Regardless of Castillo presidency’s evident shortcomings and mistakes, his ouster represents a grave setback for democracy in Peru and Latin America as a whole. His election last year took place on the back of an almighty crisis of credibility and legitimacy of a political system rigged with corruption and venality in which presidents were forced to resign on corruption charges (some ended in prison), with one committing suicide before being arrested on corruption charges. In the last six years Peru has had six presidents.

The rot was so advanced that no mainstream political party or politician could muster sufficient electoral support to succeed in winning the presidency in 2021 (the main right-wing party, Fuerza Popular’s candidate got less than 14% of the vote in the first round). It goes a long way to explain why an unknown rural primary school teacher from the remote Andean indigenous area of Cajamarca, Pedro Castillo, would become the 63^rd president of Peru. In Cajamarca, Castillo obtained up to 72% of the popular vote.

Castillo’s election offered a historic chance to bury Peruvian neoliberalism. I myself penned an article with that prognosis, which I premised on Castillo’s commitment to democratize Peruvian politics via a Constituent Assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution as the base from which to re-found the nation on an anti-neoliberal basis. A proposal that, in the light of recent experience in Latin America, is perfectly implementable but whose precondition, as other experiences in the region have shown, is the vigorous mobilization of the mass of the people, the working class, the peasantry, the urban poor, and all other subordinate strata from society. This did not happen in Peru under Castillo’s presidency.

Ironically, the mass mobilizations that broke out in the Andean regions and in many other areas and cities in Peru when they learned of Castillo’s impeachment solidly confirms that this was the only possible route to implement his programme of change. The mass mobilizations throughout the nation (including Lima) are demanding a Constituent Assembly, the closure of the existing Congress, the liberation, and reinstatement of Castillo to the presidency, and the holding of immediate general elections.

This would explain the paradox that right-wing hostility to president Castillo, unlike other left governments in Latin America, was not waged because Castillo was undertaking any radical government action. In fact, opposition to his government was so blindingly intense that almost every initiative, no matter how trivial or uncontroversial, was met with ferocious rejection by Peru’s right-wing dominated Congress. The Congress’ key right-wing party, was Fuerza Popular led by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Peru’s former dictator, Alberto Fujimori. In Peru’s Congress of 130 seats, Castillo counted on 15, originally solid, votes from Peru Libre, and 5, not very solid, votes from Juntos por el Peru. In the absence of government mobilization of the masses, the oligarchy knew Castillo represented no threat, thus their intense hostility was to treat his government as an abhorrent abnormality sending a message to the nation that it should never have happened and that would never recur.

One example of parliament’s obtuse obstructionism was the impeachment of his minister of foreign relations, Hector Béjar, a well reputed left-wing academic and intellectual on 17^th August 2021, who, barely 15 days after his appointment and less than a month after Castillo’s inauguration (28^th July 2021), was forced to resign. Béjar’s ‘offence’, a statement made at a public conference in February 2020 during the election – before his ministerial appointment – in which he asserted a historical fact: terrorism was begun by Peru’s Navy in 1974 well before the appearance of the Shining Path [1980]. Béjar was the first minister out of many to be arbitrarily impeached by Congress.

Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), an extreme guerrilla group, was active in substantial parts of the countryside during the 1980s-1990s and whose confrontation with state military forces led to a generalised situation of conflict. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that, after the collapse of the Fujimori dictatorship, investigated the atrocities perpetrated during the state war against the Shining Path, reported that 69,280 people died or disappeared between 1980 and 2000.

Congress’ harassment aimed at preventing Castillo’s government from even functioning can be verified with numbers: in the 495 days he lasted in office, Castillo was forced to appoint a total of 78 ministers. Invariably, appointed ministers as in the case of Béjar, would be subjected to ferocious attack by the media and the Establishment (in Béjar’s case, by the Navy itself) and by the right-wing parliamentary majority that was forcing ministers’ resignation with the eagerness of zealous witch hunters.

Béjar was ostensibly impeached for his accurate commentary about the Navy’s activities in the 1970s but more likely for having made the decision for Peru to abandon the Lima Group, adopting a non-interventionist foreign policy towards Venezuela and for condemning unilateral sanctions against nations. Béjar made the announcement of the new policy on 3^rd August 2021 and the ‘revelations’ about his Navy commentary were made on August 15^th. The demonization campaign was in full swing immediately after that which included: soldiers holding public rallies demanding his resignation, a parliamentary motion from a coalition of parliamentary forces essentially for ‘not being fit for the post’, and for adhering to a ‘communist ideology.’

Something similar but not identical happened with Béjar’s replacement, Oscar Maurtúa, a career diplomat, who had served as minister of foreign relations in several previous right-wing governments from 2005. When in October 2021, Guido Bellido, a radical member of Peru Libre, who upon being appointed Minister of Government, threatened the nationalisation of Camisea gas, an operation run by multinational capital, for refusing to renegotiate its profits in favour of the Peruvian state, Maurtúa resigned two weeks later. Guido Bellido himself, was forced to resign ostensibly for an “apologia of terrorism” but in reality for having had the audacity to threaten to nationalise an asset that ought to belong to Peru.

On 6^th October 2021, Guido Bellido, a national leader of Peru Libre, who had been Castillo’s Minister of Government since 29 July, offered his resignation at the president’s request triggered by his nationalization threat. Vladimir Cerrón, Peru Libre’s key national leader followed suit by publicly breaking with Castillo on 16^th October, asking him to leave the party and thus leaving Castillo without the party’s parliamentary support. Ever since, Peru Libre has suffered several divisions.

