Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | Neglecting the evils of communism? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in The New York Times recently? The newspaper has hosted a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of 20-century communism the optimism, the idealism, the moral authority. |
See the original post here:
Neglecting the evils of communism? - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
During the Cold War, few American institutions were more resolutely anti-communist than the labor movement. On the surface, this might seem counterintuitive. The Soviet Union, after all, claimed to be a workers paradise, a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Reality, of course, was different. Just because communist leaders professed to represent the interests of workers didnt mean they actually did. In communist societies, workers lacked the basic freedoms that their brothers and sisters in democratic societies enjoyed: namely, the right to assemble peaceably, free speech, and strike. Communist leaders insisted their economic system obviated the need for unions, though they gestured in the direction of the Western civil society model by creating labor fronts, regime-sanctioned bodies that served as tools of the one-party state. Any attempt at forming unions independent of the regime were ruthlessly suppressed.
For this reason, most leaders of the American labor movement understood communism to be a uniquely dangerous enemy of free trade unionism, writes Arch Puddington in his sterling biography of Lane Kirkland, the legendary president of the AFL-CIO and one of the Cold Wars unsung heroes. Workers are exploited under any form of dictatorship. But under communism, they are in a way doubly exploited, in that the exploitation is cynically implemented in the name of the working class. There is no such thing as a Communist trade union official, Kirkland said. They are all just rulers of labor.
To be sure, American labor was not uniformly anti-communist. At the outset of the Cold War, disputes between anti-communist and communist-leaning unions caused major ruptures within the movement. But the main labor confederationthe AFL-CIOnever backed down from its position that communism was an enemy of working people worldwide. In the late 1940s, the AFL published a map of gulags across the Soviet Union. When the exiled Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to the United States in the mid-1970s, his first public speech was delivered at an AFL-CIO dinner. And the AFLs most heroic international achievement was its early and unwavering support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, to which it secretly smuggled printing presses.
A fierce critic of dtente with the Soviet Union, Kirkland assailed American captains of industrythose supposed lovers of the free marketfor their willingness to cut deals with communist regimes. In a 1981 speech protesting the imposition of martial law in Poland, Kirkland even assailed the Reagan administration for being soft on communism, criticizing it for allowing a steady flow of credits to those who keep Lech Walesa in prison, Andrei Sakharov in exile, thousands in psychiatric clinics, countless more in labor camps, and whole peoples enslaved. The Polish communist regime of General Jaruzelski, he said, was a fascist junta.
Today, it is hard not to conclude that Kirkland would be anything other than ashamed at how his successors in the American labor movement have abandoned his legacy. Earlier this summer, labor leaders across the country, including those at the AFL, feted a Cuban government union representative visiting the United States. In late June, Vctor Lemagne Snchez, secretary-general of Cubas Hotel and Tourism Union and executive committee member of the Cuban Workers Federation (CTC), began a two-week tour of 11 American citiesthe first time in 17 years that a Cuban union leader acquired a visa to visit the U.S.
Like Soviet-era labor fronts, the CTC is the only organization permitted to represent workers before the Cuban government and is thus an appendage of a regime that routinely harasses and imprisons independent trade unionists (PDF). In addition to being a leader of a fake union, Snchez also sits in a fake parliament, the Cuban National Assembly of Peoples Power, in which all 612 deputies are members of the Communist Party. In Sacramento, according to the communist Workers World newspaper, he was warmly welcomed as the first Cuban elected official received onto the floors of the California Senate and Assemblya mockery of those democratic chambers.
Snchez was hosted by the Communications Workers of America in Berkeley, and paid visits to the San Francisco Labor Council, the San Jose/South Bay Central Labor Council, and the University of California/Berkeley Labor Center. On July 10 in Washington, Snchez met with AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, Cathy Feingold, (director of the confederations International Department), and representatives from the AFL-CIOs LGBTQ unit PRIDE at Work, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. The AFL-CIO did not respond to requests for comment.
The Cuban Workers Federation is not a genuine union but an instrument for controlling workers. At his speech in Berkeley, Snchez claimed that membership in his union is voluntary and conscious. This is a lie. Membership in the CTC is compulsory for anyone wishing to work in government-run factories, stores, and resorts, which, in a country where the regime either controls or has a stake in nearly every aspect of the economy, comprises a huge percentage of the labor force. The Cuban hotel workers whom Snchez ostensibly represents are not paid by the foreign conglomerates that partly own these establishments; rather, the businesses pay the Cuban regime in hard currency, and the regime, acting as middleman, pays its subjects in worthless Cuban pesos.
