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DOCUMENTS Declaration: SACP will work to strengthen its independent voice

Alex Mohubetswana Mashilo |

18 July 2022

Solly Mapaila the Party's new General Secretary, Blade Nzimande now national chairperson

Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor

18 July 2022

South African Communist Party

15thNational Congress

Boksburg, 13 to 16 July 2022

Declaration, adopted on 16 July 2022

We, the 400 voting delegates representing approximately 340,000 members of the SACP, as well as members of the Young Communist League of South Africa across the country, met from 13 to 16 July 2022 in Boksburg, constituting the historic 15thNational Congress of our Party.

In attendance were our Alliance partners, the ANC and COSATU, and formations of the mass democratic movement, as well as other fraternal organisations and distinguished guests from our country.

Also in attendance were representatives of communist and other anti-imperialist fraternal organisations from other countries in Africa, South America, North America, Europe, and Asia.

We met in the centenary year of the Young Communist League of South Africa and as we complete the Communist Partys hundred years of unbroken struggle to advance, deepen and defend the national democratic revolution and an advance towards socialism.

This has been a centenary of communist struggles to educate, organise and mobilise the working-class and its allies against a system that puts profits before people, a system that puts private accumulation before the environment, the crisis-ridden system of capitalism. It is this exploitative system that breeds the crisis-levels of racialised and gendered mass poverty, unemployment and inequality, as well as the associated crises of social reproduction and rising cost of living.

We met against the background of nearly 30 years since our April 1994 democratic breakthrough, which marked the end of decades of white minority rule and three hundred years of colonialism in our country. The April 1994 democratic breakthrough opened the prospects for a new, radical phase of the national democratic revolution, our strategy for democratic transformation and development towards socialism.

Many political and social gains have been made by the working-class majority over the last 30 years, but so have many opportunities been lost in deepening a radical structural economic transformation in favour of the workers and poor.

The countrys economy remains dominated by monopoly capital, with the continuing colonial and apartheid legacy deepening its multiple systemic crises, including inequality, unemployment, poverty, and the associated rise in cost-of-living. This situation has now been worsened by the crises of health pandemics, such as the deadly COVID-19 virus, and climate change.

Major aspects of working-class lives are in a crisis, mostly hitting women and youth the hardest, as the income of workers and poor sharply decline because of the crisis of rising cost-of-living.

In the circumstances, the main question that Congress focused on is what is to be done?

Roll back the neoliberal macroeconomic framework

Our national democratic revolution is threatened by the very things it seeks to overcomethe monopoly capitalist domination of the economy, its colonial and apartheid legacy, including the reproduction of crisis-high levels of inequality, unemployment, and poverty. Related to this, the financialisation of our economy undermines our ability to advance the programmes that the workers and poor need, such as industrialisation, a major infrastructure development programme, a universal basic income grant, and a National Health Insurance.

The working-class or proletarian communitiesmainly in urban townships and informal settlements, as well as in former bantustansare torn apart by the daily struggles for survival. The increasingly exploited and unemployed workers and poor are more and more becoming disillusioned with electoral politics because of the impact of policy failures, the impact of neoliberalism and the consequences of corruption.

Therefore, the SACP rejects the call for a social compact that is aimed at co-opting the working-class to advance neoliberal policy reforms originating from the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, imperialist credit rating agencies and other supranational bodies controlled and wielded by the US-led imperialist forces. Such a social compact excludes the crucial imperative to change the macroeconomic framework under which South Africa failed to reduce unemployment, eradicate poverty, and bring down the astronomical levels of inequality.

For the past 26 years, since the government imposed the neoliberal economic policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), the SACP and other militant working-class formations have been calling for a change in the macroeconomic framework. Without a fundamental shift in the macroeconomic framework, South Africa will continue to experience the problems of the crisis-high levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality that it has failed to address since 1996 after the government-imposed GEAR. The persistence of these problems directly results from GEAR and its lasting legacy, including its shock therapy, besides the persisting legacy of colonialism and apartheid, and the impact of global capitalist crises.

Emerging from the 15thNational Congress of our Party, we will intensify this struggle for a change in policy content and direction, most especially challenging neoliberalism.

The SACP rejects the dogmatic and widely discredited neoliberal macroeconomic framework and other policy measures which undermine our efforts to drive democratic transformation and developmental programmes of benefit to the workers and poor.

We reject the agenda of neoliberal austerity pushed by the National Treasury, which has meant massive budget cuts spending on public services and goods, resulting in a social crisis in working-class communities and affecting working-class women and youth, mostly black.

The SACP says no to the hyper-financialisation of our countrys economy. Financialisation has shifted financial resources away from the productive economy and social investments to speculative investments in the casino economy, the financial markets. These resources include retirement funds and other financial assets held by the banks and financial institutions, and many are controlled by financial services providers.

Workers need to assert their control over investments by their pension funds. Investing in the productive sector to drive major industrialisation and infrastructure development programmes towards expanding access to work for all should be an apex priority. This is one reason the government, with mobilised working-class support, needs to enforce prescribed assets on financial sector investments through legislation. This should include investments in areas of critical public developmental importance, such as a just, green transition.

It is critical to strengthen public financial institutionsthe DBSA, the IDC, the Land Bank, the PIC, the Postbank, and provincial financial entitiesto play a developmental role. This should be guided by a clearer mandating of the South African Reserve Bank to support the public development finance institutions.

In intensifying our campaign for a fundamental change in economic policy, including macroeconomic policy, we will push to dislodge neoliberalism in our national economic and social policy space. Without such a change, the masses of young people and women, who are black in their majority, will continue to be devastated by the high levels of unemployment, poverty, inequality and the crisis of social reproduction, and South Africa will not turn the tide against de-industrialisation.

To advance our policy objectives, we will build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor, guided by the 2022 iteration of the SACP programme titledThe South African Struggle for Socialism, inclusive of our Strategic Perspectives and Tasks. Immediate key priorities of our programme in the face of the catastrophic and unsustainable reality confronting most South Africans and around which we need to prioritise our mobilisation of the workers and the poor include:

A powerful, class conscious trade union movement

SACP reaffirms its support for democratic worker control of trade unions, trade union resources and workers funds. We will work to build the unity of workers in action, across trade unions and across federations.

The SACP says to the workers, together:

Let us build workers powers in the workplace and in the economy at large.

Let us fight outsourcing in the economy.

Let us fight labour-brokering in the public and private sector and build the unity of workers in the formal and informal sectors.

Let us build worker-controlled co-operatives in all sectors of the economy as an instrument of structural economic and social transformation and development.

Working-class and popular power in our proletarian communities

Proletarian communities are the historic sites of militant class struggles. However, over the past three decades, they have been ravaged by neoliberalism. We will continue to deepen our campaigns in working-class communities to win the following demands.

- The struggle for auniversal basic income grant, which should lift working-class households out of absolute poverty and help build capacity for the broad working-class to become the collective agents of fundamental change.

- The struggle for theright to work for allbeginning with the massive expansion of public employment programmes: where the work is not just temporary, but ongoing; where we care for infrastructure that makes our communities cleaner and safer places to live; where collective work rebuilds social cohesion and overcomes the huge despair and sense of alienation amongst millions of unemployed youth; where public employment work is productive and addresses the crises of social reproduction and poverty. This will include campaigning for an expansion of public employment in the caring economy, in early childhood learning, in the provision of collective food gardens and food kitchens, in sustaining places of safety for women and children.

- Build and strengthen the networks of community-based co-operatives,including organising community-owned stores and community-owned banking institutions, savings and burial societies.

- Active working-class involvement in the many institutions of participatory democracy, such as the community policing forums, school governing bodies, neighbourhood watches and street committees.

- Rebuild trade union locals in our communities as key points of focus from which we can help co-ordinate popular activism and rebuild workplacecommunity solidarity.

- Support government efforts directed at the township and village economy and the District Development Model, ensuring that these programmes impact positively on the lives of the working-class and poor.

Land reform for urban and rural transformation

South Africa needs radical land reform for both urban transformation, where 70 per cent of our people now live, and for rural development and transformation. Besides rural areas, and mainly the bantustans, the working-class and poor remain largely confined to peripheral townships and informal settlements that were designed as dormitory locations for the reproduction of cheap migrant black labour.

