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The political scientist Samuel Huntingtons famous thesis that the post-Cold War world would be defined by a clash of civilisations turned out to be off the mark. While there certainly is cleavage and conflict, the cause is a clash of cultures within civilisations. It is this clash that fuelled the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Such intra-civilisational clashes ultimately make civilisation itself impossible or at least dysfunctional, as US politics now very much seems to be. From Covid-19 to geopolitics, every issue is now subject to a culture war. A year ago, the increasingly tattered veil of conflict-mitigating political and behavioural norms was ripped away.

Though debates about cultural values are ubiquitous, everyone assumes that his or her own local or national clash is somehow unique, as if Britain and Frances post-imperial hangovers defy comparison or are all that different from Americas own imperial debacle. Are American debates about the legacy of slavery and racial oppression really idiosyncratic? Is the struggle to overcome or to reassert national identity really an essentially European phenomenon?

If financial panics destroy value, then crises of language destroy values.

In fact, the terms that define these debates are rapidly losing any meaning. In 1907, the American philosopher William James provoked widespread outrage when he suggested that the validity of an idea can be assessed by the concrete difference its being true make[s] in anyones actual life. Referring provocatively to truths cash-value in experiential terms, he argued that ideas have no innate quality; rather, they must show their worth by being broadly accepted through general circulation in a marketplace.

Writing just after the destructive financial crash of 1907, the philosopher John Grier Hibben excoriated Jamess pragmatic argument, warning that its acceptance would certainly precipitate a panic in the world of our thinking as surely as would a similar demand in the world of finance. This century-old argument is just as current today, now that a sense of panic has become the norm.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 was followed by the rise of populism, and then by the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Each development has deepened a broader crisis of language and meaning. If financial panics destroy value, then crises of language destroy values. When people use terms whose meaning they dont understand, they literally dont know what they are talking about. This practice has become all too common.

Many of the words that we use today are the products of previous upheavals. Capitalism and socialism were adopted in the early nineteenth century to come to terms with the Industrial Revolution. Globalism, geopolitics, and multilateralism gained traction in the early twentieth century to account for imperial great-power politics and World War I. Like viruses, these terms have all mutated since their inception.

For example, capitalism and socialism originally described continually evolving ways of understanding how the world was or should be organised. But now they have just become scare words. Ones side in the culture war is determined by whether one is more scared of socialism or capitalism (or iterations such as hyper-capitalism or woke capitalism). Capitalism was recognised very early on as a phenomenon that crossed borders, becoming a global reality. Socialism, too, was international, but its realisation depended on the character of the state system, which in turn embodied a belief that the nation-state was a normal (and some would argue inevitable) political structure. Thus, national politics and the international phenomena of capitalism and socialism lived in constant tension with each other.

Facebook and Google take the place of old socialist state authorities in shaping our behaviour and economic actions.

Capitalism began as the description of a system that not only facilitated exchange but commodified more domains of life, thereby breaking down traditional norms and institutions. As more types of things came to be exchanged, capitalism as an idea became increasingly diffuse, permeating every aspect of individual behaviour. Eventually, market principles were applied to dating, spousal choices, sports management, cultural production, and so on. Everything looked as if it had a financial equivalent.

Adding to its contemporary meaninglessness, capitalism is full of paradoxes. The system relies on decentralised decision-making, but as capital becomes more concentrated, decisions increasingly emanate from just a few central nodes. That opens the way to planning, with Facebook and Google taking the place of old socialist state authorities in shaping our behaviour and economic actions. Neither arrangement is really controlled by individual choices or by representative institutions.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the terms of every political debate were set by 4 binary choices: globalisation versus the nation-state; capitalism versus socialism; technocracy versus populism; and multilateralism versus geopolitics. These debates are now outdated. In each case, there is a glaring need for different options.

Adding the post- prefix helps somewhat. Post-globalisation is more apt than deglobalisation, and post-capitalism may be a good way of framing the solution to overly concentrated capital. Post-socialism may offer a way around the limits of the nation-state, which were inherent in traditional socialism. Post-populism could empower the people without relying on the destructive and surreal notion of the real people as if some people are unreal. In each case, a post- society requires a new set of terms.