Worse, Castillo was pushed into a corner by being forced to select ministers to the liking of the right-wing parliamentary majority to avoid them not being approved. All took place within a context dominated by intoxicating media demonization, accusations, fake news and generalised hostility to his government but with a Damocles sword – a motion to declare his presidency “vacant” and thus be impeached – hanging over his head.

The first attempt was in November 2021 (a few weeks after Bellido’s forced resignation). It did not gather sufficient parliamentary support (46 against 76, 4 abstentions). The second was in March 2022 with the charge of ‘permanent moral incapacity’, which got 55 votes (54 against and 19 abstentions) but failed because procedurally 87 votes were required. And finally, on 1^st December 2022, Congress voted in favour of initiating a process to declare ‘vacancy’ against Castillo for “permanent moral incapacity.” This time, the right wing had managed to gather 73 votes (32 against and 6 abstentions). The motion of well over 100 pages, included at least six ‘parliamentary investigations’ for allegedly ‘leading a criminal organization’, for traffic of influences, for obstruction of justice, for treason (in an interview Castillo broached the possibility of offering Bolivia access to the sea through Peruvian territory), and even, for ‘plagiarising’ his MA thesis.

By then Castillo was incredibly isolated surrounded by the rarefied, putrid and feverish Lima political establishment that were as a pack of hungry wolves that had scented blood: Castillo would have to face a final hearing set by Peru’s congressional majority on 7^th December. On the same day, in an event surrounded by confusion – maliciously depicted by the world mainstream media as a coup d’état – the president went on national TV to announce his decision to dissolve Congress temporarily, establish an exceptional emergency government and, the holding of elections to elect a new Congress with Constituent Assembly powers within nine months. US ambassador in Lima, Lisa D. Kenna, immediately reacted on that very day with a note stressing the US ‘rejects any unconstitutional act by president Castillo to prevent Congress to fulfil its mandate.’ The Congress’ ‘mandate’ was to impeach president Castillo.

We know the rest of the story: Congress on the same day carried the ‘vacancy’ motion by 101 votes, Castillo was arrested, and Dina Boluarte has been sworn in as interim president. Declaring the dissolution of the Congress may not have been the most skilful tactical move Castillo made but he put the limelight on the key institution that obstinately obstructed the possibility of socio-economic progress that Castillo’s presidency represented.

Castillo had no support whatsoever among the economic or political elite, the judiciary, the state bureaucracy, the police or the armed forces, or the mainstream media. He was politically right in calling for the dissolution of the obstruction of Congress to allow for the mass of the people through the ballot box to be given the chance to democratically remove it. An Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP in its Spanish acronym) survey in November showed the rate of disapproval of Congress to be 86%, up 5 points from October, and staying on 75-78% throughout the second half 2021.

What was not expected with Castillo’s impeachment was the vigorous outburst of social mobilization throughout Peru. Its epicentre was in the Peruvian ‘sierra’, the indigenous hinterlands where Castillo got most of his electoral support, but also in key cities, including Lima. The demands raised by the mass movement are for the reinstatement of Castillo, dissolution of Congress, the resignation of Boluarte, the holding of immediate parliamentary elections and, a new constitution. Demonstrators, expressing their fury in Lima, carried placards declaring “Congress is a den of rats”.

In light of the huge mass mobilizations one inevitably wonders why was this not unleashed before, say, one and a half year ago? Castillo, heavily isolated and under almighty pressure, hoping to buy some breathing space, sought to ingratiate himself with the national and international right by, for example, appointing a neoliberal economist, Julio Valverde, in charge of the Central Bank, tried to get closer to the deadly Organization of American States, met Bolsonaro in Brazil and, distanced himself from Venezuela. To no avail, the elite demanded ever more concessions but would never be satisfied no matter how many Castillo made.

The repression unleashed against the popular mobilizations has been swift and brutal but ineffective. Reports talk of at least eighteen people killed by bullets from the police and more than a hundred injured, yet mobilizations and marches have grown and spread further. Though the ‘interim government’ has already banned demonstrations, they have continued. Three days ago they occupied the Andahuaylas airport; an indefinite strike has been declared in Cusco; in Apurimac, school lessons have been suspended; plus a multiple blockading of motorways in many points in the country. It is evident the political atmosphere in Peru was already pretty charged and these social energies were dormant but waiting to be awaken.

Though it is premature to draw too many conclusions about what this popular resistance might bring about, it is clear that the oligarchy miscalculated what it expected the outcome of Castillo’s ouster would be: the crushing defeat of this attempt, however timid, of the lower classes, especially cholos (pejorative name for indigenous people in Peru), to change the status quo. Peru’s oligarchy found it intolerable that a cholo, Castillo, was the country’s president and even less that he dared to threaten to enlist the mass of the people to actively participate in a Constituent Assembly entrusted with drafting a new constitution.

The appointed interim president, Dina Boluarte, feeling the pressure of the mass mobilization announced a proposal to hold ‘anticipated elections’ in 2024 instead of 2026, the date of the end of Castillo’s official mandate. However, it has been reported that Castillo sent a message to the people encouraging them to fight for a Constituent Assembly and not fall into the ‘dirty trap of new elections.” Through one of his lawyers, Dr Ronald Atencio, Castillo communicated that his detention was illegal and arbitrary with his constitutional rights being violated, that he is the subject of political persecution, which threatens to turn him into a political prisoner, that he has no intention of seeking asylum, and that he is fully aware of the mobilizations throughout the country and the demands for his freedom.