Apartheid legislation has been removed, but now the financialised property market acts with equal brutality in forcing the majority of workers and poor to live on the margins, in poverty traps far away from resources, amenities, and recreational facilities. While we seek to transform the reality within these settlements, we will equally strive to transform the overall spatial design of our towns and cities.

Land reform in our rural areas must be guided by the Freedom Charters clarion call for land to be shared among those who work it. Rural land reform, development and transformation must be directed to the population still living in the former bantustans as a priority.The SACP will campaign for:

- A land reform programme which focuses on providing infrastructure, water rights, agricultural extension officers and veterinary services to the most marginalised.

- Security of tenure for small and subsistence farmers, giving full recognition to a variety of tenure, including communal land tenure rights.

- Unscrupulous evictions of farmworkers and their families from farms to stop.

- The evictions of labour tenants and their families from farms on which they have lived and worked to cease. These evictions are nothing less than an ongoing colonial expropriation. As the SACP we say: EXPROPRIATE THE EXPROPRIATORSand without compensation! Return the former labour tenants as rightful owners to what are, in reality, their OWN farms.

A radical transformation of the financial sector

In the 2000s, the SACP launched the Financial Sector Campaign as part of its Red October Campaign. Through the campaign, the SACP successfully mobilised over 50 other formations.

The Financial Sector Campaign culminated in a Financial Sector Summit, convened by the government. Its most important achievements are those that immediately impacted positively on the working-class and the precarious strata of the middle class. These include transparency and regulation of credit bureaux, access to banking facilities, and the regulations of loans, clamping down on reckless and predatory lending practices, and addressing unregulated and unscrupulous home repossessions by the profit-driven exploitative commercial banks.

The National Credit Act and Regulator (now the Financial Sector Conduct Authority), which cushioned South Africa from the impact of the 2008 global crisis, were the direct achievements of the SACP-led Financial Sector Campaign. We alsodrovethe passing of legislation on co-operative banking through the campaign.

The time has come to intensify the Financial Sector Campaign. But this time, while mobilising based on financial consumer issues (for debt relief, against repossessions, and against the high transactional costs charged by the banking oligopolies), we will more militantly address the larger structural issues. The SACP, together with other working-class formations, community organisations, sectoral organisations, among others, will:

- Campaign to stop the massive illicit flows of capital from South Africa. The SACP will deepen the campaign for tight regulation of the capital account, cross-border capital transitions, and to roll back the erosion of exchange controls to protect our economy against exposure to the unbridled volatility of the dog-eat-dog insatiable pursuit of private wealth accumulation. Our efforts will include measures to direct investment into the productive sector to industrialise our economy, create employment, drive poverty eradication, and tackle inequality and uneven development. The South African Revenue Services, the South African Reserve Bank and other key state institutions in the financial sector must up their game.

- Campaign for the enforcement of prescribed asset requirements on the banks and financial institutions, to ensure that a significant proportion of their investments goes to the productive sector to build national production and create employment and infrastructure development.

- Campaign for the consolidation of a strong, developmental public banking sector, comprising national, provincial and sectoral state-owned banks and financial institutions, which the South African Reserve BankMUSTactively support. In terms of articulation, this will be buttressed by the national democratic revolutionary imperative to achieve the Freedom Charters vision of the state banking sectorthe common property of allto breakdown the monopoly of profit-driven, commercial banking interests.

- Campaign for the mandate of the South African Reserve Bank to target inclusively economic growth and moderate interest rates.

- Campaign for a thriving co-operative banking sector at all levels, national, provincial and local.

Dismantling the networks of state capture and clamping down on other forms of corruption

As the SACP 15thNational Congress, we welcomed the submission made by the Central Committee to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, the fraudulent alienation of the state. In campaigning to dismantle the networks of the fraudulent alienation of the state and to clamp down on other forms of corruption, the SACP will strengthen its capacity to advance the way forward proposed in the submission.

We mandate the 15thNational Congress Central Committee of the Party to complete studying the entire text of the commissions report, its orientation, findings and recommendations, to produce a comprehensive political and strategic response, to contribute to the programme of action required to dismantle the networks of the state capture corruption and to ensure that state capture does not rear its ugly head again.

We reiterate the Partys call, for the state to move decisively with prosecutorial investigations to hold those who were involved or complicit in the state capture corruption to account, to the full extent of the law. We expect prosecutions and maximum sentences. In addition, holding to account those who were involved or complicit in the state capture must include using asset forfeiture processes to seize the assets, the proceeds, the ill-gotten wealth that they gained from the corruption

Workers of the world, unite for peace and development

We express our solidarity with the people of Swaziland struggling for democracy, against the repressive monarchy, with the people of Zimbabwe who are facing human rights violations in a country devastated by virtual economic collapse.

We denounce imperialist aggression by the blood thirsty and trigger-happy United States-dominated NATO. The expansion of NATO, which is an instrument of war, represents the greatest threat to world peace and equality in our time. At present, this is manifesting itself through the NATO-provoked war in Ukraine. The impact of the war, including NATOs weaponisation and wielding of extraterritorial sanctions, includes the global cost-of-living crisis.

We reiterate our call for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine and for an end to the war on all fronts.

We pledge our solidarity with the people of the world amidst the United States imperialist aggression and foreign occupation, including but not limited to the people of Palestine, Western Sahara, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

The SACP reiterates its support for the Cuban people and government in their struggle for the United States to lift its unilateral and illegal blockade against Cuba and unconditionally end its occupation of the Cuban territory of Guantanamo Bay. The United Nations General Assembly must make its voice consistent and louder, once again, by voting for the lifting of the blockade.

Build the SACP as a vanguard party of the working-class for socialism

We will strengthen the vanguard character of the SACP in this extremely challenging national and global context. Over the years, the Party has grown in membership from around 10,000 members in 1998 to approximately 340,000 by July 2022.

Over the next five years, we will deepen our work to build and strengthen the independent voice of the SACP and strengthen our political, ideological and organisation capacity to mobilise popular forces and build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. This will include deepening political education within the ranks of the Party, to ensure that its membership growth is accompanied by a qualitative growth. We will build the SACP as a campaigning Party of the working-class and poor for socialism.

As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels state in theManifesto of the Communist Party, the first step in the revolution by the working-class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy, to build the supremacy of the proletariat, and to organise the proletariat to become, and afterwards as, the ruling class. The questions of the class character and leadership of the state, and the societal power concentrated, organised and exercised in the state, are crucial to every working-class revolution, including the national democratic revolution, our advance to socialism.

Therefore, we directed the newly elected Central Committee to consolidate and strengthen for finalisation by the next Augmented Central Committee the roadmap of the Party on building working-class leadership of society and hegemony over the state. In carrying out this task, the Central Committee must pay particular attention to the strategy and tactics suitable for active engagement in the electoral terrain of the class struggle. This work must be guided by the key task of the SACP arising from the Congress, TOGETHER, LETS BUILD A POWERFUL, SOCIALIST MOVEMENT OF THE WORKERS AND POOR:SOCIALISM IS THE FUTUREBUILD IT NOW!

SACP 15THNATIONAL CONGRESS CENTRAL COMMITTEE

1.General Secretary Cde Solly Mapaila

2.National Chairperson Cde Blade Nzimande

3.National Treasurer Cde Joyce Moloi-Moropa

4.1st Deputy General Secretary Cde Madala Masuku

5.2nd Deputy General Secretary Cde David Masondo and

6.National Deputy Chairperson Cde Thulas Nxesi

No

Surname

Name

Gender

Total

1

Manamela

Buti

M

247

2

Mashilo

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Declaration: SACP will work to strengthen its independent voice - DOCUMENTS - Politicsweb

Sunday [ro-choice advocates rallied at the Capitol. "With Roe v Wade getting overturned they are just handing out little death sentences for so many women and children," said attendee Heidi Barnett.The Party for Socialism and Liberations organized the rally, hoping to persuade President Joe Biden and other government officials to take action to protect a person's right to abortion."We need to stay in the streets and pressure the Biden administration, and to put pressure on every level of government here, to ensure safe abortion access for everybody, not just people who can afford to travel," said Party for Socialism and Liberations Rep. Bazaleel Jupiter.Jupiter said President Biden can take action now with various executive orders to ensure nationwide abortion access."Historically, presidents have expanded the supreme court, called for national health emergencies, you know, used federal lands. I mean 5% of land in Mississippi is federal land. There could actually be abortion clinics in every area of Mississippi. So, that could mean more access before roe was overturned," Jupiter said.The organization Advocates for Youth works to teach young people about reproductive rights and how to make changes in their community. Representatives from that organization strive to be a voice for people who can be impacted by the overturn, believing it is important."Having access to equitable and affordable abortions is something that I believe would be beneficial to all Mississippians. Especially when it comes to things like maternal death rates and the increase in the rise of kids in foster care who are not protected," said Advocates for Youth Rep. Kadin Love.One person rallying Sunday says they have attended multiple pro-choice events since the Supreme Court overturned Roe."People think they can have control over women's bodies, which, uh, no, like no. It's so not right," Barnett said.