Todays uncertainties about meaning have become an obstacle to productive debate, not to mention basic logic. We need an intellectual decluttering. The minimalist lifestyle guru Marie Kondo recommends discarding anything that no longer sparks joy. Her approach has prompted families to sift through and cast away the detritus left by previous generations. That is not a bad idea for improving our intellectual hygiene. In place of an attic cleanup would be a debate to identify defunct concepts. The goal would be to make room for new ideas a reality makeover. Culture wars feed on old, empty nostrums. To stop the useless fighting, we need to discard anything that does not spark creativity.

Project Syndicate

Read the rest here:
The clash of cultures Democracy and society - IPS Journal

What is the Governments plan to tackle the cost of living crisis? It has yet to detail a credible set of policies, including genuine deregulation, pro-growth tax reform and higher quality skills, to boost productivity and wages across the board.

It seems content with the Bank of Englands performance, despite the fact that extreme monetary laxity has helped push up consumer prices and sent asset prices skyrocketing. Its agriculture policy is less about a new Corn Laws abolition moment, and more about remodelling the countryside for environmental reasons. The tax burden is rising disastrously, turning us into a continental-style economy, all to feed the appetite of an unreformed, wasteful state that tries to do too much but is now once again beloved of this Macmillan-style government.

The Governments energy policy is particularly dire: it remains wedded to the imbecilic price cap, it continues to discourage investment in UK gas, there is no hope for shale and nuclear is insufficiently exploited. Cheap renewables are great, and not just in theory, but the wind does not always blow and there needs to be a back-up plan.According to the TaxPayers Alliance, this year the green tax burden is forecast to be the highest on record: 12.5 billion, a rise of 11.6 billion since 2001. Most of the increase 10.3 billion has occurred since the Conservative Party took office in 2010.

Infuriatingly, it now seems that blaming energy companies will be part of the Governments strategy. It is true that smaller companies gambled on offering unrealistically low deals to consumers that, when wholesale costs jumped and prices remained fixed, destroyed their margins. But it is the state that set up this rigged, capped, fake market in a series of reforms over the past 10-15 years that were condemned by all of the free-market economists who had backed our once enviable, competitive marketplace.

That original system now lies destroyed, replaced by an ersatz, ultra-regulated market where prices and sources of energy are dictated centrally and where taxpayer bailouts appear to be the new normal. Market socialism never works.

Here is the original post:
The Government's market socialism is worsening the cost of living crisis - Telegraph.co.uk

Wellred Books is proud to announce the forthcoming release of an important new title by Marie Frederiksen, The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.

This great revolutionary martyr has often been misrepresented as an opponent of the October Revolution, and as standing for some sort of softer, anti-authoritarian Marxism as against that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

But as Fred Weston and Parson Young explain in this article from the latest issue of In Defence of Marxism magazine: these are so many myths about Luxemburg, and it is about time to set the record straight.

This weekend, on Saturday 15 January, the anniversary of the murder of Luxemburg, Wellred Books will host an exclusive online Q&A and book launch of The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, with the author Marie Frederiksen.

Join this online book launch and Q&A to get a taste of this upcoming work an essential read for every genuine Marxist who wants to learn the real lessons of Luxemburgs life and ideas, which are vital if we are to carry on her struggle and overthrow capitalism.

Register for the book launch here.

And head to Wellred Books to order your copy of The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Luxemburg was an outstanding revolutionary Marxist, who played a key role in fighting the opportunist degeneration of German Social Democracy, and in the founding of the German Communist Party.

Unfortunately, however, some of her writings and speeches are often used to create a completely false picture of what she stood for, presenting her as an opponent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

So-called Luxemburgists present her as a champion of working-class creativity and spontaneity, in opposition to the ultra-centralist Lenin who, supposedly, sought to crush the initiative of the workers and bring them under heel.

By building up this image of Luxemburg, left reformists, anarchists, libertarian communists, and even bourgeois liberals aim to use the authority of this great revolutionary as a battering ram against Leninism.

On this basis, the concept of Luxemburgism has been invented, as if it were a distinct trend within the tradition of Marxism.

This so-called Luxemburgism has an attraction to a layer of honest young communists who seek an alternative version of Marxism to what they regard as Leninism.

