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The treacherous lure of the Establishment has indeed been a constant problem for Labour leaders from Ramsay MacDonald and Hugh Gaitskell to Sir Keir Starmer. Roy Jenkins, who narrowly failed to get the top job, was almost a caricature in this respect. All of them could talk the talk but were ultimately less interested in socialism than in social climbing.

So perhaps it's unsurprising that Murray doesnt come up with an answer to the titular question. (Neither did Engels, by the way. He steered clear of those abominable drawing-rooms and focused instead on strike action in London's East End.) Murray's title is somewhat misleading anyway. More a memoir than a work of analysis, his book provides an often anecdotal account of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership as seen from the inside. A lifelong communist and veteran of the Stop the War coalition, Murray was unexpectedly seconded to Corbyns office by the trade union Unite to help counteract daily sabotage by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party and media.

In fact, two more immediate questions run through the book: is Labour a fit and proper vehicle for the pursuit of socialism, and can equality, social justice and ecological balance ever be attained via institutions like the British parliament?

A hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik uprising, the Labour Party made a deliberate ideological choice not to agitate for revolution but instead to take the long and winding parliamentary road to socialism.

This ambivalent century-old legacy provided the context for Murrays previous book,The Fall and Rise of the British Left, which was written at a time of peak Corbynism, following Labours unexpectedly strong showing at the 2017 general election. It told the story of a radical politician overhauling the historically conservative Labour Party. Published in the autumn of 2019, the book was, as the author himself admits, a spectacularly mistimed work, since the left in question was then teetering on the brink of a precipitous fall.

Is Socialism Possible in Britain?attempts to look at what went wrong and why Corbynism failed. Quite rightly, it points a finger of blame at the PLP, which fought Corbyn from the outset, displaying scant regard for his election by the wider party membership. The MPs' antipathy to Corbyn was based on Blairite opposition to his campaigning against imperialist wars, his disregard for neoliberal economic orthodoxies (including austerity) and, above all, his willingness to champion concepts often ignored by mainstream politics, such as public ownership and tax increases on business and the rich.

Yet Murray also candidly assesses the leaderships mistakes, in particular its botched response to the anti-Semitism controversy and its dithering over Britains relationship with the European Union. The "Brexit blunder", as he calls it, alienated Labour leave-voters in the north of England's so-called "red wall" seats by appearing to disrespect the outcome of the 2016 referendum, and therefore missed an opportunity to re-frame the question to Corbyn's advantage. By the summer of 2017, according to Murray, most Remainers had set their sights no higher than securing a soft Brexit that would have left Britain aligned with the EU single market. Had the Corbyn leadership, still riding high after its June election triumph, backed Theresa Mays deal, it might have put the issue to bed by the time of the next general election at which Labour would have trounced the Tories with its alternative vision for a post-Brexit Britain.

It's hard not to agree with Murray that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was dramatically overstated for political reasons by Corbyn's opponents. Yet he doesnt deny that there were grounds for concern. Anti-Semitism did resurface within the Party but not more so, perhaps less so, than elsewhere in the rest of British society, often as a result of misdirected opposition to Israels apartheid against Palestinians. Yetthe leaderships response to toxic attitudes was belated and inadequate. However, it is worth pointing out that similar attitudes are routinely expressed in the columns of theDaily MailandDaily Telegraph, both of which claimed that Corbyn himself was anti-Semitic a ludicrous suggestion given his lifelong fight against all forms of racism.

Undeniably one of the causes of Labours declining support in Englands post-industrial regions is a basic historical fact: the industrial communities that gave rise to the Labour movement no longer exist. In other words, socialism may no longer be possible in Britain, if it ever was, through the agency of the Labour Party. Corbynism is now receding in the rear-view mirror of politics. Yet the social conditions that it addressed, from inequality and corruption to war and climate change, loom larger than ever given the bankruptcy of neo-liberal economics and that is why a similar movement, the next attempt to make socialism possible in Britain, will no doubt come along soon.

Read more:
Andrew Murray: Is Socialism Possible in Britain? review - what went wrong and why Corbynism failed - The Arts Desk

Its a sunny spring day in 1909 at the Stadtpark in Vienna. Leon Trotsky, fresh off another jailbreak, kicks a soccer ball toward his kids and waves back at his wife, whos sprawled beneath a maple tree on a picnic blanket with another couple. Trotsky waltzes over and chats with his friend, one of the most renowned psychoanalysts in all of Vienna. No, not Sigmund Freud the man with Trotsky would actually be expelled from Freuds inner circle two years later. But while hes less remembered today, he remained highly influential on an international scale for decades, his ideas taking center stage during the citys interwar socialist period known as Red Vienna. This man was Alfred Adler.