Ultimately, 95 percent of the wages earned in joint enterprises are garnished by the state. Any American trade unionist should understand how these practices violate both the letter and spirit of democratic, pluralistic labor relations, and the Cuban regime has been repeatedly criticized by the International Labor Organization and human rights organizations for its abuse of basic worker rights (PDF). Labor relations in Cuba can hardly be said to resemble the collective bargaining processes employed by unions in democratic societies. Its more like indentured servitude.
One of the greatest insights offered by the international labor movement has been the notion of solidarity: the idea that a steelworker in Gary, Indiana, has common interests with a dockworker in Gdask, who in turn has a stake in the fate of a hotel maid in Guantnamo. Reminding American labor leaders of this legacy are independent Cuban trade unionists, two of whom wrote an open letter to the AFL-CIO protesting the organizations welcoming a Cuban regime apparatchik (PDF). Such a visit, until this moment irrelevant and confined to communism-leaning, pro-Cuban regime groups, and with no relevance in the trade union and political life of the United States, was institutionalized and enhanced by the meeting held at the AFL-CIO in Washington, stated Joel Brito and Ivn Hernndez Carrillo, director and general secretary, respectively, of the International Group for Social Corporate Responsibility in Cuba, an organization advocating for the protection of labor rights and socially conscious behavior by international companies operating in Cuba. The CTC, they explain, is an instrument of an oppressive State that systematically violates the most basic and fundamental human and labor rights of the Cuban people.
These criticisms could have been lifted from a 2009 AFL resolution condemning multinational enterprises that profit from the exploitation of Cuban workers and from the Cuban governments chronic violations of international worker rights, the Cuban governments continued imprisonment, arrest, torture and other acts of unconscionable harassment against independent trade unionists, human rights advocates and democracy activists, and call for authentic and democratic Cuban trade unionism.
Get The Beast In Your Inbox!
Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.
A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't).
Subscribe
Thank You!
You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason.
Not long ago, the AFL would have lobbied strongly against a visit from a figure like Snchez. During the Cold War, it repeatedly pressured the State Department to deny visas to communist officials posing as authentic trade unionists. In the 1980s, the New York State AFL president described a delegation of Nicaraguan Sandinista trade union leaders as an enemy within floating around the United States under the guise of representing workers. That description fits Snchez, who is, in the words of Brito and Hernndez Carrillo, not a union leader but an oppressor co-protagonist of the worst indisputable violations of the fundamental rights of Cuban wage earners.
What caused the change in labors Cuba policy? Part of the shift surely owes to the Obama administrations Havana opening, which, by offering unconditional concessions to the Castro regime, emboldened the dictatorship. But larger forces are at play, namely, the gradual triumph of progressive anti-anti-communism over an earlier generations Cold War liberalism. Emblematic of this tendency is an article in The Nation by left-wing journalist Tim Shorrock appraising the AFLs Cold War record as one stained by a belligerent anti-communism that today looks like a dangerous anachronism. But whats truly anachronistic in the 21stcentury is a one-party state devoted to the worker-crushing principles of Marxist-Leninism, not the opposition to it.
Follow this link:
What Is American Labor Thinking in Honoring a 'Union' Figure From Cuba? - Daily Beast
What Is Communism?
Communism is a political ideology that believes that societies can achieve full social equality by eliminating private property. The concept of communism began with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840sbut eventually spread around the world, being adapted for use in the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
After World War II, this quick spread of communism threatened capitalist countries and led to the Cold War.
By the 1970s, almost a hundred years after Marxs death, more than one-third of the worlds population lived under some form of communism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, communism has been on the decline.
Generally, it is the German philosopher and theorist Karl Marx (1818-1883) who is credited with founding the modern concept of communism. Marx and his friend, German socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), first laid down the framework for the idea of communism in their seminal work, The Communist Manifesto (originally published in German in 1848).
The philosophy laid out by Marx and Engels has since been termed Marxism, as it differs fundamentally from the various forms of communism that succeeded it.
Karl Marxs views came from his materialist view of history, meaning that he saw the unfolding of historical events as a product of the relationship between the differing classes of any given society.
The concept of class, in Marxs view, was determined by whether any individual or group of individuals had access to theproperty and to the wealth that such property could potentially generate.
Traditionally, this concept was defined along very basic lines. In medieval Europe, for example, society was clearly divided between those who owned land and those who worked for those who owned the land.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the class lines now fell between those who owned the factories and those who worked in the factories. Marx called these factory owners the bourgeoisie (French for middle class) and the workers, the proletariat (from a Latin word that described a person with little or no property).
