had very different representations of what it meant and neither fulfilled its obligations. Worse, in the days before the invasion the two breakaway republics were subjected to massive artillery bombardment from the Ukrainian side. This was in keeping with the long-term pattern, with over 80 per cent of the civilian casualties caused by active hostilities since 2018 coming on the separatist side.13 The central government in Kiev had long been passing laws prohibiting the use of the Russian language and even Russian culture from official usage, education and the mass media. By 2022 not a single school or university in Ukraine offered an education in Russian, even though some 18 per cent of the population were designated as ethnic Russians and over 60 per cent had earlier used Russian as their primary language. The history of the country was rewritten to present a favourable picture of Nazi collaborators and to negate any positive representations of traditional Russo-Ukrainian ties. Russian-language newspapers and TV channels were closed, and the opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk placed under house arrest.14
Russian concerns were augmented by the flood of weapons pouring into Ukraine, with the distinction between defensive and lethal weapons long abandoned. It appeared that all the trend lines were running against Russia. Moscow was almost certainly aware that since 2015 the CIA had been training Ukrainian special forces and intelligence officers in the art of guerrilla warfare.15 Russia’s concerns were heightened by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he not only repeated his opposition to Minsk-2 but also stated that Ukraine was considering withdrawal from the Budapest Memorandum and reviewing Ukraine’s non-nuclear status. He argued that the security guarantees promised by the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994 in return for Ukraine giving up the Soviet nuclear forces stationed on its territory was no longer valid. In normal circumstances such a statement, violating Ukraine’s commitments to the May 1992 Lisbon Protocol to the 1991 Strategic Arms Security Treaty and associated accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, would have been met with condemnation. Iran and North Korea have been severely sanctioned as a result of their real or putative nuclear ambitions, yet Zelensky’s statement encountered an eloquent silence.
In an emotional and tangled speech late at night on 21 February, Putin warned that Russia’s enemies were using Ukraine as a platform to threaten the country’s existence. He reprised some of the argument of his article the previous year that Ukrainians and Russians were one people, although he did not argue that they should be one state.16 Some of his historical analysis was mistaken and tendentious, although his main point that the Soviet Union gave form to the modern Ukrainian state was correct, with land added from Russia and Ukraine’s western neighbours. However, the polemical tone suggested that Ukraine was not a real nation and that Ukrainians were not a real people, which was quite a different and plainly wrong proposition. He stressed that the delivery of offensive weapons would ultimately make Russia’s defence impossible, and it was irrelevant whether that day arrived in one year or twenty. The silence that greeted Zelensky’s hint at the Munich Security Conference a few days earlier that Ukraine could develop nuclear weapons was interpreted as approbation in Moscow.
It is clear that in launching the invasion Putin miscalculated in at least four ways. The first is that he underestimated the scale of Ukrainian resistance, and over-estimated the capacity of the Russian military. It seems that he believed that a light-touch blitzkrieg would force Ukraine to capitulate. Instead, Zelensky turned out to be an inspirational wartime leader, Ukrainian forces put up stiff resistance, and the population certainly did not welcome Russian troops with bread and salt. At first there was the clear intention to avoid civilian casualties, but this was soon dropped. Instead, Russian forces got bogged down in siege warfare around Kiev, Kharkov, Mariupol and other towns. The very idea of trying to seize Kiev, a city of three million people, by force in the twenty-first century was a reckless and cruel ambition.
The second miscalculation was the scale of the Western response. Moscow claims that it had evaluated all the risks, but it soon became clear that it had under-estimated the intensity of the response, prompted in part by the appalling human suffering of Ukrainian civilians in the path of Russian forces but also generated by resentment at Russia’s long-term refusal to play by the rules of liberal hegemony. Moscow was comforted by the quasi-alliance with China, latterly enshrined in the Joint Statement signed during Putin’s visit to Beijing for the opening of the Winter Olympics on 4 February.17 Nevertheless, the coherence and intensity of the Western response must have come as a surprise. Germany under the new leadership of Olaf Scholz immediately froze the regulatory approval process for Nord Stream II, which effectively killed the project. This was followed by wave upon wave of financial sanctions by the US, EU and UK, including unexpectedly against the Central Bank of Russia, thus freezing at least two-thirds of Russia’s ‘war chest’ amounting to some $630bn in reserves held in dollars and other currencies abroad. An extensive list of ‘oligarchs’ were also sanctioned, many of whom had had nothing to do with Putin for years if not decades.
The Russian economy was just beginning to recover from the pandemic and the earlier Ukraine-related crisis, and had been forecast to grow by some 2.5 per cent in 2022. Instead, the economy will see a contraction of at least 10 per cent, amidst a plunging rouble and a severe fall in living standards. Western companies withdrew sales in Russia, and the light manufacturing sector ground to a halt. For example, Lada production in Togliatti ground to a halt for the lack of German components. The West waged full-scale economic warfare whose goal it appeared was no longer limited to stopping the war but now potentially sought to achieve regime change. The last time such sanctions had been applied to a major power was the energy war launched by Franklin Roosevelt against Japan in August 1941, with the result seen in December at Pearl Harbour. This is not to suggest that the sanctions against Russia are not appropriate or necessary, but to warn that they do not come cost-free. Apart from energy exports Russia is a relatively minor global economic player, although there will be damaging economic effects on Europe (almost none on the US), but the political costs could be high. With its back to the wall, the Putin regime could be tempted to take the Götterdämmerung option.
The third miscalculation was to over-estimate the Russian popular appetite for war. The return of Crimea to Russian jurisdiction in March 2014 was accompanied by a wave of enthusiasm (the Krymnash phenomenon), as the rectification of a perceived historical wrong. There was no such sentiment this time. The propaganda effects of the state-run media in the internet age and ferocious repression against critics of the war could do only so much. In fact, with so many family ties between Russians and Ukrainians, the suffering inflicted on civilians quickly resonated at home. Opinion polls before the war certainly indicated no war fever, and even the state-controlled mass media had done little to prepare the nation for a war with a brotherly people. The war was met by an immediate wave of indignation, and despite the draconian anti-protest legislation thousands took to the streets to condemn the inhumanity of the war. By the end of the first week at least 7,020 people had been arrested, amidst condemnatory statements by members of the elite. At the same time, it was clear that the morale of the Russian forces in Ukraine was low, suggesting that a protracted conflict would see mass defections. At first the casualty figures were kept secret, but to counter exaggerated Ukrainian claims, the Russian defence ministry admitted that some 500 soldiers had been killed in the first week of combat.
The fourth miscalculation is effectively the combined effects of the first three – the destabilisation of the Russian political order itself. The war was both an act of aggression and of self-harm, with damaging consequences for generations to come. Even if Russia was able to subdue Ukrainian resistance and take the main sites, the occupation forces would be subject to an enduring, savage and demoralising guerrilla war, not unlike that endured by Napoleon’s forces in the Iberian peninsula following the ill-advised invasion of May 1808. As in the postwar insurgency against the Soviet forces, Western Ukraine would act as a reservoir of partisan warfare, as would the neighbouring states, above all Poland. Even if a pro-Russian government was installed in Kiev, it would enjoy little to no legitimacy, especially after the savagery of the warfare that took it to the capital. Ukraine moreover would become part of the same political space as Belarus and Russia, and thus strengthen internal opposition to the various regimes. Unlike the Soviet Union, Putin’s regime has little to offer in terms of a universal progressive political project and instead on the menu would be grinding repression, censorship and mendacity.18 Even Russia’s conservative defence of the international status quo in the form of sovereign internationalism was discredited by the invasion. Russia had decisively moved from being a neo-revisionist power – defending the Charter international system against the radicalism of liberal hegemony – to becoming an out-and-out revisionist power.19
The war transformed Russia and there would be no going back. Putin’s future was doomed, however long he clung on to power. Ultimately, it was clear that in launching such a reckless and brutal war Russia was fated to suffer a defeat the like of which it had not seen in a thousand years of its history.
Could the War Have been Averted?
This is something that we will never know, but some tentative suppositions are in order. First, the assessment of Putin’s motivation and strategy, and possibly even psychology. If he was a Russian imperialist intent on recreating the Soviet or Russian empire, engaged in a landgrab, then the Hitler analogy would be appropriate. Negotiations with such a person would indeed amount to appeasement, which would be both futile and degrading. Such a person would keep pushing until they met resistance, and thus pre-emptive sanctions, arming of opponents, and the strengthening of defensive alliances would all be appropriate. In our case, emboldened by the West’s fiasco in Afghanistan reinforced by the chaotic retreat in August 2021, such a person would seize the opportunity of a West perceived to be in disarray and divided to pounce on the next victim, in this case Ukraine. It raises the question whether it was wise to goad and bait such a person, as Zelensky and the West did to the very end. Putin has a notoriously thin skin, and is quick to take offence. This of course does not exonerate the result, but it does raise the question whether such a ‘madman’ could have been handled better. The answer may well be in the negative, but it is a legitimate question to ask.
If Putin was bent on territorial aggrandisement, then he could have annexed the two separatist entities in the Donbass any time after 2015. There may have been tactical reasons not to do so, but other than the annexation of Crimea there is little evidence that the Kremlin was motivated by old-fashioned imperial expansionism. The alternative explanation provided by the veteran broadcaster Vladimir Pozner is more credible. In a lecture at Yale University in Autumn 2018 he argued that it was the West that made Putin. On coming to power in 2000 Putin sought to resolve the deepening security dilemma provoked by NATO enlargement. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in March 1999, just as NATO launched its 88-day bombing campaign of Serbia. In 2000 Putin even asked US president Bill Clinton whether Russia could join NATO, a suggestion that was dismissed at the time. Following the 9/11 attack on the US, Putin was the first to offer support. Instead of using the opportunity to deepen the security relationship with Russia, George W. Bush went the other way and intensified Moscow’s alienation. The US unilaterally abrogated the ABM treaty in June 2002, invaded Iraq in March 2003, initiated plans to install BMD systems in Eastern Europe, and then, despite Moscow’s vehement protests, in April 2008 offered the prospect of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Pozner argues that up to that time Putin had behaved in conformity with the imperatives of liberal hegemony, despite the complaints that Russia’s views were being ignored. Pozner places this in the larger context of the two types of peace on offer. The West in his view after 1989 could have offered Russia and the other states some sort of Marshall Plan to rehabilitate their economies and societies, offering a partnership of the type that was applied to postwar Europe. Instead, the US pursued what he describes as the path of hegemony, with all of the ensuing tensions.20
A second point is whether a deal on a revised European security order could have satisfied Russia’s security concerns. From this perspective, the most appropriate analogy is not with 1939 but 1914, where the ‘march of folly’ described by Barbara Tuchman led inexorably to a war that only certain hyper-nationalists may have wanted.21 As in 1914, in 2022 the war may have been prompted by security concerns but it was soon couched in the language of identity and civilisational threats. The rhetoric focused on the brotherly character of the two peoples, something that in practice the war will set back for generations. Putin dwelt compulsively and even obsessively on the identity theme, which indicates a lack of understanding of the dynamics of Ukrainian state building. His apparent claim that Ukraine was not a ‘real nation’ was presented in terms of its territorial agglomeration, but at its heart his approach failed to understand the fundamental resilience of Ukrainian identity. This was already evident before 2013 in the Donbass, where opinion polls showed that the population wanted guarantees protecting their Russophone identity, yet they wished this to take place within the framework of the Ukrainian nation. With the exception of the breakaway territories, this sentiment only intensified after 2014. Putin’s appeal at the start of the war for the population to rise up against the Ukrainian nationalist oppressors demonstrated his lack of understanding of the situation, as did his appeal for Ukrainian soldiers to defect to the Russian side. This worked in Crimea in March 2014, but the circumstances there were specific to the region. The idea that Ukrainians wanted to join some sort of recreated Slavic brotherhood is fanciful.
This does not negate the larger security perspective. We have discussed the December 2021 European security treaty proposals and their rather maximalist ambitions. They were also presented as a package thus could be seen not as a serious avenue for negotiation but as cover for military action. The serious Russian military build-up started in August, and there are suggestions that was the time when Putin decided on military action, and all the rest was feint and bluff. If that was indeed the case, should his bluff have been called.
Many ideas have been advanced to this end, including some sort of indefinite moratorium on Ukraine’s membership of NATO, to some sort of permanent Finlandisation whereby Ukraine retained its domestic autonomy but its freedom of choice in foreign affairs was circumscribed. The Austrian model was also advanced. The State Treaty of 1955 committed Austria to permanent neutrality, thus allowing the occupying forces to leave and for Austria to thrive. The inevitable riposte to these suggestions is that Ukraine should enjoy the right to choose its own alliances and foreign policy. This as we have seen is half the formula enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act onwards, but the other half is the indivisibility of security. All these documents internalise the tension between the two models of post-cold peace orders – the realist and the liberal one. If Cuba’s free choice to host Soviet nuclear missiles in October 1962 was – rightly – challenged by the US in October 1962, then why should Ukraine enjoy such a right today? In contrast, critics argue that any such compromises would be counterproductive and only feed ‘Russian revanchism’.22 This indeed was the dominant line in Kiev following the February 2014 change of regime, and it led to catastrophe. Counter-critics are thus in a position to argue that if Putin’s Russia was a monstrous beast waiting to pounce, then it would not be unreasonable to manage the animal rather than goading it and expecting the West to bail the country out from the ensuing crisis.
Worse, from Moscow’s perspective Ukraine was used by the Atlantic alliance as a platform to contain Russia.23 Washington and Brussels exploited the inherent and deep-seated Russophobia of the regime that it helped seize power in 2014. This would explain why the EU every six months renewed sanctions on Russia for not implementing the Minsk Accords, yet placed almost no pressure on Kiev to fulfil its end of the bargain. President Barack Obama had refused to send lethal arms to Ukraine for fear of aggravating the situation, but since then lethal weapons were being poured into Ukraine – for what purpose? Worse, the Western powers maintained a resolute silence on the forced Ukrainisation programme, which ran counter to the very norms that the EU and NATO formally espoused. It was not hard for Moscow to imagine that norms did not apply when it came to countering Russia and limiting its influence.
The inevitable question then arises: what were Russia’s legitimate security interests, and how could they have been reasonably met? If we work with the liberal hegemony paradigm, then Russia’s only legitimate option was to accommodate to the overwhelming material and moral power of the West, and accept its place as a subaltern. This would have provided huge advantages, including domestic prosperity, external legitimacy and regional harmony. This was the option taken by postwar Germany and Japan, and their success stands as testimony of the efficacy of this path. The only problem was that postcommunist Russia did not consider itself a defeated power, and it retained great power ambitions inherited from the Soviet and Imperial eras. That is why Boris Yeltsin and Putin pursued the realist sovereign internationalist path, generating conflicts with the collective West. This option did not necessarily entail a regional sphere of influence, but it certainly meant a sphere of security.
It also ultimately entailed attempts to create alternative regional instruments of integration, notably the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. Their western equivalents, the EU and NATO, studiously refused any sustained official contact with the two, exposing the logic of hegemony beneath the veneer of normative idealism. There could be no alternative to liberal hegemony, and attempts to construct one were met with the full force of Atlantic power, drawing on its 500-year history of imperialism. That is why Russian thinkers such as Sergei Karaganov are wrong to argue that the era of Western predominance is over.24 The war in Ukraine, with all of its endless human tragedy, proves otherwise, although this will be at best a pyrrhic victory. Russia’s rebellion against Western hegemony would be crushed and following the inevitable defeat it will be ready to join the ranks as a subaltern of liberal hegemony. This for many is no bad thing, and will allow the country at last fully to decommunize, demilitarise and lose its exaggerated great power ambitions. Russia would finally set on the path of peace, prosperity and freedom. Or so liberals believe.
Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, a Senior Research Fellow at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University. He is the author of Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Bloomsbury, 2015). His latest books are The Putin Paradox (Bloomsbury 2020) and Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War (Lexington Books 2022).
1 Vladimir Putin, ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, Kremlin.ru, 24 February 2022,
2 Vladimir Putin, ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, Kremlin.ru, 21 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828.
3 John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (London and New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2018); John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order’, International Security, Vol. 43, No. 4, Spring 2019, pp. 7-50; Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020); Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019).
4 Charter of Paris for a New Europe (Paris, CSCE, 1990), https://www.oscepa.org/documents/all-documents/documents-1/historical-documents-1/673-1990-charter-of-paris-for-a-new-europe/file.
5 OSCE, ‘Istanbul Document 1999’, https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/6/5/39569.pdf.
6 OSCE, ‘Astana Commemorative Declaration: Towards a ecurity Community’, December 2010, https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/b/6/74985.pdf.
7. Russian Foreign Ministry, ‘Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Answer to a Media Question’, 27 January 2022, https://www.rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/7060.
8 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York, Basic Books, 1997), p. 101.
9 Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘A Plan for Europe’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1995, p. 35.
10 Hibai Arbide Aza and Miguel González, ‘US Offered Disarmament Measures to Russia in Exchange for De-escalation of Military Threat in Ukraine’, El País, 2 February 2022, https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-02-02/us-offers-disarmament-measures-to-russia-in-exchange-for-a-deescalation-of-military-threat-in-ukraine.html.
11 ‘News Conference Following Russian-Hungarian Talks’, Kremlin.ru, 1 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67690. For commentary on how the US began its support for the mujahideen as early as 3 July 1979, when Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to anti-regime forces, see Joe Lauria, ‘What a US Trap for Russia Might Look Like’, Consortium News, 4 February 2022, https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/04/what-a-us-trap-for-russia-in-ukraine-might-look-like/.
12 MID RF, ‘O peredache pis’mennoi reaktsii na otvet amerikanskoi storony po garantiyam bezopasnosti’, 17 February 2022.
13 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘Conflict-Related Civilian Casualties in Ukraine’, 27 January 2022, Conflict-related civilian casualties as of 31 December 2021 (rev 27 January 2022) corr EN_0.pdf (un.org).
14 For a concise and balanced list of Russian concerns, see Alexey Gromyko, ‘When Writings on the Wall are Ignored’, Russian International Affairs Council, 1 March 2022, https://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/comments/when-writings-on-the-wall-are-ignored/.
15 Zach Dorfman, ‘CIA-Trained Ukrainian Paramilitaries May Take Central Role if Russian Invades’, Yahoo News, 13 January 2022, CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades (yahoo.com).
16 ‘Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”’, Kremlin.ru, 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
17 ‘Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development’, 4 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770.
18 The last three points made by Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘A Russian Invasion of Ukraine Could Destabilize Russia’s Political Order’, Truthout.org, 14 February 2022, https://truthout.org/articles/a-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-could-destabilize-russias-political-order/.
19 Richard Sakwa, ‘Russian Neo-Revisionism’, Russian Politics, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2019, pp. 1-21.
20 Vladimir Pozner, ‘How the United States Created Vladimir Putin’, Yale University, 27 September 2018, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ.
21 Barbara Tuchman’s brilliant March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (London, Abacus, 1985) ranges across history from the Peloponnesian War, the Renaissance popes, the British in America all the way to Vietnam. Her marvellous book on the start of the Great War is The Guns of August (London, Penguin, 1962).
22 The argument made by Andreas Umland, ‘Why Compromise in the Donbas is Unhelpful’, Global Policy, 10 February 2022, https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/10/02/2022/why-compromise-donbas-unhelpful.
23 The argument made, inter alia, by Aaron Maté, ‘By Using Ukraine to Fight Russia, the US Provoked Putin’s War’, 5 March 2022, By using Ukraine to fight Russia, the US provoked Putin’s war (substack.com).
24 Sergei Karaganov, ‘Russian Foreign Policy: Three Historical Stages and Two Future Scenarios’, Russian Politics, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2022, pp. 416-34.
In “Conceptualising Brexit”, Tom Wood argues in a rather abstract way that withdrawal from the EU makes “Socialism” more possible in the UK; this begs a number of questions.
Why did a section of the ruling class want Brexit and what are they trying to do with it?
The ruling class in the UK was split over Brexit. Significant sections, especially in manufacturing, wanted to stay in. The largest donation to either campaign was to Remain from Sainsburys. The next four largest donations all went to Leave and all were from Hedge Funds.
The faction that wanted out was motivated by a desire to align the UK with the labour and environmental standards of the USA; as these are significantly lower than those operating in the EU. No paid maternity leave as a right. Lower holiday entitlement. “Cutting red tape” and letting business “off the leash” of tedious bureaucratic health and safety standards and overheads. Time for Atlas to shrug.
It was and is a class war initiative designed to shift resources from wages and social conditions to profits. An attempt to break out of the UK’s long steady decline and stagnation with a spectacular act of will that would mobilise and cement a section of the working class into a revived national project on deeply reactionary grounds. The notion that “with one mighty bound” the UK would shrug off its European shackles and boom off into the distance has not come to pass. In fact, the already deadly slow pace of business investment has stalled even further, as this graph from the FT shows: making temporary upticks feverish and unsustainable. If I were a patient with a graph like that at the foot of my bed, I’d be worried.
As the projected economic benefits turn sour, with Richard Hughes of the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting that the long term economic impact of Brexit will reduce UK GDP by 4% – double the long term impact of the Covid pandemic, the ongoing dynamic of this is to try to keep this political bloc together by playing up the hostility to immigrants and refugees that was the dark soul of so much of the Leave vote.
A trade deal with the US, harmonising standards on their model, is still what they are after – perhaps to be consummated after the Second Coming of Trump (or one of his acolytes) after 2024.An acceleration of the creeping privatisation of the NHS, with US companies starting to take over consortia of GPs practices, is a precursor. Fire and rehire the bracing new model of labour relations, or so they hope. Such a deal will be entirely on the USA’s terms. Negotiations with the Americans by weaker economies tend to be short. The Americans write the deal. The other country signs it.
While Tom is right to argue that this was all overlaid with the delusions of restored British buccaneering grandeur and imperial nostalgia, and it’s apparent that some of the Tory right really believe in this if Daily Telegraph opinion pieces are to be taken at face value; it was also instrumentally useful prolefeed, cutting with the grain of a deeply backward looking national culture, nostalgic for past imperial glories and fearful of the future that runs deep in older, whiter workers in “left behind” areas; who look at shuttered factories and closed mines and see national decline not the brutal indifference that characterises the care the ruling class takes of them, their communities and their lives. Sink or swim. On your bike.
Where he is completely wrong is in any notion that there was any symmetry in the pro-Brexit faction in their desire to trade with the USA and China. “Glorious Global Britain” could no more be a free agent in trade than it is in military and foreign policy. Trade with China is now freezing into a Cold War framework; with pressure from the USA channelled by the right, and mainstream Labour, for increasing scrutiny and barriers to Chinese trade and investment – and even academic cooperation – on “national security” grounds. This is already doing damage to the UK economy in areas like 5G and nuclear energy. Keeping Huawei out of 5G infrastructure means using slower and more expensive Western substitutes. One indication of the consequences of this is that China’s very successful zero Covid strategy relies partly on a contact tracing App that actually works. None of those tried here works anything like as well. There are many reasons not to go nuclear, but the decision to exclude Chinese investment leaves an investment and technology gap that will be hard to fill; imposing additional costs on what is already a prohibitively expensive energy technology and a reliance on US or French companies notorious for cost and construction over runs and technical breakdowns.
What are the consequences for the UK?
Tom argues rightly that both the EU and the UK are now struggling for advantage; but the asymmetry between the economies means that this is a game of chicken between a British bubble car and a European ten-ton truck.
The impact on the “home nations” is centrifugal.
The stresses in the North of Ireland are a case in point. The North remaining in the EU single market means that it has been doing rather well economically. The problem with the Protocol is for British-based companies that now face additional paperwork, which has hindered their ability to sell into the 6 Counties. Attempts by the UK government to foment Loyalist mobilisations against this –shown by Lord Frost making it a priority to see the suits who front up Loyalist paramilitaries as his first port of call earlier this year – have foundered on three problems.
1. The majority of both communities in the North voted to Remain.
2. Virtually no one in the North wants a land border between the 6 Counties and the Republic.
3. The United States has made it plain that it will not support any course of action that threatens the Good Friday Agreement and is therefore backing the EU stance.
The political fall out in the North is that the DUP are in crisis, losing support to the centrist Alliance Party on one side and, more significantly, to harder line Loyalists on their right. In the forthcoming Stormont elections, other things being equal, Sinn Fein are set to be the largest Party, and would therefore take the First Minister position. Although the next General Election in the Republic does not have to be held until 2025, Sinn Fein are also currently well ahead in the polls there. There is a long way to go between here and there, and the UK and Irish ruling classes will move heaven and Earth to stop it, but either or both of these developments could put a border poll on the agenda; which could take the 6 Counties out of the UK altogether; and the St Patrick’s cross out of the Union Jack.
Tom’s argument that “Scottish nationalism has been undermined” by Brexit and presumption that there will be a Labour revival North of the Border – with Labour offering Scotland a “socialist future” is taking wishful thinking a little far. A General Election tomorrow would see the SNP increasing its support. Support for full independence hovers around 50%, mostly just below. So, not enough to successfully force the issue, but more than enough to stop it going away. Like Catalonia. The majority Remain vote in Scotland gives the prospect of independence in the EU a big market over the water to aspire to belong to as a pull to add to the push given by the sense that successive Conservative governments treat the UK as little more than Greater Little England. Even in Wales, which marginally voted Leave, support for independence is growing.
The impact of the pandemic has raised the profile and standing of the Scottish and Welsh First Minsters, who have each taken a marginally better line on keeping it under control, but have both struck a tone that has been more humane and competent than Johnson; whose standing has correspondingly shrunk. The dynamic of politics in each component of the UK is diverging and becoming more unique. The sudden ubiquity of Union Jacks – behind ministerial podiums and on a flagpole near you – has a slightly desperate air about it; as if they fear that if they weren’t there, we’d forget where we are. The tectonic plates are moving, slowly, under their feet.
What are the consequences for Tory Party and ruling class politics?
Boris Johnson’s New Model Tory Party, with Remainers purged and the Brexit Party vote incorporated, is more libertarian for the rights of business, and more draconian and repressive on civil liberties. Every time you see someone from the Covid Recovery Group banging on about the precious liberty to not wear a mask or turn down a vaccine, check out their view on the Police Bill or the Nationality and Borders Bill. Their concern for the right to go unvaccinated or maskless is the bravado of those who believe that it is good for the soul to take risks with your life so you can go to work. The liberties they champion are all those that smooth the path to unrestrained consumption. Block a highway to try to save the planet, on the other hand, and your feet won’t touch the ground. 51 months inside and an unlimited fine for you. Standards and order, after all, must be upheld. Ever unoriginal and derivative, they are adopting themes, slogans and attack lines off the peg from the US Republican Party which sets them up for an ever more delirious politics.
Crucially, contrary to delusions held in sections of the trade union movement, they have not and do not intend to abandon austerity. Spending vast amounts to keep private companies afloat in the face of the pandemic is what you might call “socialism for bankers”. And every time Rishi Sunak has the delusion that the pandemic is all over, he starts talking about the need to get the public finances in order, reduce the debt AND reduce taxes on the rich. Same old tune.
Despite labour shortages in some sectors giving some workers a bit of leverage, overall wage settlements are running at 2%, while CPI inflation is 5.1% and RPI (which includes housing costs) 7.1%, and there is a public sector wage freeze. This is not a nativist high wage economy in the making. Quite the reverse.
The sum total of “levelling up” is a bit of pork barrel spending on small scale cosmetic developments in Tory-held seats – the not so subtle message being “vote for us and get a bypass, don’t vote for us and we leave you to rot”. The adjustments to the social care bill – which primarily hit poorer home owners in the North and benefited wealthier people in the South – and the pruning back of rail investment in the North – showed that they just can’t help themselves.
The extent to which the Tories are coming unstuck at the moment is that after almost two years of one of the worst per capita death rates in the world and no end in sight, the penny is dropping that we are not all in it together, they make the rules to suit themselves and cock a snook at the rest of us and, when discovered, try to brass it out with laughably ludicrous denials and evasions; and this shows what they are like about everything else.
What are the consequences for Labour?
The self-comforting myth that the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn was solely a side effect of Labour’s 2019 Brexit policy has some traction on the Labour Left, because it allows us the delusion to think that the forces we are up against are nothing like as powerful as they actually are; so no deep rethink of strategy is needed.
The defeat was actually the result of every single pro-ruling class political faction making it their priority to stop him, over and above their position on Brexit, or anything else. So, not just the Brexit and Tory Parties, but the Lib Dems and SNP too. Had the Lib Dems and SNP actually been concerned primarily with stopping a hard Brexit in 2019, they’d have supported a temporary Corbyn-led government to get that done. They chose instead to precipitate a General Election that they knew Johnson was likely to win.
This was also a concern of the US State Department, who were quite overt that they were making Corbyn “run the gauntlet” (as Mike Pompeo put it).
The function of Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party is primarily to reassure the ruling class that Labour is a safe alternative government – the B team for when the Tories fall apart – and poses no threat to their interests. Much energy has been put into being “statesmanlike” and giving the government support “in the national interest” during the pandemic. Union Jacks have been as common behind Shadow as government Ministers. A relentless purge of the left of the Party, at every level, from the removal of the whip for Corbyn, to panels for local council candidates that keep left candidates off, to the growing number of auto exclusions for ordinary party members send the message that Labour is safe for business, the rules-based international order and the Atlantic Alliance.
The new Unionism even extends to Ireland, where Keir Starmer has said he would make the case for the Union in the event of a Border Poll; and Louise Haigh was reshuffled out of her role as Shadow Northern Ireland spokeswoman within a week of arguing that Labour should stay neutral.
Is Brexit a step on the road to socialism?
Tom’s central arguments are
1. that the constitutional arrangements of the EU are an obstacle to socialism and that therefore “while Brexit Britain may be at risk of being led down a blind alley by the uber-globalists, it is also, in equal measure, able to pursue Socialism. In a post-Brexit Britain, socialists would not be restricted as they had been since Britain joined the EU.” (my emphasis)
2. “Brexit shatters the myth that capitalism can be tamed and that long term liberal, capitalist cooperation is possible.”
Constitutional arrangements are, in themselves, not an insuperable obstacle to the expression of forces in class struggle. When the contradictions get too great, they crack. Making any kind of advance in current circumstances, or even taking effective defensive measures, requires the working class in every country to be both internationalist and seek international alliances and organisation, irrespective of whether we are part of the same trade bloc or not. A struggle for socialism also means seriously engaging with countries that see themselves as socialist and connecting with the recomposition of the left globally that is currently taking place; rather than presuming that we can build social democracy in one country, while paying no attention to the actual domestic relation of class forces – not least in the Labour Party.
The balance of class forces in the Leave campaign and Brexit strategy is a bit of a clue to the direction Brexit has taken, and was always going to take. It was, and is, completely dominated by the most reactionary fraction of UK capital, which controls the Tory Party and therefore the government, with a wing led by Farage directly plugged into the most right-wing fraction of US capital – always primed and ready for an astroturf revival to keep the Tories on the straight and narrow – and its street fighting component around Tommy Robinson standing back and standing by on the one side, and the small collection of “anti-EU voices on the left” on the other – some in Labour, some in the CP or from the SWP tradition. The latter would hardly have been welcome on pro-Leave demos, even had they wanted to go. Physical violence would have been likely. Who has the power here? Who is hegemonic? Conclusions should be drawn. There is a world of difference between struggling against restrictions on state ownership and investment from a position of strength and mobilisation – possibly in government – and looking for international allies in that fight; and taking part as a subordinate element in a movement aiming to remove restrictions on attacks on the working class driven by revanchist nationalism.