Sunday [ro-choice advocates rallied at the Capitol.

"With Roe v Wade getting overturned they are just handing out little death sentences for so many women and children," said attendee Heidi Barnett.

The Party for Socialism and Liberations organized the rally, hoping to persuade President Joe Biden and other government officials to take action to protect a person's right to abortion.

"We need to stay in the streets and pressure the Biden administration, and to put pressure on every level of government here, to ensure safe abortion access for everybody, not just people who can afford to travel," said Party for Socialism and Liberations Rep. Bazaleel Jupiter.

Jupiter said President Biden can take action now with various executive orders to ensure nationwide abortion access.

"Historically, presidents have expanded the supreme court, called for national health emergencies, you know, used federal lands. I mean 5% of land in Mississippi is federal land. There could actually be abortion clinics in every area of Mississippi. So, that could mean more access before roe was overturned," Jupiter said.

The organization Advocates for Youth works to teach young people about reproductive rights and how to make changes in their community.

Representatives from that organization strive to be a voice for people who can be impacted by the overturn, believing it is important.

"Having access to equitable and affordable abortions is something that I believe would be beneficial to all Mississippians. Especially when it comes to things like maternal death rates and the increase in the rise of kids in foster care who are not protected," said Advocates for Youth Rep. Kadin Love.

One person rallying Sunday says they have attended multiple pro-choice events since the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

"People think they can have control over women's bodies, which, uh, no, like no. It's so not right," Barnett said.

Read more here:
Pro-choice advocates continue fighting for reproductive rights at the state Capitol - WAPT Jackson

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Americans are experiencing once-unthinkable shortages of baby formula, personal hygiene products, fertilizer, and basic pantry staples. The Biden administration is blaming Russias war on Ukraine and doing little to end it.

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Millions of people are crossing the southern border illegally and meeting virtually no resistance. This disaster is enriching international crime cartels who benefit from illegally trading drugs and human beings. People are dying, children are being sold into sexual slavery, and the administration is doing nothing to secure the border.

Speaking of enrichment, Iran is rapidly enriching uranium. Nuclear weapons experts say the worlds largest funder of terrorism is close to having weapons-grade material. The Biden administration is feebly asking Tehran to stop and come back to a flawed deal that would only delay its plans.

This list goes on.

Now think about each one of these problems and what state they were in two years ago just before Joe Biden took office and Chuck Schumer became Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate.

In December 2020, the annual U.S. rate of inflation was 1.4 percent more than seven percentage points lower.

A gallon of gas cost $2.28 on average. America was no longer dependent on hostile foreign nations for energy.

Americas only significant shortages included rare earth metals, such as aluminum and silicon, and products made with them.

The southern border was secure. U.S. Border Patrol only had 40,565 encounters in December 2020 (compared to 239,416 in May 2022).

The shortage started three months ago, when the FDA found a deadly bacterial contamination which led to a baby formula recall, and shut down a major manufacturing plant. (FNC)

Meanwhile, there was largely peace abroad. Russia had not invaded Ukraine (and would not likely have considered doing so) because it could expect a serious reaction from a U.S.-led international community. Bloodshed had largely been staunched in Afghanistan. And Iran was under crippling economic sanctions that hindered its ability to develop nuclear weapons.

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More than any rhetoric or ideological argument, the reality of the last two years has shown that the Democrats fanatical belief that gigantic, self-interested, ideologically driven federal bureaucracies cannot solve our problems. In fact, they more often get in the way of the historic success that comes from freedom, local decision-making, and entrepreneurial activity.

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Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich is the host of the "Newts World" podcast and author of the New York Timesbestseller"Trumpand the American Future."His latest book is "Big Government Socialism." More of his commentary can be found at http://www.Gingrich360.com

Continue reading here:
Biden's big government socialism means that nothing works right in America - Fox News

From June 24 through July 6, the Ukranian section of the International Socialist League (ISL) published an eight-page document on its Facebook page in the name of its head and the leader of the Zakhyst Pratsi (Labor Defense) trade union, Oleg Vernyk. The post, which has now been published in English, Spanish, French and Ukrainian, was a response to exposures by the WSWS of the integration of the ISL into the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the promotion by its Ukrainian leader, Oleg Vernyk, of figures and documents of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

The post fully confirms the WSWS warnings of the pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist and extreme right-wing orientation of this petty-bourgeois nationalist tendency. At the beginning of its statement, the ISL openly states that it is guided by the basic principle of the defense of Ukraine as a political subject and the struggle for the preservation of the integrity of the State. These are the words not of a left-wing, much less revolutionary or socialist tendency, but of an organization that is consciously dedicated to defending the capitalist Ukrainian statefirst and foremost, against the working class.

In a Letter to a young Trotskyist in Russia, David North, the chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, exposed the reactionary nature of the political line of the ISL and elaborated on the principles of revolutionary internationalism and the historical continuity of Marxism, upon which the Trotskyist movement bases its opposition to the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the Putin regime.

The politics of the ISL are directly opposed to these Marxist and internationalist principles. In an extraordinary amalgam of historical lies, omissions and distortions, the ISL and Vernyk effectively seek to whitewash the crimes of Ukrainian fascism and justify their present-day alliance with the far-rightthe principal shock troops for the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

The fraud of the 1943 democratization of the OUN and the role of Petro Poltava

In the post, the ISL defends Vernyks promotion of materials by OUN-B and UPA members, writing:

He (Oleg Vernyk) never made propaganda in favor of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. On the contrary, he always proposed to make a deep analysis of the liberation and nationalist movement in Ukraine and the dynamics of its evolution, considering its branches both on the right and on the left, and advised against ignoring the complexities and problems that characterized these movements. In addition, Oleg Vernyk has always been very critical of the figure of Stepn Bandera, who had precisely been the leader of the ultra-radical right-wing branch of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), also expressing himself strongly against the democratization of the political figure of Bandera and against his conversion into leftist leader.

The entire post belies these claims. In fact, what the ISL presents is a revival of the same historical lies and myths that the OUN-B and UPA and their apologists have propagated for decades. Most strikingly, in the entire post, the terms fascism, Nazism, genocide, pogrom, anti-Semitism and racism are not used once in relation to the OUN or UPA. There is no discussion of the origins or ideology of the OUN, which was founded in 1929 as a fascist, terrorist organization with the explicit goal of destroying the social conquests of the October Revolution and founding an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.

Nor is there any mention of the fact that the OUN helped the German Wehrmacht prepare its invasion of the Soviet Union, and then helped instigate and perpetrate pogroms against Jews that resulted in an estimated 13,000 to 35,000 victims. While the OUN had split in 1940 into a wing headed by Andrei Melnyk (OUN-M) and one headed by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B), both collaborated with the Nazis. Even as leaders of the OUN-B were arrested by the Nazis, who had opposed the OUN-Bs proclamation of an independent Ukrainian state, the membership of the OUN as a whole was integrated into the Nazi occupation machinery and auxiliary police, which played a major role in the Nazi-led genocide of the Jews.

Completely ignoring the role of the OUN in the Second World War, the ISL and Vernyk seek to create the impression that there was a political and ideological separation between Bandera and the OUN from 1943 onward.