Adlers break with Freud in 1911 was a long time coming. He had joined Freuds famous Wednesday Psychological Society at its inception in 1902, but over the course of the next decade, the two mens thought diverged. Adler had entered the group already a socialist, and his political views shaped his psychological thought. Freud, meanwhile, preferred to keep politics out of the clinic. Because of Adlers early involvement in the group and his widely recognized clinical skill, he felt empowered to challenge Freud. But Freud found the challenge increasingly frustrating, and eventually the group dynamic became untenable.

Adler entered the Viennese stage in 1898, with his first professional publication at the age of twenty-eight. His Health Book for the Tailor Trade aimed to describe the connection between the economic condition of a trade and its disease, and the dangers for public health of a lowered standard of living. Adler outlined the diseases common to Viennese tailors, their etiologies, their psychological impacts, and the potential of various reforms to improve workers lives. He examined how industrialization had changed the tailor trade and argued in favor of robust government regulation to improve conditions and rights for workers. At the start of his career, Adler was already emphasizing the social aspect of disease and advocating for a more preventative type of medicine, both biologically and socially.

This would become the basis of Freud and Adlers conflict. Freud found Adlers emphasis on the way social forces shape the psyche unconvincing and regressive. Adler first articulated his idea somewhat crudely by way of what he initially called the aggression drive, a socially situated drive that, in his view, was totally separate from Freuds famous sexual drive, or libido. Freud initially tolerated this variant view, but within a few years began to openly reject Adlers thinking in the group and insist upon the primacy of the sexual drive. Later, after living through the horrors of World War I, Freud would develop his concept of the death drive, a drive altogether separate from libido and strikingly similar to Alfred Adlers initial conception of the aggression drive.

After his exile from Freuds group, Adler found intellectual freedom. Though the two regarded each other bitterly, talking a bit of smack at every opportunity, they mostly stayed out of each others way. During the First World War, Adler was drafted as an army physician and worked psychiatrically in Austrian military hospitals, an experience that left its mark on the man. He would later talk about the guilt he felt in treating his patients with such care, only for them to be sent back out for slaughter.

The experience of World War I inspired Adlers most enduring concept: Gemeinschaftsgefhl. An inelegant though good-enough English translation might be a community of equals creating and maintaining feelings of social interest, often shortened to just social interest in Adlerian circles. Adler started to view social interest as an inherent psychological trait and one that could be measured in the individual. In fact, Adler believed that most psychopathology was rooted in a maladaptive sense of social interest. To what degree do we care about our fellows? About the common good? Indeed, the Adlerian clinician seeks to help patients move toward more adaptive social interest in order to alleviate their symptoms and improve their conditions.

This idea has persisted, though not necessarily in Adlers precise terms. From Adlers student Abraham Maslows hierarchy of needs, to work on the psychological benefits of altruistic action, to research showing how reward chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin are released during socialization, Adler was ahead of his time in promoting social interest. His focus on collective well-being was deeply informed by his socialist politics. In one of his more poetic moments, he claimed, Socialism is deeply rooted in community feeling. It is the original sound of humanity.

After the war, Adlers influence spread across Vienna. He had a thriving practice where he saw patients and taught courses at institutes, lecturing to both professionals and the general public. He worked toward educational reform while serving as the vice chairperson of the Workers Committee of Viennas First District. He also started his own psychological society that met on Mondays. Where Freuds Wednesday group was becoming increasingly exclusive, Adlers maintained the egalitarian spirit that drove his work: all were welcome to attend. The door was left wide open, as one student put it.

Between the world wars, Vienna came under the leadership of socialists, a period known as Red Vienna. During this time, Adlers attention turned toward the youth. He observed their demoralization after the war, and embarked on a venture to connect psychological clinicians to Viennese schools and set up child guidance clinics around the city. Adler trained students, teachers, and parents in his developing psychology, proselytizing his ideas about social interest. The effort was monumental: Adlers contribution can accurately be said to have created a new educational milieu and shared emotional understanding among Viennese youth, educators, and parents. One of the many tragedies of the Third Reich would be the annihilation of this effort.