All politico-trade agreements between different nations and states are subject to stresses and none of them are eternal. The UK itself is a case in point on a smaller scale than the EU. It has held together because it was very successful as an imperial power for a quarter of a millennium. Its decline is putting its cohesion under strain.
The same applied to Yugoslavia, as a socialist federation broken apart by an economic impasse that allowed more powerful outside forces to put unbearable pressure on its national/political fault lines, with horrific consequences.
The EU is a kind of Hayekian Holy Roman Empire, with Germany big enough to call most of the shots, but not big enough to subordinate and absorb the other big economies, in the way Prussia did with the Zollverein to create the Second Reich. Its future depends partly on internal stresses, but most crucially on the centrifugal pressures put on it by the USA on the one side and China’s Belt and Road initiative on the other; and this overlaps with the eastward military drive of NATO and consequent increasingly fraught relations with Russia. It is hard to imagine that the refragmentation of the EU would follow the scenario Tom sketches of a grateful continental workers’ movement looking to the shining example of socialism being developed in Britain – hardly an immediate prospect in any case – and breaking away to follow our example. Two, three, many Brexits, could be more like Yugoslavia on a much bigger scale.
The UK capitalist faction that drove Brexit and is – for now – in charge are not “uber-globalists”. They are dyed in the wool Atlanticists. And so – for now – are the leadership of the Labour Party. That means being signed up for a US trade deal and complete fealty to the US alliance and the New Cold War. The dynamic of that anchors the Labour leadership in collusion with the Tory government – seen most recently in Starmer giving them credit for putting health first on Covid when they have presided over one of the worst per capita death rates in the world – and will drive them ever further rightwards. Their “gentleman’s agreement” on by-elections with the Lib Dems is a precursor of the least progressive coalition option possible for an alternative government; and possibly a centre recomposition on US Democrat party lines, dumping the organic connection with organised labour, as long hankered after by Blair.
The decisive task for the Labour movement, Party members and trade unions, is to resist this.
This article was first published here
]]>“They must feel that they are weak. How could this very establishment in the United Kingdom, which has been in power for hundreds of years, feel threatened? It’s quite sophisticated after all. It has many different components: the intelligence services, the banks, the landed gentry, the oligarchs from Russia, the commercial media, …the BBC which is the big propaganda organism that helps keep the country cohesive… How could they feel threatened by a wild colonial boy from Australia who arrived from overseas?”
A few pages later:
“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the ‘international community’. We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants.”
Insights like that make a man dangerous. It puts him at odds with Empire, which is used to having its way. So it’s no surprise that the man who wrote or spoke those words is now the prisoner of an endless legal checkmate carried out in the airless chambers of the English courts. Sent to prison for breaching bail, he began a 50-week sentence in April 2019. It is now December 2021 and the English courts, in a royal stitch-up, have accepted American assurances about his future treatment. This too will be contested, leaving the man, in frail health, a little longer in jail.
Every week there are new revelations, such as the plot concocted by the CIA to assassinate him, which came to light in October. To add to the brutal irony the British court’s ruling was handed down within days of events celebrating Democracy, Human Rights, the Nobel Prize and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. Julian Assange is the man in question. He isn’t a journalist toiling away at one of the legacy fronts like the Times or the Guardian but someone who invented his own role in life. Julian Assange made news until he became the news, ducking into the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid extradition to the U.S.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists issued their annual December report on journalists imprisoned around the world. It’s sitting here next to Julian’s book. The report lists some 290 journalists behind bars, and while many of the usual suspect countries are near the top, the U.S. and Great Britain are excluded. You do a double take; obviously this is an error of some sort. Assange is the prize catch, the man they are making a lesson of, so that the rest of the world gets the message. If he isn’t a journalist, then who the hell is? The CPJ has mistaken credentials for impact, so they respond to criticism with weaselly definitions of journalist. The beat goes on.
There are other problems with the Committee’s report. It is seriously outmoded. How so? The definition of a journalist is rapidly evolving. Attacks on freedom of information and expression matter not only to journalists but to everyone in the field: public interest watchdogs, NGOs, advocacy groups – even lawyers. The American contribution to the imprisoned over the last year includes Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Natalie Edwards, all having served time or in the clink now. We know their names even if mainstream media rarely mentions their stories.
If you’re an Environmental Activist these days, you’re on the world’s most dangerous beat. An activist testifies, reveals, argues: they’re attempting to expand the historical record. They do the work traditional news organizations no longer do. The MSM prefer narratives they can repeat ad nauseam. Everything else makes a lightning fast trip down the memory hole.
And so, like Daniel Hale, the former NSA analyst who revealed the savagery of America’s Afghan drone program, still in jail – no peep about him from Sleepy Joe Biden, who warned us that democracy is dying before grabbing the jail keys for Julian Assange on World Human Rights Day – there are many others who aren’t journalists, some of whom haven’t been arrested but loom large in the picture. You could start with Ed Snowden, in exile in Russia for nearly a decade. Steven Donziger, the lawyer who won a huge judgment against Shell in Ecuador, was just released to a second round of house arrest. Others, like Berta Cáceres murdered in Honduras, never had the luxury of escaping or being safe at home.
Most of this happened before the Pegasus revelations this summer. That too changed everything: now we know that anyone, anywhere, you, too, dear reader, can be spied on down to the short hairs of your private life once a government or private entity is willing to pay for it. Despite Google’s lawsuit against the Israeli-government subsidized NSO Group and Snowden’s call for the U.N. to ban Pegasus, the technique is sure to proliferate. A November report found that every government in Europe except one was employing Pegasus, and in that exception, France, the security agencies were caught napping and promised it wouldn’t happen again.
For those brave enough to be actors on this stage, the ground beneath their feet has shifted dramatically. A journalist at Forbidden Stories in Paris told me recently, “For twenty years we watched the security of our communications closely and kept up, always one step ahead. Now everything is precarious.” Forbidden Stories not only broke the Pegasus story, they revealed the truth behind Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death in Malta. Meet with a journo from FS and they’ll sometimes turn on a faucet so running water disguises our voices; you get the feeling journalists in the field are becoming like Mafia soldiers of old, communicating with hand gestures in shady corners. Pegasus turned us all into journalists, rapporteurs of what’s really going on.
Where does that leave our wild colonial boy? Charges against him have fallen apart, one after another. His lawyers chisel away at the legal fortress, attempting to free the prisoner kept illegally in notorious Belmarsh. Court proceedings are not in their interest.
“A trial… will certainly bring up two kinds of problems, the war crimes he revealed, the … enormous numbers of civilians killed which had not been reported, a major program of torture by our Iraqi allies which continued into the Obama Administration… These are not things they want discussed in open-ended trial.” That’s Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers in a recent interview. The Deep Insecurity State is making an example of Assange so journalists, researchers, whistleblowers around the world can’t help but notice, while newspaper journalists and television presenters act as if it will never happen to them.
In His Own Words is a short, sober book built around paragraph-length entrees. It is of course about Wikileaks, “the biggest dog in the room,” as Assange calls it but really more about where we are right now and what sort of future we can dare to imagine. Assange, it may surprise you, is an optimist at heart.
“I posed the question of what the most positive trajectory for the future would look like. Self-knowledge, diversity, and networks of self-determination. A highly educated global population…stimulating vibrant new cultures and the maximal diversification of individual thought, increased regional self-determination, and the self-determination of interest groups that are able to network quickly and exchange value rapidly over geographic boundaries.” Orwell’s shadow looms over happy prognostications like that.
Getting Assange out will be a real test of our resistance, our ability to act together in this fractured time. There is good news: Craig Murray – writer, blogger, ex-British ambassador, another man you may never have heard of – was released from jail in Edinburgh, Scotland on November 30th, having served four months for the newly invented crime of “jigsaw identification.” He’s out and if one can get free, so can another. Crossing party lines in November while citing Wikileaks’ revelations of American espionage on French politicians, the National Assembly here in Paris overwhelmingly voted to give him political asylum. Symbolic but important and it means it can be done.
JULIAN ASSANGE IN HIS OWN WORDS, Compiled and edited by Karen Sharpe, O/R Books 2021.
©James Graham 2021
James Graham is a Paris-based writer whose stories have appeared in Counterpunch, the Baffler, The Guardian and elsewhere. His new English-language novel is le Plouc de Paris. Continental Riffs on Substack is his port in the storm. He can reached at [email protected]
]]>Giorgio Trucchi writes: Honduras is at the most important crossroads of its recent history.
On November 28, more than 5 million Hondurans will be asked to elect the President of the Republic, 128 deputies to the National Congress, 20 to the Central American Parliament, 298 mayors and more than 2 thousand municipal councillors.
As the election date approaches, the political atmosphere has become polarized, conflict has intensified and social tension grown.
No one has forgetten the violent repression of 2017 against those who protested against the gross electoral fraud that prolonged the agony of the current government regime. At that time, more than thirty people lost their lives violently and these crimes have remained in total impunity.
The bloody events of the last few days reawaken the ghosts of that violence and repression.
On November 11, a Liberal Party candidate for councillor, Óscar Moya, was shot several times in Santiago de Puringla (La Paz). Two days later the mayor of Cantarranas (Francisco Morazán) and candidate for reelection for the Liberal Party, Francisco Gaitán, was assassinated.
The following day the leader of the opposition Libertad y Refundación (Libre) Party, Elvir Casaña, and a Liberal Party activist, Luis Gustavo Castellanos, were killed in San Luis (Santa Bárbara) and San Jerónimo (Copán), respectively. Two other activists were wounded in the deadly attack on Castellanos.
On November 15, another attack killed Dario Juarez, a Liberal Party vice-mayor candidate in the municipality of Concordia (Olancho). Two days later, unknown persons made an attempt on the lives of Héctor Estrada, independent candidate for mayor of Campamento (Olancho) and Juan Carlos Carbajal, candidate for mayor of El Progreso for the Salvador Party of Honduras.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Honduras and the National Violence Observatory (ONV) of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), more than 30 violent deaths have been registered in the context of the current electoral process, which is shaping up to be even more violent than that of 2017.
The Observatory reported at least 64 cases of electoral violence up until October 25, including 27 homicides and 11 attacks. To these must be added the most recent attacks that took the lives of five people in five days (as detailed above) and other non-fatal attacks.
The OHCHR condemned these acts of electoral violence “that affect the right to political participation” and urged the authorities to carry out “prompt, thorough and impartial investigations”.
A legacy of impunity
“These murders of local leaders are a prelude to what could happen during and after the elections. Let us remember that all this is happening after the approval in Congress of reforms and laws that deepen the criminalization of social protest and citizen mobilization,” warned Bertha Oliva, coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (Cofadeh).
“They have been practically legalizing repression against those who demonstrate their discontent and defend human rights. These are the results,” she added.
In 2017, repression against those protesting the electoral fraud orchestrated by the ruling National Party claimed the lives of 37 innocent victims (Cofadeh 2018). Of all these cases only one was successfully prosecuted and the charges against the police officer accused of shooting and killing were dismissed.
“The chain of command was never investigated, nor the context in which these deaths were caused. The dictatorship gave the military police guarantees of impunity to capture, torture and execute opponents in the streets. This only generates the conditions for similar and even more violent events to be repeated”, predicted the human rights defender.
In this sense, Cofadeh will be monitoring and denouncing any electoral crimes committed before and during Election Day, as well as violations against people exercising their right to vote.
Three for the presidency
Of the 16 presidential aspirants, only three have a real chance of winning: Xiomara Castro of the opposition Libre Party, who leads most polls; Nasry “Tito” Asfura Zablah of the National Party, main opponent of the former first lady and Yani Rosenthal of the Liberal Party, representing the other traditional party in Honduras but with little chance of victory.
For Xiomara Castro, this is her second attempt to reach the presidency of the country, after the allegations of fraud around the questionable defeat she suffered in 2013 at the hands of Juan Orlando Hernandez.
After the public presentation of her “Government Plan to Refound Honduras 2022-2026”, Castro and Salvador Nasralla (of the Salvador Party of Honduras) formed an alliance, joined by the Innovation and Unity Party (Pinu), some sectors of the Liberal Party and an independent candidacy. In order to join efforts and potential votes, Nasralla renounced his presidential candidacy and supported Libre’s candidacy.
Nasralla, an eccentric, well known sports talk show host, was the 2017 presidential candidate of the Opposition Alliance against the Dictatorship, which also included Libre and Pinu and which received the support of a wide range of social, popular and union organizations.
On that occasion, the Alliance denounced the unconstitutionality of a new candidacy of Juan Orlando Hernández, since in Honduras the Constitution prohibited presidential reelection. The Alliance also mobilized for weeks against the electoral fraud that deprived Nasralla of the presidential seat, with the tacit consent of the United States, the European Union and the OAS.
“Tito” Asfura, popularly known as “Papi a la orden”, has been mayor of Tegucigalpa for two terms (2014-2022) for the ruling National party. A businessman with more than 30 years occupying governmental and legislative positions, he was a shareholder of an offshore company in Panama while still a public official. In the end, the said company ended up under the control of Banco Ficohsa, owned by the powerful Atala Faraj family.
In June of this year, the Court of Appeals suspended a pre-trial hearing against Asfura for abuse of authority, use of false documents, embezzlement of public funds, fraud and money laundering. In order to reactivate the hearing, the Superior Court of Accounts will have to carry out a special audit on the funds investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
According to information published in recent days, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa has also been linked to the notorious “Diamante” corruption case involving the mayor of San José, Costa Rica, Johnny Araya, who is being investigated by Costa Rican authorities for alleged bribes in exchange for public works.
The third candidate is former congressman and banker Yani Rosenthal, who in 2017 was indicted and sentenced to three years in prison in the United States for participating in financial transactions using illicit proceeds (drug money laundering). He voluntarily turned himself in and was held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York but returned to Honduras in mid-2020.
Both the investigations carried out by US prosecutors and the media Pandora Papers investigation revealed the connection between the Rosenthal family, one of the richest in the region, and several offshore companies that may have been used to launder money.
Programs and proposals
In her government program, Xiomara Castro points out the need to rebuild the democracy broken by the 2009 coup and to re-found the country through a Constituent Assembly that “gathers all sectors to agree on the legal bases of their future coexistence in a new consensual order”, leading the nation towards the construction of a democratic socialist state. While, by contrast, both Asfura and Rosenthal propose the same worn out neoliberal recipes that have led Honduras to be among the poorest and most unequal countries of the continent.
“Xiomara proposes a government of national reconciliation that includes all sectors of the opposition. A government that aims to overcome these disastrous years that have deepened the neoliberal model, privatizing services, ceding national territory, handing over public goods, expanding extractivism, putting national sovereignty up for sale,” said Gilberto Ríos, candidate for congressman for Libre.
The social movement leader explained that Libre’s government plan proposes to move from a deeply oligarchic State to a democratic socialist one. Among many other points, it intends to repeal all those laws and reforms approved by the dictatorship, which deeply harm the interests and rights of the immense majority of the Honduran population.
Thus, we are talking about, among others, the Hourly Employment Law that deepens labor insecurity and annuls the rights of workers, the Secrecy Law that blocks public auditing of State funds, as well as the Surveillance Law that allows spying on the political opposition and too the Organic Law of the Economic Development Zones (ZEDEs) that violates national sovereignty. It is also expected to reverse reforms made to the Penal Code that criminalize social protest and mobilization.