Defending Vernyks post of the pamphlet What are the Banderites and what are they fighting for by Petro Poltava (Fedun), a leading ideologist of the UPA and OUN-B, the post claims:

Mr. Petr Poltava narrates in that work how he had begun to propagate ideas that were absolutely opposed to the ideology of Stepn Bandera. Precisely those ideas that were proclaimed during the 3rd Regional Congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 were described by Stepn Bandera as Bolshevik ideas, that the Congress had been organized by some Bolsheviks and that he (S. Bandera ) would never accept the resolutions approved by that Congress. S. Bandera, who at that time was imprisoned in a German concentration camp called Sachsenhausen, had perfectly understood that a tendency towards democratization was beginning to appear within the ranks of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), towards the ideas of the left and the incitement to a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism. Obviously, this position was firmly rejected by Bandera and by the other members of the right-wing branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

These are blatant lies. Despite Banderas imprisonment in Sachsenhausenwhere he lived under highly privileged conditions and was able to stay informed about the OUNs workhe remained the acknowledged leader (providnik, the Ukrainian translation of Fhrer) of the OUN-B.

And far from propagating ideas that were absolutely opposed to the ideology of Stepn Bandera, the pamphlet by Poltava proudly proclaimed that the Banderites derived their name from the glorious son of the Ukrainian people, the long-term revolutionary fighter for the freedom and state independence of Ukraine, the leader of the revolutionary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)Stepan Bandera. [1]

Indeed, historians have frequently cited this well-known pamphlet as an example of the propaganda efforts of the OUN-B and UPA to whitewash their own crimes during and after World War II, as it explicitly denied any genocidal massacres by the OUN and its collaboration with the Nazis. Its fraudulent socialist demagogy was the result of the OUNs attempts to appeal to layers of the East Ukrainian peasantry, who were overwhelmingly hostile to the very idea of the restoration of capitalism, despite the immense crimes of Stalinism.

The ISL post stands in the tradition of this far-right propaganda. It presents the national socialist demagogy of Poltava as left-wing, even Bolshevik. In reality, the political and ideological origins of the OUN-Bs national socialism and its fascist violence lay in the reaction against the internationalist and Marxist program of the October Revolution. In a 1946 essay entitled, The revolutionary elements of Ukrainian nationalism, Poltava himself made this very clear, writing:

Ukrainian nationalism is also fighting against all those epigones of socialism of 1917-20 on Ukrainian soil, who stand on the position of internationalism, who fight for a class liberation that is elevated above the struggle for national liberation, without understanding that the destruction of social oppression in Ukraine can only come as a result of national liberation. [2]

It is this nationalist opposition to the October Revolution and Marxism that petty-bourgeois nationalist forces like the ISL and Oleg Vernyk share with Poltava and the OUN-B. Their insistence on 1943 as a turning point in the OUN-Bs supposed evolution toward democracy and left-wing views is not only based on historical lies. It reveals, above all, their own political orientation toward an alliance with imperialism and readiness to tolerate and deny the crimes of fascism for the sake of the defense of the Ukrainian state.

The democratization of the OUN-B in 1943 was a political fraud, designed to lay the foundations for what has become a decades-long alliance of the Ukrainian far right with US and British imperialism.It was also the beginning of an ongoing cover-up and whitewash of the genocidal crimes of Ukrainian fascism.

Following the defeat of the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43, the Ukrainian fascists realized that their only hope for the establishment of a Ukrainian capitalist nation-state lay in an alliance with the US and Great Britain. The OUN-B undertook certain changes to its program, but these were, as historian John-Paul Himka noted, programmatic window dressing, aimed at ensuring American and British aid for their cause. [3]

Thus, at its Congress in August 1943, the OUN publicly announced the recognition of equal rights for minorities and began to tone down its anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric. But just days before the Congress, the members of the SB (security organization) of the OUN-B received orders to annihilate all enemies of UPA, which was to be understood as all Poles, Czechs, Jews, Komsomol members, Red Army officers, workers of the militia, and all Ukrainians who have even the slightest sympathy for Soviet power. [4]

Most importantly, in the spring of 1943, the OUN-UPA had embarked on a genocidal campaign against the Polish population of Volhynia and Galicia, which claimed between 70,000 and 100,000 lives in 1943-44, the majority of them in 1943.

Entire villages were wiped off the map; their residents burned alive, shot or tortured to death. The UPA also frequently forced Ukrainians who had married Poles to murder their Polish spouses or children. The bodies of the dead were often mutilated horribly. Historian Gregorz Rossoliski-Liebe writes:

The UPA was the army that the OUN-B leaders expected to cleanse the Ukrainian race. Perhaps as a result of this conviction, acts of pathological sadism occurred frequently. In May 1943 in the village Kolonia Grada, for example, UPA partisans killed two families who could not escape as all the others had, after they realized that the UPA was attacking the neighboring village of Kolonia amane. The partisans killed all the members of these two families, cut open the belly of a pregnant woman, took the fetus and her innards from her, and hung them on a bush, probably to leave a message for other Poles who had escaped the attack and might come back to the village. [5]

The UPA was also systematically hunting down and murdering the few Jews who had so far managed to survive the Holocaust. There was even an order to kill anyone who had hidden Jews. By the end of the war, a shocking 98.5 percent of the Jews of Volhynia, the center of the OUN-Bs activities, had been murdered, one of the highest death rates in all of Europe.

There is not a single note in the ISLs eight-page document even mentioning, let alone condemning, any of these horrific crimes. Instead, the ISL alleges that in 1943, that is, at the height of its genocidal massacres, the UPA had turned towards the ideas of the left and the incitement to [of] a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism. This too is a lie.

While the UPA, which had been founded in 1942 independently from the OUN, had engaged in some partisan warfare against the Wehrmacht, in 1943, the UPA was violently taken over by the OUN-B. The organizations leadership now consisted, in the words of historian Per Anders Rudling, of ruthless OUN(b) activists, most of whom were trained by Nazi Germany, and many were deeply involved in the Holocaust. [6] Moreover, in spring 1943, an estimated 5,000 members of the 12,000 men of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, which had played a central role in the Holocaust, joined the UPA.

Throughout 1943, even as the formal alliance with the Nazis by the OUN was put on hold, agreements made between the two sides preempted attacks by the UPA on German forces, reducing them to a minimum. In 1944, the alliance with Nazi Germany was revived at the initiative of Bandera, and when the Nazis withdrew from Ukraine, they left the OUN-UPA tons of arms and ammunition. The German army regarded this cooperation as a good investment in the war against the Soviet Union. [7]

Following the end of World War II and the incorporation of West Ukraine into the Soviet Union, the OUN-UPA continued an insurrection against Soviet rule into the early 1950s, killing an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian civilians, most of them collective farmers and workers. In this civil war, the UPA and OUN relied on logistical support and weapons from the US and UK, whose secret services had established close relations with Bandera and other OUN leaders.

The Soviet bureaucracys response to this insurgency was both bankrupt and politically criminal: Fearing nothing more than a mobilization of the working class which would have also threatened its own rule and could have formed the basis for an international extension of the October Revolution, the bureaucracy resorted to violent bureaucratic measures of repression to thwart the insurgency. Hundreds of thousands of people were deported from Western Ukraine, and an estimated 150,000 people were killed by the NKVD.

This violent repression proved to be water on the propaganda mills of the Ukrainian right. Above all, it served to divide and confuse the working class. Over three decades later, when the Stalinist bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev moved to restore capitalism and destroy the Soviet Union in 1985, the latent Ukrainian far-right forces, both in the diaspora and within the Soviet Union, violently broke to the fore, becoming, yet again, a central prop for the intervention of imperialism in the region.

Using the crimes of Stalinism to whitewash fascism: The role of Danylo Shumuk and the 1953 Norilsk uprising

In the founding document of the International Committee of the Fourth International, James P. Cannon insisted that Trotskyists had to know how to fight imperialism and all its petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade union bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and, conversely, know how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism. [8]

The ISL turns this principle on its head. It cynically exploits the crimes of Stalinism to justify its alliance with the far right and imperialism. Central to this effort is the figure of Danylo Shumuk, a veteran of the UPA and leader of the 1953 Norilsk Gulag uprising.

