Mediaboss Marketing

In his new book, Terreur en Bevryding, historian Leopold Scholtz tells the story of how the South African Communist Party (SACP) was one of the Soviet governments most loyal foreign cells, outperforming all other communist parties in adherence to Moscows dictates.

Scholtz further elaborates how the SACP was, and quite possibly remains, the intellectual leader in the tripartite alliance consisting of the ANC, SACP and labour federation Cosatu. Relatively recent speeches and commitments by people such as ministers Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Thulas Nxesi clearly indicate that the ANC still has some love lost for socialism.

We are poorer for it.

It is certainly true that the ANC tends to talk socialism more than deliver socialism; it has had a pragmatic flare since the 1990s. But since the Zuma years and this has become more intense during the Ramaphosa era the ANC has increasingly grasped at socialist straws to expand government power and attempt to secure its electoral future.

The agenda of expropriation without compensation is the most visceral example of this phenomenon, but South Africas global record-setting unemployment rate is perhaps its clearest consequence.

Economist Ludwig von Mises argued that it was precisely government interference in the economy that leads to unemployment. Where there is no artificial, external market interference, the market wage rate tends to settle at a point where both wage-earners and employers are willing and eager to work, with the former always opting for employment over unemployment, and the latter opting to employ rather than suffer from a labour shortage. Unemployment remains for as long as the government and its union allies are successful in the enforcement of their fiat.

Studies have borne this out as true.

Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess, in a 2004 study of labour regulation in India, conclude that regulations ostensibly meant to benefit employees in the labour market have acted as a constraint on growth and poverty alleviation. Such regulations lead to decreased investment, employment, and productivity, as well as pushing economic activity into the informal (black and grey market) sector.

Research by Juan Botero, Simeon Djankov and others, also from 2004, confirm that people opt to trade in the informal market when there is excessive labour regulation. They additionally note that there is higher youth unemployment in societies with more protective employment laws. While intuition tells us that such labour laws are ostensibly meant to protect and advance vulnerable economic classes, empirical studies show that there are worse labour market outcomes where the government is more actively involved in labour regulation.

South Africas burdensome labour laws and how they are applied are infamous among domestic and foreign investors, who rather choose to take their money elsewhere.

Every year that the Fraser Institutes Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index is published, it reinforces a lesson that our government appears determined to ignore: the poorest people in a freer market are about eight to 10 times wealthier than the poorest people in a command economy, where government actively intervenes economically in the public interest.

Some would be quick to point out that labour regulation is not indicative of socialism. But socialism concerns public (but in practice, government) control and ultimately ownership of the means of production, with labour being one of the most important means of production. The more regulation, the closer the government is to de facto ownership, even of labour.

As economist Russell Lamberti explained during a Free Market Foundation seminar, the new, evolved form of socialism that succeeded its cruder Cold War variant, is technocratic socialism.

Technocratic socialists are eager to distance themselves from the heaps of corpses and economic devastation that communism left behind in Ukraine, Russia, China and Cambodia. Technocratic socialists saw the untold prosperity that even a little bit of free enterprise brought to the disenfranchised masses of the world. Knowing their economic narrative alone will therefore fail, technocratic socialists shifted their focus away from pure economic class to race and gender, a narrative all too well-known in South Africa.

Technocratic socialists have also to an extent but in South Africa, not necessarily entirely abandoned the idea that the state must directly own the means of production. Instead, indirect ultimate control (through taxes and regulations) of the means of production is easier to attain and seems more respectable on the surface. In this respect, Lamberti argues, socialism learned a great deal from its more reviled cousin, fascism.

The ANC has opted South Africa onto the technocratic socialist path. Since 2000, South Africa has slid down the EFW rankings. With a few exceptions, such as the ridiculously disastrous discourse about land, the government seeks to control the means of production through regulation, while still allowing private owners to bear the costs of the governments mismanagement of their property. When it comes to labour, unemployed people bear the unaffordable cost of the government directing how, when, and where they may work.

The Cold War ended more than three decades ago. That period of history showed decisively that socialism, at a country scale, is unsustainable. In fact, it is socially and economically devastating.

What is described as capitalism also has its pitfalls, to be sure, but most of these imperfections will accompany any system that places value on individual autonomy. Nonetheless, the free market, unlike socialism, does not kill or destroy. All the apparent examples of economic freedom killing people yearly malnutrition, unsanitary water are usually prevalent in societies where the government tries to take a leading role in society and the economy, and goes out of its way to stifle the private sector.

There are no absolutely free markets in the world, and there are no absolutely controlled economies either. But practically without exception, the closer a society moves to a freer market, the more prosperous it is, and the closer to a controlled economy it moves, the less prosperous.

In other words, even a regulated free market like Chile proves the capitalist case correct, compared to the controlled Venezuelan economy. The lesson to be learned here is not that a society must strive for a mixed economy but rather for a free economy, as the closer one gets to economic freedom the better the outcomes for everyone, particularly the poor.

It is also true that not all economic regulations in themselves destroy economic activity. But taken together, they represent a huge burden for individuals who simply wish to eke out a living. It is cold comfort to someone who has been unemployed for years that there are a mass of labour laws out there that protect them, while they hungrily beg for money at the roadside, rather than working for an amount that socialist political elites dont approve of.

This means that while good intentions might underlie any new proposed government intervention in the economy, it is usually best to not pursue it, because history has shown that once you cede the principle that economic activity must be free from interference, that body of interventions will only grow and stifle growth and innovation. The temptation to interfere in the affairs of other people must be resisted if a flourishing and prosperous society is our goal.

View post:
OPINION| ANCs socialist thinking is crushing South Africas future - Mail and Guardian

Farming is difficult, grueling work that is essential to our economy and our very existence as a species.

On top of that, most farmers operate on thin profit margins far from the bounty of giant agribusiness. They are beholden to the vagaries of weather and the twists and turns of the global economy, and unforeseen difficulties can lead to the sale of local farmland to developers or corporations.