“It will be a more redistributive government, of social works and projects, that defends human rights, consistent with the needs and security of the population. In this sense – clarified Ríos – we differentiate ourselves from the other candidates and political parties because they are openly neoliberal and represent the interests of the Honduran oligarchy, transnational capital and the old bipartisanship. That is what it is all about: defeating the traditional bipartisanship and neoliberalism”.
How is Honduras now?
The Central American country arrives at these elections in difficult conditions, to put it euphemistically.
Honduras currently ranks among the most unequal countries in Latin America, with 62 percent of the population mired in poverty and almost 40 percent in extreme poverty (EPHPM 2020). According to a recent report by the National Institute of Statistics (INE 2021), removed from the institution’s website twelve hours after its publication, in July 2021 poverty had reached 73.6 percent of the population.
That increase is also the result of disappointing government management in the face of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the two hurricanes that struck the country last year.
According to figures from the Technical Unit for Food and Nutritional Security (Utsan), 1.3 million Hondurans face food insecurity and almost 350 thousand people are in a “critical situation”. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate has reached 10% of the economically active population (EAP), perhaps the highest in the Latin American region. There are at least 4 million Hondurans with employment problems and more than 700 thousand unemployed workers.
Faced with this scenario, thousands of families have taken irregular migration as their only option, the vast majority of whom are being held up at the borders. It is a portrait of one of the deepest tragedies of the last 40 years.
“In the last ten years Honduras has had a frank deterioration, not only in the rule of law in general, in democratic institutionality, in the population’s access to basic services and in the fight against poverty, but also socio-economically. When one looks at all these indicators, one realizes that rather than a failed state, we should speak of a dead state,” said Ismael Zepeda, economist at the Social Forum on Foreign Debt and Development of Honduras (Fosdeh).
Currently Honduras’ public debt exceeds 70% of GDP: the country’s economic growth is concentrated mainly in three sectors: financial, energy and telecommunications.
“These are sectors that do not produce development, nor do they generate redistribution, rather they produce more concentration of weath. In addition, we have an army of more than 250,000 public employees who absorb almost 50% of the budget, while there is a worrying drop in revenue. The situation is unsustainable and will represent a very heavy burden for whoever wins the elections”, explained Zepeda.
For years, the National Party has maintained a supernumerary staff, mainly composed of party activists. In practice, it has plundered the State so as to employ its political leaders and create client networks so as to stay in power.
State reengineering
For the Fosdeh economist, an immediate reengineering of the government, a reconversion of the productive system, a fiscal pact to dynamize the economy and efforts towards progressive taxation are necessary. Likewise, it is imperative to guarantee transparency, accountability and the fight against corruption, while promoting a strategy of internal and external debt reduction.
Finally, the generation of decent jobs, the creation of programs that prevent the deepening of poverty, more equitable management and redistributive policies to reduce social inequality, are also key elements the new government must implement.
“When a country is mired in a multiple crisis and has badly deteriorated, it is easy, so to speak, for a candidate to make promises. The most important thing, then, is not so much what is offered, but the way in which things eventually get done”, concluded Zepeda.
Labor insecurity
The 2009 coup d’état in Honduras not only broke the institutional framework and strengthened the oligarchy and elite power groups, but also allowed the governments that followed the coup to deepen the neoliberal extractivist model, encouraging the plundering of national territory and public wealth and increasingly deregulating the labor market.
For Joel Almendares, secretary general of the United Confederation of Honduran Workers (CUTH), the impacts of these policies on labor and union rights have been devastating for the vast majority of the population.
“There has been a growing deregulation of labor, coupled with the deepening of labor flexibilization and insecurity. One of the most nefarious laws has undoubtedly been the Hourly Employment Law: rights have been lost and permanent jobs have been made precarious,” said Almendares.
“There were also companies or institutions that simply changed their name or corporate name and did away with unions. Others created parallel unions to counteract a genuine organizing process,” he added.
Regression
All of these anti-worker measures have negatively impacted the safeguarding of rights.
“There are clear setbacks in the right to free unionization and collective bargaining. The programs to generate employment have been a mockery, tailored to the interests of large transnationals. Juan Orlando Hernández has definitely been a disaster for the labor and union sector”, stated the CUTH general secretary.
Another factor contributing to the deepening of the crisis has been the behavior of the government’s labor authorities.
“Shielding themselves behind the need to generate employment and supposed development, they have been biased and have systematically protected the interests of big national and transnational capital. They have done so at the expense of the rights of workers, abandoning them and allowing the violation of their rights. They have not protected them, and have been their executioners instead,” he lamented.
In view of this situation, the CUTH presented the Libre candidate with the political proposal of the union sector where, among other points, it calls for the immediate repeal of the above mentioned laws, to put a stop to outsourcing and labor insecurity, and to guarantee respect for the Teachers’ Statute and the ILO conventions[1].
The cancer of corruption
On November 17, the feature film “At the edge of the shadows” (you can see it here) was released in a movie theater in Tegucigalpa, a documentary that reflects the web of corruption, impunity, territorial dispossession and violence experienced by the Honduran people, forced to confront perverse plans that operate from the shadows.
Luís Méndez, member of the collective ‘La Cofradía’ that made the documentary, explained that the objective of the work is precisely to show citizens how corruption networks are formed and how they are articulated to involve politicians, public officials, national and transnational economic groups in a way cutting across all society.
The documentary addresses four crucial areas: the looting of Social Security and the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the dispossession of territories and pubic wealth, the co-optation of the justice system and its collusion with corruption, organized crime and the criminalization of protest. The fourth area has to do with the concept of democracy in a context as broken as the Honduran one.
Through key characters and experts, and with the participation of the current head of the Specialized Prosecutor Unit against Corruption Networks (Uferco), Luis Javier Santos, to tie up loose ends, the film rocks the country’s foundations, shaking up the conscience of the people, showing how Honduras is controlled by a criminal network that has ruled since the 2009 coup, and has become entrenched in the state apparatus.
“The documentary provokes disappointment, anger and rage, but also leaves the feeling that we are not defeated, that it is possible to fight, as many organizations and people do from the territories and cities.
In the midst of so much State violence, in the midst of a State held hostage – continued Méndez – there is resistance and struggle. As Berta Cáceres said, our peoples know how to do justice and they do it following their own trajectory, from their resistance, from their struggle for emancipation”.
Enough is enough!
A few days before the elections, the Convergence against Continuity, a platform made up of several organizations and personalities, made a public statement and recalled that these elections “are being held in a context of narco-dictatorship, whose creators came to control the State by violent and unconstitutional means and are not willing to hand over power by democratic political means”.
In this sense, the Convergence ratified its repudiation of “the mafia led by Juan Orlando Hernandez” and warned of the possibility that, in view of an imminent defeat, “he may orchestrate a new and violent electoral fraud by manipulating the voting process and vote counting”.
Finally, they made a vehement call to the Honduran people to “mobilize massively to the polls” and defend their vote “from these anti-democratic machinations”.
They also urged them to punish with their vote “the criminal group that has hijacked the State” and to vote for those candidates “who have shown firm signs of being against the narco-dictatorship, of fighting against corruption and for the defense of national sovereignty”.
Violence against human rights defenders
Several international reports, including “Last Line of Defense” published this year by the British organization Global Witness, point to Honduras as one of the most dangerous places in the world for human rights defenders, especially for those who defend land and common wealth.
The emblematic cases of the murder of Berta Cáceres, the disappearance of the Garífuna activists of Triunfo de la Cruz and the illegal imprisonment of the eight water and life defenders of Guapinol are a clear example of what is happening in the country.
The use and abuse of the justice system and the collusion of the State with extractive companies are two of the elements that characterize the systematic violation of human rights in Honduras.
According to Global Witness, in 2020 at least 129 Garifuna and indigenous people suffered attacks for opposing extractive projects and 153 defenders have been murdered in the last decade. In addition, the Center for Information on Business and Human Rights (Ciedh) points to Honduras as the country with the most judicial harassment against human rights defenders.
The situation of women and LGBTI people is also dramatic.
The Women’s Human Rights Observatory of the Women’s Rights Center (CDM) reports that in the first five months of the year, the Public Ministry registered a total of 1,423 complaints of sexual crimes (9.5 per day). Of these, 1,238 were attacks against women (8.1 per day) and 63.4 percent (785) were against minors. These data confirm that in Honduras a woman or girl is sexually assaulted every 3 hours.
In the last ten years, 4,707 women have been murdered in Honduras. 710 were killed in the last two years (2019-2020) and 301 women were victims of femicide up until November 15 of this year. Impunity is practically absolute.
According to the Observatory of Violent Deaths of the Catrachas Lesbian Network, in just over 12 years 390 LGBTI people have been murdered, 17 so far this year. Ninety-one percent of the cases remain in complete oblivion and impunity. Only 9 percent of perpetrators are convicted.
In recent months, a large and representative group of women’s and feminist organizations held a discussion with Xiomara Castro to present their demands and proposals. The activity led to the signing of a ‘State Pact’, the content of which will be implemented if Xiomara is elected as the first woman president of Honduras.
Similarly, in her government plan, Xiomara pledged to implement public policies safeguarding the existence and guaranteed access to fundamental human rights for LGBTI people (p.64).
Voting against the dictatorship
The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Copinh) added its voice “in moments of the battle for survival in the face of the maximum expression of dispossession, fear and violence in the history of our country under a de facto and authoritarian government.”
Although the ballot box will not change Honduras – explains the Copinh communiqué – voting against the dictatorship that governs us will be a step. The Honduran people, for the most part, will cast a vote of rejection in the face of all the accumulated suffering.
The organization co-founded by Berta Cáceres alerted the population that “the conditions for fraud are in place” and expressed that as citizens “we are preparing to reject the electoral fraud at grass roots”.
Finally, Copinh urged the immediate convocation of a Popular and Democratic Constituent Assembly “that will give rise to the reconstruction of our country, assuming the historical demands of the indigenous, black and peasant communities, women, migrant communities, workers, LGBTI community, church sectors, among others, to repeal all legislation that exposes the peoples to the surrender of their territories and the violation of their rights”.
“We call on the peoples – concludes the communiqué – to activate the organizational, articulation and debate processes to achieve Berta Cáceres’ urgent dream of re-founding Honduras. The people of Honduras need a people’s government to confront the economic sectors that have enriched themselves unjustly in these 12 years of attacks on indigenous, black and peasant peoples and the majority of the population”.
The challenge of putting an end to neoliberalism
Undoubtedly, next Sunday’s elections represent a very important move on the Honduran political and social chessboard.
“The citizenry has an enormous desire for change. They want to have an alternative to what they have had to live through during these years. They expect a process to begin of recovery of lost rights. They want to have opportunities, that their territories and national sovereignty be respected,” explained sociologist and political analyst Eugenio Sosa.
“Honduras is at a crossroads. It must choose between the continuity of a regime and its failed model or the beginning of a process of openness and change”, added the analyst.
Will the regime respect an eventual defeat or will it seek, as in 2017, an illegal way to retain power, asks Sosa.
“People have not forgotten what happened four years ago. There is a lot of uncertainty around how the electoral authorities will behave, the vote count, the transmission of results, the identification of poll station personnel to avoid the purchase of credentials. At the same time there is a determination never seen before and Xiomara (Castro) has been able to rescue and bring together a consensus of wide and diverse sectors of Honduran society”, he concluded.
Note
[1] Conventions on freedom of association, collective bargaining, labor relations in the public administration, domestic workers, violence and harassment in the world of work, free, prior and informed consultation.
This article was first published here
]]>Regrettably, however, COP26 has also become a site for geopolitical propaganda, primarily carried out by the United States; which attempts to present the advanced countries, and in particular itself, as playing the leading role, and the developing countries, particularly China, as the chief problem. The media has reflected and amplified this propaganda – for example the Financial Times, surveying the conference, declared: “China and India cast pall over climate ambitions ahead of COP26.”
This claim is the exact reverse of the truth.
- The advanced countries, especially the U.S., are the chief problem on climate change; as their per capita carbon emissions are far higher than those of developing countries.
- The policy positions advanced by the U.S. amount to a demand that advanced countries should be granted the right to emit far more carbon per person than developing countries.
This is unacceptable from the point of view of justice, democracy, the equality of nations, and peoples – as this policy demands that predominantly white countries should retain a privileged position compared to people of colour in the majority world.
This article has a strictly limited aim of setting out the factual position; showing how the U.S. and advanced countries are demanding a privileged position for themselves, and why this is unacceptable.
The IPCC’s scientific evidence
The U.S. and allied advanced economies in the “umbrella group”, present climate change in a way that does not acknowledge their overwhelming historical responsibility for carbon emissions. But objective scientific evidence has also shown the same pattern in the current situation. This article analyses the data produced by the IPCC in its “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” Report. This shows clearly that the U.S. and other advanced countries are trying to claim a privileged position in current carbon emissions too.
The key factual data concluded by the IPCC is set out in Graph 1; which shows how much total carbon emissions impacts on the chances of staying below 1.5C .
All these variants are worth analysing; but this article will look at the central one of a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. This requires that no more than 500 gigatons of carbon is emitted globally.
From this 500 gigaton figure it is then easy to calculate the per capita “carbon budget”; that is the maximum allowable carbon emissions for each person on the planet – which is 64.8 tons. Given the population of each country, it is then also easy to work out the permissible carbon budget for each individual country. This means that any country asking for a per capita cumulative carbon budget above 64.8 tons is asking for a privileged position compared to humanity as a whole, and any country with a cumulative per capita carbon emission below 64.8 tons is making an above average aid to humanity in meeting this target.
Changes in population
To complete the factual picture, it is then necessary to note that over long periods of time, up to 2050 or beyond, the population of individual countries will change. For example, on UN projections, between 2020 and 2050 the population of the US will increase by 15%, India’s population will increase by 19%, but China’s population will fall by 3%, Germany’s population will fall by 4%, Japan’s population will fall by 16% etc. Therefore, it is necessary to make calculations based not only on present populations but on future population. For this purpose, in this article, projections from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs will be used.
High per capita carbon emissions are overwhelmingly concentrated in high income economies
Turning to the present situation, it is completely clear that high per capita carbon emissions are overwhelmingly concentrated in high income countries.
This key data on this is summarised in Table 2 and 3, which show a comparison to world average per capita emissions – to be clear it is not suggested present world emissions are sustainable, they are too high, but this is primarily to simply give a point of comparison for judging present relative emissions.
The pattern is evidently clear. Of the 213 countries (and 3 sub-country administrative regions), for which there is data, 78 have per capita carbon emissions above the world average.
- Of these 56, that is 72%, are advanced economies.
- Only 22, that is 28%, are developing economies.
In contrast there are 138 countries which have below world average emissions –
- of which only 15, that is 11% are advanced economies,
- and 123, that is 89%, are developing economies.
In summary, the factual situation is entirely clear. It is the advanced economies which overwhelmingly have above average per capita CO2 emissions and it is developing economies which overwhelmingly have below average per capita emissions. In short it is advanced economies whose policies and practices are least adequate to hold down emissions.
In fact, the higher the level of per capita carbon emissions the more the situation is dominated by advanced countries. Therefore, not merely historically but in terms of current emissions, the advanced economies have the policies which most diverge from what is required for the planet.
By far the greatest violators of what is required on climate change are the advanced economies, and the biggest proportional reductions which are required are therefore also in advanced economies.
The fake criteria for climate emissions put forward by the U.S.
Once the facts on per capita global climate emissions are grasped then the fakery of claims for U.S. “leadership” in fighting climate change becomes clear.