As a youth, Shumuk had been a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU), which then functioned as an autonomous organization under the control of the Polish Communist Party (CPP). In 1938, as part of the Great Terror in the USSR, in which tens of thousands of revolutionaries from across Europe were murdered, Stalin dissolved the CPP and the Communist Parties of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine along with it.

Using the crimes of Stalinism to justify Shumuks turn to fascism, the ISL writes:

Danylo Shumuk waited until 1943, when the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) had begun its war on two fronts, that is, against German National Socialism and against Stalinism. That is when he enlisted in the ranks of the UPA. Unfortunately, Stalins executioners had taken Trotskys life by 1943. Therefore, it is very difficult for us to predict what tactics and strategy Leon Davydovich might have proposed to the communists of western Ukraine, considering the complex context of that time. He left that question to future discussions among comrades.

It is difficult to think of a more brazen lie. Leon Trotsky not only led the Red Armys struggle against counter-revolutionary nationalist forces, not least of all in Ukraine, in a civil war from 1918 to 1921 to defend and extend the conquests of the October Revolution. The Trotskyist movement has historically always insisted on rooting the opposition to Stalinism in the defense of the internationalist principles of Marxism against the bureaucracys counter-revolutionary and nationalist program of socialism in one country. And far from promoting alliances with nationalist, let alone fascist forces, Trotskyists have fought to build an independent revolutionary leadership for the international working class.

Whatever the tragic elements of Shumuks life and the crimes of Stalinism, it must be stated clearly that he never had anything to do with Trotsky and his struggle for internationalism and the political independence of the working class. His memoirs, which were published in English in 1984, have long formed an important part of the historical myth-making about the OUN and UPA by the far-right Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the US.

In his memoir, Shumuk fails to mention, let alone condemn, the Nazi-led genocide of over 1 million Ukrainian Jews, in which the OUN-UPA was deeply implicated. Instead, he justifies the (unspecified) crimes of the OUN-B as a response to the crimes by the NKVD, the typical argument of the Eastern European far right. [9] Shumuks glorification of the rank and file of the UPA and his insistence that he himself had always been motivated by nothing but truth, kindness and love squarely fall in the category of propaganda and myth-making. [10] By his own acknowledgement, he worked as a political instructor for the OUN-Bs most elite and most violent unit, the SB, and led a large UPA unit with many OUN-B and SB members in a period when the UPA was engaged in genocidal massacres.

Despite Shumuks sinister record, the ISL doubles down on Vernyk, posting about the memoirs of this unrepentant right-wing nationalist and his involvement in the 1953 Norilsk Gulag uprising. Trying to both defend Shumuk and create the impression that he worked closely with the left, they write that Trotskyist prisoners played a key role in the organization and execution of the plan for the 1953 Norilsk Gulag uprising, which Shumuk co-led.

Again, the ISL resorts to historical distortions and amalgams for definite political purposes. Out of the two individuals it mentions to prove its claim about the alleged involvement of Trotskyists, historical records indicate that one, Maria Shimanskaya, was not involved in the Norilsk but in another Gulag uprising a year later. [11] The other reference, to a certain Klichenko, is also misleading. The historical documents published about this uprising do not contain this name, but rather mention a certain Ivan Pavlovich Kliachenko. And the only existing reference to a political conversation with Kliachenko by another prisoner indicates that his group was in a minority and limited itself to the status of opposition to the plans of the Ukrainian nationalists who dominated the strike committee. [12] In both cases, it is unclear whether either of them ever were members of Trotskys Left Opposition, whose membership was murdered almost entirely during the Great Terror of the 1930s.

With these misleading references and statements, the ISL seeks to sow confusion about the character of the political forces involved in the uprising and blur the lines between left-wing and right-wing opposition to Stalinism.

The 1953 Norilsk uprising was the first in a series of Gulag uprisings that took place amidst a staggering crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which was accelerated by the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. After years of renewed repression in the Soviet Union, including openly anti-Semitic purges and a bloody crackdown on left-wing youth groups, a series of strikes and uprisingsmost notably in East Germany in June 1953now shook the Stalinist bureaucracies. The overwhelming majority of the Soviet working class and youth felt a powerful allegiance to the ideals and conquests of the October Revolution which they had just defended against fascism in World War II, and the dominant sentiment was to seek a return to the real Lenin.

Fearing the development of a broader left-wing movement in the working class, the bureaucracy responded with extraordinary violence to these developments, including to the Gulag uprisings.

However, while the political forces involved in these uprisings were extremely heterogenous, ranging from genuinely left-wing and anarchist groups, as well as religious sects, to the far right, historical documents indicate that, tragically, it was right-wing and nationalist forces that managed to dominate and direct many of these uprisings, especially the one in Norilsk. By 1953, the Ukrainian far right, in particular, had established a sophisticated underground network in many camps. This included a revival of the feared Banderite secret organization (SB), a general staff, as well as combat groups and groups for the execution of terrorist acts, political education and material provisions. [13]

In Norilsk, where the prison population included a particularly large contingent of both Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists, Shumuk created aself-help organization composed of former UPA members years before the uprising. Along with other right-wing nationalist forces, among them Russian and Baltic Nazi collaborators, they managed to dominate the strike committeeoften by thoroughly anti-democratic meansand picked a former official of the Nazi propaganda ministry to fulfill the role of propaganda minister. The hymn of the uprising was composed by a Belarusian nationalist to the tune of a UPA song and directed against the tyranny of Bolshevism. [14]

Principal responsibility for allowing the far-right to play such a major role, which by far outstripped its actual popular support, lies with Stalinism. Stalins Great Terror of the 1930s had resulted in the massacre of entire generations of socialists and revolutionaries, including the Trotskyist opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy. This mass murder, culminating in the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, politically beheaded the working class not just in the Soviet Union but in Europe as a whole and created immense damage to the socialist and historical consciousness of generations of workers.

Anyone committed to the fight for socialism today would see it as his or her primary task to establish the true historical record of these events and the crimes of Stalinism in order to politically arm the working class. The ISL does the opposite: It employs the Stalinist methods of historical lies and amalgams in order to sow historical confusion and cover up the crimes of the far right.

As always, the historical lie serves the purpose of political reactionin this case, it is the ideological cement for the ISLs line-up behind imperialism and the Ukrainian far right.

Indeed, just days after this document was published on the ISLs Facebook page, on June 29, Vernyk took part in a Ukrainian program for a 45-minute discussion with Oles Vakhnyi, one of Ukraines most notorious neo-Nazi skinheads. Vakhnyi has publicly endorsed the fascist attacks by the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed over 77 people, and made the Heil Hitler greeting in front of French TV cameras. In his discussion with this fascist thug in front of a Ukrainian flag, Vernyk expressed his support for the Ukrainian governments ban on opposition parties and strikes.

The rapid shift to the extreme right of the ISL contains important lessons for workers everywhere. Its open promotion of Ukrainian fascist forces is only the most extreme expression of the rapid rightward lurch of the petty-bourgeois ex-left internationally, which the ICFI has been documenting for many years. The ISL and Vernyks trade union are connected to various organizations in Latin America, Turkey and Europe, as well as the Progressive International, which was co-founded by the Sanders Institute of Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, who has voted in support of tens of billions of dollars for the arming of the Ukrainian army and fascists in the war against Russia.

But there is also another side to this class development: While the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left is being sucked into the capitalist war machine and is rallying to the defense of the bourgeois nation-state, the working class is being driven into an open struggle against imperialist war and capitalism on a world scale. This struggle will be waged in direct opposition to these nationalist forces on the basis of socialist and internationalist principles. The critical task now is to prepare the revolutionary leadership necessary for this struggle by building the sections of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution, including in Russia and Ukraine.

End Notes

[1] Petro Fedun (Poltava), Khto taki banderivtsi ta za shho vony boriutssia, in: Petro FedunPoltava, Kontseptsiia Samostiinoi Ukrainy, Tom 1: Tvory, Lviv 2008, p. 323.

[2] Petro Fedun (Poltava),Elementy revoliutsiinosti ukrayinskogo natsionalizmy, in: Petro FedunPoltava, Kontseptsiia Samostiinoi Ukrayiny, Tom 1: Tvory, Lviv 2008, p. 122.