Therefore, it is appropriate for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release nearly $200 million to Washington farmers who lost crops due to natural disasters in 2020 and 2021. The grant, announced last week, is part of approximately $6 billion in disaster relief for farmers and will be paid through a new Emergency Relief Program to offset lower yields and value losses.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said: Last years extreme heat wave and drought was devastating for our farmers and ranchers in the face of a worsening climate crisis, the federal government needs to step up for the Washington state growers and producers who keep our shelves stocked. . . . Im glad we could bring back some badly-needed federal dollars to help our farmers and ranchers during a really tough time.

The aid is necessary, but it also raises several questions about politics in this country.

One is whether critics who recklessly throw around the word socialism will apply it to this situation.

Of course, socialism is grossly misapplied in American discourse. Merriam-Webster defines it as any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Few people in this country advocate for the collective ownership of production and distribution, but any social program designed to provide assistance for Americans is decried as being socialist. Aid to farmers is not socialism, but it represents the kind of program that is criticized when it is directed toward cities.

Another related issue is the fact that subsidies to farmers ballooned under President Trump throughout his failed trade war with China.

After Trump imposed tariffs on some Chinese goods, the United States economic rival responded in kind. The result was diminished markets for much U.S. agriculture, and the federal government responded with payments to offset the impact. Federal subsidies to farmers went from just over $4 billion in 2017 to more than $20 billion in 2020.

That doesnt mean that all farmers were bailed out by the federal government or that all farmers needed assistance. But a government policy that requires $20 billion in annual mitigation payments can only be viewed as a failure.

And yet we have buried the lead. With a $6 billion disaster relief program aimed at farmers, there is reason to question where it will end. Climate change delivered record temperatures through Washington last year, including a day that reached 115 degrees in Vancouver.

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports: Temperature changes can cause habitat ranges and crop planting dates to shift and droughts, and floods due to climate change may hinder farming practices.

Those practices already have been hindered by a changing climate, and evidence suggests that the impact will only grow over time.

Helping farmers to continue providing food for our families will require vast attention to climate change.

View post:
In Our View: Aid for farmers needed, but where will it end? - The Columbian

The great writer and moralist George Orwell began his literary career as a disciple of G. K. Chesterton. Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chestertons views in the 1930s, under the influence of socialist ideas and hopes, Chestertons assumptions and political and ethical conceptions continued to shape him.

Orwells biographers provide intriguing evidence. Bernard Crick tells us that Orwells first published essay appeared in Chestertons renegade Distributist magazine G.K.s Weekly on December 29, 1928, and that later Orwell was recorded as saying that what England needed was to follow the kind of policies in Chestertons G.K.s Weeklythat is, anti-imperialist, Little England policies. Gordon Bowker writes that as a teenager, Orwell gave someone Chestertons novel Manalive. He adds that Orwell loved Chestertons Father Brown detective stories. Robert Colls tells us that although Orwell's friends, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, accepted Orwells own characterization of himself from the 30s on as some kind of socialist, this characterization was in several ways anomalousnot only because of his Tory upbringing, private education at Eton, and accent, but also because of his traditionalist sensibility and the way in which he took his bearings from a natural and moral universe. This is a precise and pregnant comment.

Orwell has come to have a unique authority among English-language readers, mainly due to the great anti-totalitarian novels Animal Farm and 1984. But these works were also important in communist-dominated Eastern Europe from their publication until the fall of the Soviet communist empire in the early 1990s. In The Captive Mind, the great Polish dissident writer Czesaw Miosz tells us how 1984 circulated surreptitiously in Poland and Eastern Europe (including a Ukrainian translation), and how its readers were amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of its life. One hopes that Orwells anti-totalitarian novels have also found readers in China and North Korea.

Literary and cultural critics have also argued that Orwell was indebted to Chesterton as a thinker and writer. Both the wise but now-neglected English writer Hugh Kingsmill and the eminent American critic Lionel Trilling saw Orwells social-cultural criticism as in a direct line from William Cobbett, through Dickens, to Chesterton. Orwells own longstanding interest in Dickens, evident in his substantial 1939 essay on Dickens, is clearly and explicitly influenced by Chesterton, who wrote two substantial books on Dickens and is perhaps his greatest commentator.

It is perhaps Orwells 1939 essay on Dickens that best begins to explain what Chesterton and Orwell had in common in philosophical, ethical, and political terms and why these common factors still matter today. Orwell tries to specify or pin down the ethical basis of Dickenss great fictional works, in addition to his transfiguring gifts of generous humor, characterization, description, narrative, and symbolism. He sees and says that Dickens was a believing Christian, that his morality is the Christian morality, and that despite Dickens's dislike of both Catholicism and ostentatious evangelical Protestant religiosity, he was essentially a Bible-Christian with a quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressor . . . on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.

Throughout the essay, Orwell uses a word that has come to be identified with him as a person and writer: decency. He says that Dickenss whole message is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent. Like George Bernard Shaw, Orwell is disappointed that Dickens did not adhere to socialism and was even unsympathetic to the trade-union movement: Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands, least of all by open violence. With some annoyance, Orwell asks, What does [Dickens] want? As always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing.

Despite Orwells criticism of Dickenss reformist, moralistic politics, he continues to insist that Dickens was neither superficial nor foolish: To say If men would behave decently the world would be decent is not such a platitude as it sounds. He adds: In the last resort there is nothing [Dickens] admires except common decency. Writing with great eloquence in the concluding paragraph of the essay, Orwell praises Dickenss devotion to human brotherhood and the idea of equality under God, with which all through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted. Orwell insists, against the ascendant fascists and communists, that the ordinary people in the Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of realism and power politics. Yet he concedes that they may come to do so, in which case Dickens will be . . . out of date. . . . [He] has been popular chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man.

With this emphasis we return to Chesterton, who wrote an influential 1906 book on Dickens and also introductions to each of the novels, which were published in Everyman editions and then gathered as a separate book in 1911. Chesterton saw Dickens as having an elemental, primitive, profound Christian vision of the human person and society. He believed in this vision, and worked against the spirit of his own agethe first third of the twentieth centuryin trying to recover, renew, and defend the Judeo-Christian Natural Law tradition that is the ultimate source of Dickenss worldview and Orwells, too: the very basis of Orwells own, dogged common decency.