The U.S. attempts to establish the percentage reduction from current emissions as the success criterion. Thus, Biden has announced that the U.S. aims at “to achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels” of emissions which is supposed to represent “Building on past U.S. leadership”. Given that in 2005 U.S. per capita CO2 emissions were 20.8 tons this means that the US proposes to reduce per capita carbon emissions by 2030 to 10.4 tons. This means that by 2030 the U.S. proposes that its level of per capita CO2 emissions should be 220% of the present world average!
That is not leadership, it is carbon damage on an incredible scale, and a claim for a completely privileged position for the U.S. in the world.
All this fraudulent method does is to protect the position of the highest CO2 emitters. To take a few examples, if the U.S. method of aiming at a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 was applied to present levels, this would mean
- that the U.S. would be allowed to emit per capita 8.0 tons of CO2 per person,
- China 3.7 tons,
- Brazil 1.2 tons,
- India 1.0 ton,
- and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to 0.02 tons!
This is not leadership on climate change – but an attempt to claim a privileged position. Similar claims for a privileged position by other advanced economies must also be rejected.
Such an approach is not merely unacceptable from the point of view of justice but it is also ineffectual – it will never be accepted by the 84% of the world’s population who live in developing countries
The real situation on climate change
The scientific data produced by the IPCC makes it possible to calculate the real changes which are required to combat climate change.
The key consequences for climate change are concentrated in a small number of countries. Only 17 countries each have carbon emissions accounting for more than 1% of the world total. Together these countries account for 75% of world carbon emissions. Therefore, analysis of these countries is sufficient to follow the world trends.
The key data for these countries is set out here.
The pattern is clear. Of the world’s largest emitters of carbon only two, Saudi Arabia and Australia, have higher per capita emissions than the U.S. Furthermore, despite their extremely regressive policies, these are small emitters of CO2 compared to the U.S.; Australia accounts for 1.2% of world carbon emissions, and Saudi Arabia 1.8%, compared to the U.S.’s 14.8%.
In summary, the U.S. stands in a higher league all of its own in terms of its per capita CO2 emissions. In particular, making the comparison to the largest developing countries, China’s per capita CO2 emissions are only 46% of those of the U.S., Indonesia’s 15%, Brazil’s 14%, and India’s 12%. Any attempt to portray the U.S. as a leader in fighting climate change is therefore grotesque.
Because U.S. per capita carbon emissions are so much higher than any other major country it makes clear why U.S. CO2 emissions cuts must be correspondingly much more rapid than any other major country to fit within its carbon budget. U.S. annual average reduction of CO2 emissions from 2020 onwards must be 20.2% a year – compared to 10.2% a year for China and 3.0% for India.
To be clear, for all countries, this is not the precise annual average that must be achieved but the annual average achieved over time – so if emissions fall more slowly, or rise, in the initial period there must be correspondingly rapid falls after this initial period. To give a comparison, this average means that by 2030 U.S. emissions per capita should have fallen to 1.3 tons per capita, compared to its proposed target of 8.0 tons per capita. That is the U.S. is proposing that its per capital carbon emissions by 2030 should be more than 6 times what is required to fit within its carbon budget. This has nothing to do with climate change leadership, it is climate change vandalism.
Conclusion
The above data does not all detract from the fact that climate change is one of the two most serious threats facing humanity – together with nuclear war. The world needs to radically reduce CO2 emissions. China, as the most advanced of the developing countries, needs to limit CO2 emissions too. But the attempt to present developing countries, and in particular China, as most responsible for the danger of climate change is purely propaganda by the U.S. – China ranks number 50 in the world in terms of per capita carbon emissions. The U.S.is number 3.
There are three main forces in the world who are fighting for a just response to the common threat to humanity posed by climate change:
- The Global South – that is developing countries, who as the data shows, are being fundamentally discriminated against by the advanced countries and in particular the U.S.
- China, which as the most advanced and powerful of the developing countries, is a particular target of U.S. distortion and propaganda.
- Progressive sections of the Western movement against climate change – while, as noted, the U.S. is primarily engaging in propaganda and attacks on developing countries and China there are nevertheless undoubtedly forces within the Western movement against climate change which reject such positions. Furthermore, while scientists, and research by organisations such as the IPCC, tries to be careful not to become too involved in policy questions their research entirely undermines the claims of the U.S.
The fight against a climate change is crucial for the whole of humanity. But its starting point, as the facts show, must be that it is the advanced countries that must make by far the biggest proportional reductions in CO2 emissions. The attempt by the U.S. to present the main problems as being in the developing countries, not the advanced ones, is a statistical distortion, in an attempt to attempt to claim a privileged position for itself.
Any force fighting climate change in the West has to take this as a fundamental starting point.
This is a shortened of an article in Socialist Economic Bulletin which contains more detailed tables and a fuller argument.
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Translation: ES | EN | FR
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This threatening U.S agenda, which is completely against the interests of the people of Europe, China and the U.S., is unfortunately and persistently being advanced by the U.S. administration. But significant opposition to this dangerous cold war approach is also growing across the world, including in Europe.
The opposing interest of the U.S. proponents of the new Cold War and interests of the people of Europe is particularly clear. This new cold war against China was started by former U.S. President Donald Trump. The explicit goal of the U.S. is to block China’s economic development, something that the current U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken continues to describe as the “biggest geopolitical test” facing the U.S. in the 21st century.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to attacking China differs from Trump in that the new U.S. administration is attempting to build a wider international front of U.S. allies to engage in a cold war with China. Europe is seen as a key area for this.
However, this approach runs into the obstacle of public opinion in Europe. In January 2021, polling conducted by the European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that a majority of Europeans believe that China will be “more powerful than the U.S. within a decade” and would want their country “to stay neutral in a conflict” between the two superpowers.
As Mark Leonard, an ECFR director recently said, “The European public thinks there is a new cold war but they don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
“Our polling reveals that a ‘cold war’ framing risks alienating European voters,” he explained.
Despite this European opposition, at the most recent summits of both the G7 and NATO in June 2021, Biden’s focus was to attempt to recruit new European allies to support the cold war. Under U.S. pressure, the NATO Summit’s communiqué went as far as identifying China’s rise as a “systemic challenge” and “a security threat to the Western military alliance”. From the polls, this is quite clearly contrary to the majority of public opinion in Europe.
It is clearly absurd to suggest that China poses any threat to NATO countries. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Both Europe and the U.S. are thousands of kilometres from China, and China has no military forces even remotely close to Europe or the U.S.
But the U.S. militarization of the Pacific region has been a growing trend over the past decade. The U.S. currently has 400 military bases surrounding China and the U.S. military budget request for 2022 proposes to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on upgrading the U.S. military’s capabilities with the explicit, if unrealistic, aim of overpowering China.
Regrettably, Britain, France and Germany have all sent warships to the South China Sea this year in politically provocative, if militarily insignificant, gestures of support for this U.S.-led military build-up in the Pacific. China has not sent warships to roam the coasts of the U.S. or Europe.
A further escalation of the new Cold War against China took place in September, with the announcement that Britain, Australia and the U.S. have formed an alliance known as AUKUS. This will see Britain and the U.S. furnishing Australia with the technology to deploy nuclear-powered submarines.
The reality is that any European country that decides to follow the U.S.’ cold war approach against China will suffer economic damage and loss of jobs, trade, investment and access to key advanced technologies.
China is already a major trading partner of most European countries, and the trend toward further economic cooperation is growing. Therefore, the U.S.’ attempts to disrupt the economic cooperation between China and European countries, including Washington’s efforts to prevent the signing of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, are completely against the interests of the people of Europe.
Instead of accepting this U.S. cold war agenda, Europe should cooperate with China and the rest of the world to tackle the real threats and problems facing humanity. Pursuing a new cold war against China is both a distraction and a serious obstacle to the genuine global cooperation urgently needed to end the pandemic, boost economic recovery and stop climate change.
Fiona Edwards is a member of the Organizing Committee of the No Cold War campaign.
Join No Cold War’s next online event Europe Against the Cold War – China is Not Our Enemy!
SATURDAY 23 OCTOBER 2021
11h London | 12h Madrid | 13h Bucharest
Translation: ES | EN | FR
Through his music and life, Mikis Theodorakis, the incomparable composer, everlasting fighter, partisan, communist and activist brought new meaning to freedom and political awareness. Theodorakis remains a symbol of the fight for freedom, democracy and social justice as well as a vibrant reminder of the battle against oppression and despair, as well as resistance.
The first time Theodorakis was imprisoned and tortured for his ideals he was only 18 years old, as a resistance fighter who served in the Greek People’s Liberation Army ELAS in the German occupation of Greece. During Greece’s bloody civil war, he was deported multiple times for his communist profile and sent to the camp island of Makronisos. After his release he went to Paris where he studied music and produced his first compositions, earning international appraise. Against the political circumstances, he returned to Greece in 1960, where he was tortured and detained again by the military junta that prohibited his music, which was always deeply political. After his friend Grigoris Lambrakis, a left-wing politician, was slain during a peace march in 1963, Theodorakis entered politics. In 1968, he was taken to a prison camp. Despite his confinement, Theodorakis was able to smuggle out cassette recordings and sheet music.
In 1970, Theodorakis moved to Paris. He met Pablo Neruda and Salvador Allende in 1972. After the September 1973 coup against Allende, Theodorakis’ setting of the “Canto General” became a hymn of the Chilean resistance. He returned to Greece as a hero and a political giant after the dictatorship toppled in 1974. He was a delegate for the newly legalized Communist Party and remained politically active throughout his whole life, joining protests against austerity in the 2010s and contradicting the neo-fascist “Golden Dawn”.
On behalf of the Party of the European Left, we extend our deepest condolences to his comrades, friends and family.
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Sign the Open Letter to President Biden
Dear President Joe Biden,
It is time to take a new path forward in U.S.-Cuban relations. We, the undersigned, are making this urgent, public appeal to you to reject the cruel policies put into place by the Trump White House that have created so much suffering among the Cuban people.
Cuba – a country of eleven million people – is living through a difficult crisis due to the growing scarcity of food and medicine. Recent protests have drawn the world’s attention to this. While the Covid-19 pandemic has proven challenging for all countries, it has been even more so for a small island under the heavy weight of an economic embargo.
We find it unconscionable, especially during a pandemic, to intentionally block remittances and Cuba’s use of global financial institutions, given that access to dollars is necessary for the importation of food and medicine.
As the pandemic struck the island, its people – and their government – lost billions in revenue from international tourism that would normally go to their public health care system, food distribution and economic relief.
During the pandemic, Donald Trump’s administration tightened the embargo, pushed aside the Obama opening, and put in place 243 “coercive measures” that have intentionally throttled life on the island and created more suffering.
The prohibition on remittances and the end of direct commercial flights between the U.S. and Cuba are impediments to the wellbeing of a majority of Cuban families.
“We stand with the Cuban people,” you wrote on July 12. If that is the case, we ask you to immediately sign an executive order and annul Trump’s 243 “coercive measures.”
There is no reason to maintain the Cold War politics that required the U.S. to treat Cuba as an existential enemy rather than a neighbor. Instead of maintaining the path set by Trump in his efforts to undo President Obama’s opening to Cuba, we call on you to move forward. Resume the opening and begin the process of ending the embargo. Ending the severe shortages in food and medicine must be the top priority.
On 23 June, most of the member states of the United Nations voted to ask the U.S. to end the embargo. For the past 30 years this has been the consistent position of a majority of member states. In addition, seven UN Special Rapporteurs wrote a letter to the U.S. government in April 2020 regarding the sanctions on Cuba. “In the pandemic emergency,” they wrote, “the lack of will of the U.S. government to suspend sanctions may lead to a higher risk of suffering in Cuba.”
We ask you to end the Trump “coercive measures” and return to the Obama opening or, even better, begin the process of ending the embargo and fully normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba.
See other signatories and Sign here
This letter was first published as an advert in the New York Times
]]>These elections are of vital importance for the future of AMLO’s 4T Transformation of the country’s affairs, and opinion polls indicate that his Morena party is likely to win a large majority of the positions being contested.
But the opposition, or to be more precise the old guard which has controlled Mexico for decades, is determined to prevent such a victory and is using every trick in the book to prevent free and honest elections.
A corrupt election referee
In common with most countries, Mexico has an official body to supervise elections, like the Electoral Commission in the UK: the National Electoral Institute (INE by its Spanish initials). Indeed, INE is larger and has greater powers than similar bodies in many other countries.
But this is far from guaranteeing free and fair elections, indeed the country is notorious for ballot-rigging and corruption of all kinds. AMLO and Morena only won the 2018 elections by a massive popular movement coupled with unprecedented organisation and vigilance at the polls.
The reason for this is that for decades INE has been stacked with placemen whose only purpose is to guarantee continued domination by the establishment PRI and PAN parties and the corrupt elite they represent.
The current Chair of INE, Lorenzo Córdova, has a salary of 178,000 pesos ($8,900 US) per month, roughly 60% more than AMLO. This despite a law passed by the Mexican Congress after AMLO slashed his own salary by 50%, which also specifies that no public official can earn more than the President. Both Córdova and Ciro Murayama, one of his main pals at INE, obtained injunctions to prevent the salary cap being applied to them.
With its bloated and overpaid staff, INE is probably – according to AMLO – the most expensive electoral commission in the world.1 It is without doubt one of the least impartial.
In recent months INE, led by Córdova and Murayama, has tried to silence AMLO´s morning press conferences. These hugely popular events are the President’s main vehicle of publicity in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile media. INE was unable to shut them down, but they did succeed in imposing a gagging order which forbids AMLO from expressing partisan opinions or promoting governmental programmes during the official two-month campaign period.
While some restriction on executive intervention in election campaigns is normal, what INE has imposed on AMLO is clearly excessive and has produced rather comic results in which the President not only refuses to comment on partisan disputes (even in his own party), but carries out routine visits to public institutions in semi-clandestine fashion without publicity.
When publicly attacked by the opposition, AMLO now responds by criticising “the conservatives”, avoiding INE’s ban on partisan comments since there is no party with that name officially registered in Mexico.
Arbitrary disqualification of progressive candidates
While this shadow-boxing has its comic side, the right-wing agenda of the INE directors is deadly serious. In recent weeks they have disqualified quite a number of Morena candidates (49 at last count), including gubernatorial candidates in two key states, Guerrero and Michoacán, for failing to file expense reports for their primary campaigns.
Morena does not have formal primaries but selects candidates on the basis of opinion polls, and in any case the expenses involved were very small. Fines might conceivably be in order, but disqualification is totally unjustified, especially since no such penalty has been applied to any other party’s candidates who seem to have been guilty of similar infractions.
INE’s past record makes even more of a mockery of its claim to be an impartial monitor: under its previous name as IFE (“Federal” as opposed to “National”) it ratified the notorious fraud against AMLO in the 2006 presidential election, and in the 2012 election of Enrique Peña Nieto it ignored his blatant violation of expense limits in which it is estimated that the PRI leader exceeded the permitted amount by a factor of 13.
There is one theoretical check on INE, which is the possibility of appeal to a higher institution, the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power (TEPJF). This higher court can and occasionally does overrule INE, and in the case of the Morena candidates it did initially rule that disqualification was an excessive punishment. However, INE rejected this ruling and reiterated its decision to disqualify, and remarkably, the supposedly superior Tribunal then ratified the disqualification.
Questioned on these arbitrary decisions, AMLO has become more and more categorical in condemnation of INE (and now TEPJF) for making undemocratic and unconstitutional decisions, and has now (in his press conferences of 28 and 29 April) made it clear that he intends (after the elections) to propose an Administrative Reform Bill to eliminate or restructure these and several other institutions which in his view were only created as smokescreens to conceal corrupt practices.2
Strange as it may seem, he argues, organisations like INE and the Mexican Institute for Transparency were created for the purpose of simulation: to give an appearance of electoral integrity and open and honest administration while in fact ensuring the opposite.