We’ll see how things develop from here. Castillo’s ouster is a negative development; it is a setback for the left in Peru and for democracy in Latin America. Latin America’s left presidents have understood this and condemned the parliamentary coup against democratically elected president Pedro Castillo. Among the presidents condemning the coup are, Cuba’s Miguel Diaz-Canel, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Honduras’ Xiomara Castro, Argentina’s Fernandez, Colombia’s Petro, Mexico’s Lopez Obrador, and Bolivia’s Arce.

More dramatically, the presidents of Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Bolivia issued a joint communiqué (12^th December) demanding Castillo’s reinstatement that in its relevant part reads, “It is not news to the world that President Castillo Terrones, from the day of his election, was the victim of anti-democratic harassment […] Our governments call on all actors involved in the above process to prioritise the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box. This is the way to interpret the scope and meaning of the notion of democracy as enshrined in the Inter-American Human Rights System.  We urge those who make up the institutions to refrain from reversing the popular will expressed through free suffrage.” (my translation)

At the XIII ALBA-TCP summit held in Havana on December 15^th, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines; Saint Lucía, St. Kitts and Nevis, Grenada and Cuba condemned the detention of president Pedro Castillo which they characterised as a coup d’etat.

It is very doubtful that Peru’s oligarchy will be able to bring political stability to the country. Since 2016 the country has had 6 presidents, none of whom has completed their mandate, and the impeachment of Castillo has let the genie (militant mass mobilizations) out of the bottle and it looks pretty unlikely they will be able to put it back. The illegitimate government of Boluarte has on 14^th December declared a state of emergency throughout the national territory and, ominously, placed the armed forces in charge of securing law and order. The armed forces, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that investigated the dirty war between the Peruvian state and the Shining Path guerrillas (1980-1992), were responsible for about 50 per cent of the 70,000 deaths the war cost. It is the typical but worst possible action that Peru’s oligarchy can undertake.

The demands of the mass movement must be met: immediate and unconditional freedom of president Castillo, the immediate holding of elections for a Constituent Assembly for a new anti- neoliberal constitution, and for the immediate cessation of the brutal repression by sending the armed forces back to their barracks.

About the Author

Francisco Dominguez is head of the Research Group on Latin America at Middlesex University. He is also the national secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and co-author of Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America (Zed, 2011).

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.

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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).

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).

In 2012, seeing their salaries slashed by over half, the Association of Greek Archaeologists launched an international appeal against massive government cuts and to stop the targeted, professional looting of archaeological sites and museums. Here in the UK, Neil emailed the Greece Solidarity Campaign (GSC) saying he really ‘ought to do something.’ In his self-effacing way, Neil explained that he had ‘quite a high profile’ in archaeology, knew Greece well, and had just had a book out on the Ancient Greek Olympics. He sent a list of ideas for what the campaign could do but stated that he did not ‘do Facebook’ so I would have to connect him with the Greek archaeologists some other way.

Neil’s intervention was remarkable – he quickly had an event called Archaeologists Against Austerity: Solidarity with Greece arranged at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, plus further events at Bristol University and in Newcastle which allowed archaeologists Despina Koutsoumba and Fotis Georgiadis to come to the UK, speak at these events and make headlines in Greece.

Neil’s good friends in archaeology supported the tour, some of the establishment boycotted the events as they were unhappy at the politics. The best bit was holding a protest inside the British Museum, with Despina and Neil holding up a banner saying Can’t Pay Won’t Pay – Solidarity With Greece, and demanding the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

Here is Neil at his best explaining the living breathing significance of these stolen revolutionary treasures:

“History is sanitized. The role of the people in making their own history, the idea that it’s people organising themselves to bring about revolutionary change is not something that our rulers want us to celebrate and talk about. So what happens is that the objects are ripped out of their original contexts and treated like art objects which you approach in a hushed awe in an environment like this.”

This ‘People’s History’ approach was reflected in a recent letter Neil published in support of the ‘ritual killing’ of the Colston statue by Black Lives Matter protesters, a cause which for Neil represented huge power and hope. Neil was deeply committed towards making the world a better place. He once wrote to me:

‘BTW I became a revolutionary on the Grunwick picket-line in 1977. A group of Asian women sacked for joining a trade union by a sweatshop boss, and hundreds of police mobilised to smash a way through the mass picket to get busloads of scabs into the factory. That was when this innocent grammar-school boy from Tunbridge Wells began to grow up!’

Neil was also heavily involved in organising a South Africa disinvestment campaign on his campus in the late 70s, and then worked for two years in the head office of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He was also instrumental in creating the No Glory In War commemorative WWI campaign with Stop The War Coalition and Jan Woolf. You can read more about his political work here.

Anyone who met Neil knew he was whip smart with an extraordinary intellect and capacity for writing brilliant books including the extraordinary A Radical History Of The World. I was suitably intimidated when I wrote to Neil in his role as series editor at Pluto Press to ask him to take a look at a book idea I’d had. He was immediately warm, kind and encouraging: “If this is your first such venture and you are unsure about all this book publishing stuff, very happy to talk on the phone.”