Orwell himself intermittently saw this. His intellectual departure from Chesterton occurred partly because Chesterton became a serious Christianfirst an Anglo-Catholic and then, in 1922, a Catholicand tried to renew the central Christian tradition through thought, argument, and writing. The vaguely, residually Anglican but increasingly agnostic Orwell moved on to socialism. He vehemently opposed the Catholic Church and, in fact, all systematic thinking, especially Marxism (an education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense). His own socialism never favorably impressed left-wing intellectuals, who have always been his greatest haters and detractors.

True communists or socialists such as Raymond Williams, Isaac Deutscher, E. P. Thompson, and the Arab-American Edward Said always knew that Orwells socialism was a jerry-built, home-made, unsystematic, non-Marxist affair, a fact made particularly clear in Orwells own 1941 book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius and in many of his best essays and reviews. One of the most revealing is his December 1940 review of Charlie Chaplins satirical-comic, anti-Hitler film The Great Dictator. In this review, he credits Chaplin with depicting a sort of concentrated essence of the common man [and] the ineradicable belief in the decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is everywhere in retreat . . . liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from Christian culture. Just as Orwell was to be banned in Soviet Russia and its satellites, Charlie Chaplin was banned in Nazi Germany (it is precisely the idea of human equalitythe Jewish or Judaeo-Christian idea of equalitythat Hitler came into the world to destroy, Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn).

But Chesterton understood something that Orwell would not steadily meditate: This set of allegedly normal beliefs is not ineradicable. Orwell wantedloved, in factthe fruits of centuries of Christian civilization, including manners and customs, and often said so, dreading their replacements. (Of a popular, depraved contemporary novelist he wrote in 1944: Emancipation is complete, Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.) But those fruits that Orwell loved came from Judeo-Christian roots. It was Chestertons long quest to recover and restore those roots, through popular and witty but also powerfully philosophical works such as The Everlasting Man and St. Thomas Aquinas. In A Knight of the Woeful Countenance, a brilliant retrospective 1971 essay on Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge praised his dogged devotion to the truth but warned that one of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only truth as enlightened expediency.

Orwell thought, or at least hoped, that common decency (ethics) and objective truth (epistemology) could survive without any metaphysical-philosophical basis or confessional-ecclesiastical structure, though he married in an Anglican church and requested burial in an Anglican service and grave (which was a bit tricky for his friends Muggeridge and David Astor to arrange). But he was also frightened at the erosion of this inheritance: the common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped . . . but . . . the doctrine of realism is gaining ground (Raffles and Miss Blandish, 1944). The ascendancy of fascist and communist propaganda in the 1930s and 40s is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943). Of course, this is the ultimate nightmare of 1984.

Orwell had gotten his essential currency of beliefs and valuations from traditional English culture, whose nineteenth-century and subsequent capitalist-imperialist developments he documented, despised, and critiqued with great eloquence in his novels and expository prose works. The culture he loved was represented by writers such as Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Chesterton, not by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalinor even by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. In 1936, when he tried to get a letter of recommendation to fight in Spain from Harry Pollitt, the leader of Great Britain's Communist Party, he was turned down. In Spain he fought the fascists (and was badly wounded) but was horrified by the communist purges of fellow Spanish Republicans, including the party of anarchists in whose ranks he was serving. Orwells documentary account of his experience in Homage to Catalonia was not initially popular, but Trillings 1952 introduction to an American edition did much to make Orwells modern reputation, and not only in America.

Orwell rather dangerously committed himself more than once to the phrase and idea that all art is propaganda (Charles Dickens, 1939). Every writer, especially every novelist, has a message. . . . Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. He means that all artevery work of artpropagates some worldview and scheme of valuations, however absurd, idiosyncratic, or irrational. But this is to recognize that philosophy, worldview, or ideology cannot be escaped; that analytical reason, inference, implication, and evaluation are inevitable in humans. Philosophy cannot be escaped.

Chesterton died too early (1936) to see the astounding historical tragedies that Orwell would see before his untimely death in 1950. But Chesterton was in crucial respects wiser and deeper. In 1906, the same year his first great book on Dickens was published, he wrote a brief introduction to a volume of selections from the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold. He praised Arnold and credited him with great insight. He discovered (for the modern English) the purely intellectual importance of humility, Chesterton wrote. He had none of that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and good men. But he had a cold humility which he discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence. To see things clearly, he said, you must get yourself out of the way.

It is that cold humility, self-depreciating and honest, that so many of Orwells friends, admirers, and readers saw or see in him. Whatever his deficiencies, we are right to do so.

M. D. Aeschliman is the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism.

First Thingsdepends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Clickhereto make a donation.

Clickhereto subscribe toFirst Things.

Follow this link:
What Orwell Learned From Chesterton | M. D. Aeschliman - First Things

Marxists define their attitude toward a given war by analyzing the profound historical and material forces that give rise to it, and which are manifested in the development of the conflict. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), while opposing the invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putins government, places the current war in the context of a broader Marxist analysis of the entire 20th century, in particular of the historical processes triggered by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent three decades of imperialist war waged by the US and NATO.

A diametrically opposed attitude is adopted by petty-bourgeois opportunists. They base their views on the surface of events and the limits of their own orientation to capitalism and its national state system.

One of the most striking expressions of this attitude is exemplified by a Morenoite and Shachtmanite amalgam called the International Socialist League (ISL). Over the past months, the ISL has issued statements with titles such as No to Russian imperialist aggression against Ukraine! NATO and the US out of Eastern Europe! No more wars in the interests of the imperialists!; and Russian imperialism out of Ukraine! Solidarity with the Ukrainian workers and people! No more wars promoted by the imperialists!