The reason they are seeking such an alternative is because the Stalinist, bureaucratic caricature of socialism embodied in the USSR under Stalin, and later replicated in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam and other regimes has been portrayed as Leninist (or Marxist-Leninist, as Stalinists today like to describe themselves).

It is sufficient to read Lenins Last Testament (Last Testament Letters to the Congress, December 1922 - January 1923), however, to see that he was already becoming concerned at the bureaucratic tendencies that were emerging in the Soviet Union even before he died, and he suggested measures to combat them.

Stalinism, rather than being the natural child of Leninism, is a complete negation of what Lenin stood for. Our latter-day Luxemburgists conveniently ignore this fact.

We have to ask ourselves, therefore, what does this Luxemburgism actually consist of? Is it so different from the revolutionary Marxism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks?

A serious study of Rosa Luxemburgs writings, her whole life and everything she fought for, reveals that the real Rosa was a revolutionary.

At a time when the world workers movement split into revolutionary and reformist camps, Luxemburg was on the same side of the barricades as the Bolsheviks. In the same way that the Bolsheviks fought the opportunist current of Menshevism, Luxemburg waged a battle against the opportunist degeneration of the Social-Democratic leaders in Germany. In spite of this or that criticism that she held at different moments, she fully backed the Russian Revolution led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Nevertheless, a number of myths persist that attempt to depict Rosa Luxemburg as an opponent of Bolshevism. The first of these is the idea that Luxemburg stood for the spontaneity of the masses as opposed to the Leninist model of the revolutionary party.

We can read a prime example of such distortions in what is written about her by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung a think tank in Germany affiliated with the left-reformist Die Linke party:

Luxemburg criticized Lenin for his conception of a highly centralized party vanguard; according to Luxemburg, it was an attempt to put the working class under tutelage. Her argumentscharacteristic of all her workcomprised factors such as independent initiative, the workers activity, their ability to learn through their own experience and mistakes, and the need for a grassroots democratic organization.

Similarly, Noam Chomsky who claims to be an anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist paints Lenin as a conspiratorial hijacker of the Russian Revolution who destroyed its potential to develop communism. He presents Luxemburg as having warned against this:

Although some of the critics, like Rosa Luxemburg, pointed out that Lenins program, which they regarded as pretty right-wing, and I do too, was, the image was, that there would be a proletarian revolution, the party will take over from the proletariat, the central committee would take over from the party and the maximal leader will take over from the central committee.

This kind of thinking completely ignores the conditions in which the Russian Revolution took place and, most importantly, the consequences of its isolation in a backward country.

Thus, according to these superficial critics, the roots of the monstrous Stalinist regime that arose later are not to be found in the objective conditions, but in the ideas and methods of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Such an analysis simplifies to such a degree that it is impossible to understand the real objective causes of the bureaucratic degeneration i.e. the isolation of the revolution to one very backward country. It relies instead on a subjective explanation of Lenins supposed dictatorial tendencies.

What was Rosa Luxemburgs real view on the question of the spontaneity of the masses? How did she view the relationship of the party to the spontaneous action of the masses? And did her views actually differ fundamentally from those of Lenin?

Her pamphlet, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, is one of her works used by those who claim she was fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism. It is argued that in this pamphlet, which analyses the strength of the spontaneous mass strike movement of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg dismisses the concept of revolutionary leadership. This couldnt be further from the truth, and completely misses the point of why she wrote it and against whom she was polemicising.

The pamphlet was written just as a wave of strikes was sweeping across Germany, inspired by the 1905 revolution, which was very popular amongst the German working class.

Unlike Russia, where trade unions were very weak and the forces of Marxism were small, Germany had mass trade unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was a mass force. The problem was that the leaders of the SPD and the trade unions in Germany exhibited a passive and sometimes even a derisive attitude towards these spontaneous strikes.

Whereas Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary wing of the party welcomed the strikes and posed the need for the party to intervene, the right-wing SPD leaders dismissed them as premature and doomed to failure. Many SPD leaders claimed that only struggles that were planned and organised by the party in advance could succeed. Therefore all other manifestations from below were fundamentally meaningless.

This was, in reality, an indication that these leaders were abandoning the idea of a revolutionary struggle against capitalism itself.