Neil gave me the courage to write Stitched Up – The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion and to do it to the best of my ability. He was an intellectual safety net who I could explore Marxist theory with and who expected me to be smart and inquisitive, to read extensively and push ideas forward. In the acknowledgements I wrote: ‘To Neil Faulkner for polishing this book from a rough diamond to something I wanted everyone to read. For patience, guidance, and letting me phone you at all hours to discuss topics from Chanel to use-value.’ (Last time I phoned him to discuss something random and fashion related was to get his thoughts for this article on Klarna and debt schemes. Once again, his answers to my questions made everything click into place.) When the book launched, I was so proud to share a platform with Neil, he was warm with the audience and also very funny – though sadly he did not wear one of his definitive waistcoats to the event.

I saw Neil’s ability to inspire confidence in people extend through the work of the Brick Lane Debates a political group whose aim was to mix politics with culture and attract wide audiences to discuss and act on crucial topics of the day. The group was mostly in their twenties and thirties and we punched well above our weight and ahead of the times – holding large symposia in East London – Changing The Climate, We Should All Be Feminists, and I Can’t Breathe. Neil provided energy and intellectual vigour to the creation of this work.

Last night, having learned of Neil’s passing, I sat in candle light with a friend who I met through Brick Lane Debates and we talked about Neil. About his brilliant public speaking, his compassion and insight into a truly remarkable range of subjects. My friends talked about a formative event called Capitalism 101 which we ran at Housmans Bookshop – Neil would talk about capitalism and how it intersected with an issue in society, helping people to join the dots before everyone split into discussion groups. My friend remembered in great detail the Capitalism 101 on workplace mental health (long before it was de rigour to talk about mindfulness) where people felt comfortable enough to talk about the extreme levels of anxiety and stress they were being subjected to at work and how Neil prompted people to understand that this was not something we should accept as an individual problem but how we should see it as part of capitalism which must be pushed back on and dismantled.

We then got to talking about the This Changes Everything conference at Friends Meeting House – it was based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name and over video link she told the packed audience it was the most exciting thing to ever happen in her life as a writer. It was an urgent call to action on climate change, pre-dating XR. It is one of my biggest regrets that the Left still has not managed to build an anti-capitalist movement on the climate. Neil was instrumental to creating This Changes Everything and as anyone who has had the pleasure of working with him on a political project will know he brought bucket loads of organisational energy and ideas, giving the project a serious political backbone. In a world where much of the organised Left has traditionally dismissed climate change as ‘not a priority’ or even more stupidly ‘a middle class problem,’ Neil understood it as THE defining global issue of capitalism and for that directional leadership I will always be truly grateful.

Having spoken to people and scrolled through Twitter to see people publicly mourning Neil’s loss, one word comes up time and again: Mentor. Looking up the dictionary definition of mentor brought me to tears once again – ‘someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.’ Neil’s heart was so big, his patience so endless, his capacity for both learning and imparting knowledge so wide, and his revolutionary spirit so strong. What gives me comfort is to look around at the people he mentored and see them doing remarkable things – whether with Anti-Capitalist Resistance which he co-founded, the climate movement, social justice campaigns, Momentum, trade unions, and of course archaeology. People leading in their field, keeping revolutionary flames burning, fighting for justice, and being better kinder people. Neil’s impact lives on far beyond his tragic, untimely and utterly unfair death at just 64. In grief I believe all we can do is make his work live on through our actions.

I will never stop missing Neil. I am crushed by the certainty that I will never know another like him. His intellect and insight were one thing, but equal irreplaceable is the joyful, funny, brave human being who always signed his emails to us with these words –

Love Neil.

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]

A few days ago, when neofascist candidate José Antonio Kast was winning the first round of the country’s presidential elections, Chile’s 2019 rebellion aimed at burying neoliberalism appeared to be at an end. However, it has been greatly reinvigorated with the landslide victory of the Apruebo Dignidad¹ (I Vote For Dignity) candidate, Gabriel Boric Font, who obtained 56 percent of the vote in the second round, that is nearly 5 million votes, the largest ever in the country’s history. Gabriel, age 35 is the youngest president ever.

That result would have been greater had it not been for the policy of the minister of transport, Gloria Hutt Hesse, deliberately offering almost no public transport services, especially buses to the poor barrios, aimed at minimising the number of pro-Boric voters, hoping they would give up and go back home.² Throughout Election Day, there were constant reports on the mainstream media, especially TV, of people in the whole country but particularly at Santiago³ bus stops bitterly complaining for having to wait for 2 and even 3 hours for buses to go to polling centres. Thus, there were justified fears they would rig the election, but the determination of poor voters was such that the manoeuvre did not work.

Kast’s campaign, with the complicity of the right and the mainstream media, waged one of the dirtiest electoral campaigns in the country’s history, reminiscent of the US-funded and US-led ‘terror propaganda’ mounted against socialist candidate Salvador Allende in 1958, 1964 and 1970. Through innuendo and the use of social media, the Kast camp spewed out crass anti-communist propaganda, charged Boric with assisting terrorism, suggested that Boric would install a totalitarian regime in Chile, and such like. The campaign sought to instil fear primarily in the petty bourgeoisie by repeatedly predicting that drug addiction – even implying that Boric takes drugs, crime, and narco-trafficking, would spin out control if Boric became president. Besides, the mainstream media assailed Boric with insidious questions about Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, for which Boric did not produce the most impressive answers.

To no avail, the mass of the population saw it through and knew that their vote was the only way to stop pinochetismo taking hold of the presidency, and they had had enough of president Piñera. Their perception was correct, they knew that in the circumstances the best way to ensure the aims of the social rebellion of October 2019 was by defeating Kast and his brand of unalloyed pinochetismo.