Marx believed that it was these basic class divisions, dependent on the concept of property, that lead to revolutions and conflicts in societies; thus ultimately determining the direction of historical outcomes. As he stated in the opening paragraph of the first part of The Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.*
Marx believed that it would be this type of opposition and tensionbetween the ruling and the working classesthat would eventually reach a boiling point and lead to a socialist revolution.
This, in turn, would lead to a system of government in which the large majority of the people, not just a small ruling elite, would dominate.
Unfortunately, Marx was vague about what type of political system would materialize after a socialist revolution. He imagined the gradual emergence of a type of egalitarian utopiacommunismthat would witness the elimination of elitism and the homogenization of the masses along economic and political lines. Indeed, Marx believed that as this communism emerged, it would gradually eliminate the very need for a state, government, or economic system altogether.
In the interim, however, Marx felt there would be the need for a type of political system before communism could emerge out of the ashes of a socialist revolutiona temporary and transitional state that would have to be administered by the people themselves.
Marx termed this interim system the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx only mentioned the idea of this interim system a few timesand did not elaborate much further on it, which left the concept open to interpretation by subsequent communist revolutionaries and leaders.
Thus, while Marx may have provided the comprehensive framework for the philosophical idea of communism, the ideology changed in subsequent years as leaders like Vladimir Lenin (Leninism), Josef Stalin (Stalinism), Mao Zedong (Maoism), and others attempted to implement communism as a practical system of governance. Each of these leaders reshaped the fundamental elements of communism to meet their personal power interests or the interests and peculiarities of their respective societies and cultures.
Russia was to become the first country to implement communism. However, it did not do so with an upsurge of the proletariat as Marx had predicted; instead, it was conducted by a small group of intellectuals led by Vladimir Lenin.
After the first Russian Revolution took place in February of 1917 and saw the overthrow of the last of Russias czars, the Provisional Government was established. However, the Provisional Government that ruled in the czars stead was unable to administer the states affairs successfully and came under strong fire from its opponents, among them a very vocal party known as the Bolsheviks (led by Lenin).
The Bolsheviks appealed to a large segment of the Russian population, most of them peasants, who had grown weary of World War I and the misery it had brought them. Lenins simple slogan of Peace, Land, Bread and the promise of an egalitarian society under the auspices of communism appealed to the population. In October of 1917with popular supportthe Bolsheviks managed to roust the Provisional Government and assume power, becoming the first communist party ever to rule.
Holding onto power, on the other hand, proved to be challenging. Between 1917 and 1921, the Bolsheviks lost considerable support amongst the peasantry and even faced heavy opposition from within their own ranks.
As a result, the new state clamped down heavily on free speech and political freedom. Opposition parties were banned from 1921 on and party members were not allowed to form opposing political factions amongst themselves.
Economically, however, the new regime turned out to be more liberal, at least for as long as Vladimir Lenin remained alive. Small-scale capitalism and private enterprise were encouraged to help the economy recover and thus offset the discontent felt by the population.
When Lenin died in January of 1924, the ensuing power vacuum further destabilized the regime. The emerging victor of this power struggle was Joseph Stalin, considered by many in the Communist Party (the new name of the Bolsheviks) to be a reconcilera conciliatory influence who could bring the opposing party factions together. Stalin managed to reignite the enthusiasm felt for the socialist revolution during its first days by appealing to the emotions and patriotism of his countrymen.
His style of governing, however, would tell a very different story. Stalin believed that the major powers of the world would try everything they could to oppose a communist regime in the Soviet Union (the new name of Russia). Indeed, the foreign investment needed to rebuild the economy was not forthcoming and Stalin believed he needed to generate the funds for the Soviet Unions industrialization from within.
Stalin turned to collecting surpluses from the peasantry and to foment a more socialist consciousness amongst them by collectivizing farms, thus forcing any individualist farmers to become more collectively oriented. In this way, Stalin believed he could further the states success on an ideological level, while also organizing the peasants in a more efficient manner so as to generate the necessary wealth for the industrialization of Russias major cities.
Farmers had other ideas, however. They had originally supported the Bolsheviks due to the promise of land, which they would be able to run individually without interference. Stalins collectivization policies now seemed like a breaking of that promise. Furthermore, the new agrarian policies and the collection of surpluses had led to a famine in the countryside. By the 1930s, many of the Soviet Unions peasants had become deeply anti-communist.
Stalin decided to respond to this opposition by using force to coerce farmers into collectives and to quell any political or ideological opposition. This unleashed years of bloodletting known as the Great Terror, during which an estimated 20 million people suffered and died.