This was precisely what Luxemburgs Mass Strike pamphlet was arguing against. She was not arguing against the Bolsheviks, but rather against the opportunist leaders of the SPD. Her goal was not to dismiss the need for leadership, but rather to push the SPD leaders into actively intervening in these spontaneous struggles precisely because they needed political leadership. As Rosa wrote:

To fix beforehand the cause and the moment from and in which the mass strikes in Germany will break out is not in the power of social democracy, because it is not in its power to bring about historical situations by resolutions at party congresses. But what it can and must do is to make clear the political tendencies, when they once appear, and to formulate them as resolute and consistent tactics. Man cannot keep historical events in check while making recipes for them, but he can see in advance their apparent calculable consequences and arrange his mode of action accordingly.

Any serious analysis will show that both Luxemburg and Lenin agreed that the revolutionary partys task was not to impose a pre-existing schema upon the masses and dictate a schedule for revolution according to its own whim. They both understood that the masses move at their own pace, and when events erupt the task of revolutionaries is to understand them and intervene in them to provide leadership.

Take, for example, the workers councils (soviets) that emerged during the Russian Revolution of 1905. These new organs of workers power were a creation of the Russian workers, an expression of the spontaneity and creativity of the working class.

The ranks of the Bolsheviks inside Russia did not recognise their significance, and even tried to impose an ultimatum on the soviets that they submit to the partys control. But Lenin clearly disagreed. In Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies (November, 1905), he wrote:

I think that it is wrong to put the question in this way and that the decision must certainly be: both the Soviet of Workers Deputies and the Party. The only questionand a highly important oneis how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. I think it would be inadvisable for the Soviet to adhere wholly to any one party.

Lenin recognised that revolutionaries should join the soviets in order to win over the working-class masses that had created them as organs of workers power. This was the very same strategy that Lenin maintained until the success of the October Revolution in 1917.

In his April Theses published in April 1917, Lenin summed up the task of the Bolsheviks in relation to the masses:

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

Here we can find no fundamental difference between Lenin and Luxemburg in their understanding of the necessarily spontaneous nature of the outbreak of struggles, but also of the need for revolutionaries to politically intervene.

Were there any differences between Lenin and Luxemburg? Of course there were, but as Marie Frederiksen shows in her soon-to-be-published work, these were not about whether a revolution needed organisation and leadership or not:

A disagreement was expressed on the Russian Social Democratic Labour Partys congress of 1907 in which Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for putting too much emphasis on the technical side of the uprising in the 1905 Revolution, while believing that they ought instead to have focused on giving the movement political leadership.

In this sense, Luxemburgs approach to the revolution was abstract: the masses will move, and when they do it is up to the party to provide the correct political programme. From her experience in the SPD, focus on the practical side of organising was the hallmark of a conservative leadership that held back the movement of the masses.

Instead of rejecting the bureaucratic character of the SPD, she rejected the technical, practical side of organising altogether as an evil in and of itself. Luxemburg seemed to believe that the movement of the masses itself would solve the problem of organisation and leadership.

It is abundantly clear that, even when Rosa Luxemburg was making criticisms of the Bolsheviks, she did not reject the need for a political leadership in general, just as Lenin did not reject the spontaneity of mass struggles.

What the two differed on was the degree of emphasis revolutionaries should place on the practical tasks of intervening in the mass struggles.

On this question, however, Luxemburg was proven to be wrong in her earlier writing, as the act of intervening in and winning over the masses involves highly practical tasks in order to be successful.

The experience of the October Revolution would prove that it was precisely the existence of the Bolshevik Party, a highly disciplined and educated organisation with cadres in key workplaces and neighbourhoods, that allowed the Russian workers to take power.

Furthermore, towards the end of her life, Luxemburg worked towards building a party along similar lines in Germany.

The inescapable conclusion from what we have been highlighting is that the supposed gulf between these two outstanding Marxists on this question is highly exaggerated. The aim of this exaggeration is to distort the truth in order to ward workers and youth away from a genuine revolutionary outlook, and in particular from the need to build a mass revolutionary party as an essential prerequisite for a victorious socialist revolution.