[3] John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944, Stuttgart: Ibidem 2021, p. 368.

[4] Ibid., p. 372.

[5] Grzegorz Rossoliski-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. Stuttgart: Ibidem 2014, pp. 268-269.

[6] Per Anders Rudling, The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths, Carl Beck Papers No. 2107, November 2011, p. 10. The paper is available online.

[7] Rossoliski-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, p. 284.

[8] James P. Cannon, A Letter to Trotskyists throughout the World. Available on the WSWS: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/open-o21.html

[9] Danylo Shumuk, Life Sentence. Memoirs of a Ukrainian Prisoner, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies: University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1984, p. 346.

[10] Ibid., p. 100.

[11] Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-khpervaia polovina 1950-kh godov. Tom 6. Vosstaniia, bunty i zabostvki zakliuchennykh, ed. by V. A. Kozlov, Moscow: ROSSPEN 2004,pp. 611, 626, 628. The volume is available online: https://statearchive.ru/474

[12] The reference by a camp official to Kliachenko as a Trotskyist involved in the Norilsk uprising can be found in a document published in: Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, tom 6, p. 325. The discussion with him is recounted by Hrycyak, a former member of the OUNs youth branch, who co-led the Norilsk uprising, in his memoirs, which were published by a OUN-affiliated publishing house. Yevhen Hyrcyak, The Norilsk Uprising. Short Memoirs, Institut fr Bildungspolitik in Mnchen, Munich 1984, p. 23.

[13] Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, p. 81.

[14] Shumuk, Life Sentence, p. 213; Gimn norilskikh povstantsev. Available online under: https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=page&num=7564

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

Read more here:
The ISL whitewashes the crimes of Ukrainian fascism to justify its alliance with the far right - WSWS

Im Warren Smith, and today youll be listening in on my conversation with Jefrey Breshears. He is the author of a new book called American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and The Culture War: A Christian Response.

SOUNDBITE: The early church, if you want to describe it, or characterize it as moderately socialistic, to use modern terminology, the early church really practiced voluntary socialism, or voluntary communalism out of a sincere love for others. So, which is totally different, of course from secular political socialism, which is government mandated. It's always invariably coercive and involuntary.

Jefrey Breshears took an interesting path to become one of the most quietly influential thinkers in evangelicalism today. He was raised in the church, a conservative Baptist church, and he never completely left the faith of his youth, but he did have sojourns in what today we sometimes call the religious left or progressive Christianity. Well talk about that in our conversation today.

Jefrey also spent time in the music industry, working for both secular and Christian record labels in the early days of the Jesus Music era. His experiences there have informed his approach to apologetics, and his strategy at the Aeropagus Forum, which is a study center that combines apologetics with history and contemporary cultural issues.

Jefrey Breshears new book is American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and the Culture War: A Christian Response. He spoke to me from his office in Atlanta.

WS: Well, Jefrey, welcome to the program. It is really great to see you and to have this chance to talk. You and I have known each other for a very long time.

JB: Absolutely. Almost in a prior life, I'd say.

WS: Well, in fact, in some ways it was a prior life. And that's partly, the reason I said that is partly because that's why I, that's where I want to start our conversation. You were raised in a Christian home. And you, in your book, devote a couple of chapters to your own personal upbringing in Odyssey. And I think that because your book is so rich with, and so big, nearly 500 pages, 450 pages, that maybe telling your personal story might be the best and easiest way for us to get into that. Talk about your upbringing. Talk about your Christian home, and what that taught you and what the limitations of it were.

JB: Well, thank you, I certainly appreciate the opportunity. I rarely, obviously, I rarely ever get to speak about personal things. And it is a relatively small portion of the book. But I'm always pleased to be able to do that. I appreciate that very much. I grew up in a very devout, very sincere and committed Christian family. My father was a very dominant and expressive personality. He was absolutely one of the most principled and disciplined people I think I've ever known. And when he set his mind to something he absolutely would not be deterred. He was, I would say, a dogmatic moralist. He was rarely puzzled by the kind of vagarities and ambiguities that confound most people. In fact, as one biographer once wrote about Theodore Roosevelt, Dad seemed to be born with his mind already made up. Now what he did possess, among other qualities, was what C.S. Lewis oftentimes referred to in his writings, as the most rare of all the virtues. And that is courage. And so I very much admired that in my father as well. He had three passions really in life: his Christian faith, of course, his wife and family, and also he very much loved America. And so I grew up with those kind of values. In fact, he would oftentimes use our supper time as a teaching opportunity. Now, like most families back then, we would usually eat supper together. And we oftentimes, of course, would chat about what went on at school or work that day, and so on. But he also would use that dinner time to talk about current events and politics and church and the Bible. And one of his great passions was Biblical prophecy. He would also use the time oftentimes on Sunday afternoons to critique the pastor's sermon from that, from that morning.

WS: Well, Jefrey, let me jump in here and interrupt you because as I read in your book, and as you've just described, I mean, there's much admirable, much honorable about what you just said about your dad and about your upbringing. And clearly you share a lot of those values today. I mean, you your passion for Scripture, and the family, and for America are pretty clear in your book. However, there was another side to that upbringing in the 1950s and 60s. You you mentioned for example, the fascination of many conservatives, including your father, with the John Birch Society and with conspiracy theories, and the Trilateral Commission and the Illuminati and all of that kind of stuff. Can you, can you say a little bit more about that and how that how those ideas influenced your dad, and how they influenced you, either in the acceptance or the rejection of them?

JB: Yes, very good question. I grew up from the time I was about 10 or so he would take me to various conservative meetings. We were living in Orange County, California. Anaheim, California at the time. And so I would accompany him. We would see some of the latest films, produced by conservatives. He was very involved in the John Birch Society. So all of that was very much familiar to me as I was growing up. When I went off to junior high school in seventh grade, I joined the Young Americans for Freedom local chapter. So that was very familiar, a very familiar subculture to me. I heard in person at various churches some of the prominent Christian, conservative, right wing evangelists of the day. So yes, I, I was pretty well indoctrinated in that whole orientation by the time I got to high school.

WS: So what then changed in you? And when did it change? Because at some point, you observed that while there were, there was some truth wrapped up in these conspiracy theories, that there was also some significant deficiencies in that worldview. That it was not a truly Christian worldview, and not a full orbed Christian worldview. In fact, one of the things that you said in your book that really captured my imagination and attention was that often your dad and some of these, you know, right wing conservatives of the 1950s, and 60s, got the good, and the true, pretty well. They, you know, they kind of understood that, but they didn't get the beautiful. That, that there was a very limited aesthetic, and that the beautiful, really depend upon each other, that you can't sort of separate them and pull them apart, that it over time really started eroding your confidence in their vision of the good and the true as well as the beautiful.

JB: Well, from my perspective, as a teenager, and then in college, there was so much about conservative evangelicalism that was so out of sync with the times. Now that's not, of course, necessarily negative. Not at all. Because our times are usually very out of sync with Biblical principles. But yes, in in the churches I grew up in there was a lot of emphasis on, on theology, on Biblical history, and so on, what is true and what is good. But as you've pointed out, the element of the beautiful was oftentimes missing. And I've thought about that over the years. And, you know, when you think about the origins of what we would call modern art, it really begins with the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, of course, is oftentimes described as a very humanistic movement. Now, that's not to be confused with secular humanism that's so prevalent today. But the humanism of the Renaissance, of course, was a celebration of human creativity and ingenuity. And there was much about it that, frankly, was very, very inspiring and very compatible with a, with a Christian worldview. Now, centuries later, of course, as the Reformation came about, Protestants, most Protestants, regarded anything that was associated with Catholicism or Catholic tradition, to be tainted and suspicious, due to, for instance, all the very garish and ostentatious art and icons that decorated Catholic churches and cathedrals.