As always, the President takes a clear stand on vital issues, but seeks to avoid open conflict. On the electoral disqualifications, while condemning the decisions and expressing sympathy with popular protests against them, he called on people to avoid provocation and accept the need for Morena to obey INE and propose alternative candidates.
As on previous occasions, AMLO’s patience and astute tactics may well prove to be his opponents’ undoing. The two most important positions at stake were Morena’s candidates for State Governors in Guerrero and Michoacán, key states where support for AMLO´s Transformation is massive.
The candidates now disqualified are Felix Salgado Macedonio for Guerrero and Raúl Morón for Michoacán. Salgado Macedonio, a Morena Senator, is a controversial figure, but the relevant point is that he is very popular in Guerrero (a state with a vigorous revolutionary tradition), and Morena’s response to his disqualification was (1) to announce that its new candidate would be a woman, and (2) that of three possible female candidates, the one chosen on the basis of opinion polls was Evelyn Salgado, the former candidate’s daughter.3
In Michoacán Raúl Morón was Mayor of the state capital Morelia before becoming a candidate, and Morena has chosen as his replacement a younger man, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, a former member of the State Assembly.
Interestingly, when on May 4th INE announced its intention of disqualifying a third Morena gubernatorial candidate – Mónica Rangel in San Luis Potosí – the reaction was so strong, especially since only one month remained before the elections, that INE backed down two days later and limited itself to imposing fines. Nevertheless, the fines – both on the party and on Rangel personally – are very substantial and surely disproportionate.
The crisis of the opposition
The context of INE´s machinations is the crisis of the Mexican opposition. The PRI, which ran the country as a virtual one-party state for much of the 20th century, and the right-wing PAN which was allowed to alternate with PRI from 2000 onwards to give an appearance of pluralism, had made a cosy arrangement to share the fruits of neoliberal corruption, until in 2018 they could no longer prevent the victory of a popular movement for real democracy with AMLO and Morena.
PRI and PAN lack any alternative programme except defence of privilege and corruption, and despite overwhelming media dominance they have been unable to undermine AMLO’s popularity and the people’s desire for change. Despite sometimes fighting each other like rats in a sack, PRI, PAN and a couple of smaller parties have finally – as AMLO predicted – come together in an unholy alliance to oppose the 4T Transformation.
AMLO now lumps them together as “PRIAN” or indeed “PRIANRD” with reference to the small PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party) which in the 1990s was a left-wing force for change in which AMLO participated, but which later degenerated and was incorporated into the system.
Given the flagrant bias of INE and TEPJF, it is interesting to note that other institutions have begun to take action to prevent electoral infractions. The Attorney-General’s office (FGR) can investigate allegations of electoral fraud, which is now (thanks to a law passed under AMLO) classified as a serious crime with no right to bail.
The Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) of the Finance Ministry, run by Santiago Nieto, has also been very active on the anti-corruption front investigating fraudulent transactions and money laundering, and is now devoting its attention to suspicious transactions related to the elections.
In recent weeks both the FGR and the UIF have begun to investigate allegations of electoral fraud by right-wing candidates, allegations studiously ignored by INE. Thus the PRI candidate for Governor of Nuevo León, Adrián de la Garza, was discovered to be distributing cards promising payments to women voters, in other words vote-buying; the case is now under investigation by the FGR and the UIF.4
Similar evidence has now emerged of cards pledging payments in return for votes being used by candidates of the Citizens’ Movement (MC) which is dominant in Jalisco State; this is also under investigation by the FGR.
Right-wing candidates and their allies are also more than willing to resort to threats and violence if it suits them. The outgoing PRD Governor of Michoacán, Silvano Aureoles, has a well-earned reputation for crude insults and threats, sending very offensive text messages to Morena candidate Ramírez Bedolla and others: Morena has reported him to the FGR.5
Overt threats and violence point to the most serious underlying problem for Mexican democracy in areas still dominated by the old regime: links to organised crime. This above all is why judicial reform is so important, along with the new security apparatus of the National Guard.
Never lacking in barefaced effrontery, some right-wing candidates and their INE allies are now claiming persecution. Adrián de la Garza actually went to the OAS (Organisation of American States) for a personal interview with its notorious Secretary-General Luis Almagro (the same Almagro who helped promote the coup in Bolivia in 2019) to request help in “defending Mexican democracy”.6
When this appeal to the OAS was raised with AMLO, he responded that all electoral observers are welcome including the OAS, although “it reminds me of a song by the late Carlos Puebla”, the Cuban troubador (“Como no me voy a reír de la OEA, que es una cosa tan fea” – “How can I stop laughing about the OAS, when it is so ugly”), an anti-imperialist classic from the 1970s.7
There is a growing movement for fundamental reform of INE, but it will not lead to change in time to avoid conflict over the current elections; only mass popular pressure and vigilance will guarantee reasonably fair elections this June. But the INE controversy is closely linked to another key issue which has now come to a head, that of judicial reform.
Judicial reform: a crucial matter
Although AMLO has been scrupulous in respecting the constitutional division of powers, it has been obvious for decades that judicial corruption is one of the foundations of inequality, injustice, political fraud and endemic corruption in Mexico.
Time and again notorious criminals on remand or condemned for fraud, money-laundering, violence and murder have been released on legal technicalities by corrupt judges, a practice which AMLO has tried to reduce but which still continues, and will only end if there is root and branch reform.
A notorious case hit the headlines early in May when a judge ordered the release of Héctor Palma, nicknamed “El Guero” (“Blondie”) and linked to the Sinaloa cartel. The judge made the order in the early hours of Saturday May 1st, a classic device using the weekend to avoid scrutiny. Fortunately the Fiscalía (Attorney-General’s office) was alert to this and had agents ready to re-arrest him on another charge minutes after his release.8
This did not prevent the right-wing media from absurdly trying to blame AMLO for the release, when the truth is quite the opposite: the President commented on the matter in his press conferences on May 4th and 5th as an example of a judicial decision which was an insult against the Mexican state. What price “judicial independence” when it is used to aid and abet criminals?
An equally pernicious pattern is the abuse of legal devices (“amparos”, injunctions) originally intended to safeguard individuals, in order to protect commercial privileges and prevent implementation of progressive legislation.
A case in point is AMLO’s re-nationalisation of electricity, or to be more precise, his reassertion of national control over electric power generation and distribution. The legislation, passed in late February this year, guarantees primacy for the CFE (Federal Electricity Commission) and for public enterprise, while allowing private investment only subject to strict norms protecting the public interest and workers’ rights.
No sooner had the law been passed than Juan Pablo Gómez Fierro, judge of the Second District Court in Administrative Affairs relating to Competition, Broadcasting & Telecommunications, granted an injunction to five companies against application of the law, and “in order to guarantee fair competition” to others, decreed a general suspension of the law.9
That a relatively minor judge in a specialised tribunal should be able to override both Congress and the President in this way is remarkable, and it is no accident that the very same judge granted injunctions to companies seeking immunity from the Hydrocarbon (oil and gas) Law and the Mobile Telephone Law, also both recently proposed by AMLO and passed by Congress.
Gómez Fierro is the most diligent judge in defending corporate privilege but he is not alone: his colleague Rodrigo de la Peza of the First District Court also granted injunctions to 11 companies against the electric power law.
As AMLO commented, it’s open to speculation whether such judges are motivated by conservative ideology or by money, but impartial administration of justice is clearly not their priority.10
In order to overcome such flagrant abuse of the judicial power, AMLO is reliant on two key figures: Attorney-General (Fiscal General) Alejandro Gertz Maneiro, and Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar. The Attorney-General has been busy investigating and prosecuting individual cases of corruption and human rights abuses, working to end impunity. But Zaldívar’s role is arguably even more important since it is he above all who is promoting root-and-branch reform of the judicial system as such.
Zaldívar’s four-year term as Chief Justice is due to end next year, but in view of his importance AMLO has proposed extending his term for another two years. On April 15 the Morena majority in the Senate passed an amendment to this effect as part of the Judicial Reform Bill then under discussion.11
Not surprisingly, the right-wing opposition immediately objected, as did an Association of District Judges.12 Along with reform of INE, this has become a key issue in the elections. Indeed, AMLO has been remarkably frank on the issue, declaring in his April 26 press conference that Zaldívar is an unusual example of the historic importance of key individuals such as Father Hidalgo in the Independence struggle, Benito Juárez in the great liberal Reform, and Francisco Madero in the 1910 Revolution: individual leadership (caudillismo) is not necessarily bad, he argued.
The problem with conservatives defending judicial independence, he declared, is not that judges are independent of the executive (as they should be), but that they are independent from the people and dominated by powerful private interests.
Relations with the United States
Relations with the United States are not an electoral issue as such, and both the President and Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard have insisted throughout on their success in maintaining relations of respect and cooperation with Washington under both Trump and Biden.
However a serious source of tension arose early in May when a progressive journalist produced evidence that two notorious opposition organisations, “Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity” and “Article 19”, receive significant funding through the US Embassy (from the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID).13
A formal Diplomatic Note was immediately issued demanding an explanation and pointing out that this amounts to intervention in Mexico’s internal affairs and violates the country’s Constitution. AMLO pointed out that this is virtually promoting a coup: that coups are not just carried out by the military but can be promoted by the media and foreign interests, as happened with revolutionary President Francisco I Madero in February 1913 (whose overthrow and murder were incited by the press and the US Embassy).
However, AMLO explained that he does not think the US is promoting a coup against him, simply that they have a “mistaken practice” of financing such groups in many countries, and Mexico will not accept it: “Mexico is not a colony, it’s an independent, free and sovereign country!”14
Despite such bold and unwavering defence of sovereignty, AMLO continues to seek cooperative and productive relations on other matters. Thus on migration and refugees he has had a respectful video conference with President Biden and more recently with Vice-President Kamala Harris. In particular, both countries agree in principle that Central American migration cannot be halted or controlled by force or administrative barriers, and that promotion of development and better conditions in the region is crucial.
The Mexican President has made a specific and ambitious proposal on the subject: that his very successful agro-forestry programme Sembrando Vida (“Sowing Life”), which has brought support and hope to over 400,000 peasant families and has reforested over 1 million hectares of land in Mexico, should be extended to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Mexico has already signed an agreement with Guatemala to implement the programme there on a limited scale; but what is now proposed is that the US should finance Sembrando Vida on a massive scale, to benefit 1,200,000 peasant farmers in Central America.
Cooperation with the US also continues in other areas: since the Trade Treaty with the US and Canada now includes labour rights, Mexico accepted a US complaint about a corrupt union election at a GM motor plant, and also lodged a complaint about agricultural migrant workers’ treatment in the US.15
The Transformation continues
Despite the restrictions imposed on AMLO by the Electoral Institute, his transformative programme continues and INE cannot prevent announcement of important decisions or agreements which were under negotiation long before the election period.
Thus on April 23 a major agreement between the government and the private sector on Subcontracting and Labour Rights was formally announced. Difficult negotiations went on for more than six months, and now Labour Secretary Luisa Alcalde and employers’ representative Carlos Salazar were able to announce the agreement which bans false subcontracting used only to deprive workers of their rights.
Companies cannot legally contract out their own employees, only specialised services which are not their main activities; any subcontractors must be registered with the Ministries of Labour and Finance within 90 days; taxes and benefits are guaranteed; there must be prompt response to any workers’ grievances; subcontracting is banned in the public sector; and profit-sharing is increased from 2.8% to 7.7%.16
Equally, diplomatic exchanges and symbolic public actions commemorating historic events are doing much to reinforce public awareness of the 4T Transformation. The visit of Bolivian President Luis Arce on March 24-25 had great significance and included his attendance at the re-enactment of the Battle of Chakan-Putum in 1517, where Mayan Indians inflicted a serious defeat on the invading Spaniards. Then on May 12-13 Dilma Roussef, ex-president of Brazil, was guest of honour and attended the commemoration of 700 years since the foundation of México-Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital which is now Mexico City.
What is at stake in the June 6 elections could not be clearer: either you are for AMLO’s 4T Transformation or you are against it. If Morena wins a clear majority in the lower house of Congress, if it wins most of the 15 State Governorships being contested and most of the hundreds of state assembly and municipal positions, then the transformation process will be accelerated.
Indeed, INE’s blatant efforts to impose censorship on AMLO and to hamstring Morena’s election campaign seems to have backfired spectacularly. But as the President never tires of repeating, only the people can guarantee democracy, and popular vigilance will be essential to ensure free and fair elections on June 6th.
David L Raby is a writer, political activist and retired academic living in Norwich (UK). Professor Emeritus in Latin American History, University of Toronto; former Senior Fellow in Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool; former City Councillor in Norwich; executive member, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign; Chair, Norwich-El Viejo (Nicaragua) Twinning Link. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @DLRaby.
1 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/04/13
2 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/04/28 & 2021/04/29.
3 www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/05/02/politica/arrasa-en-encuestas-evelyn-salgado-va-en-guerrero-por-morena/
4 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/05/06, 06 & 11.
5 www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/05/17/estados/morena-acusa-por-amenazas-al-gobernador-aureoles-conejo
6 @AdrianDeLaGarza Twitter, 2021/05/12
7 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/05/13
8 www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/05/03/politica/resguardan-el-altiplano-ante-liberacion-de-el-guero-palma/
10 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Confeencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/05/11
11 GuruPolítico, “Durante Décadas entre el PRI y el PAN se repartían ministros y magistrados: Monreal”, guruchuirer.com/guru5184.htm
12 www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/04/17/politica/magistrados-repudian-que-amplien-gestion-a-zaldivar/
13 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/05/06 & 07.
14 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/05/13
15 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/05/13
16 www.gob.mx/presidencia/ Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, 2021/04/23
Herd immunity
The favorable prospects we had at the end of last year were based on the expectation that vaccines would allow us to build up herd immunity fairly quickly, either through vaccination or past exposure to the virus.
Herd immunity makes the virus disappear on its own. Initially it was thought that inoculation of 60 to 70 percent of the population would be sufficient for this. But with the new variants and taking into account new insights, we realize that the percentage will have to be a lot higher. We should even take into consideration that we will never achieve herd immunity.
For one thing, infection-induced immunity declines over time. This is also the case with other coronaviruses. Studies indicate that current infection-induced immunity lasts for at least six months, and at least eight months in people who have developed severe symptoms. Afterwards, immunity may weaken and disappear. In addition, findings from South Africa and Brazil have shown that previous infection offers little immunity to the new variants.
This means vaccination is left as a way of acquiring permanent herd immunity. But here there are at least five obstacles.
The limits of vaccination
First of all, some variants behave almost like new viruses, against which vaccines offer only partial protection. Governments’ clumsy corona approaches, especially in the West, have resulted in 136 million people being infected to date. This uncontrolled spread increases the risk of new mutations that current vaccines do not protect against.
Second, it is believed that the protection of the vaccines is not permanent. People are still in the dark about this, but experts believe the vaccines provide protective immunity for six months to two years. That is why boosters are already available to ensure lasting protection after six months. In Israel, the validity period of a vaccine passport is also six months.
Third, it is not certain whether and to what extent the vaccines will stop the infection itself. It is suspected that they prevent the transfer to a large extent, but there is still no definitive answer. That is not an unimportant detail. “Herd immunity is only relevant if we have a transmission-blocking vaccine. If we don’t, then the only way to get herd immunity in the population is to give everyone the vaccine,” said Professor Bansal of Georgetown University in Washington DC.
Fourth, not enough people are being vaccinated. With the current variants, at least a good 80 percent of the population must be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. Only a handful of countries currently reach the 80 percent willingness to be vaccinated mark. Moreover, you still have to deduct all youngsters under the age of 18, because they will probably not be able to get a vaccine until 2022 at the earliest. This is about at least one fifth of the population.