In reality, Stalin led a totalitarian government, in which he was the dictator with absolute powers. His communist policies did not lead to the egalitarian utopia envisioned by Marx; instead, it led to the mass murder of his own people.
Mao Zedong, already proudly nationalist and anti-Western, first became interested in Marxism-Leninism around 1919-20. Then, when Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek cracked down on Communism in China in 1927, Mao went into hiding. For 20 years, Mao worked on building up a guerrilla army.
Contrary to Leninism, which believed a communist revolution needed to be instigated by a small group of intellectuals, Mao believed that Chinas huge class of peasants could rise up and start the communist revolution in China. In 1949, with the support of Chinas peasants, Mao successfully took over China and made it a communist state.
At first, Mao tried to follow Stalinism, but after Stalins death, he took his own path. From 1958 to 1960, Mao instigated the highly unsuccessful Great Leap Forward, in which he tried to force the Chinese population into communes in an attempt to jump-start industrialization through such things as backyard furnaces. Mao believed in nationalism and the peasants.
Next, worried that China was going in the wrong direction ideologically, Mao ordered the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in which Mao advocated for anti-intellectualism and a return to the revolutionary spirit. The result was terror and anarchy.
Although Maoism proved different than Stalinism in many ways, both China and the Soviet Union ended up with dictators who were willing to do anything to stay in power and who held a complete disregard for human rights.
The global proliferation of communism was thought to be inevitable by its supporters, even though prior to the World War II, Mongolia was the only other nation under communist rule besides the Soviet Union. By the end of World War II, however, much of Eastern Europe had fallen under communist rule, primarily due to Stalins imposition of puppet regimes in those nations that had lain in the wake of the Soviet armys advance towards Berlin.
Following its defeat in 1945, Germany itself was divided into four occupied zones, eventually being split into West Germany (capitalist) and East Germany (Communist). Even Germanys capital was split in half, with the Berlin Wall that divided it becoming an icon of the Cold War.
East Germany wasnt the only country that became Communist after World War II. Poland and Bulgaria became Communist in 1945 and 1946, respectively. This was followed shortly by Hungary in 1947 and Czechoslovakia in 1948.
Then North Korea became Communist in 1948, Cuba in 1961, Angola and Cambodia in 1975, Vietnam (after the Vietnam War) in 1976, and Ethiopia in 1987. There were others as well.
Despite the seeming success of communism, there were starting to be problems within many of these countries. Find out what caused the downfall of communism.
* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. (New York, NY: Signet Classic, 1998) 50.
Visit link:
What Is Communism? - ThoughtCo
NewsBusters (press release) (blog) | What? Amazon's New Anti-Communist Satire Mocks Lefties NewsBusters (press release) (blog) They then brought in such talent as Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to dub over the original Romanian dialogue. In reality, this is a new show created to make fun of these old propaganda pieces, and mocks their love of communism and fear of the ... |
Originally posted here:
What? Amazon's New Anti-Communist Satire Mocks Lefties - NewsBusters (press release) (blog)
A Lancaster bomber of 463 Squadron RAAF, at RAF Base Waddington, England. (This aircraft, number ME701 code JO-F, with nose art of a cow titled "Whoa Bessie" was the camera aircraft for the bombing mission which sank the German battleship "Tirpitz" in September 1944.) Image via Department of Defence.
According to Frank Walkers new book Traitors, an overwhelming fear of communism saw some of the most reprehensible Nazis helped to resettle in Australia, once World War II had ended.
Walker said that after the war ended, the intelligence agencies that went out and kidnapped or recruited German and Japanese scientists, ultimately did so to ensure that the Allies had the edge in developing the next generation of warfare, which started with the atomic bomb.
Speaking to Defence Connects Phillip Tarrant, Walker said that in order to underpin his main theme of the betrayal of the Allied soldiers by their own governments, he was able to draw on a wide range of sources and archives.
I wanted for the reader to be able to perceive that this was a much wider happening in history than just a few isolated cases, he said. But I think the moral of the story, that we can see today, is that we've got to remember what we're fighting for.
Why do we have a defence industry [and] why do we have a defence of Australia, asked Walker, adding: who are our real enemies?
Walker also highlighted another pressing and rather sobering question around the issue of certain high-profile US companies which had conducted business with Germany in the lead-up to the war, continued to do so through back doors into Germany.
That was all for profit, he argued. It wasn't a great ideological war.
To hear more from Frank Walker, staytuned for ourexclusive podcast.
See the original post here:
Fear of communism saw Nazis resettled in Australia - Defence Connect