So in general, and I am speaking in broad generalizations here, Protestantism and of course, also Anabaptism, which very much influenced my Christian faith and development, both of those forces Protestantism and Anabaptist sought to return to what they regarded as the simple expressions of the of the Christian faith that they felt characterized the early church. We know, for example, that Martin Luther wanted icons removed from churches and so on. So to update it to my father's time and my younger years, by the turn of the 20th century, of course, a lot of the popular art, the visual arts, the music, the performing arts, and so on, a lot of it was created and performed, of course, by non Christians. And increasingly much of the music, and later, of course, the movies, expressed very secular themes. Now, I wouldn't want to exaggerate the issue, but I think that there was a general tendency on the part of conservative Christians to ignore music and movies and other art forms that, in fact, have certainly been tainted, maybe even outright corrupted by non-Christians, oftentimes propagating a very anti-Christian value system. Popular culture in general, and certainly popular music, as we know is overwhelmingly mediocre at best. But there was always some that's wholesome. There's always some that's inspiring. There's always some that is credible. It may be a very tiny percentage of all the music and the movies and the TV that's produced, but that 2% or 3% can certainly enrich our lives, but we have to be proactive in terms of finding it. And I think there was a tendency on the part of many Christians, adult Christians, not to bother with it at all, because again, they found it overwhelmingly negative.

WS: And your love of music is where you got to be out of step I guess a bit with your upbringing because you love music, right? And ultimately, you ended up working for one of the record labels.

JB: Well, yes. Other than baseball, I'd say music was probably my passion growing up.

WS: By the way, Jefrey, just for the record. As you and I are watching this, the Braves you're playing an afternoon game with the Cubs and I've got them on the television behind us. But that's that's a subject for another day.

JB: Well and life is not fair. Because I understand up there in Chicago today, the weather is nearly perfect. Whereas here in Georgia, it is nearly as hot as hell or Texas, whichever you want to use for the proper analogy.

WS: Right. But anyway, so other than baseball, our shared passion for baseball and our shared passion for music, you know, it was this more music. Music is more relevant to our conversation right now. The that, you know, kind of caused a turning, shall we say in your life?

JB: Well, it was quite influential. Again, I was very much enraptured with a lot of popular music of the 60s and early to mid 70s. A lot of it was just incredibly creative. A lot of the music of Bob Dylan and The Beatles and of course, many others that we could cite. Now, I felt like I had a fairly good grounding, in terms of what is true and good. Evangelical churches were very, very adept at clearly addressing critical moral issues and so on. But there was something that I felt at the time was seriously lacking. And also, when I looked at the total dysfunctionality of American society and culture in the late 60s and into the 70s, I think music became more than anything else, an escape. I did not see a whole lot in America at the time that I would have felt was in sync with the truth and the goodness that we encounter in Scripture. So I think with that being the case, I gravitated toward music, looking for some meaning, some purpose, some beauty and fulfillment in music. So my first job out of college actually was with Capitol Records. Capitol Records had a large distribution center here in Atlanta at the time, as there were five or six of these scattered around the country. And of course, that was the company that had produced some of the most popular recording artists of the previous 10 or 15 years, going all the way back to the Kingston Trio, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and so on. When I was at Capitol, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was released - one of the most popular records of course of the 1970s. So for me, music was, as I said, a therapeutic escape from the realities, the ugly realities of what was so prevalent in American society and culture at the time.

WS: Well as you got more deeply into music and started seeing some of the limitations of your upbringing, your fundamentalist or evangelical upbringing, you didn't renounce your faith, but you did branch out a bit - you tested other waters. Jefrey, from where you and I sit today, I think you and I are both pretty familiar with the narrative of progressive Christianity or exvangelicals or the movement that some people call the deconstructing of faith. Some of them still want to hold on to the label of Christian, they want to still say they're Christians, while they reject core Christian doctrines. You didn't exactly reject core Christian doctrines during this era, but you were questioning the evangelical subculture and some of the conservative American political climate as well, especially those elements that seemed to go hand in glove with the evangelical subculture. Can you say a little about that, that flirtation with progressive Christianity and the deconstructing of your faith?

JB: Well, I worked for Capitol Records for a couple of years. I, it was a very hedonistic environment, of course. So during that period of time, I I really recommitted my life to Christ. And I wanted to go to work for the company that produced most of the popular Jesus music of the early to mid 1970s. And that was Word Incorporated. They had a large book division, as well as a music division. And they had some of the most talented Christian artists of the day. Artists such as Larry Norman, distributed his music through them, Phil Keaggy, Second Chapter of Acts, Barry McGuire, and others as well. So I, I worked with Word in the music division for four years. And I found that to be satisfying in some respects, but in others not so much.

Now, I was traveling all over the south at the time interacting with a very, very wide range of Christians, professing Christians, some of whom were very impressive. Others, not so much. But it did very much expand my horizons, as far as the Christian demographics, you might say, in America. So I never, of course, became an ex, exvangelical, to use the term that you used a minute or so ago. But I did spend several years searching for what I thought were more credible expressions of true Christianity. I certainly was never a liberal, or a progressive, either in my faith or in my politics. I always knew that what we call liberalism today, in other words, modern liberalism, was really just the political ideology of a secular humanistic philosophy. And that was, that was totally unappealing to me. But for several years, I was involved in several groups that had a left wing orientation. Many would have described themselves probably as Christian socialists. Now, I probably would have characterized myself at the time as a socialist Christian, keeping the proper noun being Christian and socialist only as an adjective. But only because I believe that the early church, at least the Jerusalem church, that we read about in the book of Acts, practiced communitarian values. But the early church if you want to describe it, or characterize it as moderately socialistic, to use modern terminology, the early church really practiced voluntary socialism, or voluntary communalism out of a sincere love for others, which is totally different, of course from secular political socialism, which is government mandated. It's always invariably coercive and involuntary. So, political socialism inevitably leads to authoritarianism, in which the government attempts to control virtually every aspect of our lives. It also limits our free expression, including the free expression of our Christian faith. And socialism is certainly antithetical to religious liberty. So I felt at the time that I did need to broaden my perspective on Christian discipleship. And more liberal, or left wing, Christian groups, and enterprises, I felt like was something that I seriously needed to check out.

WS: So you started reading and communicating with people like Ron Sider, who wrote a very influential book called Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger, who, by the way, I've had on this podcast, by the way. An also, the Sojourners movement, which was fairly new at that point. They published a magazine, Sojourners Magazine, and you had your own Christian publication in Atlanta for a while.

JB: Yes, it was in the early 1980s. Actually, I had just returned to graduate school to study history at Georgia State University. But I founded a publication called Crossroads: an Atlanta Christian Forum. And we took a position that might be described as perhaps mildly Christian left wing in that regard. And I did have the opportunity during those years to interact with a lot of the, a lot of the more public faces and leaders in the Christian left. I was offered a job actually with Ron Siders organization, Evangelicalism for Social Action, they were based in Germantown, Pennsylvania, just a little north of downtown Philadelphia. And I admired Ron and believed that he was sincere and a credible Christian. There were others, however, in the Christian left that very quickly I had suspicions about. So many of these people seem to me to be considerably more socialistic than they were Christianistic, if I can use that term.

WS: Sure.

JB: And so I felt like over the years, I came to see a lot of the fallacies in that whole movement. And eventually, I was drawn back into a more conservative orientation in most every regards. As I thought about these things, over time thought about them more deeply and also taught on political science as well as history in my career as a, as a history professor.

WS: Hold on a second. Jefrey, I'm have a something happened here to my recorder. And I just don't know what happened. But it stopped recording. Fortunately, this is a backup that and not the main thing. So okay. Let me

JB: Now, should I also mention that I would have totally lost my faith if had I not met you in Sunday school?

WS: Yeah, no, yeah. Do not say that. No, I do. Do I do want to. Okay, but by the way, Johnny, we're off. We're off the record now that you can cut all this out. But I'm about to go back on. Are you ready? Jeffrey, can I go back on this?

WS: Well, Jeffrey, I do want to sort of close our conversation with what you are doing now. But before we do that, there are a couple of little anecdotes that I'd like to hit you with. One is, you describe in your book, and I may have heard you describe this in person at some point, I don't remember now. An encounter you had with Keith Green that while you were working for, I think it was while you're working for Sparrow Records. It may have been while you were still at Capitol, where you when you left Capitol to go to work for Sparrow. You were kind of hoping that you were, you know, leaving Egypt for the promised land. And you found out.