Finally, there is the slow and chaotic roll-out of the vaccines. Given the urgency, we could and should have put companies to work, as in a war economy. Instead, production was left to a few pharmaceutical giants. As a result, the vaccine campaigns are running far too slowly.
Vaccine Nationalism
At the current rate of vaccination, the effect of the vaccines will be finished sooner than they can be administered to the entire population. In the rich countries we may get vaccinated against the newest variants several times a year, but the question is whether this will be fast or complete enough to achieve herd immunity.
The situation is much worse in the poorer countries because the distribution of the limited supply of vaccines is very uneven. Rich countries, which account for 20 percent of the world’s population, have bought up 55 percent of all vaccines. Chances are high that many people in poor countries will have to wait for their vaccine until 2023 or 2024.
This vaccine nationalism is shortsighted. Even for a country with high vaccination coverage, the potential for new outbreaks remains if neighboring countries have not done the same and the populations can mix. The world is four to six times more likely to get a new variant from an under-vaccinated country than from a vaccinated country. “No one is truly safe from Covid-19 until everyone is,” said experts from the Lancet Commission on COVID-19.
“Maximum suppression”
Every day there are almost 700,000 new infections worldwide. With such a high rate of infection, new worrisome variants will inevitably emerge that will spread and against which vaccinations or previous infections will not provide immunity. The longer that situation persists, the more we may expect such variants. According to experts at the Lancet Commission, we are in a race against time to get global transmission rates low enough to prevent the emergence and spread of new variants.
Vaccine arrogance is misplaced. According to the experts, a successful vaccination campaign in itself is no longer a guarantee of victory against the virus. Chile is a good example of this: today 60 percent of the population has already received a first dose of vaccination, but the number of infections is still increasing. In a population of 19 million, there are 7,000 new infections and 100 COVID deaths every day.
That’s why experts at the Lancet Commission argue for a “maximum suppression” of COVID-19. It is vital to significantly reduce the number of infections, not over time, but as fast as possible. This means combining vaccination with known measures such as limiting social contacts, maintaining strict safety measures (mouth masks, hand hygiene, safe distance, better ventilation, etc.), fast testing, accurate and fast tracing of contacts.
Taiwan, China, Australia, Vietnam and New Zealand have shown that it is possible to almost completely eradicate the virus. Regions where the virus is raging continue to act as breeding grounds for resistant variants. In this way we will never subdue the pandemic.
In addition to the strong reduction in the number of infections, a number of other things are needed, according to the experts. First, we need to distribute vaccines fairly worldwide and accelerate vaccine programs in all countries. That will not be possible without the removal of patents and without production planning. Second, surveillance programs are needed that enable us to detect new variants based on DNA sequencing techniques. Third, international research is needed into the effectiveness of vaccines on existing and new “variants of concern”. There is still a lot of work to be done in these three areas.
Winter waves
A common pattern of contagious diseases is that they become more contagious over time but less potent. After all, if the host does not die, this provides an advantage in the natural selection of the virus. This is apparently not the case with the current virus. The known variants so far are more contagious but no less dangerous, on the contrary.
If that trend continues, and given that we cannot achieve group immunity in the current constellation, we are likely to face a permanent cycle of outbreak and relapse. As with the flu, the seasonal factor may also play a role here. Especially in the winter periods, we can expect new outbreaks for the time being. According to top virologist Peter Piot, in the absence of masks and keeping a safe distance next winter, the reproduction rateii could even be higher than during the previous winter. That is, despite the protection of vaccination.
That is why Piot advocates making face masks mandatory during peak months, promoting teleworking and digital education (for larger groups), and motivating people at risk (e.g., over 65 years old or with a health problem) to avoid attending large events or public settings such as bars, restaurants, etc. He also advocates increasing the capacity of the IC units during the winter months.
The new normal
Eradicating an infectious virus is not self-evident. The smallpox virus pandemic is one of the few to have been completely overcome in the past. Like the flu virus (Influenza A), Covid-19 will probably never be completely eradicated.
The good news is that very efficient vaccines have been found quickly. As Israel shows, they cause fewer infections and significantly fewer hospitalizations or deaths.iii As a result, lockdowns may be avoided from now on. But as we saw above, vaccines alone will not get us there.
All in all, the question is not how soon we will return to normalcy, but what kind of normalcy that will be. The new normal will in any case – for the time being – be one without herd immunity and therefore with the necessary precautionary and protective measures. In the long term, COVID-19 could then evolve into an endemic diseaseiv such as the flu.
We had better prepare ourselves, but also our society, to dealing with this as well as possible. We seriously messed up the approach start of the corona crisis. It would be unforgivable to screw up the rest of the crisis too.
Translation: Dirk Nimmegeers
i In Belgium, for example, 16 percent of the population has antibodies.
ii The reproduction factor is the average number of people who infect a carrier of the virus.
iii Currently, there are 250 new infections and 8 COVID deaths every day, out of a population of 9 million.
iv In an endemic disease, outbreaks are fairly constant in number and remain local.
Neoliberalism digs in
With most votes counted, Lasso had secured around 52%. He embraced some centrist positioning in his campaign, including proposing to raise the minimum wage, protect the rights of women and end discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people. But he’s a staunch supporter of the extreme capitalist doctrine of neoliberalism; and he will likely intensify the economic, political and social attacks the Ecuadorian people have faced in the last four years.
The left’s defeat follows on from the political betrayal of Lenín Moreno, who became president in 2017 with the support of incumbent president Rafael Correa and had promised to build on the latter’s progressive achievements. Moreno instead launched austerity attacks; and he aligned Ecuador firmly with US foreign policy interests.
With Moreno in power, the US saw its chance to weaken the left. And to do this, it collaborated closely with the Ecuadorian state, business class and media.
Indeed, Lasso’s victory wasn’t about him gaining more support than in his last run for president. Because in 2017 he got 4.8 million votes, but he only got 4.65 million in 2021. His win was more about Arauz getting just 4.2 million votes in comparison to Moreno’s 5 million in 2017.
A big defeat for the left
Andrés Arauz stood on a platform of returning Ecuador to Correa’s progressive project. But as a relatively unknown candidate, he was unable to defeat the combined forces of US imperialism, its regional allies, and the Ecuadorian right.
While Arauz received the backing of an influential indigenous leader, his campaign was damaged in part by a call for abstentions from other sections of the indigenous movement, some of which had links to the US (in particular failed indigenous candidate Yaku Pérez, who prominently called for supporters to spoil their ballots). There were around 1.7 million null votes in the end. When Correa was in power, he clashed with indigenous movements on several occasions; and while Arauz acknowledged these issues during his own campaign, tensions remained.
The US and its allies have not crushed the left, though. The 47% of support that Arauz received is testament to that.
The IMF-inspired neoliberal agenda Lasso will pursue is deeply unpopular and will inevitably face mass opposition. Outgoing president Moreno pursued such an agenda himself and became one of the most unpopular Latin American presidents in modern times as a result. His policies provoked a massive anti-IMF uprising in October 2019 and caused his personal approval rating to plummet from 77% in 2017 to 7% in 2020. The true character of Lasso’s regime will be revealed when he’s in office; and his political honeymoon may be even shorter than Moreno’s.
The US project to subvert democracy and reverse the ‘Pink Tide’ in Latin America
Western mainstream media coverage of Lasso’s victory has largely ignored the history of US influence and interference in Ecuador (and Latin America in general).
The US has a long history of intervention in Latin America to promote its own interests – from sponsoring military coups and backing dictatorships to launching economic warfare. And it still treats the continent as its ‘backyard’ nearly 200 years after the infamous Monroe Doctrine was first declared.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the US faced a huge challenge to its project of subordinating Latin America, as a wave of left-wing governments took office across the continent – rejecting the neoliberalism that had impoverished so many millions of people.
Ecuador joined this ‘Pink Tide’ when Rafael Correa became president in 2007. His government slashed poverty from 36.7% in 2007 to 21.5% by 2017, lifting more than 1.5 million people out of poverty through progressive social reforms and building infrastructure.
Unacceptably to the US, Correa also pursued an independent foreign policy. His government kicked a US military base out of the country, gave asylum to Julian Assange, pursued mutually beneficial economic relations with China, and tried to make US oil company Chevron pay for the damage its oil spill caused in the Amazon.
Washington took a number of steps to fight back in both Ecuador and elsewhere. One of these was ‘lawfare.’
‘Lawfare’: a strategy to stop Latin America’s left
In the ominous words of Hillary Clinton in 2009, “having a functioning democracy isn’t enough in Latin America, we have to support these countries to have strong, independent judiciaries”. The implication: ‘there must be levers independent from the will of the people to intervene in the continent’s political processes’.
US allies have attempted to use judiciaries to attack the most popular left-wing leaders in Latin America with the goal of decapitating the left of its most commanding figures. Elections can effectively be rigged by preventing the left from putting forward their chosen candidates, by either throwing them in jail or forcing them into exile.
This approach had a devastating impact on Brazil, where former president Lula da Silva was jailed and blocked from standing in the 2018 presidential election against far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Opinion polls showed Lula would have won by a landslide had he been on the ballot paper.
That Lula was the victim of a witch-hunt has now been exposed with the decision of Brazil’s Supreme Court to annul his corruption convictions in March 2021. But jailing Lula paved the way for Bolsonaro to win in 2018, and his rule has been catastrophic. Around 360,000 people, for example, have died so far as a consequence of his appalling handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lawfare in Ecuador
A similar lawfare offensive took place in Ecuador too, with Moreno persecuting both Correa and his allies. This helped to prevent a truly free and fair presidential election in 2021.
On 7 April 2020, a court sentenced Correa (already living in exile in Belgium) to eight years in prison on trumped-up charges of corruption. The apparent goal was to stop him returning to Ecuador and standing as Arauz’s vice president. This came after a referendum from Moreno in 2018 that effectively banned Correa from running again for president by retrospectively imposing term limits.
In addition to Correa not being able to participate, his new party was also barred from registering as a political party. This forced the movement to put Arauz forward on a different electoral platform, the Union for Hope.
Other leading progressives also suffered ‘lawfare’ attacks, including former vice president Jorge Glas, who is serving a six-year prison sentence on trumped-up corruption charges.
Arauz, meanwhile, faced bogus corruption charges, including the claim that he received funding from Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN). This was part of a concerted campaign of disinformation to inflict damage on Arauz’s campaign.
Perilous times
The US-led hybrid war on Ecuador’s left has succeeded in electing right-wing banker Lasso. But he won’t have it easy. Because Moreno’s neoliberal policies have already seen the country’s economy contract by 7.5% in 2020 and led to one of the worst coronavirus catastrophes of 2020. Morgues overflowed, leaving dead bodies lining the streets.
The left, meanwhile, remains a major political force in Ecuador and will resist the avalanche of attacks to come. But it will need all the international solidarity it can get as it struggles against political persecution, to defend ordinary people’s living standards, and to resist the offensive on basic democratic rights and sovereignty.
The above article was originally published here by the Phoenix Media Co-operative.
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Maia Thomas
Food is essential to everyone but inaccessible to many. Hunger is a matter of urgency but constantly ignored. Many people say they are ‘hungry’ as a throwaway comment daily, but have you really experienced true hunger? Behind closed doors some people face an empty fridge most days of the week with nothing but hopes and prayers till they see their next meal. In a world where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow daily, some have little or no access to food.
As an Equality Activist I have championed numerous projects in my community to be a leader in creating change. Creating the opportunity for thousands of individuals to gain access to food which they struggle daily to get, was essential. So I did it. I created Feed Our Community – a project supplying food packages to those in food poverty, struggling financially, on furlough and anyone truly in need. Over 2,600 households have received food packages in around six weeks.
some of the food donations
But reducing food poverty in my area could not be solved just by providing food packages. I wanted to provide opportunities for free education on household and financial management, meal ideas and smart ways to shop. This has been achieved by hosting free zoom meetings and coaching sessions. I have created a support group, so people no longer feel they are alone; this is extremely valuable due to the tumultuous world in which we currently live. Hundreds of individuals from my local community and beyond have attended these informative sessions. Many have since got jobs, are on track to paying off their debts and now have a network to confide in.
The project started one lunchtime when I was scrolling through Facebook. I found a young woman reaching out to her community for guidance on getting food, due to the financial hardship she was facing. This was not what I usually come across and that moment made me decide to act. I created a food package for her and delivered it to her doorstep. I was unaware at this moment that one food package would turn into supplying over 2,600 households six weeks later.
To decide the content of food packages I always give what I would like to receive, a value that I have stuck to throughout the development of Feed Our Community. Fresh fruit and vegetables should be accessible to everyone, so I made this a priority. After planning a week’s worth of meals, I packaged the bags with different nutritious ingredients. The packages include tinned meats and fish, pasta, rice, other tinned products, breakfast items and daily essentials such as toiletries.
This woman was young, at an age where you may lack knowledge of available support systems. Reaching under-represented and often unreachable groups has been a core focus of Feed Our Community. For some, reaching out for help – whether that be food or financial assistance – is viewed as shameful in their culture. Others may not be able to get to food banks due to being disabled physically or having mental health challenges. Exploring accessibility to Feed Our Community through the lens of different groups is essential. Accessibility of a service is fundamental. No one should have to suffer in silence, not having food available to them. Therefore, this project was designed with a range of groups in mind and contactless delivery was the best way to be most inclusive.
Maia speaking at an Exeter Black Lives Matter rally.
The young woman who originally reached out was extremely brave to allow public knowledge of her financial situation but not everyone would feel comfortable doing so. Feed Our Community has always been confidential. After finding my posts via different community groups, or through being a member of my Facebook group, people can reach out via direct message, expressing their need for a food package or other financial assistance: for example an emergency electricity top up. The Facebook group was created to break down the barriers and end the sense of shame about needing to reach out. The world is in a particularly difficult space and now more than ever people need to feel able to get assistance when they need it.
Reducing food poverty and food waste go hand in hand. Making the connection between food that would otherwise be wasted and those truly in need is part of my mission. Connecting with supermarkets through FareShare has enabled this project to reduce food waste in my community. The project also works alongside farms and other local businesses to get good quality food to those who are truly in need.
In a society where we spend a lot of time talking, I decided to act. Food poverty is a matter of urgency which we cannot continue to ignore. The number of people in food poverty is rising yet food waste is greater than ever before. Why do we continue to waste, when so many do not have? Society is becoming increasingly divided yet so many groups’ voices are unheard and not catered for. Feed Our Community intends to bridge these gaps.
It is time for a revolution, and this is a first step among many.
Maia will be speaking a public meeting on Thursday 18th March at 6.30pm and discussing her campaigning work and the Peace and Justice Project of Jeremy Corbyn which she has signed up to. She will be joined at the meeting by CND General Secretary Kate Hudson and former MP Thelma Walker. Please register for the meeting using this link. It will be held on Zoom
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The specifics of the landslide reveal the size of the defeat of the de facto extreme right wing regime: the MAS-IPSP won the presidency with a 55% of the votes cast, against 28% of right-wing Carlos Mesa, and 14% of extreme right-wing Luis Camacho. This was a much improved performance compared to the election in November 2019 when their candidate, Evo Morales won with 48% against right wing Carlos Mesa’s 36%.
Not only that, the MAS-IPSP won in 6 out of the country’s 9 departments (with 68% in La Paz; 65% in Cochabamba; 62% in Oruro; 57% in Potosí; 49% in Chuquisaca; and 46% in Pando), with the right wing winning in 2 (with 50% in Tarija, and 39% in Beni) and the extreme right wing being victorious only in Santa Cruz (by 45% with the MS-IPSP getting 36%). The 6 departments where Arce was victorious contain nearly 7 million of Bolivia’s total population of 11 million.