As the electoral campaign unfolded, though Kast backtracked on some of his most virulent pinochetista statements, people knew that if he won he would not hesitate to fully implement them. Among many other gems, Kast declared his intention as president to abolish the ministry for women, same sex marriage, the (very restrictive) law on abortion, eliminate funding for the Museum in the Memory of the victims of the dictatorship and the Gabriela Mistral Centre for the promotion of arts, literature and theatre, withdraw Chile from the International Commission of Human Rights, close down the National Institute of Human Rights, cease the activities of FLACSO (prestigious Latin American centre of sociological investigation), build a ditch in the North of Chile (border with Bolivia and Peru) to stop illegal immigration, and empower the president with the legal authority to detain people in places other than police stations or jails (that is, restore the illegal procedures of Pinochet’s sinister police).

Kast’s intentions left no doubt as to what the correct option was in the election. I was, however, flabbergasted with various leftist analyses advocating not to vote, in one case because ‘there is no essential difference between Kast and Boric’, and, even worse, another suggested that ‘the dilemma between fascism and democracy was false’ because Chile’s democracy is defective. My despair with such ‘principled posturing’, probably dictated by the best of political intentions, turned into shock when on election day itself a Telesur correspondent in Santiago interviewed a Chilean activist who only attacked Boric with the main message of the feature being “whoever wins, Chile loses”.⁴

The centre-left Concertación coalition⁵ that in the 1990-2021 period governed the nation for 24 years, bears a heavy responsibility for maintaining and even perfecting the neoliberal system, expressed openly its preference for Boric, and assiduously courted support for im in the second round. Hence, those who believe there is no difference between Kast and Boric, do so not only from an ultra-left stance but also by finding Boric guilty by association, even though he has not yet had the chance to even perpetrate the crime.

This brings us to a central political issue: what has the October 2019 Rebellion and all its impressively positive consequences posed for the Chilean working class? What is posed in Chile is the struggle not (yet) for power but for the masses that for decades were conned into accepting (however grudgingly) neoliberalism as a fact of life, until the 2019 rebellion that was the first mass mobilization not only to oppose but also to get rid of neoliberalism.⁶ The Rebellion extracted extraordinary concessions from the ruling class: a referendum for a Constitutional Convention entrusted legally with the task to draft an anti-neoliberal constitution to replace the 1980 one promulgated under Pinochet’s rule.

The referendum approved the proposal of a new constitution and the election of a convention by 78 and 79 per cent, respectively in October 2020. The election of the Convention gave Chile’s right only 37 seats out of 155, that is, barely 23 per cent, whereas those in favour of radical change got an aggregated total of 118 seats, or 77 per cent. More noticeably, Socialists and Christian Democrats, the old Concertación parties, got jointly a total 17 seats. The biggest problem remains the fragmentation of the emerging forces aiming for change since together they hold almost all the remaining seats, but structured in easily 50 different groups. Nevertheless, in tune with the political context the Convention elected Elisa Loncón Antileo, a Mapuche indigenous leader as its president, and there were 17 seats reserved exclusively for the indigenous nations and elected only by them; a development of gigantic significance.

The mass rebellion also obtained other concessions from the government and parliament such as the return of 70 percent of their pension contributions from the private ‘pension administrators’, which rightly Chileans see as a massive swindle that has lasted for over 3 decades. This has dealt a heavy blow to Chile’s financial capital. A proposal in parliament for the return of the remaining 30 percent (at the end of September 2021) failed to be approved by a very small margin of votes. I am certain the AFPs have not heard the last on this matter.

The scenario depicted above suddenly became confused with the results of the presidential election’s first round where not only Kast came out first (with 27 percent against 25 for Boric), but which also elected Deputies and Senators for Chile’s two parliament chambers. Though Apruebo Dignidad did very well with 37 deputies (out of 155) and 5 senators (out of 50), the right-wing Chile Podemos Más (Piñera’s supporters) got 53 deputies and 22 senators, whilst the old Concertación got 37 deputies and 17 senators.

There are several dynamics at work here. With regards to the parliamentary election, traditional mechanisms and existing clientelistic relations apply with experienced politicians exerting local influence and getting elected. In contrast, most of the elected members of the Convention are an emerging bunch of motley pressure groups organised around single-issue campaigns (AFP, privatization of water, price of gas, abuse of utilities companies, defence of Mapuche ancestral lands, state corruption and so forth), which did not stand candidates for a parliamentary seat.

A most important fact was Boric’s public commitment in his victory speech (19 Dec) to support and work together with the Constitutional Convention for a new constitution. This has given and will give enormous impetus to the efforts to constitutionally replace the existing neoliberal economic model.

What the Chilean working class must address is their lack of political leadership. They do not have even a Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) as the people of Honduras to fight against the coup that ousted Mel Zelaya in 2009. The FNPR, made up of many and varied social and political movements, evolved into the Libre party that has just succeeded in electing Xiomara Castro, as the country’s first female president.⁷ The obvious possible avenue to address this potentially dangerous shortcoming would be to bring together in a national conference, all the many single-issue groups together with all social movements and willing political currents to set up a Popular Front for an Anti-Neoliberal Constitution.