Whenever currents on the left have begun diverging from a revolutionary standpoint, they have never openly admitted that what they are doing is betraying the basic interests of the working class. Instead, they will often seek this or that authoritative figure of the movement whose words they can distort and exaggerate in order to justify their own bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, Rosa Luxemburg has been the victim of such methods time and time again. She is quoted out of context, or criticisms that she later abandoned are dishonestly used to present her as being fundamentally opposed to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

In particular, the myth has been woven that Luxemburg stood for genuine workers democracy in opposition to the dictatorial methods of Leninism.

This myth draws from her writings in a 1904 pamphlet called Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, where she denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for their ultra-centralism and even Blanquism that is, the idea of organising a socialist revolution totally controlled by a small conspiratorial group of revolutionary leaders.

In reality, Luxemburg did not understand what Lenin was striving for at that moment in time.

Those who use this to try to separate Rosa Luxemburg from Lenin ignore the real development of her later thinking. Only a few years later, Luxemburg abandoned these views.

Later on, she would set herself the aim, along with Karl Liebknecht, of transforming the Spartacus League into the German Communist Party a section of the Communist International led, at that time, by Lenin and Trotsky.

To attempt, on this basis, to paint Luxemburg as diametrically opposed to Leninism, is sheer dishonesty.

These same currents falsify what Lenin and the Bolsheviks really stood for in order to facilitate this myth-building. The Bolshevik Party is presented as having a monolithic, highly-centralised regime under Lenin, where no debate was possible and where there was no internal democracy.

The truth is that the history of the Bolshevik Party reveals that there was the fullest freedom of internal debate, with different opinions being freely discussed.

What the reformist critics of the Bolshevik Party really object to is the fact that the party was not a debating club, but a fighting, revolutionary organisation of the advanced layers of the working class. Its task was to clarify questions of programme, methods and tactics and to build a disciplined party whose aim was the overthrow of the capitalist system.

Its internal life was governed by the principles of democratic centralism: once an internal debate had taken place on any question, a vote would be held and the majority view would become the policy of the party. On that basis, the whole membership would then be required to take the democratically-agreed positions into the wider labour movement.

This has nothing to do with the caricature of Bolshevism drawn by the reformists. Their lie about Bolshevism as nothing but a conspiracy and a dictatorship in party form is complemented by the lie about Luxemburg as someone who stood up against Lenin in the name of democracy.

In doing so, they conveniently ignore what she wrote a mere two years later in 1906 in Blanquism and Social Democracy, in which she defended Lenin against the charges of Blanquism and attacked the Mensheviks for their opportunism:

If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have never given it the old Blanquist meaning; neither have they ever made the mistake of Narodnaya Volya, which dreamt of taking power for itself (zachvat vlasti). On the contrary, they have affirmed that the present revolution will succeed when the proletariat all the revolutionary class takes possession of the state machine.

It is high time to finish with such scholasticism and all this hullabaloo to identify who is a Blanquist and who is an orthodox Marxist. Rather we need to know if the tactic recommended by comrade Plekhanov and his Menshevik comrades, which aims to work through the duma as far as possible, is correct now; or, on the contrary, if the tactic we are applying, just like the Bolshevik comrades, is correct the tactic based on the principle that the centre of gravity is situated outside the duma, in the active appearance of the popular revolutionary masses.

And a year later, in a speech she gave in 1907 at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party where both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were present in one reunified party she again defended the Bolsheviks from charges of rigidity and narrowness in terms of organisation:

It is possible that Polish comrades, who are accustomed to thinking more or less in ways adopted by the West-European movement, find this particular steadfastness [of the Bolsheviks] even more startling than you do. But do you know, comrades, where all these disagreeable features come from?

These features are very familiar to someone acquainted with internal party relations in other countries: they represent the typical spiritual character of that trend within socialism that has to defend the very principle of the proletariats independent class policy against an opposing trend that is also very strong. (Applause.)

Rigidity is the form taken by Social-Democratic tactics on the one side, when the other side represents the formlessness of jelly that creeps in every direction under the pressure of events. (Applause from the Bolsheviks and parts of the Centre.)

The conclusion here is clear. What Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and the Bolsheviks all stood for, more than anything else, was precisely the proletariats independent class policy.