It gets better: MAS-IPSP candidates obtained 75 out of the 130 seats of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, and 21 out of 36 in the Senate. The MAS-IPSP presidential candidate also won in 314 municipalities, the extreme right in 21, and the right wing in 18.
This was a very robust electoral victory indeed, all the more impressive given that it took place against the background of a year of systematic political and judicial persecution against the MAS-IPSP, its leaders and cadre (Morales himself was charged with terrorism that forced him to flee the country), including brutal repression against the social movements associated with it; the illegal imprisonment, harassment and exile of its leaderships and the spirited use of lawfare. All in a context of well-organised and very well-funded racist violence unleashed specially against indigenous women, by fascist paramilitary groups, the police, and the armed forces who perpetrated massacres against social movements defending their rights and fighting for democracy. To top it all, the mainstream media nationally and internationally was at best seeking to whitewash, and at worst supporting, the golpistas and Añez’ regime’s brutal violation of human rights.
Añez’ economic policies, in line with extreme right wing ideology and that of its foreign mentors, deliberately aimed at both demolishing what had been achieved for the nation in the 14 years of Evo Morales’ administration and brutally reversing all the social policies that had benefited the people. Not a small undertaking given the rather amazing progress and transformation that Bolivia and its people had undergone in that short period of time. Below we list some of the most important achievements of the MAS-IPSP government during the 2006-2019 period:
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Bolivia’s GDP went from US$9,574 bn in 2005 to US$40,000 bn in 2013 (an increase of over 400%), that is, an annual average of 4,6%, the highest in the region, thus from 2006
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Bolivia had a fiscal surplus in 2006 for the first time in its history; and by 2018 it had US$8,946 million in international reserves
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Extreme poverty was reduced from 38% in 2006 to 16% in 2018 (a historic low)
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Infant mortality declined by 56%
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Social bonuses (the elders, primary and secondary school pupils, pregnant women) benefited 5,5 million people (more than 50% of the population)
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Domestic savings in the period 2006-2018 increased from US$4,361 million to US$27,123 million
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External debt went down from 61% of GDP in 2004 to 23% in 2018
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Number of health centres went from 2,870 to 3902, and 49 new hospitals were built that were well equipped by the state with the latest medical technology (public health is free of charge)
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With the collaboration of Cuban doctors, Operation Miracle conducted over 3 million ophthalmological visits and 742,000 surgeries leading to many Bolivians having their eye sight restored (Añez expelled the Cuban doctors) – the budget for health went from 2,5 million Bolivianos (national currency) in 2005 to 18, 805 million in 2018
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Illiteracy, with the use of Cuba’s Yo Si Puedo method, was eradicated by 2014.
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Between 2014-18 the nine-lines metro-cable in La Paz (completed in 2014), had transported 174 million passengers
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Drinking water by 2020 reaches 9,7 million people out of total population of 11 million
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The end of the latifundia system led to the redistribution of about 1 million hectares of land to peasants and peasant families
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In 2005 only 18% of the parliamentarians were women, by 2018 they have increased to 51%
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Under decades of neoliberalism only 1,098 km of motorways were built but between 2006-18 new 4,796 km were added to existing motorways
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All of the above was financed by the renationalization of the energy industry (Bolivia is rich mainly in gas but also has oil; and it is extraordinarily rich in minerals, especially lithium)
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Bolivia placed in space the Tupac Katari satellite and renationalised ENTEL (telecommunications company) granting Internet access to millions of Bolivians free of charge, as a fundamental right
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With a world historic decision, 36 indigenous nations were recognised special cultural and ancestral land rights, for the first time in 500 years that are enshrined in the new Constitution of the Plurinational State
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No wonder, in 2018 the World Human Development Report, classified Bolivia for the first time a “high human development country”
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The MAS-IPSP under Morales affirmed national sovereignty by eliminating foreign (US) interference with the expulsion of the DEA, USAID, CIA and even the US ambassador
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And much, much, more.
The Añez regime adopted policies that sought to wreck all these advances, something she nearly achieved in less than one year. Nothing too surprising here, a popular refrain among activists in Latin America goes like this: ‘whereas Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno took 3 years to wreck both the achievements of the Left government and the country’s economy, Bolsonaro did it in Brazil in 2; but Añez did it in only 6 months’. Thus, one of Añez’ first measures was a wave a mass lay-offs of public employees, compounded by a total lack of state support to companies, business, and workers in trouble due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
With regard to the pandemic, instead of taking extra measures of support, just as contagions and deaths raged, the de facto government not only expelled hundreds of Cuban doctors who were in Bolivia as part of Cuba’s collaboration with Evo’s government –literally days after the coup d’état – it also refused point blank to allocate extra resources to health so as to strengthen the fight against Coronavirus, and, for good measure, it reduced expenditure on health. But, when, forced by the pressure of mass mobilization, to make available extra resources to purchase health inputs, the minister in charge engaged in gross corruption leading to his resignation but not to a serious investigation or trial. The new authorities of Arce’s government have already instigated investigations in ‘emblematic’ corruption cases such as the overcharging in the purchase of ventilators; the hiring of cronies to work in state companies with huge salaries or unjustified stipends; millionaire ‘emergency’ contracts in YPFB (state/gas oil company) without due process or public legal tender thus massively defrauding the company; millions paid in ‘ghost’ contracts for public housing; and so forth.
Worse, by the end of 2020, the de facto government did not yet have a list of the companies that had closed down business caused by the pandemic, nor a clear idea of how many jobs had been lost in the country’s economy, even though the information was available. According to the Centro de Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (Labour and Agrarian Development Centre) not only had poverty massively increased but unemployment had jumped from 4,3% to 9,6% in a country where the informal sector of employment has reached 80%.2
The neoliberal response of the de facto government to poverty, unemployment and the biting economic crisis was not policies but repression, thus thousands literally went hungry. A report at the time (May 2020) informed that about 1,7 million Bolivians were unable to cover the costs even of a basic food basket. The total neglect and lack of measures by Añez and Co allowed the pandemic to wreak havoc among the poorest with hundreds of thousands being infected and thousands dying. Thus, as Añez’ ‘interim government’ added illegitimacy to illegality, brutality to incompetence, and neoliberalism to corruption, the consequences of such a terrifying ‘Bolsonaresque’ cocktail the situation had created nearly 2 million new poor. And invariably their explanation to any criticism of such messy governance was to blame everything on Evo Morales and the MAS-IPSP government. And, as night follows day, Añez’ neoliberal ‘urges’ led her to end up requesting unnecessary financial emergency assistance from the IMF, which immediately obliged by issuing a loan of US$327 million with the customary onerous conditionalities undermining Bolivia’s hard-won economic sovereignty.
By 2020, the economy had shrunk by about 10% causing further unemployment, hardship and hunger, leading to mass protests, and, of course, more repression. Añez’ by now infamous minister of interior, Arturo Murillo, in response to this mass political opposition, said, “firing bullets [on protestors]would be what is required politically”. This was not idle rhetoric; the repressive forces had already perpetrated two massacres in November 2019, in Senkata (La Paz) and Sacaba (Cochabamba), about which a human rights organization reported 36 people dead and over 500 injured, describing the situation with the eloquent title “They shot us like animals’3.
As Añez’s government was only temporary with no constitutional or legal authority to change anything since its only task was to organise national elections, the extreme right wing coalition holding the reins of power used the pandemic as an excuse – about which it was doing very little – to postpone the elections, which it did four times. Thankfully, through mass pressure, political discipline, intelligent unity in action of the MAS-led mass movement, and the use of a few positions in the existing political edifice, the people managed to persuade (actually force) Añez’s de facto government to accept a legal decision by Parliament to hold elections on 18 October 2020, with the extraordinary above-mentioned results.
When the newly elected president, Luis Arce, who had been Evo’s minister of economic policy and architect of Bolivia’s impressive economic performance in the 2006-2019 period, announced that as his first political decision he was restoring full diplomatic relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, it sent shivers down the spine of right wingers from Patagonia all the way to the Klondike.
Arce’s first economic measures were as interesting. First, there is the Bonus Against Hunger of 1,000 Bolivianos (US$150 / £100) aimed at the most disadvantaged (disabled, pregnant women, the elderly, the poorest, etc.) that will benefit about 4 million people. Secondly, a reduction of the tax on credit card payments from 13% to 8% and returning the difference (5%) to the customer, the return of VAT to low income people, and a tax on large fortunes over their assets on real and non-real estate, and income. Thirdly, to enter into negotiations with multilateral bodies (World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank) to obtain credit without economic or political conditionalities attached, and including a moratorium and condoning the country’s debt and the interest on it. Fourthly, if at all possible, avoid devaluation of the national currency so as to encourage economic growth, and foment import substitution among other reactivating policies. Fifthly, strengthen domestic economic demand so as to help reactivate economic activity via subsidies to the poorest and other segments of society. Sixthly, professionalization of the judiciary through merit and qualifications not by political quotas determined by the relative strength of existing political forces, a method Arce characterised as “useless”. And seventh, in the medium and long term to continue with the industrialization of lithium and iron, coupled with a programme towards food sovereignty, promotion of domestic tourism, export of electricity and the industrialization of gas, all within the context of keeping all these activities broadly under state control and ownership.
State expenditure on health and education to be increased to 10 and 11 percent, respectively. A crucial factor will be public investment, which is to be increased so as to bring about a rate of economic growth of 4,8% for 2021 (Añez had destroyed or dismantled all the ongoing public works, which Arce intends to retake and bring to completion as another plank for the reactivation of the domestic economy). In this connection, prompted by Arce, the MAS-IPSP majority in parliament has already passed legislation to ensure the implementation of all these urgent measures. To be noted is Arce’s decision to return the IMF loan contracted by Añez in 2020.4
Furthermore, Arce has developed a comprehensive strategic plan to combat Covid-19 involving rigorous methods to stop contagion, biosecurity measures at the workplace, strengthening existing medical facilities and furnishing them with appropriate equipment and health inputs, the carrying out of mass tests so as to substantially improve detection, the mass use of ancestral herbs to aid prevention, and mass vaccination. For the latter, Arce has secured the mass supply of vaccines from Russia and China (Sputnik V and Sinopharm respectively), and mass vaccination has already begun.
However, the decision by Arce to decree a law of sanitary emergency, thoroughly justified in the lethal context of the Covid-19 pandemic, is being used by doctors in the private sector to launch a national strike which has very little to do with their ostensible objection to the law as being ‘punitive’. A racist ultra right plot seems to be rearing its ugly head on the back of this clearly orchestrated destabilisation ‘mass action’ by reactionary forces. In support of the doctors, extreme right wing leader, Luis Camacho, on 20 February 2021, totally opposed the law of sanitary emergency, and called on the government to respect the health professionals, in effect threatening a (another) coup d’état.5
We should expect Bolivia’s right and extreme right to cooperate in unleashing anti-government mobilisations of ‘middle class’ groups such as doctors, lawyers, non-indigenous elite women, university students, commerce, private enterprise and the like. In other Latin American countries these groups are likely to receive millionaire subsidies funded by the US taxpayer and distributed by the US interventionist machinery through USAID, NED, and such like, as they did in Chile under Allende, and have done also, for example, in Nicaragua and Venezuela. This means that in the coming period we should expect all sorts of provocations, fake news, false flags, international demonization campaigns, with the almost guaranteed fervent support of the national and international mainstream corporate media (including not corporate, BBC and ‘progressive’ The Guardian in the UK, which at the time ‘editorialised’ that the coup had been Evo’s fault).6 In other words, the robust electoral victory of 18 October 2020 has taken Bolivia on the way to recuperate their democracy, reactivate their economy, restore all people’s social, political, economic and cultural, but the MAS-SPSP Arce government is not yet out of the difficult terrain: the road ahead is likely to be a tortuous and uphill battle.
This brings our analysis to the crucial matter of solidarity with the people of Bolivia and with the progressive transformation of that nation that begun in 2006 under the presidency of Evo. The key principle of solidarity with the people of Bolivia must be the unconditional defence of their right to self-determination and national sovereignty, thus opposing, rejecting and condemning any external interference especially coming, as it has done for so long, from the United States and its allies. Secondly, the full recovery of the economy, despite the formidable economic base built by Evo’s government in 2006-2013, will not at all be easy. The additional difficulty stems from the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a protracted world economic crisis of rather gigantic proportions thereby depressing demand for raw materials and minerals, the strength of Bolivia’s economy.
This means that Bolivia’s right wing will use any economic complications or difficulties the Arce government may face, by mobilising –especially middle class-– discontent to oppose it thus, as Wiphalas Across the World has correctly stated: international solidarity played a fundamental role in helping the people of Bolivia to fight for a full year against the racist and fascist regime of Jeanine Añez, but this solidarity must be maintained for at least the next five years of reconstruction. It must be borne in mind that the explicit aim of the racist right wing opposition to the current MAS-IPSP Arce government, as it was with Evo’s government, is not to be a loyal opposition that respect the rules of the game, but to inflict a political/electoral defeat, and use every opportunity to capitalise on any problems that may arise seeking the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government. Furthermore, the persistent golpista threats from Bolivia’s reactionary forces are driven by an intensely racist hatred of the country’s indigenous majority.
Given this context, the full recuperation of democracy will present similar complexities. Among the many tasks there is the unavoidable one of bringing to trial all those guilty of corruption, law breaking, unconstitutional acts, and human rights atrocities. The latter raises the delicate but unavoidable matter of reforming the armed forces and the police to ensure they do not participate in supporting coup d’état in the future as they did in November 2019. Thus the road ahead will be littered with traps, provocations and dangers. In this connection, the solidarity movement must not rush to draw ultimatist, purist or doctrinaire conclusions from any difficult decision or tactical move the Arce government may be obliged to take.
More importantly, given its gigantic geopolitical significance, it is vital to continue organising solidarity to defend and help preserve the electoral and political victory of October 2020. Furthermore, the heroic triumph of the Bolivian people has dramatically contributed to changing the continental relation of forces in favour of progressive politics. The victory obtained in October 2020 is immense and precious, but precarious. We must do everything in our power to preserve it, defend it, and protect it.
1 Calls intensify for resignation of OAS secretary general Luis Almagro, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/10/25/calls-intensify-for-resignation-of-oas-secretary-general-luis-almagro/
2 Economy, La pandemia del Covid-19 lacera el sistema laboral boliviano, 5 Aug 2020, https://economy.com.bo/portada-economy/25-nosotros/4401-covid-19-destroza-el-sistema-laboral-boliviano.html
3 International Human Rights Clinic, “They Shot Us Like Animals”, Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, 2019, http://hrp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Black-November-English-Final_Accessible.pdf
4 ‘Bolivia’, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State, produced a very well designed and highly informative Special edition on the Arce government’s economic reconstruction plan called La Reconstruccion (it’s a pity is available only in Spanish), https://issuu.com/periodicobolivia/docs/especial_-_la_reconstruccion_22_de_enero_2021
5 The right wing mobilization in national strikes of doctors – among other middle class groups – was a powerful political weapon against Allende in Chile staged around the demand for the president’s resignation (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/18/archives/protest-strikes-spread-in-chile-but-army-key-to-power-is-faithful.html)
6 Guardian correspondents in La Paz, Laurence Blair and Dan Collyns, days after Morales’ ouster by the violent coup d’etat (15 Nov 2019) wrote an ‘in-depth’ piece with the title “Evo Morales: indigenous leader who changed Bolivia but stayed too long” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/15/evo-morales-indigenous-leader-who-changed-bolivia-but-stayed-too-long); and the BBC also published a piece (6 Dec 2019) with a detailed itemization of the OAS’s thoroughly false charges of election rigging with the title “Evo Morales: Overwhelming evidence of election fraud in Bolivia, monitors say”. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-50685335)