JB: Oh, when I left Capital, I actually went to work for Word. Okay. And then, two years later with Sparrow Okay, here we go, sorry to interrupt.

WS: Yeah, no, that's good. Okay, Johnny, we're here we go. We're starting all over again.

WS: Jeffrey, I do want to sort of land this plane and bring our conversation to a conclusion by, you know, talking about what you're doing now. But before we leave this era of your life, I want to, I can't resist asking you about a couple of anecdotes that are alluded to in your book. I may have heard you talk about them face to face at some point. With Capitol Records, you were kind of hoping to go into a Christian label, first Word and then Sparrow, might kind of give you the best of both worlds. It would give you, you know, kind of what you loved about the music business, and, you know, the creativity and all of that, but doing it in a Christian environment. Over time, my understanding from reading you and from talking to you is that you became, I guess, a little bit disillusioned with the, you know, the commercialism of even Christian music. And that may have led to your, some of your forays into Christian socialism, just kind of testing out what else might be an option. But you had an encounter with Keith Green, who I think a lot of our listeners are going to know. And a lot of listeners are going to know that he also had some really serious concerns about the Christian music industry. Can you say a little more about that?

JB: Well, I interacted with Keith on on just a few occasions. I didn't know him real well, but we corresponded. Keith, as you said, was very concerned about the commercialization of Christian music and going back to the early 1970s, when Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill, and people like that emerged, singing folk rock style music that had Christian lyrics, biblical lyrics. That was quite unusual at the time. Now later, that Jesus music, of course, will morph into what became known as contemporary Christian music. It became an industry unto itself. This was troublesome to Keith. He didn't believe that the gospel should be so aggressively marketed. Nor did I, for that matter. So I was always a little out of sync even with the company that I was representing. But when I finally resigned from Sparrow Records to return to graduate school and study history, I remember sharing my thoughts with Keith and he sent me a very nice letter, encouraging me to do just that. He was very concerned about some of those tendencies in the Christian book and music industry itself.

WS: Yeah. Well, of course, that's been a concern of mine as well. I remember, I wrote I wrote a book back in 2009, called The Lover's Quarrel With The Evangelical Church that you read and were generous enough to invite me to Atlanta to speak to the Areopagus Forum at that time, and I guess that would be nearly 15 years ago now. By the way, I'm working on a revised version of that book. So that sort of segues me though, Jeffrey, a bit into what you're doing now. I mentioned the Areopagus Forum. Many of our listeners who are Christians will know of course that the Areopagus was also known as Mars Hill. It was where Paul made his famous Acts 17 speech, from which you derive the name of the Areopagus Form, of course. What are you trying to accomplish with the Areopagus Forum? What are your kind of day to day activities and by what are you trying to accomplish? I mean, sort of the big picture, what's your vision or mission? And then what do you do? How do you accomplish that vision on a sort of day to day boots on the ground kind of way?

JB: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that question in particular. Yeah, for 20 years, I was a history professor mostly at Georgia State University. My, by the way, my doctoral studies concentrated on two areas of history. One was modern U.S. history, so as to try and make sense of the 60s. And the other area was actually ancient history, philosophy, and religion due to my interest in early church history. And I also, of course, taught church history at Atlanta Christian College and Reformed Theological Seminary. But I left the university and began the Areopagus in 2003. And, as you mentioned, the Areopagus is a term that's pretty familiar to most people who are familiar with the book of Acts. Acts chapter 17, in particular. And of course, the apostle Paul visited the Areopagus, where he testified his faith in Christ and really planted the seed of Christianity there in Athens. Now, throughout Christian history that name Areopagus has oftentimes represented the intersection of Christian faith and culture. And that's why I chose that particular name for our particular ministry. Ours is basically a forum for the exchange of ideas. Now, today in America, of course, we realize that we are in the midst of a culture, of a culture that's increasingly skeptical, if not outright hostile toward Christian faith and values. And the erosion of Christian influence in our society is apparent in in virtually every area of of life today, from law and politics to business, education, the media, certainly the arts and entertainment, certainly in public and private morality, as well. So the Areopagus is essentially a Christian education ministry. We're based in the Greater Atlanta area. We offer seminars and forums on issues relevant to contemporary Christian life. We always say that our mission fundamentally is this - and that's to help Christians effectively engage our society and culture with the life transforming truth and love of Jesus Christ. And so, to that end, we offer substantive seminar courses and topical forums that would challenge Christians to live in accord with the principles and the practices of a holistic, comprehensive, Biblical worldview. So we, we have a website at http://www.theareopagus.org. We also have a Facebook page. And by the way, we also have a newsletter that we send out periodically that's devoted to significant issues and events. We call it The Watchman. And oftentimes, we will reference some of the articles that you featured in MinistryWatch.

WS: Wo you can't you can't get out of the publication business can you?

JB: Well, it's, it's not only a passion, it's, it's truly a calling. Yeah. And I, I've written several books. Probably...

WS: Well, you know, it's interesting to me, and I'm sure you know, this, Jefrey, that the Areopagus figures prominently in Acts 17. And, obviously, the word from which you derive your name. But the, also John Milton wrote a famous essay, I think I'm gonna pronounce it right, the Areopagittica, I think, I think that's the way it's pronounced. It was a kind of a Reformation era document. And it was a defense of free speech. It was really one of the first modern documents defending free speech. It's interesting to me that he called it the Areopagittica, because he made the observation in that document that Paul was not only preaching the gospel, but he was also appealing to the authorities for religious liberty and freedom of speech. He was basically, you know, saying, I have the right to stand here and proclaim this God in whom I believe, this unnamed God. So it's kind of interesting how the confluence of these, religious liberty and freedom of speech, and the proclamation of the gospel are so closely intertwined in that one word, Areopagus kind of, encapsulates all of that.

JB: Yes, it's been a very useful term, basically taking the gospel message in the public, dealing with serious issues, be they religious, spiritual issues, moral, cultural issues, and basically just the fulfilling our mission to to adopt a comprehensive understanding of Christian discipleship. This fall, I'll be doing a course that will be focused on the life and works of Francis Schaeffer. And of course, Francis Schaeffer was one of those who kept calling us back to a comprehensive understanding of Christian discipleship in contrast of what he called pietism, which is this very narrow, limited understanding or view of Christian discipleship. And so we try to incorporate those kinds of themes and that kind of a broad based approach in our ministry.

WS: Yeah. Well, Jeffrey, we've got to bring our time to a close. And we've we really haven't talked specifically much about your book, even though your story is in chapter seven and eight of your book. And the ideas that we talked about are what energize your book, what innervate, your book, you might say. But what do you want people to get out of the book? Why should people read this book?

JB: Well, I think it's an extremely relevant book for our time. It's an analysis basically, of the origins and the manifestations and the consequences of America's culture war that's raging today, and what Christians can and what Christians should be doing in response. So I'd say that basically, the purpose of the book is to reveal and analyze the great spiritual, moral, and cultural challenges that we face today as American Christians. It also explores the historical and philosophical origins for our culture war, exposes the the consequences of the erosion of Christian influences in our society. And in addition to that, we also challenge Christians to become better informed, more actively engaged in these great issues of our time, so that we can truly fulfill our mission to be a source of light and love and hope and truth in the midst of a society and a culture that's rapidly disintegrating and descending into more and more spiritual darkness.

Youve been listening in on my conversation with Dr. Jefrey Breshears. His new book is American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and the Culture War: A Christian Response. He spoke to me from his office in Atlanta.

Listening In comes to you from WORLD News Group, and this program is just one of the many benefits that comes with a WORLD subscription. To find out more visit WNG.org/subscribe.

Tune in next week to hear my conversation with Roland Warren. Hes the president of CareNet, one of the largest networks of pregnancy resource centers in the nation, with more than 1,200 affiliates. When the Dobbs decision was announced, the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Roland Warren was one of the first calls I made. His insights about the future of the prolife movement will both encourage and challenge you. I hope youll tune in.

The producer for todays program is Leigh Jones. Johnny Franklin is the technical producer. And Paul Butler is executive producer for WORLD Radio. Im your host, Warren Smith. And youve been Listening In.

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