In the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism, between revolutionary Marxism and reformism, Luxemburg stood firmly on the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against reformism, which is precisely the policy that the so-called Luxemburgists today try to attribute to her.

As Lenin later commented: In 1907 she participated as a delegate of the SD of Poland and Lithuania in the London congress of the RSDLP, supporting the Bolshevik faction on all basic questions of the Russian revolution.

Another text of Rosa Luxemburg that is used to pit her against the Bolsheviks is one she wrote privately, but which she never decided to publish in her lifetime, entitled The Russian Revolution (1918).

In this article she makes several criticisms of the actions of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. However, what the Luxemburgists conveniently ignore is that Luxemburg was in prison when she wrote this article. She had been in prison since 1916 and was still incarcerated when the Russian Revolution took place. She could only get very partial information about the October Revolution and she wrote down her observations privately.

After she was released from prison in 1918, aware of the fact that her analysis written in confinement would inevitably be imperfect, she refused to publish anything she had written on the Russian Revolution while in prison. This was because she knew full well that it would be distorted by the enemies of the revolution.

Clara Zetkin, who had a close relationship with Rosa Luxemburg, later testified that after she was released from prison in November 1918, she stated that her views had been wrong and were based on insufficient information.

Rosa Luxemburg was capable of recognising when she had made a mistake, and there can be no confusion here about where Rosa Luxemburg stood in relation to the October Revolution: she fully backed it and the party that led it.

In fact, the 1918 text was only published later, in 1922 by Paul Levi, three years after Rosas death. He published it after his expulsion from the German Communist Party and the Third International for severely violating party discipline. He had never been given Rosas permission to publish the text a very important detail that one has to bear in mind.

However, even in this text, one still finds that she was fully supportive of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks from start to finish. Hers was a comradely criticism rather than a denunciation of October.

If she had genuinely believed that Lenin was setting up a monstrous dictatorial regime, it is hard to imagine why she took the time to offer critical suggestions. Rather, she would have called on the Russian workers to oppose the Bolsheviks. This was clearly not the case.

The article opens with the words, The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War. And this is how she ends the first section of the article:

Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far reaching revolutionary program; not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky, and all the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honour and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism.

And she concluded her article thus:

What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such.

In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: I have dared!

This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism.

Luxemburg, however, did not limit herself to supporting the Russian Revolution. She was also aware of the fact that the flaws in the Soviet regime were not the product of the intentions or ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, but of the isolation of the Russian Revolution and the backward conditions in the country.

The solution was to break the isolation of the revolution by carrying out the German Revolution:

Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism.

It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy.

By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions.

Continued here:
Rosa Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks: Dispelling the myths - Socialist Appeal

In remarks reminiscent of the darkest days of the eugenics movement, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Friday that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are unwell to begin with is encouraging news.

As the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 reached a record high, the CDC director was asked in an interview on ABCs Good Morning America about those encouraging headlines that were talking about this morning.

Walensky replied:

The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who are unwell to begin with, and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.

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As a factual matter, the claim that COVID-19 in general, and the Omicron variant in particular, is only affecting the elderly and ill is false. The spread of the new variant has driven a record surge in hospitalizations of young people, and in particular children and infants. The long-term consequences for those who survive and suffer the consequences of Long COVID are still little understood.

However, the suggestion that the overwhelming number of deaths occur among the elderly and those with preexisting conditions (comorbidities) is encouraging news is shocking in its implications.

Walenskys comments were broadly condemned by doctors, scientists and advocates for the disabled as an embrace of eugenics by the Biden administration.

This is eugenicist, lawyer and disability activist Matthew Cortland, who is chronically ill, wrote on Twitter. The problem is that the people running @CDCgov, including @CDCDirector, **fundamentally believe** its encouraging if disabled and chronically ill people die. And all of their decisions are informed by, and enact, that belief.

None of this is hyperbole. Walenskys comments express the turn on the part of the White House and dominant sections of the US political establishment toward an open embrace of the view that the lives of the chronically ill, the disabled, and the elderly are fundamentally valueless.

The leading advocate of this policy is Ezekiel Emanuel, the former Obama administration official and current Biden COVID task force adviser, who is now being promoted in a full court press in the US print and broadcast media.