Adler started to gain international recognition for his progressive work, especially around child development, marriage, gender equality, and a host of other issues all infused with Gemeinschaftsgefhl. In the late 20s, he began traveling to the United States to spread the message, and picked up a teaching post at the New School. His American sojourns produced a popular book called Understanding Human Nature, which catapulted Adler to prominence in both the American public and academic circles. While in America, Adler became less overtly political, but his psychological perspective maintained its characteristic egalitarianism and consideration for economic and social conditions.

The less socially conservative American audience greeted his contributions with enthusiasm, especially his lectures on the gendered power dynamics in marriages. Adler toured across the country and would go on to influence Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, Harry Stack Sullivan, and most other major mid-century American psychologists. Adlers influence on American popular psychology was profound: one need look no further than the contemporaneous emergence of Alcoholics Anonymous and its primary philosophical principle that by helping another alcoholic, you are actually helping yourself to see Gemeinschaftsgefhl weaving itself into the fabric of American culture. While the United States in the interwar period was no Red Vienna, Adlers ideas matched the political mood here as well, particularly as the New Deal fostered a more inspired imagination of the prospects for social interest among the American public.

In 1929, Adler decided to move to New York City to begin teaching at Columbia Universitys medical school and to run a child guidance clinic at the university six days a week. His wife, Raissa, intended to come later, preferring to stay in Europe to continue her revolutionary work, which at that point primarily consisted of assisting their dear friend Trotsky in trying to topple Joseph Stalin. (Raissa was a committed Trotskyist, and her politics no doubt served as the foundation for much of Adlers political thought.) Adlers association with Columbia was short-lived, and his 1930 exit is shrouded in mystery. What is known is that when Adlers name was put up for a permanent position, it was quickly denied by the loyal Freudian psychoanalysts populating the Columbia University medical faculty.

Nevertheless, Adler continued to popularize his ideas, mostly by touring and lecturing. He kept himself busy promoting his theories on the ground, his published works consisting of little more than patched-together lecture notes. In fact, one reason Adlers afterlife has suffered is because his writings are not very good. His early German work has not been properly translated into English, and his English work is second-rate. Where Freud wrote with great care and skill, Adler phoned it in, at times just passing his notes to students to compile into something digestible. In a great irony, his active promotion of his ideas from the lectern and in the clinic made him wildly influential during his lifetime, while his neglect of published works has caused that influence to go unrecognized.

Adler died suddenly in Scotland in 1937. He had just completed a lecture and written a letter to Raissa, now living in New York, announcing his intention to travel on to Russia in an effort to locate their missing daughter, the sole Adler still in Europe. Their daughters disappearance was weighing heavily on the sixty-seven-year-old Alfred, and he suspected the worst, considering the family ties to Trotsky. In 1942, a friend of the family and great admirer of Adler, one Albert Einstein, would deliver the news to Raissa that their daughter had died in a Siberian prison camp.

Even beyond his concept of social interest, Adlers thought offers us useful concepts today as we continue to move toward a more emancipatory future.

Perhaps his most famous contribution to the field of psychology is the idea of compensation. Adler posited that when a person experiences some deficit in their being, whether natural or imagined, they will then compensate in other ways for that perceived inferiority. Compensation is often healthy: Adler was quick to cite a study done in a German art school showing that a majority of the art students claimed a congenital optical abnormality. When our experience of coping with this inferiority becomes maladaptive, we develop a neurotic complex hence the now popular concept of overcompensation.

Adler believed that most neuroses stemmed from leftover feelings of inferiority from childhood. As children develop, they begin to recognize their natural inferiority to their caretakers physically, socially, and emotionally. When not properly cared for, encouraged, or empowered toward healthy compensation, these feelings of inferiority can begin to take a different shape and send them into maladaptive behaviors and away from social interest. Adler believed that the effects of this process carried into adulthood. In todays terms, we would call this feeling of characterological inferiority shame. Many psychological studies have since borne out Adlers theory, finding that shame increases disconnection, alienation, and isolation.

These ideas can help us understand the psychological factors at play in the current political climate, where overcompensatory personalities dominate and social interest is in short supply. They are also instructive for the Left as we conceptualize how to pursue our project of repairing that sense of investment in the well-being of society. Moments of perceived inferiority will inevitably arise in both the individual and collective experience; comparison is part and parcel of human existence. But it is how we compensate for those perceived inferiorities, how we find nuance and maintain mutuality in dealing with these dynamics, that makes all the difference. We can choose overcompensatory status jockeying and corrosive individualism, or we can choose solidarity.