After all, they have taken to the streets for two years to bury the oppressive, abusive and exploitative neoliberal model, and it is becoming clearer what to replace it with: a system based on a new constitution that allows the nationalization of all utilities and natural resources, punishes the corrupt, respects the ancestral lands of the Mapuche, and guarantees decent health, education and pensions. The road to get there will continue to be bumpy and messy, but we have won the masses; now, with a sympathetic government in place, we can launch the transformation of the state and build a better Chile.

By means of sheer resistance, resilience, mobilisation, and organisation, they have managed to defeat Juan Orlando Hernandez’s narco-dictatorship at the ballot box. Xiomara Castro, presidential candidate of the left-wing Libre party (the Freedom and Refoundation Party), in its Spanish acronym), obtained a splendid 50+ percent—between 15 to 20 percent more votes than her closest rival candidate, Nasry Asfura, National Party candidate, in an election with historic high levels of participation (68 percent).

The extraordinary feat performed by the people of Honduras takes place under the dictatorial regime of Hernandez (aka JOH) in an election marred by what appears to be targeted assassinations of candidates and activists. Up to October 2021, 64 acts of electoral violence, including 11 attacks and 27 assassinations, had been perpetrated. And in the period preceding the election (11-23 November) another string of assassinations, mainly of candidates, took place.

None of the fatal victims were members of Hernandez’s National Party. The aim seems to have been to terrorise the opposition, and particularly their electorate, into believing that it was unsafe to turn out to vote—and that even if they did, they would again steal the election through fraud and violence, as they have done twice already, in 2013 and 2017.

Commentators correctly characterise this as the ‘Colombianisation’ of Honduran politics—that is, a ruling gang in power deploys security forces and paramilitary groups to assassinate opposition activists. In Honduras, the most despicable act was the murder of environmental activist, feminist, and indigenous leader Berta Caceres by armed intruders in her own house, after years of death threats.

She had been a leading figure in the grassroots struggle against electoral fraud and dictatorship, and had been calling for the urgent re-founding of the nation, a proposal that has been incorporated into the programme of mass social movements such as the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). Since 2009, hundreds of activists have been assassinated at the hands of the police, the army, and paramilitaries.

The Colombianisation analogy does not stop at the assassination of opponents. Last June, the Washington Post explained the extent of infiltration by organised crime: ‘Military and police chiefs, politicians, businessmen, mayors and even three presidents have been linked to cocaine trafficking or accused of receiving funds from trafficking.’

US Judge Kevin Castel, who sentenced ‘Tony’ Hernandez, JOH’s brother, to life in prison after being found guilty of smuggling 185 tons of cocaine into the US, said: ‘Here, the [drug]trafficking was indeed state-sponsored’. In March 2021, at the trial against Geovanny Fuentes, a Honduran accused of drug trafficking, the prosecutor Jacob Gutwillig said that President JOH helped Fuentes with the trafficking of tons of cocaine.

Corruption permeates the whole Honduran establishment. National Party candidate Nasry Asfura has faced a pre-trial ‘for abuse of authority, use of false documents, embezzlement of public funds, fraud and money laundering’, and Yani Rosenthal, candidate of the once-ruling Liberal party, a congressman and a banker, was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison in the US for ‘participating in financial transactions using illicit proceeds (drug money laundering).’

The parallels continue. Like Colombia, Honduras is a narco-state in which the US has a host of military bases. It was from Honduran territory that the Contra mercenaries waged a proxy war against Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was also from Honduras that the US-led military invasion of Guatemala was launched in 1954, bringing about the violent ousting of democratically elected left-wing nationalist president Jacobo Arbenz. Specialists aptly refer to the country as ‘USS Honduras’.

So cocaine trafficking and state terrorism, which operates as part of the drug business in cahoots with key state institutions, is ‘tolerated’ and probably supported by various US agencies ‘in exchange’ for a large US military presence—the US has Soto Cano and 12 more US military bases in Honduras—due to geopolitical calculations like regional combat against left-wing governments. This criminal system’s stability requires the elimination of political and social activists.

Thus many US institutions, from the White House all the way down the food chain, turn a blind eye to the colossal levels of corruption. In fact, SOUTHCOM has been actively building Honduras’ repressive military capabilities by funding and training special units like Batallion-316, which reportedly acts as a death squad, ‘guilty of kidnap, torture, and murder’. ‘Between 2010 and 2016, as US “aid” and training continued to flow, over 120 environmental activists were murdered by hitmen, gangs, police, and the military for opposing illegal logging and mining,’ one report explains.

The legacy left by right-wing governments since the violent ousting of Mel Zelaya in 2009 is abysmal. Honduras is one the most violent countries in the world (37 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, with 60 percent attributable to organised crime), with staggering levels of poverty (73.6 percent of households live below the poverty line, out of which 53.7 percent live in extreme poverty), high levels of unemployment (well over 12 percent), and even higher levels of underemployment (the informal sector of the economy, due to the effects of Covid-19, grew from 60 to 70 percent). Its external debt is over US$15 billion (57 percent of its GDP), and the nation suffers from high incidences of embezzlement and illegal appropriation of state resources by this criminal administration.

The rot is so pronounced that back in February this year, a group of Democrats in the US Senate introduced legislation intended to cut off economic aid and sales of ammunition to Honduran security forces. The proposal ‘lays bare the violence and abuses perpetrated since the 2009 military-backed coup, as a result of widespread collusion between government officials, state and private security forces, organised crime and business leaders.’ In Britain, Colin Burgon, the president of Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America, issued scathing criticism of the British government’s complicity for ‘having sold (when Boris Johnson was Foreign Minister no less) to the Honduran government spyware designed to eavesdrop on its citizens, months before the state rounded up thousands of people in a well-orchestrated surveillance operation.’