These pseudo-lefts seek to camouflage their support for US-NATO imperialist policies with phony anti-imperialist slogans. Joining the frenzied war propaganda of the Western corporate media in promoting Ukrainian resistance, regardless of its NATO-backed and largely far-right character, the ISL presents the alleged aggressive expansionism of Russian imperialism as the determining factor in the outbreak of war. To the extent that NATOs participation is mentioned, they claim that its presence is no guarantee for peace and provides Putin excuses.

The ISL enthusiastically endorsed anti-Russian aggression protests that took place in Germany and other European countries, covering up the role of their bourgeois leaderships, which demand a military escalation by their imperialist states, distill hatred against the Russian people and promote Ukrainian chauvinism.

In Latin America, where the national bourgeoisie assumed a more reticent attitude toward the conflict in Ukraine, the ISL itself organized such demonstrations that appeal to reactionary sentiments among the affluent middle class. In Argentina, the ISLs leading party, Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers Movement - MST), held a protest in front of the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires, in which ISL flags were mixed with right-wing placards depicting Putin as Hitler and with the slogan Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine).

On March 4, the ISL published its Chronicles from Kiev, a series of comments on the war by Oleg Vernyk (or Vernik), the leader of its affiliated group in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Socialist League (USL). Speaking the language of a petty-bourgeois chauvinist, he proclaimed: The Ukrainian military is much smaller in composition and less prepared. We are not an imperialist state. But yesterday, our boys showed miracles of heroism. And they resist! ... Long live Ukraine!

These views were further developed in an online event hosted by the ISL on March 9 titled International Conference from Kiev, featuring Vernyk as its main speaker. The conference completely confirmed that the ISLs so-called opposition to NATO is a hoax.

In the name of the ISL, Vernyk praised the Ukrainian state and the right-wing government of Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he praised for having shown very positive personal characteristics. He dismissed the presence of far-right and fascistic forces in the Ukrainian state apparatus and the army as nothing more than a myth, and demanded in practice that US/NATO engage in direct military confrontation with Russia, likely provoking a nuclear war. In Vernyks words:

Many left-wing organizations say that there is a conflict between two imperialisms, but were not willing to support either side. But we should look at the real situation: who started a war against whom? Russian imperialism. Before the war, the US had sent only a hundred anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, but there was a huge scandal, as if it had sent a lot of weapons. For two weeks now, our President Zelensky has been asking NATO to close Ukrainian airspace and defend the Ukrainian people. But what does NATO answer us? Dear friends, this is your conflict, and we dont want to take part in it.

Contrary to what the ISL misleadingly claims, the engagement of the United States (as well as of the European imperialist powers) in the war against Russia in Ukraine goes well beyond the deployment of a few weapons. The amount of American and European weapons poured into the country, before and after the invasion, has actually been massive and is growing. As the World Socialist Web Site reported, the Biden administration is pushing through a $40 billion package of military and financial aid to Ukraine that brings the total allocated to the war in Ukraine in less than three months to a staggering $53 billion. Moreover, Finland and Swedens moves to join NATO are the latest imperialist provocations and preparations for a direct war against Russia, totally vindicating the analysis made by the ICFI.

But these are only the most recent episodes in the systematic advance of the US and NATO in Eastern Europe since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The aim is to encircle and ultimately colonize Russia.

These efforts were significantly escalated by the US-backed far-right coup in Kiev in 2014 that transformed Ukraine into a de facto military base for NATOs imperialist ambitions. Since then, the NATO powers have engaged in ever more bellicose provocations against Russia, with joint military drills with the Ukrainian army and diplomatic treaties such as the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership, which directly threatened a war with Moscow.

The supposed starting point of the ISLs positionwho started a war against whomis fundamentally anti-Marxist. For revolutionary internationalists, the determining question is not who fired the first shot, but rather what is the general character of a given war and the social forces behind it. In his writings about the first imperialist war, Lenin often recalled Clausewitz famous dictum, War is a continuation of policy by other means, claiming that Marxists have always rightly regarded this thesis as the theoretical basis of views on the significance of any war.

As Lenin warned, if you have not studied the policies of both belligerent groups over a period of decadesso as to avoid accidental factors and the quoting of random examplesif you have not shown what bearing this war has on preceding policies, then you dont understand what this war is all about [War and Revolution, May, 1917]. The attitude criticized by Lenin, transformed into a systematic method of political cover-up, is precisely what guides the ISLs response to the war.

This is especially true in the ISLs characterization of Russia as an imperialist country, which tears the concept of imperialism completely out of its historical context. For Marxism, imperialism is the epoch of the highest stage of development of capitalism, marked by the dominance of finance capital, which arose in the late 19th century and has extended itself into our time. Whether in war or peace, the major capitalist powers pursue imperialist policies in the sense that they seek to resolve the contradiction between the growth of global productive forces and the constraints of national state borders through the drive to dominate the world.

The position of Russia in this international struggle is of a subordinated economy, mainly based on the exportation of commodities (and not of capital). The imperialist NATO powers are financing their proxy war in Ukraine with the aim of gaining control of the vast Russian landmass, which contains among the worlds largest reserves of oil, gas, and strategic minerals. Moreover, this US-led imperialist campaign is part of broader war preparations against China. Russia, on the other hand, intervenes militarily abroad seeking not colonies for exploitation, but geo-strategic guarantees against imperialist intervention.

The ISL is particularly unable to explain how Russia emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a new imperialist power. This position is not in any sense a continuation of the tradition of Trotskyism, which has historically explained that the restoration of capitalism in the USSR would entail the transformation of Russia back into a semi-colonial country. The ISLs position is a development, in fact, of the positions of the petty-bourgeois opposition led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham, who broke with the Fourth International as far back as 1939-40.