Adler came to his emphasis on the social while working psychotherapeutically within the working class, championing gender equality, and surrounding himself with people devoted to social transformation through political action. When Vienna turned red, Adler was in the trenches. He walked the dialectical line between emphasizing the individual and society, seeking to empower individual people in order to encourage collective feeling. Adler knew that Freuds initial neglect of the social was not going to suffice to get to the root of the tailor workers issue or the oppressed wifes woes. He started from a belief in equality among people, and trusted that the answer to our problems lay in each other.

See more here:
For Socialist Psychologist Alfred Adler, Collective Feeling Was the Cure - Jacobin magazine

Brazils dominant classes have never had a great fondness for democracy. Inheritors of three centuries of European colonization and four centuries of slavery, they have shown, in the last hundred years, a strong propensity for an authoritarian state from 1930 to 1945 under the personal power of the caudillo Getulio Vargas; 1964-1985, a military dictatorship; in 2016, a pseudo-parliamentary coup against President-elect Dilma Rousseff; from 2018-2022: neo-fascist government of Jair Bolsonaro. The more or less democratic periods seem to be parenthesis between two authoritarian regimes.

The four years of Bolsonaros presidency have been a huge disaster for the Brazilian people. Elected with the support of the bourgeois press, business circles, landowners, banks, and neo-Pentecostal churches, he took advantage of the fact that Lula, the only opponent capable of beating him, had been put in prison, under false accusations. The former captain was unable to fulfil his dream of re-establishing a military dictatorship and shooting thirty thousand communists. But he has sabotaged every health policy in the face of Covid, resulting in more than 600 thousand deaths; he has ravaged Brazils fragile public services (health, education, etc.); he has reduced tens of millions of Brazilian women to poverty; he has actively supported the destruction of the Amazon by the kings of soybeans and cattle; he has promoted neo-fascist, homophobic, misogynist, and climate-sceptic ideas; he supported the paramilitary militias (responsible for the assassination of Marielle Franco); and he has not ceased to try to set up an authoritarian regime.

Will the October 2022 elections put an end to this nightmare? Lula is likely to win in the second round on October 30. But Bolsonaro, following the example of his political model, Donald Trump, has already announced that he will not recognize an unfavorable result: If I lose, it is because the vote has been falsified. A part of the Army, strongly represented in his government, seems to support him: will it go so far as to take the initiative of a military coup against the elected president, i.e. Lula? This hypothesis cannot be ruled out, even if it does not seem the most likely: the Brazilian Army is not used to moving without the green light from the Pentagon and the State Department. But right now, Biden has no interest in supporting a tropical Trump at the helm of Brazil. Bolsonaro tried to mobilize his supporterspolice, militiamen, retired generals, neo-Pentecostal pastors, etc.to create a crisis situation comparable to that caused by Trump around the Capitol after his electoral defeat. Will he have the same success as his North American idol?

Despite the highly questionable choice of a reactionary bourgeois politician (Geraldo Alckmin) as his running mate for for vice-president, it is clear that LulaLuis Inacio da Silva, former metalworker, trade union leader of the great strikes of 1979, and founder of the Workers Partyis currently embodying the hope of the Brazilian people to put an end to the neo-fascist episode of the last four years. He is supported by a broad coalition of forces, which includes not only most of the organizations of the left and the social movementtrade unions, the landless movement, the homeless movementbut also the broad sectors of the industrial bourgeoisie, which unlike the land owners, who remain loyal to Bolsonaro, came to the conclusion that the ex-captain was not a good option for business. It must be acknowledged that the electoral battle was not preceded by a rise in popular mobilization as in Colombia.

The Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), the main force of the radical and/or anti-capitalist left in Brazilwhere there are several currents associated, in one form or another, with the Fourth Internationaldecided, after a long internal debate, to support Lula from the first round. A small dissident current, led by the economist Plinio de Aruda Sampaio Jr, who disagreed with this choice, left the party, but the main left currents of the PSOLsuch as the Movement of the Socialist Left (MES), whose spokeswoman, Luciana Genro, was the presidential candidate of the PSOL in 2014have, despite their desire for a PSOLs own candidacy in the first round, accepted the majority decision and actively participated in the campaign in support of Lula.