To top it all off, through the ZEDES (Special Zones of Development and Employment) initiative, whole chunks of the national territory are being given to private enterprise subjected to a ‘special regime’ that empowers investors to establish their own security bodies—including their own police force and penitentiary system—to investigate criminal offences and instigate legal prosecutions. This is taking neoliberalism to abhorrent levels, the dream of multinational capital: the selling-off of portions of the national territory to private enterprise. Stating that the Honduran oligarchy, led by JOH, is ‘selling the country down the river’ is not a figure of speech.

It is this monstrosity, constructed since the overthrow of President Mel Zelaya in 2009 on top of the existing oligarchic state, that the now victorious Libre party and incoming president Xiomara Castro need to overcome to start improving the lives of the people of Honduras. The array of extremely nasty internal and external forces that her government will be up against is frighteningly powerful, and they have demonstrated in abundance what they are prepared to do to defend their felonious interests.

President-elect Xiomara’s party Libre, is the largest in the 128-seat Congress, and with its coalition partner, Salvador, will have a very strong parliamentary presence, which will be central to any proposed referendum for a Constituent Assembly aimed at re-founding the nation. Libre has also won in the capital city Tegucigalpa, and in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city. More importantly, unlike elections elsewhere (in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia), the National Party’s candidate, Asfura, has conceded defeat. Thus, Xiomara has a very strong mandate.

However, in a region dominated by US-led ‘regime change’ operations—the coup in Bolivia, the coup attempt in Nicaragua, the mercenary attack against Venezuela, plus a raft of violent street disorders in Cuba, vigorous destabilisation against recently elected President Castillo in Peru, and so on ad nausea—Honduras will need all the international solidarity we can provide, which we must do.

The heroic struggle of the people of Honduras has again demonstrated that it can be done: neoliberalism and its brutal foreign and imperialist instigators can be defeated and a better world can be built. So, before Washington, their Honduran cronies, their European accomplices, and the world corporate media unleash any shenanigans, let’s say loud and clear: US hands off Honduras!

This article first appeared in Tribune.

And this is a continuing problem: in recent weeks we have seen further attempts. The left has been successful in the regional elections in Venezuela but the US refuses to recognise the left’s victory. Instead Venezuela is suffering from a punishing raft of sanctions, imposed by Trump and maintained by President Biden. The sanctions, which amount to a blockade, are designed to inflict such damage on the economy that the people will be amenable to ‘regime change’. Such a result would be enormously damaging for the people of Venezuela, their self-determination and progress.

And US attempts to undermine and destroy Cuba continue. Recently the US has tried to mobilise demonstrations against the government in Cuba in an attempt to foment regime change. These have met with little support. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has so far left all the Trump-era sanctions in place. These powerful sanctions coupled with Covid have halved foreign currency inflows over the last two years, leading to shortages of basic goods with the goal of generating discontent.

But nevertheless Cuba’s anti-covid work goes from strength to strength. More than 81 percent of Cuba’s population of 11 million is fully vaccinated, and researchers are upgrading the Cuban vaccine to ensure protection against the new Omicron variant. This is the reality of the Cuban system that the US wishes to destroy – health security for its people, not to mention the health solidarity that we have seen Cuba extend to other countries.

Given the amount of effort that the US puts into destabilising socialist governments and progressive advance in Latin America, it is not surprising that at times there have been victories which have been reversed or overthrown. But what we see is that the reversal is never accepted, whether in Bolivia or most recently Honduras, where the people have organised and fought back until victory. Bolivia recently celebrated the first anniversary of reversing the coup which took place against Evo Morales in 2019. The 2020 election saw a landslide victory for the MAS candidate after a year of brutal repression and neoliberal hardship. The process has taken longer in Honduras, but the coup in 2009 against Manuel Zelaya has now been reversed with the recent glorious victory of Castro, after 12 terrible years of neo-liberalism. Now Honduras will begin the process of building a democratic socialist society.

Of course there are many other examples across Latin America of imperialist intervention, and the common theme over decades has been western determination to introduce neoliberal economic policies to allow unfettered exploitation of the people and their economic resources. Indeed we can say that Latin America has been a testbed for neoliberal policies which have for decades been the main weapon for destroying socialism and for advancing US interests across the globe.

There has of course been repeated rejection of neoliberalism, Argentina is a powerful case that comes to mind, but when the US fails to impose its economic policy prescriptions it resorts to other means. Military intervention and war is one such method, but in Latin America the US has perfected a whole range of methods, from political intervention in elections, to lawfare and its use to conduct coups against legitimately elected representatives of the people.

Struggles on this front still continue – in Ecuador, for example, with the lawfare coup against Correa, but the left is still a huge force and I have no doubt that it will recover and prevail.

Brazil’s election next year is of the utmost importance globally. At the minute it is looking like Lula versus Bolsonaro and the US will do everything it can to support Bolsonaro. Lula is ahead and we must do everything possible to support his re-election. His victory will change geopolitics significantly for the better – whether it’s climate change, or increasing multipolarity. Brazil is an economic power house and it can once again be a political power house for the left.