The basis of the Shachtmanite opposition was a repudiation of Trotskys definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state and of its bureaucracy as a caste, and not a social class. Variants of Shachtmanism such as that represented by C.L.R James (Johnson-Forrest tendency)proposed that the Soviet Union represented a new form of state capitalism with imperialist tendencies. In his complete and open break with the Fourth Internationals perspectives, James exclaimed: Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in the world which cannot recognize that the conflict is a struggle between two powers for world mastery. [State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950]

The ISLs characterization of todays Russia as an imperialist power contains in itself the assumption that the Soviet Union constituted not a degenerated workers state, but some half-way development toward an imperialist capitalist state. The dissolution of the USSR would have represented only a completion of that process. The historical significance of the October Revolution, instead of the beginning of the international socialist revolution, is reduced to a mere shortcut in the development of Russian national capitalism.

In its reactionary defense of the Ukrainian national state, the ISL further reveals the implications of its bankrupt historical conception. Advocating collaboration with Zelenskys military forces, Vernyk claims that the Ukrainian regime should be supported because, supposedly in opposition to Russian totalitarianism, it is just a common bourgeois democracy. In its previously mentioned declaration of January 21, the ISL declares that The obstacle to the establishment of complete and total control of Russian imperialism over the territory of the former USSR has been Ukraine.

From these assertions, one can conclude that the breakup of the Soviet Uniona progressive historical event according to the ISLs reactionary political standpointresulted in two distinct products: imperialist Russia on the one hand, and democratic Ukraine on the other. The logical corollary to this perspective is that, to eliminate Russian imperialism and give birth to other common bourgeois democracies, a further partition and crippling of Russia is necessary.

The false conceptions of Russian imperialism and democratic Ukraine must be rejected by Marxists. The Russian and Ukrainian states have fundamentally common characteristics as the reactionary product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Both are ruled by bankrupt capitalist oligarchiesthe descendants of the Stalinist bureaucracy and inheritors of the stolen property of the Soviet statewhich are fundamentally unable to assert their independent interests from imperialism.

The ISLs rotten orientation to the Ukrainian bourgeois state and NATO is not merely platonic. Their supporters in Ukraine sit at negotiation tables with imperialist agents, make commitments to far-right politicians and build their constituency among the fascistic paramilitary forces.

The ISL offers no explanation of the political origins and trajectory of the forces that founded its Ukrainian Socialist League (USL). This is understandable, since a look at its background and ties reveal the most sordid political record.

On its website, the ISL reports that the foundation of the USL occurred less than a year ago, in April 2021. The opening remarks at the event were given by the groups leader Oleg Vernyk, introduced as the president of the Zakhyst Pratsi (Labor Defense) union. Exhibiting the stamp of every opportunistic political tendency, Vernyk declared that the USL repudiates the traditional conflicts in the Marxist milieu and instead proposes the unification of efforts of all Marxist organizations and circles that exist in Ukraine.

While the principled divisions that emerged within the Marxist movement throughout the 20th centurymost decisively the river of blood separating Trotskyism and Stalinismdo not interest the USL, it is inclined to divide political tendencies according to their orientation to different bourgeois national states. In a recent interview with the Russian website Levoradikal, Vernyk defines myself and my comrades from the USL as the pro-Ukrainian left, as opposed to the pro-Russian left [which], of course, dominates the left in Ukraine. He claims that his position boils down to consistently fighting both Russian imperialism in Ukraine and Western imperialism at the same time. That is a blatant lie.

The connections between Vernyk and his trade unions (hes also in the leadership of the Democratic Trade Unions of Ukraine) and the pro-imperialist political forces that promoted the Maidan coup are glaring. In one of its 2014 statements, the Democratic Trade Unions of Ukraine claims: The All-Ukrainian Union of Democratic Trade Unions of Ukraine, represented by its leaders and union members, has been on the European Maidan in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, since the first day of mass protests against the governments brutal violence to overturn the Ukrainian peoples historic choice. European integration.

Revealing its role as an agent of European imperialist powers and its purely bourgeois nationalist perspective, the statement calls for the [f]ormation of a pro-European government of peoples trust and a broad public debate involving politicians, civil society and European partners on how to implement the agreement. This reactionary program would later take place, with Vernyk sitting at the table with representatives of the European and Ukrainian ruling classes to discuss the capitalist future of the country.

Several photos on the Democratic Trade Unions of Ukraines Facebook pagenow dedicated to sharing ISL and USL statementsshow their flags raised alongside those of the fascist Svoboda (Freedom) party, one of the major forces in the far-right coup in 2014. In one of them, both flags are displayed together on a wall of what they claim was the occupation of Kyiv City Hall in December 2013.

Glorifying the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its leader Stepan Bandera, which aided the Nazis in horrific massacres of the Jewish population during the Second World War, Svoboda posted a statement in 2010 reading: To create a truly Ukrainian Ukraine in the cities of the East and South we will need to cancel parliamentarism, ban all political parties, nationalize the entire industry, all media, prohibit the importation of any literature to Ukraine from Russia... completely replace the leaders of the civil service, education management, military (especially in the East), physically liquidate all Russian-speaking intellectuals and all Ukrainophobes (fast, without a trial shot. Registering Ukrainophobes can be done here by any member of Svoboda), execute all members of the anti-Ukrainian political parties....

During the 2020 Ukrainian local elections, Vernyk made an official statement supporting right-wing candidate Yuriy Levchenko and his Peoples Power party, which had accepted leaders of his trade union as candidates. Vernyk wrote: On behalf of the Central Committee of the VNPS Labor Defense I express my gratitude to the political party Levchenkos team Peoples Power, which in fact demonstrates the support for independent trade unions of Ukraine and boldly and in principle nominates its activists to local governments.

The Peoples Power party supported by Vernyk was founded in 2020 by Levchenko shortly after he broke with Svoboda, which he represented as an MP in Kiev. A representative episode in his political career occurred in October 2017, when Levchenko admittedly dropped a smoke bomb inside the parliament to disrupt the vote on a bill for a Peaceful Settlement of the Situation in Certain Areas of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions.