Most PSOL activists have no illusions about what the government led by Lula and the Workers Party (PT) would be: probably an even more unbalanced version of the social-liberal policies of class conciliation of previous experiences under the aegis of the PT. Admittedly, these experiments have allowed some social advances, but it is not certain that this will be the case this time. This will depend, of course, on the ability of the radical left and, above all, of the social movements, of the exploited and the oppressed to move, autonomously and independently. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the vote for Lula is an unavoidable necessity to free the Brazilian people from the sinister nightmare that the regime of Jair Bolsonaro has signified.

Once elected, Lula will face many difficulties: fierce opposition from sectors of the Army, the kings of cattle and soybeans, neo-Pentecostal churches, fanatical (often armed) supporters of Bolsonaro. He risks having before him a hostile Congress, dominated by reactionary forces; the present Chamber is governed by the so-called 4 Bs: beef, banks, Bibles, bullets, i.e. landowners, finance capital, evangelical sects and paramilitary militias. One of the decisive battles of the future will be the rescue of the Amazon, which is being destroyed by agro-capitalism.

In addition, Lula will be, like Dilma Rousseff, under the permanent threat of a parliamentary coup. This results from a disastrous choice for the vice-presidency: Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of So Paulo, the former right-wing opponent beaten by Dilma Rousseff in 2014. Lula probably chose him to give pledges to the bourgeoisie and disarm the right-wing opposition. But he has thus given a decisive weapon to the ruling classes. If Lula takes any action that does not please the Brazilian oligarchs, who controls the majority of the parliament, he will be the subject of impeachment proceedings, as was the case with Dilma in 2016. In this sad precedent, she was punished under ridiculous pretexts, and replaced by the vice-president, Temer, a reactionary of the so-called bourgeois center. The same could happen to Lula: impeachment and substitution by Alckmin. The Colombian Gustavo Petro was more skilful, choosing as running mate Francia Marquez, an Afro-Colombian woman, feminist and environmentalist.

That said, the imperative of the moment, in October 2022, is, without a doubt, the vote for Lula. As Trotsky explained so well almost a century ago, the broadest unity of all the forces of the workers movement is the necessary condition for defeating fascism.

3 October 2022

Source New Politics.

Original post:
End of the Nightmare in Brazil? - International Viewpoint

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Is the media all powerful?

The rest is here:
Booklaunch: Socialism or extinction - the meaning of revolution in a time of ecological crisis - Socialist Worker

Not since October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, has the world come so close to nuclear war as today.

It is not necessary to glorify the Stalinist leader Nikita Khrushchev, let alone the imperialist president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, to recognize that there is a glaring difference between the reaction to that crisis and the one gripping the world today.

In a recently published book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear Folly, historian Serhii Plokhy writes that, despite enormous miscalculations and misjudgments on both sides, The crisis did not develop into a shooting war because Kennedy and Khrushchev both feared nuclear weapons and dreaded the very idea of their use.

Plokhy adds that Kennedy and Khrushchev did not step into the traps so masterfully created by themselves because they did not believe they could win a nuclear war, nor were they prepared to pay a price for such a victory. It is hard to imagine what the outcome of the Cuban crisis might have been if the two leaders had a more cavalier attitude toward the use of nuclear arms.

In the midst of a new global nuclear crisis, the United States/NATO and Russia seem to be proceeding in a manner aimed at demonstrating what this unimaginable outcome would actually be. There is a staggering indifference to the consequences of nuclear war.

Having launched the invasion of Ukraine with the nave and desperate assumption that he could compel his Western partners to negotiate, Russian President Vladimir Putin confronts the staggering failure of his bankrupt and reactionary strategy in Ukraine. The Russian military has suffered a series of defeats in recent weeks, including the debacle in Kharkiv followed by further advances of the Ukrainian military into territory that Russia now claims as its own.

Russia was goaded by the United States into a war for which it was entirely unprepared, underestimating the agenda of the United States and NATO. In the wake of humiliating defeats and facing internal crisis and recriminations within the Russian oligarchy, the Putin regime is responding with unmistakable threats to use nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, the United States and NATO, determined to press their advantage in pursuit of their global geopolitical objectives, are making statements that they will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear war.

In American newspapers and on television programs, there is open discussion about the possibility of nuclear war. The New York Times wrote on Sunday: Officials in Washington are gaming out scenarios should President Vladimir V. Putin decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon to make up for the failings of Russian troops in Ukraine A range of officials suggested that if Russia detonated a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukrainian soil, the options included some kind of military response.