On Wednesday, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a set of articles by Emanuel and other former Biden health advisors arguing for making COVID-19 the new normal and calling on states to retire the reporting of COVID-19 deaths. These articles were treated as gospel in the US media, with fawning front-page write-ups in the New York Times and Washington Post.

But this campaign went into overdrive on Sunday, with Emanuel serving as the unstated surrogate for the White House on NBCs Meet the Press. Emanuels call for a new normal was simultaneously hailed by the lead editorial in the Washington Post, which called it a sensible strategy for living with covid, presented by experts.

In reality, the call by Emanuel and his co-authors is nothing more than a recapitulation of the pseudo-scientific Great Barrington Declaration, stripped of the myth that herd immunity would lead to the end of the pandemic. It is a plan for COVID-19 in perpetuity, with wave after wave, variant after variant, taking countless lives each year.

Neither Meet the Press nor the Washington Post editorial mentioned that Emanuel is a leading advocate of reducing life expectancy and slashing the provision of medical care for the elderly and chronically ill.

Emanuel, in the words of University of South Carolina philosophy professor Jennifer A. Frey, thinks of disabled and elderly people as useless and ineffectual; when we run the cost/benefit analysis they cost more than they are worth. Emanuel believes that life after 75 [is] not worth living and old people a drain on our resources, she concluded.

Emanuel has expressed his eugenicist ideas time and time again, noted journalist and disability researcher Laura Dorwart.

Emanuels basic precept is that the fundamental determinant of medical care must not be the individuals rights to decency and dignity, but rather a cost-benefit analysis driven by the costs to society of extending the lives of the ill and the elderly.

Emanuel claimsrightlythat the medical profession is averse to such cost-benefit analysis. But this is because the application of such an analysis to medicine and public health is informed by the legacy of eugenics and the German Nazi Partys murder of tens of thousands of people with chronic illnesses whom the Nazis branded unfit to live.

In the bioethics textbook From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, professors Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler note the legacy of cost-benefit analysis in the American eugenics movement.

They cite the Eugenics Catechism of the American Eugenics Society of 1926, which argues, It has been estimated that the State of New York, up to 1916, spent over $2,000,000 on the descendants of one familythe Jukesclaimed to be genetically deficient. How much would it have cost to sterilize the original Jukes pair? asked the society: Less than $150.

The book continues, Similar examples abounded in the arithmetic books of German schoolchildren in the 1930s, extending to the cost of keeping institutionalized, handicapped people alive; not long afterward, tens of thousands lost their lives.

In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of mercy death code-named Operation T4, writes the US Holocaust Museum. The killings secretly continued until the wars end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.

Today, hundreds of thousands of elderly and chronically ill people are dying, not in gas chambers, but gasping for air in Americas hospitals. Seventy-five percent of those who have died from COVID-19 have been above the retirement age of 65, and 93 percent have been over the age of 50. In 2020, a year in which 373,000 Americans died from COVID-19, US life expectancy at birth fell by 1.8 years, from 78.8 years to 77.0, according to federal mortality data released last month.

But this reality is not, as Walensky says, encouraging, but a horrifying source of guilt and shame, a condemnation of an utterly inhuman society driven by the needs of enriching the few at the expense of the many.

Scientists and doctors have responded to Walenskys remarks with the demand that she resign. Their anger is justified. But the fact is that Walensky was speaking not only for herself, not only for the Biden administration, but for the entire capitalist class.

For years, American think tanks and military strategists have systematically advocated reducing the life expectancy of American workers. The pandemic has created the means by which this policy could be implemented through seeming inaction and incompetence.

It is, in fact, a deliberate policy, driven by the diseased reliance of all aspects of American capitalism on the perpetual rise in the markets, fueled by the ever-greater immiseration and impoverishment of the working class. Having bled much of the working class dry, the capitalist oligarchy looks to the elderly and the disabled as a source of untapped value.

If they have their way, the cutting of outlays on Social Security and Medicare is to be accomplished not by politicians touching the third rail of American politics, but by allowing the pandemic to continue in perpetuity.