The USLs sinister orientation to the Ukrainian far right is further evidenced by a post on Vernyks Facebook page. In one picture, dated November 2017, he poses next to uniformed police officers described as members the Special Tasks Patrol Police, among whom he is reportedly inaugurating a union branch. He writes in the caption: The time has come when the soldiers of the regiment, on whose shoulders rest the harsh everyday life of the anti-terrorist operation, will independently and responsibly begin to fight for their socio-economic and labor rights in the ranks of our militant independent trade union.

The Special Tasks Patrol Police was a direct product of the 2014 coup. Under the new regime, it was created as a network of volunteer battalions formed by paramilitary forces, some of them openly fascist, such as the notorious Azov Battalion, which carries a variant of the Nazi swastika as its emblem. Yuriy Bereza, a fascist politician and commander of the Dnepr-1 battalion, explained the significance of these militias: The volunteer battalions, which were created within the structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, are probably one of the most significant reforms that brought real patriots to the police.

The ISLs man in Ukraine, Oleg Vernyk, has an extremely dubious past. In 2003, he was at the center of accusations of a political and financial scam in Ukraine involving at least 12 and probably many more (over 20) organizations around the world, according to the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) in the United States, one of those who fell for this scam.

While then leading the Ukrainian section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), Vernyk and his colleagues reportedly introduced themselves under different identities to various Western organizations, declaring their interest in establishing an affiliated group in Ukraine and on that pretext collecting financial support from each of them. These fraudulent operations and the phony political parties created by them lasted for years, exposing at the same time the rottenness of the international relations sought by these various pseudo-left organizations. The scandal led to the CWI issuing a statement in August 2003 announcing its decision to Immediately suspend Oleg Vernik, a member of the IEC of the CWI, and to recommend his expulsion to the next meeting of the IEC.

Another figure reportedly participating in this scam was Ilya Budraitskis, the then-representative of the Russian section of the CWI, now leader of the Pabloite Russian Socialist Movement and, like Vernyk and the USL, an apologist for the Maidan coup.

The ISL is a political amalgam of national tendencies with different anti-Trotskyist origins, which have in common the need to hide their records of opportunism and betrayals of the working class under a new political faade.

It was founded in 2019 on the initiative of the Argentine MST, a party that originated in a split of Nahuel Morenos Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) in 1992. While it is impossible to find any explanation for the political reasons that led them to break with the MAS and its international grouping, the LIT-CI, their subsequent record has only reinforced the most rotten aspects of Morenoism.

Between 1997 and 2005, the MST presented itself in the Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) electoral alliance with the Stalinist Communist Party of Argentina. They borrowed the name of one of the opportunistic alliances established between Morenos MAS and the already discredited CP in the aftermath of the Argentine military dictatorship. And, even after their alliance with the Stalinists broke up in 2005, the MST continued to uphold it as its fundamental political model. In 2015, it joined the Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores (Left and Workers Front, FIT), led by the Partido Obrero (Workers Party, PO) and the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (Socialist Workers Party, PTS), where it remains until today. The PO began an initiative together with the Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK) in Greece and the Revolutionary Workers Party (DIP) in Turkey to refound the Fourth International in alliance with Russian Stalinists.

The Venezuelan Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide, MS), another founding section of the ISL, was created during the rise to power of the bourgeois nationalist government of Hugo Chavez, which it defined as a revolution. In 2008, the MS joined Chavezs ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), leaving it later in 2015 while claiming to represent the real chavismo against the deviations committed by the new President Nicols Maduro.

The orientation to their own bourgeois national states and political establishments is what defines the policies of every section of the ISL. This generates the permanent potential for an organizational implosion. Last years presidential election in Chile has clearly demonstrated this, with the ISLs Chilean and Turkish sections issuing conflicting statements on the victory of pseudo-left candidate Gabriel Boric over his far-right rival Jos Antonio Kast. While the Chilean Movimiento Anticapitalista (Anticapitalist Movement) raised a clear call to vote against Kast in favor of Boric and celebrated the defeat of Pinochetism, the Turkish Sosyalist Emekiler Partisi (Socialist Laborers Party, SEP in Turkish acronyms) said that revolutionaries should not be excited about Boric winning the presidency.

The ISL was not and could not be created based upon a critical analysis of its own political experience, much less through a principled appropriation of the 80 years of history of the Trotskyist movement, with which it has broken any and all ties. Rather, it starts from an attempt to falsify this history and claim that the Fourth International in fact never existed, being no more than a project that was aborted with the assassination of Trotsky in 1940.

In 2020, the ISL held an event titled the Leon Trotsky Series, supposedly celebrating the life of the great Russian revolutionary. ISL leader Alejandro Bodart summed up his organizations fraudulent view of the history of the Fourth International after Trotskys death:

[The] distance between [Trotskys] experience and ability, and that of the cadres who continued his work, was enormous. ... The Fourth International was decimated and effectively paralyzed during the war. And when it reorganized at its end, its leaders turned out not to be up to the difficult circumstances. ... These difficult circumstances were compounded by a series of tremendous mistakes by the leadership of the Fourth International, which ended up dividing and dispersing the Trotskyist movement. ... Those of us who continued the struggle to build a world revolutionary party did so separately, building international currents centered on a more developed party with like-minded groups in other countries.

Pointing to the political conclusions derived from this historical fabrication, Bodart continues: [R]ecovering [the Fourth Internationals] legacy requires us to overcome the limitations we have had. This is the challenge the ISL is taking up in trying to regroup the revolutionaries who come from different experiences and traditions, from different currents of Trotskyism on the basis of a principled program for socialist revolution.

The ISLs refusal to address the internal struggles that developed within the Fourth International during and in the aftermath of World War II fulfills a critical political role. By erasing and falsifying the history of the protracted struggle of orthodox Trotskyism against all kinds of revisionism, it attempts to avoid the obvious identification of the opportunist politics it pursues with that of the anti-Trotskyist renegades of the Fourth International. Bodart himself and his MST were until recently represented in the Pabloite United Secretariat with observer status.

In its document What Kind of International Organization do We Need? the ISL advocates a different model of international construction, openly rejecting the principles under which the Fourth International was founded, and declares that the ISL is not built on 100% sameness.