Asked by ABCs Face the Nation what the United States would do if Russia used a nuclear weapon, former CIA Director David Petraeus replied, We would respond by leading a NATO, a collective effort, that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.

General Petraeus, who led US forces in genocidal rampages in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems to believe that the United States and NATO can wipe out Russian military forces, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, without retaliation. One must be borderline insane not to understand that such an attack by NATO on the Russian military forces would provoke a thermonuclear response by the Kremlin that would result in the utter destruction, with a horrific loss of life, of every major capital in Western Europe and North America.

The level of recklessness was summed up by an unnamed European official quoted in the Washington Post in an article headlined, Russias annexation puts world two or three steps away from nuclear war: No one knows what Putin will decide to do. But hes totally in a corner, hes crazy and for him there is no way out. The only way out for him is total victory or total defeat and we are working on the latter one. We need Ukraine to win and so we are working to prevent worst case scenarios by helping Ukraine win.

Have the Dr. Strangeloves who are making these statements even thought through the implications of their own policies? They are insisting that, whatever the consequences, the US and NATO powers must pursue a course that leads to the total defeat of Russia. Far from preventing the worst case scenario, their words and actions are fueling the fire that is leading to a worst case outcome.On the edge of the abyss, the position of the imperialist powers is: Forward until complete victory.

As always, the imperialist warmongers who are denouncing Putins threats to use nuclear weapons as an unprecedented breach of Great Power morality exhibit an astonishing forgetfulness about their own past actions. But it is a matter of historical fact that the United States has not only used nuclear weapons (against the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but it and other imperialist powers came close to using nuclear weapons when threatened with military defeat.

In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur sought authorization to use as many as 30 atomic bombs against Chinese troops crossing the border into Korea. In 1954, France pleaded with US President Eisenhower to use nuclear bombs to save its encircled troops at Dien Bien Phu. In 1962, Kennedy himself threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1973, Israel, facing defeat during the initial days of the Yom Kippur War, came close to using nuclear weapons against Egypt.

Desperation and recklessness may describe the moods gripping Washington and Moscow, but not their source. A political explanation must be found for this behavior.

The desperation of the Putin regime arises from the fact that it is confronted with the consequences of the dissolution of the USSR, a historic betrayal that set into motion all the subsequent socioeconomic andpolitical disasters. In dissolving the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy deluded itself into believing that Lenins analysis of imperialism was nothing more than a Marxian myth. But this myth has proven to be true. Thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, Russia is confronted with a war by the imperialist powers aimed at dismembering it.

Despite the disasters created by the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, the American ruling class believes that through war it can somehow stave off the growth of working-class opposition that haunts them.

Amidst all of this, there is no frank statement of the implications of the likely consequences of nuclear war. Politicians, high-ranking military personnel, and the media are talking nonchalantly about an event that could lead to the annihilation of hundreds of millions, even billions, of people.

What accounts for the difference between the response to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the situation today? Ultimately, the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not lead to nuclear war can be attributed to the character of the political period. In the 1960s American imperialism was passing through the era of the postwar capitalist boom. The Soviet Union, encompassing one-sixth of the worlds land mass, was in an immeasurably stronger position than the desperate and encircled Russian state.

Putins national chauvinism and xenophobia offer no alternative to the crisis created by US imperialism. Putin, speaking for a parasitic Russian oligarchy, fears the Russian working class even more than he does the US and the West. His response to the disaster created by the dissolution of the USSR blends the medieval obscurantism of Tsarist Russia with the counterrevolutionary nationalist politics of Stalinism.

No faith can be placed on the reasonableness of the American or Russian oligarchies. The pandemic has already revealed the utter indifference to human life, both of the Kremlin regime, which has accepted the death of 400,000people in Russia, and the imperialist ruling class in the US and Europe, whose herd immunity policies have led to millions of deaths worldwide.

The reckless actions of governments that are leading the world to disaster must be countered by a global mass anti-war movement of the working class and youth.

The working class must demand the immediate end to this reactionary war. It is necessary to unify the struggle by workers in defense of their social and democratic rights with the struggle against war.

The building of a new anti-war movement must be based on the perspective of international socialism, rejecting all forms of nationalism and xenophobia and fighting for the unity of workers in every country.

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Stop the war in Ukraine! - WSWS