Many of us will have been directly involved in one of the great initiatives of the Brazilian Workers Party – the World Social Forum, founded in Porto Alegre and backed by the city’s PT government, twenty years ago. 12,000 people attended that first meeting from around the world, organising and discussing alternatives to neoliberalism, and for a globalisation from below. That was a moment of transformation not only for the movement internationally but for Brazil, leading eventually to the electoral victory of Lula. No wonder the Brazilian elite and its US allies worked to drive him out of politics, but those malign forces will be defeated.

It is that kind of international cooperation, that emerged from Porto Alegre, that we need to regain, to re-empower ourselves as an international movement. A fighting movement, like the movements in Latin America, that don’t lie down when faced with coups, lawfare, economic warfare, military intervention, but re-organise and win.

We must stand together with the forces of progress internationally, get ourselves united and organised to challenge our own ruling class and the imperialist role it plays across the world. There is nowhere better to look to for lessons, guidance and inspiration than to our comrades in Latin America.

This is the text of a speech delivered at the Latin America conference in London on 4th December, 2021

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

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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.

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SATURDAY 23 OCTOBER 2021

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If anyone thought that talking of a ‘new cold war’ with China was overstating the case, the recently announced AUKUS military pact must make them think again. Surely timed to deflect notions of US weakness after its defeat in Afghanistan, this major new multifaceted defence agreement between the US, UK and Australia sees the latter firmly jump into the US camp and the former strengthen and renew its Pivot to Asia through unashamedly militaristic means. The UK is coat-tailing the US as usual, hoping to garner some jobs in nuclear reactor production, and trying yet another gambit to boost the ‘global Britain’ profile.

Just six months on from the publication of the government’s big overhaul of foreign and defence policy – the Integrated Review which included a 40% increase in the nuclear arsenal – this is the UK’s second significant provocation towards China, following on from the UK aircraft carrier’s tour to the South China Sea. Australia has the most to lose from this agreement – China is its biggest trading partner and up to recently Australia has avoided getting too sucked into US strategies against China. Earlier attempts during Bush’s presidency to build a ‘Quad’ against China with Australia, Japan and India, foundered when Kevin Rudd withdrew Australian support, but now Australia is back in the fold.

Billed by the signatories as ‘a landmark defence and security partnership’, it’s partly being sold as a values-driven agreement to support a peaceful rules-based international order (US/UK rhetoric for some time now even when the US was unilaterally withdrawing from fundamental pillars of said order); and its key military focus centres on ‘the development of joint capabilities and technology sharing’, deeper integration of security and defence-related science, technology, industrial bases and supply chains.

What this actually means is that the US and UK are going to collaborate with Australia to help provide them with nuclear-powered submarines. Bizarrely the joint governments’ statement suggests that this will ‘promote stability in the Indo-Pacific’; it looks more likely to massively ramp up tension in the region at a time when cooperation with China – in the run up to COP26 to deal with the climate emergency – should be top of the agenda. Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities haven’t responded well. It’s also dealt a blow to Britain’s relations with France which already had a contract with Australia to provide them with 12 diesel/electric-powered subs to replace their ageing fleet. That contract has now been ripped up but in spite of comments about delays in production and escalating costs, this is not a military-industrial decision, it is a strategic one, fully entering the US orbit – and being granted access to rare nuclear reactor technology.

Nuclear – whether military or civilian – is always controversial and symbolic, and here it means Australian admission to the top level club; only six countries, all nuclear weapon states, have nuclear-powered subs. It is also an indication by the US of the priority it gives to this growing – fortunately still cold – conflict, and its determination to get Australia onside and keep it there. T he nuclear component of the subs lies in the fact they are powered by onboard nuclear reactors. They won’t have nuclear weapons – and the Australian PM Scott Morrison has been quick to insist that Australia will not be pursuing either nuclear weapons or civil nuclear capacity.

Beyond the strategic nightmare created by AUKUS there is much that is not yet clear. Will the Australians build the subs or buy them in? How will the highly enriched uranium necessary to fuel the reactors be provided? There is no doubt that the provision of reactors and the technology they require is the most significant factor here.

Reactor technology is highly prized and top secret, as the uranium used for the reactors is enriched to 95% – weapons grade. The US and UK cooperate on this under the terms of the Mutual Defence Agreement, the world’s most extensive nuclear sharing agreement which first came into force in 1958. Renewed by parliament every decade, the last time in 2014 allowed for greater cooperation on reactor technology. If the Australians were going to build the reactors themselves they would need US technology and expertise and a nuclear-sharing agreement with the US of their own. So the simplest solution would be to buy them in; Boris Johnson’s comments so far about jobs suggest he will try and get reactor orders for the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby. Maybe he will also try for the decommissioning contracts for the spent fuel that eventually needs disposing of. Presumably it will add to the nightmare build up of radioactive waste at the dangerously unsafe Sellafield complex in Cumbria. Highly enriched uranium is stored there but no safe long-term storage facility has yet been found.

Boris Johnson said in Parliament today that the AUKUS agreement did not contravene the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – that this is for nuclear power not nuclear weapons so the restrictions do not apply. But the fact is we are talking about providing weapons grade enriched uranium to a non-nuclear weapons state to power military submarines undertaking provocative action in a very fraught area of the world.

The NPT does not stop the exchange of civil nuclear technology but it stipulates it must be ‘for peaceful purposes’. Sending war-fighting subs to potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific region is hardly that. This is yet another breach of international law by our government, hard on the heels of the nuclear arsenal increase. It’s time to stand up and oppose the government’s reckless and illegal foreign policy.

This article was first published here