Explaining the kind of political heterogeneity it advocates, it says that partial differences, such as the class nature of the USSR, which is a very classical discussion of the past, cannot be a reason for separation.

The very classical discussion of the past they refer to, far from an open question for the Trotskyist movement, was the cause for a definitive separation between Trotskyism and petty-bourgeois opportunism. The path taken by those who opposed the Fourth Internationals designation of the USSR as a workers state, such as Max Shachtman, ended in direct collaboration with US imperialismwhere the ISL finds itself today.

Another historical ancestor of the ISL sections, Tony Cliff, broke with the Fourth International in 1950 on the basis of the Shachtmanite theory of state capitalism, proclaiming the Soviet Union a new form of class society and the Stalinist bureaucracy a new ruling class. Rejecting the defense of the USSR against imperialism, he initiated the slogan neither Washington nor Moscow.

Rejecting all the historical foundations of the Fourth International and basing itself on Shachtmanite and Pabloite revisionism, the ISL is one of many middle-class anti-Trotskyist organizations that abuse the dignity of Trotskyism, and invoke the need for an international organization only as a cover for their national opportunist agendas.

As we point out that the present war in Ukraine is rooted in the consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a principled revolutionary position in relation to the present war must stem from a correct political assessment of the major historical event of 1990-91.

In its document, Our vision of the world. Our strategy, the ISL proclaims that It was not a triumphant counter-revolution that opened the way to capitalist restoration, but one democratic revolution after another that ended the domination of Stalinism over a third of the planet. With this reactionary celebration, the ISL claims its place in the rotten tradition of the Morenoites and other Pabloite organizations that gave a political cover to the Stalinist restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.

The ICFI clearly saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism by the Soviet bureaucracy as the culmination of the Stalinist counterrevolution, fully vindicating the Fourth Internationals prognosis and perspective. The Morenoites, however, claimed it represented a new kind of democratic revolution not envisaged by Trotsky that fundamentally refuted the program of the Fourth International.

Fighting to expose the illusions promoted by the Stalinist bureaucracy and its Pabloite apologists, the ICFI warned the Soviet and international working class that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would not open the way for the flourishing of capitalism and a pacific coexistence with imperialism. On the contrary, it would lead to the fragmentation of the USSRs territory and intensification of aggression by the imperialist powers, not to mention an unprecedented decline in the living standards of the Soviet working class. These were the tendencies manifested in the subsequent 30 years of wars waged by the United States and NATO, of which the present war in Ukraine is a continuation.

After the August putsch in the USSR in 1991, David North visited Kiev on behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International, delivering a lecture at a workers club. In this lecture, based on the Trotskyist analysis of world economy and the danger of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, he said, As Russia and the Ukraine attempt to integrate themselves into the structures of world imperialism on a capitalist basis, they will quickly find themselves not only confronted with all the massive problems confronting every other third world nationnone of which has found successful answers to their problemsbut with additional and especially harrowing difficulties.

As North explained, the only solution which can be found is that which is based on the program of revolutionary internationalism. He continued:

The return to capitalism, for which the chauvinist agitation of the nationalists is only one guise, can only lead to a new form of oppression. Rather than each of the Soviet nationalities approaching the imperialists separately with their heads bowed and their knees bent, begging for alms and favors, the Soviet workers of all nationalities should forge a new relationship, based on the principles of real social equality and democracy, and on this basis undertake the revolutionary defense of all that is worth preserving of the heritage of 1917.

The past 30 years of NATOs eastward expansion and relentless encircling of Russia, provoking a desperate invasion in Ukraine, have sharply vindicated these warnings. The narrative of the Morenoites and other pseudo-left groups of an imperialist Russia waging an unprovoked expansionist war, on the other hand, lacks any historical or materialist basis.

As the WSWS previously explained, even if this definition were correct (which it is not), this does not justify the Morenoites support for NATO and the Ukrainian national state. Socialist defeatism applies to all sides in an inter-imperialist conflict.

Nearly 80 years ago, Trotsky explained that A socialist who preaches national defense is a petty-bourgeois reactionary at the service of decaying capitalism. The task of Marxists in Ukraine is not to defend their own imperialist-backed national state against Russia in the war, but to advance an internationalist revolutionary perspective based on socialist defeatism to unify and mobilize Ukrainian, Russian and the international working class against the NATO powers, as well as the Kiev and Kremlin regimes.

The Russian Marxists must also base their perspective on socialist defeatism, mobilizing masses of workers and youth against the Putin regime with the demand for an immediate end of the reactionary invasion. The only allies of the Russian workers are their Ukrainian and international class sisters and brothers. This position is an integral part of a single program for the Ukrainian and international working class based on a world socialist revolutionary strategy. This means building ICFI sections in Ukraine, Russia, and all over the world.

Also completely absent from the pseudo-left explanations for the present war are its roots in the insoluble crisis of world capitalism, brought to an explosive level by the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with the war, the criminal response of the capitalist ruling class to the pandemic is disrupting the living standards of hundreds of millions around the globe and pushing the proletarian masses to the path of socialist revolution.

The major wave of protests and strikes erupting across the globe, from Sri Lanka to Turkey, Brazil and across every continent is the fundamental constituency for an international movement against war, social inequality and the mass death policy toward the pandemic, and for socialism.

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.

See the original post here:
What is behind the International Socialist League's support for the US/NATO war drive against Russia? - WSWS

In the history of the socialist movement, parties and political figures are defined above all by their attitude to imperialist war.

On June 16, 1918, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was arrested and jailed for a speech opposing the US governments involvement in World WarI. Speaking to a large crowd in a park in Canton, Ohio, Debs called the war an imperialist war and denounced the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson and the capitalist governments of Europe for waging it.

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot, Debs declared. Every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense!

On May 10, every single Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-backed member of Congress voted to approve Joe Bidens request for $40 billion in military and financial aid for Ukraine.

Bernie Sanders, who once published a recording of himself reading Debs Canton speech, voted yes for war credits and said, We should always have a debate, but the problem is that Ukraine is in the middle of a very intense war right now. I think every day counts, and I think we have to respond as strongly and vigorously as we can.