This filthy policy is accompanied by an equally filthy lie: That COVID-19 cannot be stopped. China has successfully executed a Zero COVID policy, with just 5,000 deaths in a country of 1.4 billion. If a similar policy had been carried out in the United States at the start of the pandemic, over 850,000 people would still be alive.

This homicidal new normal demanded by the capitalist oligarchy is being challenged by a growing movement of the working class to resist mass infection and mass death. Teachers in Chicago voted last week to oppose the resumption of in-person instruction, and teachers in Chicago, New York and San Francisco have launched sickouts. They will be joined this week with a wave of walkouts by students in opposition to the Biden administrations homicidal drive to keep schools open no matter the costs in human lives.

The open turn to eugenics by the ruling class expresses a fundamental reality that is dawning on millions of people: Capitalism is incompatible with the social rights of the great mass of humanity. Securing those rights requires the struggle to end this social order and replace it with socialism.

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The stench of eugenics at the White House - WSWS

'Kudlow discusses Bidens failing policies as inflation continues to soar.

Happy New Year everyone. It's great to be back after a lovely week off.

And right at the start, I want to make two points. First, I remain steadfastly optimistic about America's future. Conservative values and free enterprise capitalism will handily defeat Joe Biden's woke leftist drive. The America we love will not accept big government socialism.

And second, let's work together to: Save America. And Kill the Bill. We beat the bill back last year.

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Poll after poll shows the American public does not want a new entitlement state, nor inflationary spending, nor huge tax hikes, nor a regulatory takeover of economic sector after sector, nor an end to fossil fuels with soaring energy costs and limited supply, nor continued monetary pump priming by the Fed that fuels even more inflation.

The American way rewards success, not punish it. The American way loves the freedom to invent, innovate, discover, create, and prosper. Americans don't want to be strangled by red tape and taxes from radical left bureaucrats in the Washington D.C. swamp. The American way promotes parents and families, not government control of education and child-rearing. The American way defends police and law and order.

National Taxpayers Union EVP Brandon Arnold and Walser Wealth Management CEO Rebecca Walser discuss Sen. Joe Manchin's stance on the Build Back Better plan and what's in store for Congress in 2022.

Americans very much favor legal immigration through appropriate processes, but the country is appalled by the current lack of borders and nearly two million illegals who are also, by the way, receiving various forms of government welfare. Americans are not racist. They do not believe the country was founded on a bunch of white supremacists,they don't want divisive racism in their kids' classrooms, and they are sick and tired of far-left crazy people who constantly charge racism as the answer to every legitimate disagreement or even conversation. This kind of totalitarian approach that seeks to end freedom of speech is unacceptable to traditional America. The majority of this country, indeed it's backbone, is comprised of honest, blue-collar workin' folk who cherish traditional conservative values.

Their arch-enemy is leftist wokeism and that's why the middle class is in full revolt against these leftist attacks.

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Also, Americans want to see a strong nation, peace through strength, American interests first, not diplomatic appeasement. Whether it's China's Xi, or Russia's Putin or Iranian mullahs, workin' folks are sick and tired of seeing America pushed around. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a catastrophe. We could be on the verge of war with Russia and Ukraine. We mustn't give up Taiwan. And we must not allow Iran to nuclearize.

These are a few key points and what has turned out to be a populist revolt against the administration of Joe Biden. His foreign policy is in shambles. His economic policy is universally unpopular. His honesty and competence are questioned at every turn. And frankly his presidency is on the verge of collapse. Would that this were not so.

Former VA Secretary Robert Wilkie discusses Biden's response to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, U.S. energy dependence and the administration's foreign policies.

Unfortunately, I fear it is so.

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This is the America I love, just as you love it, too. But remember, policies can be changed, and problems can be solved. That optimistic thought has always been part of my personal DNA. We've been through rough patches before, but we've always come out of them greater, stronger, and more prosperous. I worked for two problem-solving presidents:Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Nothing is ever perfect, but the country was always stronger when they left office. I don't see why the same thought won't apply now.

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This little socialist interlude we are experiencing will soon pass. America is too good, too practical, too commonsensical, and too smart to allow socialist economics and bigoted prejudicial values to last for long.Join me in my new year's optimist. And that's my Riff.

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow's opening commentary on January 3, 2022

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Kudlow: The America we love will not accept big government socialism - Fox Business