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who knows nothing about the history of socialism, voted yes too. Hoping that people either would not notice or would quickly forget her vote, she refused to issue as much as a press release or tweet explaining her vote. The other DSA members of congress, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, all voted yes as well.

The vote marks a crossing of a political Rubicon. It is an endorsement of the US/NATO war against Russia. It takes money out of the hands of working people confronting inflation and poverty at home and directs it toward death and destruction abroad. It dramatically increases the possibility of a world war between nuclear powers.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have risen to national prominence by promoting themselves as representatives of the anti-war and left-wing sentiments of masses of people. The DSA similarly calls itself the largest socialist organization in America. But their pro-imperialist actions speak louder than words. They are nothing more than petty-bourgeois lackeys of the most ruthless imperialist power in the world.

According to a House Appropriations Committee summary of the legislation, Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and the DSA have cast their votes for the following:

Ocasio-Cortezs campaign website states she aims to put everyday New Yorkers first, but her vote takes billions of dollars out of the hands of the working class and into building missiles and paying the salaries of Ukrainian fascists who worship the perpetrators of the Holocaust. One cannot fight fascism at home while arming them abroad, nor can one fight corporate power in the US while doing Wall Streets bidding on a global scale.

In 2021, the leadership of the DSA attacked the World Socialist Web Site for exposing Ocasio-Cortezs denunciation of socialist opposition to Biden as bad faith and privileged, in an article that was read over 100,000 times. The DSA leadership declared that the WSWS was slandering Ocasio-Cortez and manipulating her words, with prominent Democratic political operatives declaring that the WSWS was itself acting in bad faith.

Now, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have cast a vote to arm American imperialism and its puppet regime in Ukraine as it prosecutes a war that threatens the extinction of humanity. This is an extension of a role Sanders has played since he first entered Congress in 1991.

As it did with DSA member Jamaal Bowmans vote to fund the Israeli military, the DSA may attempt to distance itself from Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders votes in order to shore up its flagging image as a left organization. But support for imperialism is a central feature of the DSAs political character. The DSA was founded by Michael Harrington, who wrote that socialists must play a pro-American, Cold War, State Department kind of role. Harringtons political mentor, Max Shachtman, supported the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In recent weeks, the DSA has been preparing its justification for supporting imperialist war in the pages of Socialist Forum, one its official publications.

In an article entitled Breaking Camp: The US Left and Foreign Policy after the War in Ukraine, Georgetown University Professor Greg Afinogenov argues that the left must abandon its opposition to American imperialism in order confront Russia and China.

Economic sanctions, Afinogenov writes, will not be enough to compel a retreat, let alone to overthrow Putin, and Ukrainian leaders themselves have lost hope in NATO protection. The article makes no mention of the fact that US sanctions are throwing hundreds of millions of workers to the brink of starvation across the world.

The purpose of Afinogenovs article is to call for support for US imperialism and its war aims.

The most controversial feature of contemporary anti-imperialism, the article states, Is its tendency to boil down to the simple procedure of determining which side the US is on in any given conflict and automatically taking the opposite position. Afinogenov writes that socialists should be wary of those who base their outlook on a recognition of the need for rational limits on the use of US power abroad. He concludes, as a result, that contemporary anti-imperialism is not a coherent political strategy.

If the USs position as world policeman is undermined, Afinogenov writes, it would give a freer hand to other actors pursuing their own economic or imperial goals, including China and Russia. Russia, he claims, is much more aggressive than US imperialism, and is therefore the main enemy.

Only a pro-war publication operated by a pro-war organization could print such a statement. For the last 30 years, the United States has destroyed entire societies, killing millions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria and many other countries. Socialists lend no support to the right-wing Putin regime for its invasion of Ukraine, but to claim that Russia is more aggressive than American imperialism is nothing more than war propaganda in the service of the US government, aimed at paving the way for its next crimes.

In the same edition of Socialist Forum, another article, entitled Toward a modern theory of internationalism, by Bjorn Pederson, calls for arming the Ukrainians:

Mutual aid and even sanctions have their place in our response, but they simply are not equal to quickly stopping the Russian war machine. Opposition to military aid is less persuasive when that aid is given at the request of the democratically elected government of a country being invaded, as has happened in Ukraine.

Pederson demands that the left cease criticizing American imperialism for its role stoking the conflict: It doesnt serve the Left well to spend this moment railing against the limited slate of bad options that have been forced on us by decades of failed international policy.

The proponents of imperialist war promote the fiction that a victory for American imperialism will serve humanitarian ends. In a May 10 forum hosted by the former publishing house of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization, Haymarket Books attempted to put an identity-politics spin on support for arming Ukrainian fascists. During the event, Yulya Yurchenko, a fellow at the George Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center (and self-described feminist activist), declared:

We must channel theory into praxis. We need to do what is necessary to help the victims of aggression to protect themselves by any means necessary. that means arming Ukraine and overcoming personal moral conflicts about violence. This is not about us staying pious but about helping those subject to violence, and they need to protect themselves. So, standing by and [calling for] non-interference in such situations are tantamount to condoning the continuation of violence. The moral choice here is clear. I am also against war. I hate violence in any form. Yet when somebody comes to you with a gun, you waving a flower in their face is not going to solve the problem.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA are sending weapons to the Ukrainian military not out of theoretical confusion, but because it serves the interests of the privileged social force which they represent.

The pseudo-left represents the top 10 percent of society, a privileged section of the population whose stock portfolios depend upon the ability of American banks and corporations to dominate the world and subjugate their rivals. This layer is now hysterically pro-war and rabid in its denunciations of the Russian people and Russian culture.

The role of the DSA is to provide a left propaganda spin on American imperialisms ruthless war aims. To paraphrase Debs, while there is a political establishment, they are in it. While there is imperialism, they will support it. They represent everything socialism is not.

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.

See more here:
Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and the DSA vote for war - WSWS